
Bruno Latour Tracks Down Gaia - Hooke
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bruno-latour-tracks-down-gaia/#!
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davebryand
Off topic, but I just learned about Actor-network theory, and his work,
earlier tonight. I love frameworks or models that put their attention on the
edges instead of the nodes. Interesting stuff to check out if you're
interesting in graphs/networks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory)

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foobarbecue
Man, I had a lecture series on this (Cambridge undergrad geography). It seemed
like complete bunk. The lecturer seemed to be arguing that inanimate objects
were alive. The other students seemed convinced, though.

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pasabagi
I also think it's bunk, but I think the alive-inanimate-objects thing is
really just a symptom. It's not his idea - rather Spinoza's, and in Spinoza's
hands, is fairly sensible. Lautour's work is a lot of stuff like that - fairly
commonplace* philosophy ideas, said in the most controversial way possible,
rebranded as his own.

*Commonplace philosophy ideas occupy a similar kind of remove to common-sense realism as set theory, so they tend to be the sort of things that sound kinda crazy until you dig in.

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jhbadger
While Lovelock himself distances himself from any interpretations of Gaia as
either creationist (as in the Earth was "created" to be perfectly balanced) or
that the Earth is literally alive (like the planet in the book/movie
"Solaris"), it is clear that both interpretations are easy misconceptions for
people to make, and are in part responsible for the popularity of the "Gaia
Hypothesis" in popular culture.

The actual case it is just turns out that a set of lots of independently
evolving organisms just happen to have emergent properties of stability as a
system. That's interesting to a degree, but using a hypothesis of the Earth as
a single organism is not the most helpful way to get that idea across.

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pinewurst
I have to recommend "Aramis, or the Love of Technology" by Bruno Latour. It's
an account of the development of a failed personal mass transit system that's
both brilliant and very beautiful.

