What if everything was connected? What if all the information we need would be just one glance away? What if every single move we make could be translated into data, be documented, and evaluated. What if all our senseless actions and unsustainable behaviors would be visible to everyone. What if, instead of learning a new language, we create one that nobody understands.

Karen Brad wrote that thingification“ the turning of relations into “things,” “entities,” “relata”—infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it.” [1]

it is once again possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming without resorting to the optics of transparency or opacity, the geometries of absolute exteriority or interiority, and the theoretization of the human as either pure cause or pure effect while at the same time remaining resolutely accountable for the role “we” play in the intertwined practices of knowing and becoming. [2]

What if in our desperate attempts to control what was given to us for free, we cover the world in rubbish and data. What if everything is already connected and our dense species just fails to see it.

[1] Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2003, vol. 28, no. 3] https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/sv/sai/SOSANT4400/v14/pensumliste/barad_posthumanist-performativity.pdf

[2] ibid