The effect of our globe’s spin is to sculpt this liquid machine into beautiful loops and curves, giant whorls and vast underwater undulations.

Lesson one about the structure of the ocean is that it’s layered, and those layers generally do not mix with one another.

In principle there’s no reason why the layers can’t mix. But they don’t, because mixing requires extra energy, and if there’s no source of energy they’ll stay separate.

So in the right conditions, ocean water masses with different characteristics will form layers.

Waves form at a boundary between different layers of fluid—in the duck’s case, the boundary between the liquid lake and the gaseous atmosphere.

But waves can also form between the layers inside the liquid.

They travel much more slowly, and they can be much higher than the surface wake, but if you have layers, you can make what ocean scientists call internal waves.

You can see something like this if you create a stratified ocean in a jar: Pour in some water and an equal amount of oil and slosh the layers around.

You’ll see that the surface where the oil touches the air swirls around much as you might expect.

But if you look at the boundary between the water and the oil, you’ll also see another set of waves swirling around, behaving differently from the ones on the surface.

These are the internal waves.

Helen Czerski, Blue Machine

The greatest complexities arise exactly at boundaries.

Disorderly, mixed-up borders are sources of diversity and creativity.

There is no clearly determinable boundary between the sea and the land, or between sociology and anthropology.

There are only boundaries of word, thought, perception, and social agreement—artificial, mental-model boundaries.

On planet Earth, there are no ultimate boundaries. Everything physical comes from somewhere, everything goes somewhere, everything keeps moving.

If we’re to understand anything, we have to simplify, which means we have to make boundaries.

We have to invent boundaries for clarity and sanity; and boundaries can produce problems when we forget that we’ve artificially created them.

We get attached to the boundaries our minds happen to be accustomed to.

It’s a great art to remember that boundaries are of our own making, and that they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose.

Donella Meadows, Thinking In Systems

How used we are to looking at pictures that have only the outline!

What is the outline? It is not something definite.

It is not, believe it or not, that every object has a line around it!

There is no such line. It is only in our own psychological makeup that there is a line.

Rich Feynman

Social theories and scientific theories alike owe much to the idea that the world is composed of individuals with separately attributable properties.

An entangled web of scientific, social, ethical, and political practices, and our understanding of them, hinges on the various instantiations of this presupposition.

Much hangs in the balance in contesting its seeming inevitability.

Karen Barad, Meeting Universe Halfway

One need only remember the sensation experienced when attempting to orient oneself in a dark room with a stick.

When the stick is held loosely, it appears to the sense of touch to be an object.

When, however, it is held firmly, we lose the sensation that it is a foreign body, and the impression of touch becomes immediately localized at the point where the stick is touching the body under investigation.

Niels Bohr

The instruments man uses become, after all, extensions of his body.

Man must, in order to operate his instruments skillfully, internalize aspects of them in the form of kinesthetic and perceptual habits. In that sense at least, his instruments become literally part of him and modify him.

Being the enormously adaptive animal he is, man has been able to accept as authentically natural (that is, as given by Nature) such technological bases for his relationship to himself, for his identity.

The computing machine represents merely an extreme extrapolation of a much more general technological usurpation of man’s capacity to act as an autonomous agent in giving meaning to his world.

It is therefore important to inquire into the wider senses in which man has come to yield his own autonomy to a world viewed as machine.

Joseph Weizenbaum,
Computer Power and Human Reason

Man is a creature that can do anything.

Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine.

And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that?

Believe that.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

One day while tending the machinery, he got the forefinger on his left hand stuck in one of the gears, which tore the finger off at the joint.

While he screamed in pain, desperately “clapping the mangled joint, streaming with blood, to the finger,” the overseers laughed in his face.

It could have been worse.

While ten-year-old Mary Richards was getting ready to leave one night, her apron got caught in the horizontal shaft that turned the immense drawing frames, and her entire body was immediately pulled into the machinery.

He called out for help, but could do little but watch as she “whirled round and round” the machine.

Brian Merchant, Blood In Machine

Those who successfully rally for a technology’s creation are those who have the power and resources to do the rallying.

As they turn their ideas into reality, the vision they impose—of what the technology is and whom it can benefit—is thus the vision of a narrow elite, imbued with all their blind spots and self-serving philosophies.

Only through cataclysmic shifts in society or powerful organized resistance can a technology transform from enriching the few to lifting the many.

Karen Hao, Empire Of AI

Matter’s dynamism is generative not merely in the sense of bringing new things into the world but in the sense of bringing forth new worlds, of engaging in an ongoing reconfiguring of the world.

Bodies do not simply take their places in the world.

They are not simply situated in, or located in, particular environments.

Rather, “environments” and “bodies” are intra-actively co-constituted.

Bodies (“human,” “environmental,” or otherwise) are integral “parts” of, or dynamic reconfigurings of, what is.

Karen Barad

All of culture and all of nature get churned up again every day.

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

Not only is everything changing, but all is flux.

That is to say, what is is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process.

The best image of this process is perhaps that of the flowing stream, whose substance is never the same.

On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such.

Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow.

David Bohm, Wholeness and Implicate Order

This ongoing flow of agency, through which part of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another part of the world, does not take place in space and time.

It happens in the making of spacetime itself.

It is through specific agential intra-actions that a differential sense of being is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency.

Meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility.

Boundaries do not sit still.

Karen Barad