December 26, 2922 – Chum Creek
At family Christmas in the Yarra Valley I think every person would have loved this book. My mum, a science teacher, my dad, a history buff, my sister who works at CSIRO and her partner, an artist, as well as Christopher, an engineer.
I loved New Dark Age and knew I'd love this too. Bridle uses his beautifully curious writing style to take you on a journey from a DIY self driving car to cheeky octopus behaviour to plant communication, an internet of animals and a history of non binary computing. This is a book deeply interested in what it means to be intelligent, human, artificial, animal, plans or ecological. Whether other intelligences exist in ways so different from our own that we perhaps fail to perceive them, as an alien might mistake us for simple livestock.
Bridle argues that a life on earth with any possibility of survival must find harmony, if not solidarity or even collaboration with these other intelligences, and asks us to step away from our anthropocentric conception of our world and into a ecological mindset, decentralised, without the need to dominate and even with an element of play.
There is so much in this book and so many stories I hadn't known before. I feel smarter and more interesting for having read it. Please pick it up, there's so much to learn and we as a species have barely scratched the surface. This book scratches a little deeper. Merry Christmas!