Abstract

This paper presents the idea of multispecies diplomacy on the background of unstable and violent political geographies of the Anthropocene. The idea is first defined in terms of associated notions of sympoiesis and habilitation. After the preliminary arrangement of the conceptual framework of the paper, the possibilities of multispecies diplomacy are assessed in relation to current militarization of environment, that prevents any diplomatic solution of climate change and leads to increased environmental injustices worldwide. This is illustrated on example of conflict in Negev desert, where changing climate is inherently integrated into the structure of conflict. Secondly, digital infrastructures are identified as an ambiguous factor influencing the outlooks of future practices of multispecies diplomacy. Thanks to their capacity to redesign existing environment, they can act as forces of deterritorialization that can either stabilize existing hegemonies or lead to subversive appropriation. As far as digital platforms are open to ideological reframing, ecosocialist politics engaging in multispecies diplomacy is encouraged to appropriate them in terms of cognitive mapping and habilitation.

Introduction

The two central notions of this paper are war and military. They can however make sense only if they are considered in duality with their respective counterparts – peace and diplomacy. Given the ongoing period of ecological emergency (threating to culminate in unprecedented climate catastrophe) I would like to follow the metaphor of diplomacy, as originally set out by Latour (2004: 209-217). The art of diplomacy involves understanding the territories that precondition any planetary diplomatic relations, since in these territories peace is not considered as the default option – it must by patiently arrived at. Moreover, diplomacy is needed only if there is an urgency to manage and design relations, hence to politically and ethically intervene into world’s becoming that way or another (to put it in Deleuzian dictionary). Such a standpoint implies

1) the idea of Nature which is neither harmonious nor evil and catastrophic, but which simply does not exist at all (see Latour 1993, Latour 2004, Descola 2013), and

2) that diplomacy does not presuppose eschatology (which always smuggles into our ontological analysis some inadequately narrow normative presuppositions).

These two claims are inherently intertwined. The idea of Nature (1) is very dangerous, since it easily justifies a belief in some historical point of arrival for humanity navigating itself throughout overheating planetary ecosystem. Thus, it gives us false guarantees regarding our environmental political action, because it presents us a simplistic roadmap for climate change mitigation and/or adaptation that depicts a future time when climate change is definitively eradicated (2) and when we can finally proceed – with a great relief – to solve other problem, less environmental and perhaps more “human” (for whatever that word might mean). In this respect, my idea of diplomacy is nihilistic, since it operates with everchanging environment that will never cease from our political horizons. Such an idea presupposes a world being in constant trouble and always inventing new troubles once the previous ones seem to be finally resolved (Haraway 2016: 10-12; 56). Optimism and catastrophism presuppose each other, and for this reason, exorcizing the spectre of climate catastrophe must simultaneously mean to get rid of naïve environmental optimism.

Ecological entanglements and predatory relations are closely interlinked (Viveiros de Castro 2014, Haraway 2016). This does not justify predation per se, but only gives us a peculiar ethical perspective: it allows us to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable predations and entanglements in given context. In other words, this paper is motivated by strong intuition that if one takes seriously the idea of inter-species diplomatic relations in the Anthropocene, one should also seriously consider potential future sites of conflict, exploitation and violence, in order to prevent their harmful proliferation and multiplication. Throughout this paper, the normative framework of such diplomatic practices will be further developed in terms of interlocking concepts of sympoiesis (Haraway 2016), conviviality (Illich 1975) and habilitation (Likavčan & Scholz-Wäckerle 2016) and assessed as feasible if the task to assemble, reassemble, generate and interconnect particular material spaces or territories is met in a serious fashion.

The paper will proceed as follows. At the very beginning, the key notions of sympoiesis, conviviality and habilitation will be properly defined. Secondly, the analysis of the processes leading to the militarization of environment will provide us understanding of territories of transversal and cross-species diplomacy as highly conflictive zones further destabilized by climate change (Keucheyan 2016). Then, our focus will shift towards digital platforms as emergent sites of governance and sovereignty in late capitalism and as potential post-capitalist infrastructures. They will be analysed in terms of Srnicek’s (2016) and Bratton’s (2016) accounts of platform capitalism and the Stack as instruments of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and as infrastructures re-assembling territories and creating new spaces of control, governance or freedom. (De)militarized environments and digital infrastructures present together territorial and infrastructural conditions determining the overall space of possibilities for radical political intervention against climate change. This space will be defined by the set of sympoietic and habilitative practices, which foster strong interfacial relations between human and non-human collectives and allow their mutual flourishing without aiming to reach some state of perfect equilibrium. As we will see, the peace of Earth is in the perpetual revolution.

Sympoiesis and habilitation

The emblematic idea of this paper – and of the emergent possibility of multi-, cross- , inter- as well as intra-species diplomacy – is the concept of sympoiesis. Sympoietic practices and tools generate multispecies flourishing and well-being (Haraway 2016: 51). They enable proliferation of manifold parallel evolutionary dynamics criss-crossing each other and layering organic and inorganic beings in thick compounds, meshes and networks – i.e. in open-ended patchy planetary assemblages of kinship and companionship (so called holobiont(s), see Haraway 2016: 60). Sympoiesis means becoming with, making with, worlding with and thinking with all the critters of this world rather than against them (Haraway 2016: 59-60). This approach of “staying with the trouble” exorcises the spectre of teleology in political interventions, since teleology would mean a negation of the irreducibly troubling aspects of this world. Hence such attitude accepts the planetary assemblage in its irreducible and complex richness and thickness (Haraway 2016: 56). It is further defined by speculative appetite and an ability to follow the thread of manifold kinships without necessary sense of any ultimate direction. It does not imply any consolation or redemption and it allows individual and collective operations in space of deep and structural contingency (Haraway 2016: 10-12). @@1

For this reason, sympoiesis invents a wholly new operational mode of political and ecological intervention, laying outside the dichotomy of anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism, since it does not operate with a hypothesis of Earth or ecosystem as closed system (and for this reason, it operates outside of the register of One)@@2 and it plays with intimacy of strangers, where individual units of being join larger structures of juicy companionship. Here they can mutate, but nevertheless they are still treated as distinguishable subjects of kinships, thus they are not being dissolved in some planetary mesh of underdifferentiated relationality. Thus every agency in such a matrix enters relations of mutual symbiosis of a special kind: it always means a detailed negotiation between predation and deliberate withdrawal of predation (the idea of kinship in Amerindian perspectivism, see Viveiros de Castro 2014: 59). As Haraway puts it: “Eating each other properly requires meeting each other properly” (Haraway 2016: 73). It follows that every kinship and every sympoietic worlding is inherently precarious, but nevertheless it always includes care, patience as well as passion (Haraway 2016: 55).

Such an approach furthermore denies both naïve belief in technofixes on the one hand as well as an opposite attitude of total scepticism or even determinism on the other hand. Haraway rather calls us “to embrace situated technical projects and their people” (Haraway 2016: 3). According to her story, technologies are not the enemies, but also they are not ultimate solutions of any problem (Haraway 2016: 3). In this respects, Haraway’s notion shares many similarities with Illich’s (1975) concept of convivial technologies. The innovation of new technologies as well as re-use and re-appropriation of the old ones should be kept in line with the long-term metabolic limits of energy and material consumption and ecosystem reproduction. This idea further emphasises worker cooperatives, consonance with democratic values and development of the care economy or gift-exchange, and it also demands a novel mode of innovation that endogenously adapts to institutional changes and respects the entropy law (Georgescu-Roegen 1971).

The two scenarios of technology innovation and appropriation are analysed in this respect by Likavčan and Scholz-Wäckerle (2016), and they are called prosthetics and habilitation (Callon 2008: 43–51): “In general, prosthetics stabilizes agencies via processes of convergence; habilitation disrupts them and induces a substantive change in the distribution of agencies through divergent operations” (Likavčan and Scholz-Wäckerle 2016: 7). Prosthetic change can be further explained as a design strategy aimed to enable an actor to conduct a desired activity that she/he/it would not otherwise be able to execute (Callon 2008: 43). It leads to disciplination and subjectification of human and non-human users (Callon 2008: 45–46, Fuchs 2010, Bratton 2016), consequently leading to petrifying existing power structures. Habilitation – contrary to prosthetics – plays the role of potentially subversive technological innovation. Rather than focusing on the enhancement of individual agency, habilitation aims at interfaces between agencies, and generates a shift in their performativity as a function of mutual adaptation (Callon 2008: 44); it therefore operates within post-humanist imagery and requires a knowledge of the actual environment where agencies are deployed and produced, not just of the agency itself. Thus it can be defined as reversed prostheticization, de-centering humans and facilitating series of becoming rather than stable structures of being (Bratton 2016: 274-276). For this reason, it can be further conceptualized as involving procedures of cognitive mapping (Jameson 1991: 51). Habilitative innovation thus reorganizes interfaces between technological agencies, creating sympoietic alliances between and within various actor-networks. Habilitation does not privilege any actor in the network and for this reason, it carries emancipatory potential (Callon 2008: 47). Moreover, habilitation accelerates the creative potentialities of current technological innovation in information and communication technologies, as will be explained in Section 3.

Nature is a battlefield

Sun Tzu (2009) introduces in his Art of War an old saying: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete” (Sun Tzu 2009: 40). What is at stake here is a strategic understanding of territory as a pre-condition of decision-making. Context of any practice is never neutral – by shaping the terrain or by creating a new territory, you modify the results of operations executed upon the given site. Climate change itself functions in this respect as a fabrication of new territories and logics of both inter- and intra-territorial relationality. Late capitalism gets adopted to this changing landscape, as it

1) appropriates military invention and

2) develops strategies of resilient extraction, production and logistics for the Anthropocene (Evans and Reid 2014).

The contradictory (and unfortunately still more and more mainstreamed) greening of capitalism can be interpreted as an attempt to dystopically continue the dull system of exploitation of labour and appropriation of nature on the overheated planet (Kenis and Lievens 2015, Moore 2015). Prolonging an expired economic system however cannot be successful without techniques of power, and as a territory of power relations becomes significantly reconfigured by climate change, the institutional and technological innovation leads to new perspectives on how to appropriate and use destabilized weather patterns, intensive droughts and floods or desertified landscapes for the sake of overall continuation of ongoing economic constellation (Keucheyan 2016). Thus climate change itself functions as a generative process of new militarized environments (Keucheyan 2016). From this perspective, it is indeed a “natural weapon” against those who do not have sufficient economic power, technological means and scientific knowledge to partially adapt on the new and uneven patterns of climate behaviour.

Keucheyan (2016: 104-109) gives us in this respect a very detailed account of how military strategies recently adopted to situation of climate change. Extremely unpredictable weather conditions behave like a general threat multipliers and so they raise demands on resilience of military technologies and on methods of tactical planning (Keucheyan 2016: 112). Hence armies gradually become chaos specialists capable to facilitate seemingly disorganized behaviour and contingent events, and they learn to intervene into territory not by direct force of weapons but by tactical hacking of the territory itself. Post-disaster situations are future operational environments of armed forces and for this reason, adaptation to disaster or even deliberate non-intervention that would otherwise prevent a disaster from happening is accounted into military strategies (Keucheyan 2016: 106). In terms of global international relations, this new emergent quality of military forces can lead to novel and nasty ways of leading warfare in the Anthropocene, since the destructive force of corrupted ecosystem processes joins the club of the cataclysmic means of total war, such as nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction. One does not have to produce a catastrophe in order to win a war; it is sufficient to deliberately create conditions in which disasters tend to occur (Keucheyan 2016: 122-124). If the future is in hell, capitalism wants to make sure it will get some profit even once we are all doomed there forever.

Using environment as a weapon (and as an integral part of strategic planning) is not a new idea, as one can observe in Sun Tzu’s (2009) writings. For example, Weizman (2014) gives us a very detailed account of a particular case when desertification is employed as a method of continuous, structural political violence: a so-called “battle over the Negev” in Israel/Palestine, described as “a systematic state campaign meant to uproot the Bedouins from the fertile northern threshold of the desert, concentrate them in purpose-built towns located mostly in the desert’s more arid parts, and hand over their arable lands for Jewish settlement, fields, and forests“ (Weizman 2014: 7). In his picture, colonialism, military and climate are intertwined – as a line of desert changes from one year to another, so the settlements of Bedouins are again and again built and then destroyed by IDF. For example, one particular settlement in area of al-‘Araqib has been already demolished 65 times by June 2014. The threshold of the desert, which is represented by pulsating 200 mm isohyet aridity line (Weizman 2014: 8), denotes the borders of legal apparatus of Israeli state, and hence as a desertification of Negev proceeded, the Bedouin settlements occurred repeatedly either inside, or outside of the juridical power that did not recognized their claim on a desert land which they tried to cultivate. The cultivation of land was an important marker of a legal claim for the land – and as far as Bedouins were considered by default as nomads having no techniques and practices of agriculture, they were not treated as having any legitimate right on the land, and so the desert landscape of Negev became from a point of view of Israeli jurisdiction a terra nullis – the no man’s land, which can be freely appropriated and repurposed (Wiezman 2014). Bedouins thus in certain sense share the fate of many indigenous tribes across the world: they were and still are considered a part of natural environment, not a part of state polis.

My claim is that similarly as a desertification is used in Israeli ecological-military strategy in Negev desert, so by means of climate change, we will see in future time a global militarization of changing and chaotic environment, in order to petrify and govern lines of colonization and environmental / climate injustices (Keucheyan 2016). For this reason, a new doctrine of military perspective as an expertise in governing chaos gains an extreme importance. These are very bad news for anyone who wishes that climate change can become a major argument in deliberate worldwide transition towards more peaceful future, since in fact, we can see nowadays attempts to design new ways how conflicts can be produced and further amplified. Another testing ground of warfare in extreme weather is, for example, Siachen glacier on the borders between India, Pakistan and China. This rapidly melting glacier suffers by military activities of Pakistani and Indian army, as both states claim the right on this territory. Thirty years of continuous warfare changed the mountain wilderness into rotten ecosystem, and Indian army gained in the conflict a major know-how about military ecology (Keucheyan 2016: 119-120). In other ways, armies often operate in the mode of ecological task forces, which aim to contribute to labour of nature preservation and conservation, not only in India, but also in China or Israel and Palestine. Obviously, nature was always an object of military activity and re-fashioning, and national politics is historically intertwined with protection of biodiversity, production of nature and spaces of wilderness, as an important practice of building a consistent idea of national identity (sometimes even connected to racist stereotypes, as in historical cases of French, British or German conservation movement, see Keucheyan 2016: 38-40).

Getting back to the idea of environmental and climate (in)justice, we can see a general pattern that many environmental injustices are intersectional with racial, ethnical, gender, age and class divides in late capitalism (Keucheyan 2016). Seeing from the global picture, we can see a continuation of many colonial relations as they are translated into asymmetries in the quality of living environments of whole nations. We can further observe also systemic “outsourcing” of global climate change to the countries of global South, where as an evidence it can serve us the imbalance between the impacts of the changing climate on respective regions – while island countries of Oceania are sinking and South-Asian countries face unprecedented extreme weather such as well-known Hurricane Haiyan (that ravaged Philippines in 2013), countries of global North hesitate to implement policies of radical climate change prevention and/or mitigation. Importantly, despite we must count among major polluters also accelerated economies of China or India, we must, first of all, see climate change as a result of worldwide parasitic supply-chain network of capitalist production, and hence cease from the old-fashioned nation-state optics. In this perspective, it is still predominantly Western capital which is heavily burdened with historically high carbon footprint (Malm 2015: 327-333). What is worse, capital and international power turn into means of preserving oneself from the suffering generated by climate change, since it allows one to invest in the military, technological and economic fixes of climate disasters. Thus it is predicted that the most advanced countries can in limited fashion withstand the initial impacts of climate change and literarily export suffering to the “buffer zone” of the global South, similarly as the poor neighbourhoods of New Orleans de facto served as an urban buffer zone of hurricanes (see Keucheyan 2016).

If the environment and climate change become militarized, we can expect a spectrum of highly conflictive ways of saving one class, ethnicity or nation from impacts of climate change to the detriment of others. Hence it is claimed that the regulative ideas of multispecies diplomacy require active dissolution of such zones of conflict and injustice, in order to progressively unfold sympoietic practices within socio-natural assemblages. It means that a successful facilitation of these practices requires an embracement of anti-capitalist normative presuppositions. De-militarization of environment must in such case become an inherent part of both human intra-spieces political relations, as well as planetary inter-species diplomacy, since otherwise it can’t be ruled out that climate change will work in fact in favour of class divisions and worldwide economic injustices, potentially leading to total eradication of some nowadays habitable land together with its populations. Enclaves, exclaves and areas of militarized climate management will be increasingly used as ways the armed forces and capital will coalesce in global war machine facilitating late-capitalist regime of exploitation and appropriation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 351-355). Militarized environments thus can lead to deepening and prolonging of economic predation on the global scale, and hence if the era of climate change is to be replaced by peaceful future, this trend must be overcome by non-militarized production of ecosystems. In the next chapter, we will see how we can find sites of such diplomatic activity in digital platforms of the near future.

Planetary-scale computation

Nowadays, calculation of nature becomes an inherent part of the internal mechanism of algorithmic computation (Kittler in Gale and Sane 2007: 324), since no computation occurs without transformation of matter to energy and energy to information (Bratton 2016: 75). The idea of ubiquity of computation in contemporary socio-economic formation was recently conceptualized by Bratton (2016: 66; 70-71) as the Stack – a massive planetary infrastructure that turns to be a technological regime plugged into fabric of ecosystems as well as societies. The Stack is defined as a site of proliferation of digital platforms, and is structured as a layered architecture unevenly enveloping the globe. Its six layers are Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User. These layers are functioning as relatively independent modules that can be modified and re-fashioned without affecting the functionality of other layers. The overall functional logic of this architecture is not as much horizontal as it is mainly vertical – throughout columns crossing the layers of the Stack, energy, material and information flows can travel up and down, deterritorializing on one side of the world and reterritorializing on the other. Thus the Stack architecture undermines and overmines territorial jurisdictions and allows for cosmopolitan mobility of the elements within the planetary network, and hence the Stack operates within its own mode of sovereignty: i.e. Cloud sovereignty.

What is important, Cloud sovereignty generates its own enclaves, exclaves, zones of exception and temporary or permanent camps. Some are used for extractive purposes (as in case of mines, oil fields or plantations, see Mehrotra and Vera 2016), others as sites of sacred life (Agamben 1998), i.e. of total exclusion and political de-subjectivation of refugees, minorities or “pathological” personalities. Still others are not realized as “geoglyphs” on terrestrial landscape (Bratton 2016: 296), but as virtual spaces within spaces which are materially realized only as ephemeral bits of code flowing thought servers and data centres. For this reason, the question of the design of the Stack is inherently political, because designing the Stack means also designing the future of planetary ecosystem. Nowadays, the Stack terraforms the planet in a deadly way, speeding up the entropy of ecosystem, as it relays mainly on extractive industries that feed its material, mineral and energy appetite (Bratton 2016: 93; 259). In this process, the planetary infrastructure of ephemeral enclaves of extraction and distribution was set out (Mehrotra and Vera 2016). More precisely, militarization and securitization of environment act as mappings that always simultaneously produce new territories, hence drawing new violent borders on the Earth’s surface. According to Bratton (2016: 323-324), the multiplication of digital interfaces allows for further petrification of this state of affairs. The world was thus turned into layered carbosilicon machine, where energy of sun trapped in fossilized dead bodies merges with abstractions of cybernetic algorithms (Pasquinelli 2017, Bratton 2016). Destabilized, appropriated and militarized environments thus function as spaces of conflict between capital and planetary ecosystem, where the extractivist nature of the former allows the degradation of the latter. The task then is: how to refashion the machine of planetary computation without instituting a new regime of planetary occupation.

In this picture, digital infrastructures and platform economies are identified as major factors affecting the results and methods of potentially successful sympoietic practices. As one can see from the analysis of Cloud sovereignty, they do not only actively shape material environments and human behaviour, but they also give rise to political conflicts, they facilitate ideological hegemonies and they create new sovereignties (Bratton 2016: 56-65). Under conditions of climate change, they can help to elaborate zones of safety from ravaging of negative planetary feedback loops, since they can help us monitor the environment and manage the sympoietic practices upon solid data. The enclave/exclave logic of the Stack can be a precondition for new modes of environmental nomadism in the Anthropocene. However, these dialectics can also directly expose Earthlings to the worst outcomes of changing the climate, since the creation of exclaves can easily mean the birth of the new regime of refugee camps, not the romantic and frictionless embeddedness of humans in the environment. As platforms provide the means for invasion of abstraction and imagination back to direct presentation in reality (due to augmented reality / virtual reality / hypermedia / biomedia / ubiquitous interfaces / Internet of Things), they can facilitate the unprecedented proliferation of fundamentalisms and of secessionist tendencies (Bratton 2016: 241-242). The adaptation to climate change under platform capitalism can easily mean indirect warfare against global South without a single bullet being fired because the environment itself can easily become the most active means of conflict, which can get even worse when technologies itself become new environments. Such a situation can easily lead to worsening injustices even if the global socio-economic regime becomes partially adapted to climate change, because climate justice is a function of spatial justice, as seen in previous Section 2.

Digital infrastructures, however, can counter this trend if appropriated in sympoietic fashion – that is if they function under habilitative appropriation (Likavčan & Scholz-Wäckerle 2016). They have power to re-connect disconnected and map territorially scattered processes in cognitively accessible fashion (the idea of cognitive mapping – see Jameson 1991: 51, Srnicek 2012). For this reason, digital infrastructures represent powerful cartographical machines. Their potential has been clearly demonstrated in 2010, when Google Maps shifted borderline between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. This resulted in severe diplomatic crisis including the possibility of war between both states. Fortunately, the cartographic power of digital platforms can be used also in an opposite manner, since they can be particularly helpful in the context of building new spaces of sociality and exchange as well as in evangelizing people about the effects of climate change. Interspecies diplomacy thus seems feasible if it leans on strong material groundings that provide infrastructures capable to generate spaces of sympoiesis. However, platforms can also similarly prevent the realization of emancipatory political interventions, given the ideological context which embeds them (Easterling 2013, Mouffe 1979). Accordingly, digital infrastructures either generate spaces of conflict or can produce sites of sympoietic practice if driven by complementary political goals and practices. The overall ideological environment of given epoch thus must be shaped in parallel with technological innovation, since technologies are sociomorphic (Pasquinelli 2016). For this reason, I will offer in the concluding section a political design brief of viable habilitative innovation and appropriation.

Conclusion

If the Earth is wounded now, the wounds will leave scars even once being healed. And the scars will generate traumas that will haunt future generations for sure. Solution of climate change does not mean restoring some old order of things. It is an intervention as severe as changing the climate by more than 150 years of carbon dioxide emissions generated by intensive industrial production. The planetary assemblage of the Stack was fabricated in series of unfortunate semi-accidents on the crossroads of multiple historical trajectories between humans and non-humans, and our political task is burdened with all this crazy past (the idea of path dependency, see Pagano 2011: 382). As we have seen, we are trapped within carbosilicon war machine (Pasquinelli 2017: 322), and hence we are left with no other option than to replace it with a new planetary machine, not necessarily less silicon but definitely carbon-free. We must think and act globally, since if it holds that we live in the carbosilicon machine of the Stack, the relation between global and local is perverted and there is simply nothing like a local action complemented with global thinking or vice versa.

Such a political intervention needs its design brief. For this reason, we can conclude now with a list of diplomatic practices of sympoiesis for the age of Anthropocene and planetary-scale computation (hopefully leading to a transition towards post-Anthropocene, meaning also post-capitalism):

1) Cognitive mapping:

Cognitive mapping is developed in order “to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (Jameson 1990: 51). In other words, cognitive mapping is an aesthetic strategy to comprehend immensely complex entities, and in this respect, it mediates alien principles of association and makes them manifest in a manner adequate to human comprehension. Aesthetic experience of climate change gives us the impetus to seek for ecologically sensitive alternatives to the capitalist civilization of infinite excess. Instead of focusing on human perception of time, we must think in intentions of geological time. This can happen, for example, by means of a live visualization of satellite data crunched by supercomputers. Another aesthetic strategy could be an intense visualization of non-human gaze from nowhere (Likavčan 2016: 116). Such strategies offer us tools to create non-human centred narratives. Moreover, cognitive mapping can further serve as emancipatory strategy if it is understood as Agamben’s (2009: 17-19) profanation of apparatuses, i.e. making opaque structures and systems exercising power upon individuals transparent again. In Agamben’s words, it is “the restitution to common use of what has been captured and separated in [apparatuses]” (Agamben 2009: 24). As an example, once can introduce the practices that open the black box of digital technologies and shift power relations on the side of their users (Bratton 2016: 341-346) – open source / open access, creative commons, independent hacker initiatives, whistleblowing etc.

2) Technology appropriation:

Technology appropriation can be understood as a means of ideological repurposing or reframing of given technology (Likavčan & Scholz-Wäckerle 2016). Since innovation is always embedded in the political context and hence technologies tend to be appropriated by hegemonic agencies. However, this trend can be countered by subversive appropriation, which can unlock some new spaces of interlocking complementarities and path-dependencies (Pagano 2011). In this context, we can especially emphasize habilitative appropriation, when the technologies are used in novel ways by counter-hegemonic agencies in sympoietic fashion. As an example, one can mention terra0 (2016) project of Dutch artist Paul Kolling, who deployed a set of drones, sensors and cameras in a forest. This forest thus gained a capacity to perform autonomous operations on blockchain markets, capable of buying new pieces of land, obtaining maintenance services or even selling its own wood (Kolling 2016). Taken out of its hyper-libertarian ideological context, the principle of employing smart technologies to provide for non-humans special capacities to act as equal members of some platform polis can be seen as one of the essential strategies of habilitative appropriation. Similar attempts are clear also in works of David Bowen (2012), Art-Act collective (2015) or in Methbot operation by Russian hacker collective in 2016, which resulted in earning 180 million dollars via online advertisement by faking hundreds of thousands of American user accounts. In academic literature, Bratton provides a more infrastructural example, when he mentions NASA’s project Rainforest Skin, which shall serve to measure capacities of global forests to absorb carbon dioxide (Bratton 2016: 88). As can be seen on these examples, a crucial feature of habilitation is its orientation on interfaces and non-humans. For this reason, we can approach habilitative innovation and appropriation as radicalized prosthetics – as non-human centred design – where not only humans but also (and simultaneously) non-humans are enhanced in order to achieve the regulative ideal of sympoiesis (see the idea of reverse prostheticization in Section 1). The figure and the background are thus inherently reversible (Bratton 2016: 274-276), and hence habilitation does not presuppose any finished state of given individual or group agency, but its continuous mediation through series of interfaces. In such an agonistic picture of politics, the initial landscape of habilitative practice is necessarily conflictual and populated with predatory relations. Nothing can prevent reactionary re-militarization and precarization of the environment, and habilitative technologies convey a collective attempt of humans and non-humans to tackle this trend.

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In Cubic no. 1
2017