James Bridle’s “Ways of Being”

Dispatches from the more-than-human world.

It’s hard to pin down the thesis of James Bridle’s Ways of Being, published today in the USA by Farrar, Strauss, Giroux — it’s a big, lyrical, strange and inspiring book about the “more than human world” — a world that encompasses the worldview of animals, ecosystems, and software.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601119/waysofbeing

Bridle, an English artist and technologist who lives in Greece, pulls on so many threads to tell this tale. Some will be familiar to people who encountered some of his viral work, like the homemade self-driving car he “trapped” in a salt-circle that simulated the unbroken lane-markings the car was trained to respect.

https://jamesbridle.com/works/autonomous-trap-001

Or his investigation “Something is wrong on the internet,” which revealed a vast web of incredibly disturbing children’s animation and programming, much of it automatically produced, that…