Hybrid Animism: The Sensing Surfaces of Planetary Computation

This article proposes to examine animism through the perspective provided by a notion of immanent matter drawn on process philosophy(Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari), and quantum physics (Bohm, Rovelli). It then deploys this perspective to illuminate how planetary computation - the impact of digital media technologies on a planetary scale - is rewiring the cognitive, affective, perceptual capacities of the human. The article puts forward the notion of hybrid animism, as a speculative and imaginative philosophical fiction (‘philoso-fiction’)to grasp planetary computation as a sensorial panaffective event, and to account for the hybrid techno-digital ecologies humans already inhabit, characterised by ongoing modulation, sensorial intensification and pervasive distribution of computational matter across a plethora of screens,surfaces and surroundings. The value of this proposition, the article explains, is to eschew dominant techno-deterministic narratives: not only techno-euphoria and techno-dystopia, but also the notion of technology as enchantment, with its in-built mystification. By deploying the philoso-fiction of hybrid animism and the unmediated intuitive sensorial grasp it fosters, planetary computation can begin to be immediately perceived as the expression of new modes of co-habitation and coevolution of the human and the nonhuman. Finally, the article brings together the nonhuman mutating surfaces of digital matter with cephalopods’ skins to vividly and speculatively illustrate hybrid animism as a thought experiment of sorts.