After purchasing the Super Furry Animals new album “Phantom Power” last week – one line, from one song has been reeling around my head. Singing itself into my mind and my mouth over and over.
It’s from an epic, sinister and beautiful track called “Slow life”, and the line is “Rocks are slow life”. Reflecting on it’s resonance, and thinking that the band had plucked it out of the (probably quite smokey) air, I decided to type it into google.
It’s a chapter heading in Kevin Kelly’s “Out of control”.
Which, also, happens to be the name of Track 9.
I mentioned this to a friend who’s not averse to chewing over The Supercontext now and again, and he mentioned it reminded him of something he’d read once, that all evolution, the biosphere of carbon based life, was just a catalyst for silicon-based evolution on a grander, longer scale.
We’re just part of the process of turing mountains into computers.
From Out Of Control>
“A pair of coevolutionary creatures chasing each other in an escalating arms race can only seem to veer out of control. Likewise, a pair of cozy coevolutionary symbionts embracing each other can only seem to lead to stagnant solipsism. But Lovelock saw that if you had a vast network of coevolutionary impulses, such that no creatures could escape creating its own substrate and the substrate its own creatures, then the web of coevolution spread around until it closed a circuit of self-making and self-control.”
And perhaps we’ll end this run of Filth-inspired finds, with this, from Out Of Control>
“...if Earth is reduced to the size of a bacteria, and inspected under high-powered optics, would it seem stranger than a virus? Gaia hovers there, a blue sphere under the stark light, inhaling energy, regulating its internal states, fending off disturbances, complexifying, and ready to transform another planet if given a chance.”
Ah.
Good.
The nurse seems to be here with today’s dose of Key 23.
Filed under: Ubiquitous computing
2 Comments 
