“The vast body — and by this I mean 90% or more — of the conserved evolved intelligence potentials implicit in the structure and potential of your species are denied to moderns for a simple reason. They are only awakened and activated in the contexts in which they were developed, and all of those are contexts in which human beings are, exactly, animals, in nature, with other animals. What I mean to say is this: those things you carry around with you as if your lives depended upon them… your machines? Those are the dead bodies of relationships so astonishing that the sum of your fictions would appear insipid in comparison. Those dead bodies are the bodies of agreements your species made and broke with your allies — the animals and living places. Your cell phone cannot deliver any of the assets you were born with. In fact, it serves to sever you from them — permanently. Because you have machines and live in representational cultures… you will probably never discover what it means to be human. It means more than all your fantasies. Even in its simplest implementations. Your machines are a kind of promise. But not the one they advertise. They are the promise of eternal forgetting, of self, other, life, and all of its treasures. They are the shiny token you get instead, and serve, and even love… instead of the living persons, places, and beings who would have been both your allies and your wings, had you only stopped playing with your mechanical abilities long enough to remember; that is to say: to re-acquire the memberships and relationships that were amputated so that machines and tokens could acquire the assets properly belonging to living beings, places, and relationships.”

— an anonymous informant