On the 12th of November the book Quantum Ecology: Why and How New Information Technologies Will Reshape Societies, which I co-authored together with Derrick de Kerckhove, will be released open access by MIT Press.

Here a few quotes that inspired our work, as well as a few original excerpts from the book:

“Two cultures or technologies can, like astronomical galaxies, pass through one another without collision; but not without change of configuration.” — Marshall McLuhan.

“While quantum mechanics was invented a century ago to solve technical problems in physics, today it can be fruitfully explained from an extremely different perspective: as part of the history of ideas, in math, logic, computation, and philosophy, about the limits of the knowable.” — Scott Aaronson.

“In science, too, it is impossible to open up new territory unless one is prepared to leave the safe anchorage of established doctrine and run the risk of a hazardous leap forward.” — Werner Heisenberg.

“Observing arises with language as a co-ontogeny (…) And meaning becomes part of our domain of conservation and adaptation.” — Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.

 “It is the architecture of interplay and entanglement that is the real innovation. (…) Value begins with physical arrangement, location, community, diversity.” —Keller Easterlng.

“We (but not only ‘we humans’) are always already responsible to the others with whom or which we are entangled, not through conscious intent but through the various ontological entanglements that materiality entails.” — Karen Barad.

“All theories are insights, which are neither true nor false but, rather, clear in certain domains, and unclear when extended beyond these domains.” — David Bohm.

“The experience of meaning can thus be understood as a (‘sixth’) sense modality for ‘perceiving’ psychophysical correlations.” — Harald Atmanspacher.

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“We outline the contour of what we call a theory of open reality: quantum physics tells us that an objective reality does not exist; what exists — we claim —are dispositif-dependent ecologies, intended as sociotechnical processes that shape self-organizing world-sensing — enacted through embodiment, operationalized via specific operating systems, and articulated in different technocultural fields — which repeatedly overlap and conflict within and across themselves, coupling individual and collective dimensions in a mutually implicated order of emergence.”

“The act of observing/measuring is consubstantial to the coming into being of physical reality. (…) This means that any living organism is always already in a condition of ‘observership’; such an organism is therefore technological for the very fact of living.”

“Being self-organizing, ecology, like quanta, has effects, but not causes, at least not causes in the ordinary sense of a direct relationship between cause and effect.”

“The open-ended fact of simply living, intended as an immanent and non-predetermined process, repeatedly finetunes with the environment and orients, summons, and ultimately actualizes certain physical instantiations, based on certain psychophysical needs, and in view of certain goals. To live is, first of all, a matter of ecological dispositions, of ‘search and see’ as a unique entangled whole.”

“Deep fakes are real and false at the same time: of course, their disentanglement is (still) possible (with a good dose of criticism), but this is beyond contention. Deep fakes, indeed, bypass reason by leveraging on (the fascination of) being ‘paradoxical’, just another possible opinion, which is appealing for the very fact of destabilizing the known in favor of the probable.”

“The kairological dimension of the datafield is precarious, a fundamentally insecure time, a time that does not unfold but simply happens.”

“Humanity lingers on uncertainty; humanity lives in uncertainty. This uncertainty is not (only) epistemological or historical (the uncertainty about the future or the past), it is constitutive of life.”

“Physical reality is discontinuous, discrete, and this is exactly what makes it ontologically generative. This discontinuity is infinitely reworked in kaleidoscopic ways whereby the particularities making up totality cut through this latter and actualize it. Tout se tient: past and future, here and there, “I” and “Other.” Everything is generative (by) differentiation: nature does not exist as a given; it cannot stay still.”

“The quantum ecology is fundamentally communitarian, although not in the sense this term is usually understood. People tend to think of community as a “positive” concept, a gathering together, based on common goals (or even properties), but in fact community is a “negative” concept: it derives for cum + munus (‘duty together’), denoting a bond among people based on necessity. In other words, the communitarian bond rests on a gap, a fundamental condition of deficiency. Humanity can be self-sufficient only as a whole.”

“Increasing quantum computing power will bring increased modularization, transferability, and replicability of experience, intended as enveloped sets of rules, variables, and embedded values to be performed in dislocated scenarios. Quantum computing, then, will allow moving a step further toward the technologization of the ethos of the real, as a synthesis of (individual) minds and (collective) bodies.”

“Our suggestion is that QIT’s management — their development, implementation, and use — should be one based on a republican approach. A quantum republic envisions roles, rules, and mechanisms to keep the whole ecology in balance. To design a republican approach for QITs means to realize a decentralization of the control of these technologies and a systemic distribution of the oversight processes concerning their implementation (and possibly development), to make them it as resilient as possible.”