question what we mean by intelligence and which, in certain parts of the world,
are starting to produce something rather like Robson’s carpet of ‘stuff ’ acting as
a constantly-on background. Thus, on one side, the world formerly called ‘bio-
logical’ is being loaded up with all kinds of monitors and points of feedback and
continuous monitoring and is being treated as a material surface. For example,
animals are not just the object of more and more surveillance, ranging from the
simple chipping of companion animals through to all kinds of complex ethological
surveillance including GPS transmitters attached to smaller and smaller mammals
and now birds, continuous video feed into sites which have previously been opaque
to detection, and the representation of senses like infra-red that we could not
mark before. They are also increasingly thought of, in part no doubt because of
this mediated interaction, as the focus of knowledges which are, in certain senses
co-operatively generated (Hinchliffe et al. 2005). Something similar is happening
in the human realm in terms of modern medicine where it is now possible not only
to write of ‘re-ordering life’ through new systems of classification and measurement
combined with technologies which make the clinical encounter more and more
immediate but also to open up more possibilities for co-operation between clinician
and patient (Brown and Webster 200 4 ). On the other side, in the world formerly
called material, many materials are beginning to have characteristics which used
to be reserved for life and biological material is being incorporated into the
production of all kinds of things, from plastics to robots (Thrift 200 4 b). The result
is that the realm of ‘not-quite-life’ is growing apace.
Some writers will want to call ‘enough’ on this mass miscegenation, seeing a
threat to ‘nature’, ‘human nature’, and the world of the senses, that might lead to
a general ‘species suicide’ (e.g. McKibben 2003; Habermas 2003). But, I do not
believe that an authentic nature/inauthentic technology narrative is a viable one,
a point that is only underlined now that crossovers that used to take place in the
laboratory are becoming a part of everyday life and are producing new hybrid
entities, not as singular bodies but as distributed environments, as autonomic physi-
ologies which have re-organized human being, putting it together again as a skein
of bodies, things and spaces. This process of reticulation is becoming so general
that it is worth taking some time to consider it. The process consists of six main
elements, each of which is inter-related, and which are the twenty-first-century
equivalent of the laying down of pipes, cables and roads but with an even more
effective grip on human being because they pay more attention to establishing
patterns of continually adapting pre-reflective movement which, it might be argued,
actually chime rather well with the innate plasticity of human movement.
First, and most obviously, through developments like grid computing, environ-
ments are becoming ever more computationally intensive. Elsewhere, I have
pointed to the effects of the population of the world with software coupled with
general increases in computing power (Thrift and French 2002). In recent
work (Thrift 200 4 a, 2005c), I have been trying to outline what such a ‘qual-
culated’ world of continuous and ubiquitous calculation in endless loops will look
like, and, in particular, what new capabilities and senses it will bring into being,
such as extended reach or the kinds of effects produced by modern mood-altering
From born to made 163