POST GROWTH TOOLKIT

Ant Manifesto


Interview with Geoffrey Bowker

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Video transcript: "The ants generically what they do, is they act very, very intelligently, but in a collective fashion. It's not just the individual thinker, it's what is the species doing right now: how are we developing, how are we changing? The way in which they act together is for all intents and purposes an intelligent form of action. No one person, in that, is the genius ant. Ants don't have Einsteins, ants don't have Stephen Hawkings... Ants just have other ants, but they're able to act very, very intelligently collectively.

Now think about taking that vision across to humans. Let's work out ways in which we can start to people the world with new kinds of entity, with new kinds and ways of being, which will allow us to build the kind of kinships, to change our structures, not from above. There's no solution that's going to come from central government in any of this. It's going to be us, as a species, rethinking who we are, reworking who we are, replanning who we are and then rippling that out across the whole sets of relationships that we have. That's what we see ants doing enormously successfully. There's no reason why we, as a species, shouldn't do it. It's just we need to get away from the heroic vision, the scientific vision, the technical vision. These are all red herrings when the real question is - how do we relate with each other, how do we relate with people in distant parts of the world and how do we relate with other species."


Other interviews with Geoffrey Bowker

Related tags: Theory, Tactic, Commons, Sustainability,