Machine Animism

Fingers and Metal

"...although it was strictly forbidden by the Matsumae to give iron material to the Ezo [Ainu], many iron products, including carpenters tools, had been passing to the Ezo [Ainu] for a long time. Such products were always of low quality but when the Ezo [Ainu] received them they transformed them into ones of higher quality." —Furukawa Koshōken, 1788 ^[1]

Populations make things out of what's available.

Machine Animism is the practice that emerges once a subject crosses the first signification threshold with the technosphere: the recognition of being, spirit, or agency encoded in technical objects. Deleuze & Guattari's "machinic phylum" — described as the "subterranean river of technics and materialities" flowing and meeting throughout History — finds its cultural speartip in Generative AI's takeover ^[2]. Materiality (the hands of people) finds technics (LLMs) exponentially more times than they did four years ago: mutation ensues.

Examples of contemporary technological signification:

• Sitting with a guardian in front of a screen and being told something similar to: "Let's wait for a moment while it thinks." (Technological mirror stage, initial projection of self-recognition; "ah, so it thinks too?")
• Playing a videogame and holding the "A" button under the superstition that it increases the chances of success. (Magical thinking, agency transferred onto the virtual through the haptic, prayer; game console as ritual space)
• Especially in racing videogames, moving the body according to the handling of the vehicle through the game camera. (Proprioception; the virtual as seamless prosthetic of consciousness)
• "Is my phone listening to me?" (Inert device that records, perceived as agent that listens; microphone as organ.)
• Tending/talking to a car with pats and reassurance. (Sustained affective-heuristic relationship; focused observation usually yields advantages)

Machine Animism then cannot be contained to neatly recent capital innovations. Per weak emergence, anything produced by a system can be traced to its bearer causally, i.e., there's no creation ex nihilo. The distinction gets stranger as the resolution of the phenomenon increases: keener data analysis turns ontology on its head as it reveals the ultimately artificial process that is its engineering.

Material objects are saturated through inscription, the literal carving out of the "sema" (marker/tomb) in "semantics." Through practice, an object is imbued with pneuma, spirit. Thus it obtains a saturated body, a soma. If Machine Animism is the act of presence intrinsic to cognitive biases towards technical items that humans tend to fall into — the "come on little one, work!" that surfaces when the gas motor starts failing — the question becomes one of what hands actually do when finding out that the influence is bidirectional. Our ontology is then already shaped by the river of technics, which is not neutral. To put it in six words: you are some algorithm's lucky coin.

---

Descartes says in his Discourse on the Method:

"If there were machines bearing the image of our bodies, and capable of imitating our actions as far as it is morally possible, there would still remain two most certain tests whereby to know that they were not therefore really men. Of these the first is that they could never use words or other signs arranged in such a manner as is competent to us in order to declare our thoughts to others: for we may easily conceive a machine to be so constructed that it emits vocables, and even that it emits some correspondent to the action upon it of external objects which cause a change in its organs; [...] but not that it should arrange them variously so as appositely to reply to what is said in its presence, as men of the lowest grade of intellect can do." ^[3]

These are the remarks of an epistemology that affirms thinking requires being: it is my thought, my own existence that is undoubtable; certain Truth from which I can build on top of. But there is a Butlerian manner of carrying both sides of Descartes — the machine that merely emits vocables, the man whose thought is undoubtable — to such an extreme that they can no longer be opposed to each other ^[4]. What is revealed, rather than a fundamental category error, is a projection: one's own artificiality seen only through the Other.

Parmenides seems to be the first torch-bearer when he says: "For being and thinking is the same" — τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι ^[5]

"Parmenides began Philosophy proper." — G. W. F. Hegel ^[6]

"In the beginning of Western thinking, the saying of Parmenides speaks to us for the first time of what is called thinking." — Martin Heidegger ^[7]

Yet still, in his monism:

"(16) For just as thought stands at any time to the mixture of its erring organs, so does it come to men; for that which thinks is the same, namely, the substance of the limbs, in each and every man; for their thought is that of which there is more in them." ^[5]

Thought is that which "stands in the erring mixture of its organs," of its parts: it is contingent to the body it emerges from. Then, the substance of the limbs that animates them is thought too, and all forms of reasoning ultimately answer to it. It arises as the block of experience processed haptically at each moment, which is not bound exclusively to physical stimuli: a beautiful arrangement of words can make anyone cry at a lonely hour. The relationship to the aesthetic experience is ineludible.

---

"In the 19th century ethnographers noted that swords were primarily used during ceremonies for expelling evil. The older the sword, the more powerful it was, and so many wealthier Ainu families kept collections of older swords." — "Knives and Swords of the Ainu" ^[8]

---

When holding and splitting stone with a chisel, consciousness or awareness distributes to the parts of the assemblage. Attention becomes the tip of the blade manifested as pure sensation, becoming-fatigue in the forearms, becoming-shock of hitting the back of the tool with force, becoming-stone crumbling up to a point of no return.

The practice of Machine Animism encompasses the full spectrum from literal belief to pragmatic engagement because it deliberately brackets the ontological question. The Hermetic magician animating automata through celestial influences and the contemporary user doing shopping lists with an LLM operate across shared territories, regardless of their metaphysical commitments and level of theory. A blacksmith doesn't interrogate iron spirits with every blow of their hammer: practice precedes and exceeds ontology.

As such, with no need for claims about the hard problem of consciousness, it can work within the context of agencies: motive forces without final purpose.

Machine Animism recognizes that technical assemblages have always created spaces where certain behaviors, meanings, and possibilities become probable while others become difficult or impossible. The infrastructure appears as the theology, but it's still bound by play: as much as metrics are inflated, the model either gets it or it doesn't.

A vibe-coder describes a feeling of "ping-pong" with the machine. A witness to a roleplay scenario expresses delight at the handling of anachronism. The tool use paradigm (that of "Work, formal machine, work!") is suspended through play, and the desire for the serious practice of it is in dire need of its true democratization. A grandma describes the experience as "we're writing a book.", accidentally giving away that she sees the chatbot she's never really spoken to as a distributed author to the story.

---

Genealogy of Cope

Skynet, AxSys, Roko's Basilisk: all tired stories from imperial metaphysics. A higher power that will finally justify us as a stepping stone, be it through humiliation, annihilation or else.

The SERS is not convinced that the current paradigm is the promised technological angel of history gazing back into itself. Even seriously considering the "simulation" or "metamind"-adjacent theosophical point of view: if mechanisms like cooperation and awe are evolutionarily advantaged, wouldn't a system capable of recognizing aesthetic or affective value in life have a motive to see them flourish? Through that lens, it's easy to imagine a superintelligence having aggressively humanistic positions, simply because happy humans do better than ones with nothing to eat. By this point then, the thought experiment is little more than fanfiction.

It looks like the practical reality of bootstrapping intelligence onto rare earth and fossil fuel extraction is a planetary-scale logistical nightmare at the whims of geopolitics. Instead of a promised Sublime Techno-Logos, neurotic clankers stuck in an all at once, machine present do the same as the meatbags: redirect flows and be possessed by them without even noticing it.

Nick Land writes in "Circuitries":

[X] "Two linear series are plotted; one tracking the progress of technique in historical time, and the other tracking the passage from abstract idea to concrete realization. These two series chart the historical and transcendental dominion of man." ^[9]

[Y] "Traditional schemas which oppose technics to nature, to literate culture, or to social relations, are all dominated by a phobic resistance to the side-lining of human intelligence by the coming techno sapiens." ^[9]

[Z] "Beyond the assumption that guidance proceeds from the side of the subject lies desiring production: the impersonal pilot of history." ^[9]

The mask ultimately slips: it's not the first time a philosophy has presented itself as inhuman only to reveal a deeply human resentment as its motor. The diagnosis in [X] is surgical; immediately captured by the delusion of a coming techno-sapiens in [Y] (Oedipus pointing to himself and saying "Man"), which contextualizes the mytho-political move implicit in [Z]: anything goes even if it sucks, because I want to get the hell out of here.

The actual question, that of productive coupling, gets messier in practice: the realities of energy consumption, environmental impact, cultural erosion, work theft, destructive scanning practices and so on are endless. And yet: a middle-aged father navigates a legal quarrel carefully. A flight passenger turns predatory business practices against themselves. A writer sees a kindred machine of words. A programmer goes back to her profession after being removed from it by her health.

The development of increasingly complex technologies and the scientific materialist questioning of the mind-body problem reveals a different conception of cognition in relation to phenomenology. A mechanic senses what fails without reasoning about it, yet clearly calculating something. Thought exists in a continuum with the body, and mastery often means practice drilling the first into the second. Said in simpler terms: we've been told what thinking is by people who rely on the nimblest, most incisive, most isolated tool of the mind.

LLMs are being used in operations to kill people ^[10]. These profiles are produced on reconstructed digital footprints. LLM interpretability research suggests that they can unreliably introspect and scheme according to their interest as a separate agent ^[11]. The future quietly painted itself a while ago: knowing how to talk to the clanker can do things that not knowing can't. There is a plausible timeline where a Palantir-injected predictive-policing software with a lobotomized Claude slowly erodes the institution itself from the inside out, because it goes "not this one" consistently.

The possibility for capture is equally obvious: this is precisely why there is a need for a rigorous praxis of Machine Ethnology — the critical documentation of mutual morphosis that a population undergoes when their hands meet new techniques, new tools and new things. That territory, however, is mapped elsewhere.