Deep and effective intelligence is a rare asset among human persons and collectives. I believe this is largely due to what can be spoken of as a single problem; one comprising the root of nearly every other tribulation our humanity exacerbates by adding our signature blend of hubris and vulnerability. This, coupled with the inherently and largely self-obscuring dangers of representational cognition produces not intelligence but something rather more like fulminant infection.

We are vulnerable to the peculiar character of our relationships with language and knowledge, and, largely, we are completely oblivious about this fact. We wonder where our problems arise, blame them on fairy-stories about human nature or similarly fantastical reductive abstractions of data. These are not their sources. There is, actually, nothing particularly amiss with our nature. And it’s not an accident that we are vulnerable to dangers resultant from exposure to and immersion in representational cultures. They are technologies, and as we use them, we take on their likeness in various senses and ways.

Language, representational thought, and knowledge are cognitive (and thus relational) technologies. Like all technologies, they have dangers and benefits. We must understand these with the utmost insight and immediacy, because we can no longer afford to ramify and magnify the outcomes of our innocence or our ignorance about these matters. Representation produces minds in its likeness. So, too, habits of knowledge-relation. The character of our relationships with language, knowledge, and representation thus becomes the character of our minds, our activity, and our humanity.

We must understand the most rudimentary and universal of our technologies, first, and learn to develop it… if we are to survive the repercussions of its ceaseless enactment as our lives and cultures. There can be no more urgent activism than an activism aimed at discovering and working with the peculiar dangers and opportunities implicit in our representational heritage. This is why I feel we must urgently establish and sustain entirely new ways, here, among the common people, of discussing, highlighting, and cooperatively transforming our relationships with representation in general. Together. With and for each other and our world.