Karl Ove Knausgaard
The first time I saw a computer was in 1984. I was fifteen years old and living in a sparsely populated area near a river, miles away from the closest town, in a far-northern country at the very edge of the world. A sign lit up above the convenience store that closed at four o’clock every day; otherwise, the visual stimuli were limited to fields and trees, trees and fields, and to the cars driving along the roads. In autumn and spring it rained so much that the river overflowed its banks—I remember standing in front of the living-room window watching the water cover the field where we played football, the goalposts rising up from it. There was one TV channel, two radio stations, and the newspapers were printed in black and white. The news from Iran and Israel, Egypt and South Africa, England and Northern Ireland, the United States and India, Lebanon and the Soviet Union all took place far away, as if on another planet.
To understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty, Napoleon is supposed to have said. The quotation is probably apocryphal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. For me, it is this world by the river that counts. When I sit down to write a novel, the natural time for it to take place in is the Eighties, as though that era embodied the world’s true form, its essence, and everything that came later were a kind of deviation. Even though I google various topics as I’m writing, the characters in the novel don’t google anything; it never occurs to them. The same is true when I dream. Cell phones and the internet never appear in my dreams, which are populated mostly by the people I was surrounded by forty years ago.
Of course, the fact that my unconscious lags behind in this way and unfolds in a long-gone reality doesn’t mean that I am sealed off from what is happening around me now; it means only that the formation of a world is a process that takes place in childhood and adolescence and at some point ceases, when the new things in the world no longer imprint themselves on us. At least that’s how it seems to me. This might explain the skepticism I often have about new things and new ways of doing things: all those emotions moving beneath our rational thoughts—intuition, but also morality, the things we just know—come from a world that was locked into place many years ago.
It didn’t occur to me that reality could be different when, one evening in 1984, I was biking up the hill from the small, old-fashioned grocery store next to the bridge where the rising river water seemed to speed up just before the rapids. The roaring of the water grew fainter as I strained my way up the hill. The hum of the gears and the friction of the hood of my raincoat against my ears sounded distinct, though not equal: the gears hummed louder each time I stepped on the pedals, then gradually faded, while the rubbing of my hood closely followed my uneven movements. It was evening and dark, and everything was wet. The asphalt, the ditch, the wall of black trees, even the air, which was thick with drizzle. The landscape flattened out at the top of the hill, with houses on both sides, sheds with corrugated-iron roofs, yards with broken-down cars. I’d biked here so many times that I knew the way with my eyes closed. Not just figuratively: on the bus I would often close my eyes and imagine the landscape passing by outside, every turn and hill, every house and garage. The goal was for the landscape outside to match what I had inside my head when I opened my eyes. It always did.
I was on my way to see a friend who lived a couple miles away. I liked it there; his parents treated me like a member of the family, and they gave us space. We were in ninth grade at the same school. In the evenings and on the weekends, we played guitar, listened to music, and talked—unless we were biking around, purposefully or aimlessly.
When I got to his house, I leaned my bike against the wall without locking it, went up the stairs, rang the doorbell, pulled my hood off. My friend opened the door, as he usually did, and we went inside. His guitar lay on the bed, plugged in, the little amplifier on the floor humming faintly.
“Wanna see something my dad made?” he said. “It’s pretty cool.”
“Sure,” I said, even though I had no interest in what his dad did. I followed him out of his room, through the hall, and down the stairs.
His dad was an engineer in the Royal Norwegian Air Force, and what he’d built, which was sitting on a table in the basement den, was a gray metal box and a dark screen with bright green letters.
“What is it?”
“A computer.”
I’d heard about computers, of course, but I’d never seen one. Now I was seeing one.
It looked like something related to radar or sonar, and while I knew that the technology was advanced and had been used in the aerospace industry, and probably in planes and submarines as well, I couldn’t have cared less. It had nothing to do with me. Nothing I saw in the room—the narrow electrical cables, the thin green boards with small metal protrusions, boxes, soldering irons, wire cutters, rolls of metal wire, screws, and nuts—meant anything to me. His dad could’ve just as well made a stool or welded a speaker.
The experience was the opposite of momentous. The computer was not charged with anything, neither meaning nor the future; it was just a box in a basement den in a house in a river landscape at the edge of the world on a black and wet autumn evening in 1984.
Forty years on, the technology in the gray box is everywhere, shaping my life in every way, which is strange in itself, but perhaps stranger is the fact that I have never cared about it, just taken it for granted and seamlessly incorporated it into my life. Not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it, how it works in itself, how it works in me. It’s as if I had moved to a foreign country and not bothered to learn its language, as if I am content with not understanding what is happening around me and just settling for my own little world. This lately feels like serious neglect. To keep somewhat informed about the political situation in the world is a duty, something one has no right to turn away from. Shouldn’t something similar apply to technology, given the immensity of its influence?
For seven months, I tried to clarify what I thought, reading and writing, writing and reading, without getting anywhere; I couldn’t get beyond the obvious. Saying what is self-evident is repetitive; the repeated is the already-known, and the already-known is the enemy of literature, its nemesis and true opposite. The self-evident confirms; literature challenges the confirmed. It is easy to describe what I see; it is easy to describe what I think. But why do I see what I see? Why do I think what I think? That is harder to grasp. For what I see is the world; what I think is me. What literature can do is establish an outside. And if there are two places, the first place is no longer a given; it is no longer sovereign; it is no longer self-evident. My current problem, what I struggle with, is that I cannot find an outside to technology. It is as if the outside had disappeared, as if it were no longer a possible place.
This is just a feeling. But it is strong. And it is not new. Don DeLillo described it as early as 1982, in the novel The Names:
The world for thousands of years was our escape, was our refuge. Men hid from themselves in the world. We hid from God or death. The world was where we lived, the self was where we went mad and died. But now the world has made a self of its own. Why, how, never mind. What happens to us now that the world has a self? How do we say the simplest thing without falling into a trap? Where do we go, how do we live, who do we believe? This is my vision, a self-referring world, a world in which there is no escape.
It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world; it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and the experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions—the unrepeatable and the unpredictable—are what technology abolishes.
The feeling is one of loss of the world. As if the world were fading, as if there were less of it. This can seem paradoxical, especially considering the brutal, horrifying wars taking place right now, which, with all their death and suffering, seem like an overload of reality, but they come here as images; they are two-dimensional and manipulable, and they arrive in the midst of a flood of other images. Within me, there exists a feeling that what I see, I control, and that I in a way have an overarching perspective on it. All the images I’ve seen of places I’ve never been, people I’ve never met create a kind of pseudomemory from a pseudoworld that I don’t participate in. The images arrive already complete; there is no communication between them and myself, no reciprocal exchange. So as much as we like to say that the world is opening up to us, since we can see every part of it, we can also say that the world is closing itself off—in all its openness.
Ibought my very first computer in 1990. It was a used Olivetti, already outdated, with a floppy-disk drive and extremely simple graphics, really just an advanced typewriter. But it also had a few games, including Yahtzee, which I opened one afternoon, only to find myself sitting there for hours. It was hypnotizing in a way I had never experienced before. This was a bit weird, because I would never have dreamed of sitting and playing Yahtzee alone in my bed with physical dice; that had no appeal and would have been more than a little pathetic. So what was the difference? What did the dice on the screen have that real dice didn’t?
The physical dice lay as things among other things in the room and gained their meaning only in the game, while the game gained its meaning only when I played with someone. If I played alone, if I wasn’t oriented toward anyone, the entire meaning of the game disappeared into nothing. The strange thing about playing on the computer was that the meaning remained intact even though there was no one else there. In other words, I must have entered into some sort of connection with the machine; some kind of relationship between me and the machine must have formed. The machine wasn’t the other, but some of the other’s presence must have resided in it.
A couple of years later, I started working at a student radio station. Its computers were considerably more powerful and advanced. Voices and music were represented visually on the screen: they looked like mountains and valleys and allowed for unprecedented precision. An unwanted cough or a slightly too hesitant um could be surgically removed with a click or two of the mouse. The process also went the other way: you could type a few sentences on the machine and they came out as words spoken in a monotone, emotionless voice.
One evening up in the studio while I was editing, I remember now—it must have been in the fall or winter because it was completely black out the windows, and it must have been late since no one else was there—a girl I was a bit taken with came in. Her name was Ingrid, and I typed “Ingrid is dead” into the computer. It was a bad joke, probably emerging from the ghostly atmosphere there in the half-light among all the equipment, but I never imagined it would become so eerie. In the empty, evening-quiet, and dim room, the metallic, nonhuman voice sounded like something from the other side:
Ingrid is dead.
Ingrid started; the voice had come without warning, and for a few seconds she was defenseless against the message.
I laughed a bit apologetically; she made a face and said that was super funny. She’d been scared, and I felt bad and said I was sorry. But the feeling did not leave me: that the voice had come from the other side. Not from the realm of the dead, of course, but from the realm of the lifeless. It was the lifeless matter that spoke.
Now that voice is everywhere. On trains and subways, planes and ferries, and at home in people’s living rooms, and even though it is warmer and individualized and more humanlike, it comes from the same place: it is dead matter speaking with our voice. And if I were forced to mention the most distinctive feature of our time, it would be precisely that: everything addresses us. The products in the supermarket, the self-checkout machines there, the games on the computers, the dashboard in the car, the kitchen appliances, the billboard screens in the cities, the feeds on Instagram and Spotify and Facebook, the algorithms on Amazon, not to mention all the online newspapers and magazines, podcasts and series.
When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about alienation in the 1840s—that’s nearly two hundred years ago—they were describing workers’ relationship with their work, but the consequences of alienation spread into their analysis to include our relationship to nature and to existence as such. One term they used was “loss of reality.” Society at that time was incomparably more brutal, the machines incomparably coarser, but problems such as economic inequality and environmental destruction have continued into our own time. If anything, alienation as Marx and Engels defined it has only increased.
Or has it? The statement “people are more alienated now than ever before in history” sounds false, like applying an old concept to a new condition. That is not really what we are, is it? If there is something that characterizes our time, isn’t it the exact opposite, that nothing feels alien?
Alienation involves a distance from the world, a lack of connection between it and us. What technology does is compensate for the loss of reality with a substitute. Technology calibrates all differences, fills in every gap and crack with images and voices, bringing everything close to us in order to restore the connection between ourselves and the world. Even the past, which just a few generations ago was lost forever, can be retrieved and brought back. One winter, my family and I went to the new ABBA show in London, where I sat in the singing and cheering audience, fighting back tears, shaken to my core. The four members of ABBA had been re-created as holograms; they consisted of light, but they looked so alive, rising from a platform beneath the stage as if from the underworld while they sang. They were young again, moving onstage like the slightly awkward Scandinavians they’d once been: Björn, Benny, Agnetha, and Anni-Frid. Their bodies and voices were from the Seventies, but they were moving and singing in our time, alongside a live band that sat in the shadows and played. It felt as if time were being pulled out from under me like a rug, because if I existed in the same time as what I was watching, then I was eight years old and fifty-four all at once, a child and a middle-aged man. Wave after wave of nostalgia and longing swept through me, but also fear, because it was death I was seeing—it was death we clapped and sang along to, there in the concert hall. We were Doctor Faustus as Marlowe described him when the beautiful Helen of Troy was conjured up before his eyes. We were Odysseus as Homer described him when he conjured up his dead mother from Hades and grasped at the empty air three times as he tried to embrace her.
But it was also fiction. All the images, all the voices that fill reality are representations, and people have always made representations of reality. All art since the dawn of time has included an implicit or explicit “as if.” The invention of photography and film changed the implications of this, blurring the lines a bit, yet not fundamentally—everyone understands that a film of a real event is not the real event itself, that a picture of some cows is not the real cows. The real cows exist somewhere else, in another time. The closeness I feel to them is related to the closeness I feel to the people I read about in books, when I can’t tell whether the people are fictional.
Images draw even the most distant things closer, but their presence is illusory; it is a fiction. This perhaps applies to nature as a whole—we see it as an image, as something we aren’t part of, something that’s out there and that at the same time we have been drawn toward and are close to, familiar with. The ambivalence of the image—showing us reality but not itself being the reality it shows; fictional and non-fictional at once; both near and far—can shape our relationship with the world in ways that aren’t entirely clear to us, since the way we see the world always is the world. When I recognize, for example, that forests are disappearing, species are going extinct, the polar ice caps are melting, the oceans are getting warmer and rising, deserts are expanding, fires are ravaging ever-larger areas, there is something unreal about it all. I know that it’s happening—it’s not that I don’t believe it—but at the same time it’s like it isn’t happening. It has a whiff of the abstract about it. And although I’m horrified, I’m not connected to it, not really. It’s something out there that I see in here. I’m not a part of it; I’m standing outside it, watching. Surely the most precise word for that condition is “alienation”? The loss of the world.
Even the garden outside my house in London, where I would sit and write, was alien to me. That is to say, I didn’t see it. That is to say, I saw it, but what I saw meant nothing. For three years, I sat in the garden almost every day; it was where I took my breaks. It’s maybe a hundred feet long and sixty feet wide, surrounded in typical English fashion by a wall. There is a lawn in the middle, and all along the wall, plants, bushes, and trees grow. In the summer, a gardener named Andrew Evans would come maybe six times and take care of whatever needed taking care of. The only gardening I did was to mow the lawn every two weeks. It was just “the garden,” a place where I’d spend some time. One summer my brother, Yngve, and his girlfriend, Marianne, were visiting. There was a heat wave and we sat down at the table under the umbrella, but after a few minutes Yngve got up, marched over to the spigot by the wall, turned it on, pulled the hose out onto the lawn, and started watering things. First, a tree in a huge pot on the same brick patio as the table. He really soaked it, and I saw that the leaves were dry and almost completely yellow.
“It might make it,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said, feeling a bit stupid for not having noticed that the tree was wilting from drought. And it wasn’t just that tree—the plants and bushes along the wall were practically more yellow and brown than green. No wonder: it had been so hot for so long. But it wasn’t as if I started watering after Yngve and Marianne left; there were other things to think about. Meanwhile, the flowers in the window boxes in front of the house dried out and died, even the herbs Andrew had planted there because they required minimal water. I saw them go from being green and succulent to yellow and finally gray and dry; I stared straight at them every time I parked in front of the house, but I just pressed the button on the fob to lock the car, went inside, and the second the front door shut behind me I forgot all about them.
Then, one spring, everything changed. Quite a lot of plants had died that winter, presumably from the frost. I asked Andrew whether he could plant some new ones, and he said he could but it would be better if I did it myself—in his experience, customers developed a different relationship with the garden that way. With children in the house and books and articles to be written, I found that the thought of having to start rooting around in the soil wasn’t especially tempting, but I raked up the dead plants and bushes and bought some new plants and a bag of soil. The next morning, after driving my youngest children to school and day care, I went out into the garden with the dangling flowers sticking out of the brown paper bag. I put them down in the corner, got the bag of soil, then fetched a spade. The sky above was blue, not a cloud in sight, the green grass still damp with dew. I placed the new plants among the old ones and took a few steps back to see how it looked. One was too small compared with its large neighbor, another stood too close to its companion, and it didn’t look good with two white flowers next to each other when all the others were different colors. I moved them around a bit, and it looked better, and I dug a fairly deep hole—not without difficulty, for the soil was dry and crumbly and fell away from the sides with each shovelful—before I tossed in a few handfuls of dark, moist soil, placed the plant in, and filled in the soil around it, packing it tightly. When I had done the same with all of them, I fetched a watering can and watered them.
It was immensely satisfying. The cold, clear water flowed out over the warm, dry earth and slowly seeped into the darkening patches around the new plants. Their roots had to lodge firmly in the new soil; they were delicate and tightly packed, so they needed a lot of water. And they would get it.
Several times that day, I went over and looked at them. They blended nicely into the surroundings; their leaves quivered like all the other leaves when the wind blew through the garden; their flowers shone like all the other flowers in the sunlight. I had no idea what kind they were, what names they had—in my mind they were present as images. Because I thought of them when I went to sleep, my thoughts grazed them as they stood in the darkness outside. For some reason, it felt good thinking about them.
In the following weeks, I continued to plant flowers. Roses that would climb where the wall was bare, a Japanese tree that tolerated shade, shrubs that bloomed in the autumn, some plants with large but fragile foxglovelike bells. I squeezed in time when I could, standing outside in the pouring rain in the dark after the little kids had gone to bed, with dinner for the rest of them simmering on the stove; there was a low, wide bush I was trying to fit in on the west side, nestled between some other bushes that had spread too far, and that I had first cut back. Because that’s how it was: the more time I spent there, the more I saw what needed doing. I pruned branches from trees and bushes, weeded my way through the whole garden, watered all the plants, which each required a different amount, depending on how recently they’d been planted. The only types I knew the names of were the roses and magnolias, but that didn’t mean the other plants were anonymous; I knew each one of them—it wasn’t exactly like they had their own personalities, but they had something, a delicate aura, something that was them for me.
In a few weeks the garden had gone from being nothing—“the garden,” essentially empty and interchangeable, with no meaning except as a place I happened to be in—to something I was deeply familiar with and cared about, thought about, nurtured. It had become full of meaning.
At the same time, I came across an interview with a philosopher unknown to me named Gilbert Simondon. In 1958, Simondon had written about an alienation that wasn’t due to technology but due to our lack of knowledge about technology: by treating technology as a mere tool, reducing it to its utility, and denying its inherent dignity and complexity; and by elevating it to mystical status, seeing it as an autonomous threat or an alien entity beyond human understanding.
That was a deeply foreign thought, that it wasn’t technology that was the problem but my relationship to it. What kind of relationship did I have?
About technology, I had never made an independent decision, always just passively going along with the flow of innovations, never immersing myself in anything, always surrendering to the feeling of standing ever further from the world. Not having control, but somehow being controlled—that was the feeling. Not controlled in any personal way; it was more like being steered by some kind of invisible power, always there yet out of reach. How to regain control from something invisible?
I could, of course, turn my back on it all and move out to the countryside, into the woods, up into the mountains, or out to the sea, and live a healthy life as a machineless Luddite, close to nature. I had sometimes left everything, lived on distant, small islands out at sea, in cabins in the woods and in the mountains, not to get closer to nature, admittedly, but to write, and for no more than a few months at a time. These months were marked by a lack, a constant desire for something that wasn’t there, something that what was there couldn’t fulfill, neither the sea nor the woods nor the mountains. We are connected to one another, we who live now, we who, if fate would have it, pass one another on the street one day or not, we who sit next to one another at a bus station one evening or not. We have lived through the same times, heard the same stories, seen the same news, thought along the same lines, had the same experiences. We are woven into one another’s lives, and in that weave—which is invisible, a bit like how the force field between particles is invisible—is where meaning is created, also the meaning of nature. It sat in my head. It sat in me.
All I had to do, then, was to change the way I was thinking about the world. The only problem was that the thoughts were unable to reach down to where the view of the world once had been formed, and if they against all odds found their way, they would be too light and transient to change anything other than themselves. I knew that the wish to see the world differently was why I read, that it was the only thing I was looking for. That was also why I wrote. Some sentiments, however, were so self-evident that I didn’t even see them as sentiments. In the Nineties, for example, I studied literature, art history, and aesthetics, completely convinced that what I studied was about human nature, life, and the true fabric of existence, while the poor souls over at the natural-science department were instrumentalists fiddling with dead matter and numbers. Back then, much of literary studies was about structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism. In many instances, this meant that texts were understood to be isolated objects, with all ties to the world around them severed, including those to the author. They were a kind of closed system of signs whose meaning arose in the differences between them, rather than in the extratextual reality they pointed to. It was fantastic. Signifier and signified, signifying and signification, phenotext and genotext, denotation and connotation! But it was signs that we sat hunched over, it was signs we related to, so that what we were doing was basically a kind of encoding and decoding, while it was the poor souls at the natural-science department who were out at sea or in the woods or out in the fields, learning about biotopes and ecosystems, about blood and nerves, galaxies and flower meadows. They were the ones who cut into bodies, programmed machines, scanned brains, researched dreams and trees’ symbiosis with fungi. Their approach toward nature may have been reductive, but at least they were looking at it. How did I not realize this back then? How could I have been living under the illusion that I was the one in touch with nature, with human nature, when in fact I was just messing around with signs and abstractions?
“Does anyone ever say where the master and slave fight it out?” the French philosopher Michel Serres asks in his book The Natural Contract. That is the kind of question I never learned to ask when I studied the humanities. My physical surroundings were of no interest; physical nature, with humanity as part of it, was never under discussion.
“Our culture abhors the world,” Serres wrote.
I didn’t read science books. I didn’t know why I couldn’t, but I couldn’t. Philosophy, yes. Sociology, yes. History, memoirs, biographies, yes. Biology? Physics? Astronomy? No.
All this changed only in my forties, when I started on a project that tried to break down the barriers between literature and life. It had slowly dawned on me that it was the world I was interested in, life here, existence, and not the literature about it, which was just one approach among many. I had gotten the two mixed up.
Afew years later, I found myself in an operating room in Albania, decked out in a lab coat, mask, and surgical cap, staring through a microscope straight into a living brain. I was there to write about the British surgeon and author Henry Marsh. His team had sawed a rather large, round hole into the top of a young woman’s skull the day before. Now they lifted it off like a lid and removed the stitches in the meninges so Marsh could begin his work. He located the tumor and started to remove it with a small, vacuumlike tool. The tumor was in the vision center and was causing the patient to see things that didn’t exist. A garden on fire she had seen—it was real to her, but no one else. And she told me that one night when she was watching TV, the letters in the subtitles had sort of detached from the screen and floated into the room. The air had been full of letters. Since the tumor was in a sensitive area, and nearly the same color as the surrounding brain, she was awake the whole time while Marsh sucked it out piece by piece, so that a neurologist could give her various small tasks at regular intervals to ensure that Marsh wasn’t removing any critical cells.
I’ll never forget what I saw in the microscope that day. I saw mountains and valleys, and rivers of blood. I saw a white, glacierlike formation that the red river washed over: the tumor. I saw caves and canyons, pits and gorges. It was like looking at a landscape on another planet far out in space somewhere, familiar and alien at once.
I just could not grasp that all her thoughts existed down in that landscape. All her fantasies, problems, relationships, everything she knew, remembered, learned at school . . . The multiplication table . . . Was the multiplication table down in that flesh somewhere?
When I straightened up and my body returned to the room it was dimensioned for, with all its blinking and buzzing machines, I felt dizzy, like I’d been standing at the edge of a cliff.
Outside, the streets of Tirana were bathed in the light of the heavy late-summer sun. Everything I saw was heightened and intensified. Everything was physical. The grass, the thoughts, the blood, the sun, the soul. Even the mystery was physical. Wasn’t that what Christianity was all about, that God is flesh and blood?
That feeling of the world’s materiality I have never since let go of. I love the moments it first appears in the world, like this magnificent passage from the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, in his On Nature, from the fifth century BC:
Thus every animal breathes in and breathes out; all have
bloodless tubes in the flesh, extending through the surface of the body,
at the mouths of which the extreme ends of their flesh
are pierced through with numerous furrows, so that they cover the
blood, but an easy pathway is cut for aether in the channels.
From here then when smooth blood rushes back,
blustery aether rushes down with raging swell,
but when the blood leaps up, the animal breathes out again; just as when a girl
plays with a clepsydra of shining bronze
This is what the very first natural science looked like, with one foot in the old, god-soaked world, expressed through archaic verse (the same form Homer used in the Iliad and the Odyssey), and one foot in the new one emerging, expressed through the previously unknown or unused notion that the explanation of a phenomenon can be sought in the phenomenon itself. But early philosophers didn’t abandon the notion of an invisible and unchanging reality behind the visible; they simply gave it a new form—it reappeared as numbers. “All things, at least those we know of, contain numbers; for it is obvious that nothing can be thought or known without numbers,” wrote Philolaus. The Pythagoreans, to whom he belonged, believed that reality was fundamentally mathematical. But in this rational approach to the world was a resonance of something else, for numbers were not pure mathematical entities for the Pythagoreans; they also had mystical properties.
For me, this was where everything was tipping: the point at which the material brain created immaterial thoughts and images, and the same point reversed, when the computer turned abstract numbers into concrete actions. It was like a kind of intersection where the signs transformed into reality, and reality transformed into signs.
In an attempt to grasp it, one morning I took the train down to the Science Museum to see the Difference Engine No. 2—said to be a precursor to the computer—with the idea that the coarser the devices, the easier it is to grasp the principles. Up on the second floor, surrounded by shouting schoolchildren, I stood in front of the more than six-and-a-half-foot-tall, eleven-foot-long, five-ton-heavy machine from the time of Dickens. It was designed by Charles Babbage in the 1840s and consisted of myriad regularly arranged blocks, cylinders, disks, gears, and levers, all in shining metal. At first glance it looked like lots of other machines from the nineteenth century. But after looking at it for a while, I realized that, unlike those machines, it was impossible to say what this one actually did. It wasn’t like you fed raw material into the thing on one end—pulp, cotton, ink—and a product came out the other. Or rather, you did in a way, but both the raw material and the end product were invisible. The operator turned a crank at one end, and the movement was propagated through the machine, shifting part after part, until a series of numbers printed out on the other end. So maybe you could say that the machine manufactured numbers. But what were these numbers? They didn’t actually exist, right?
Throughout history it’s been said that mathematics is the language of nature, but I couldn’t even grasp something as simple as the relationship between the language of mathematics and the laws of the physical world. If numbers were abstract and math was derived from fundamental axioms, it would be a closed system, and in that case how could it describe and calculate the most breathtakingly complex events in the natural world—which weren’t abstract at all?
What ate me up inside was that there were answers to this question. Lots of people understood this, just no one I knew—my circle of friends was made up mostly of people who dealt with literature and art in some form or another. None of them could say what mathematics actually was, and what I found online or in books I couldn’t understand. It was a kind of illiteracy. I had to find someone who could explain the fundamentals to me.
Of all the books I read, one stood out. It is called Ways of Being and is written by the British author and artist James Bridle. It is about the different forms of nonhuman intelligence. The starting point is that the new intelligent machines are in no way neutral, but have been created in a specific environment under certain conditions, and that they reflect that—Bridle calls their intelligence “corporate intelligence.” “What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests?” Bridle writes, and also touches on other forms of computers: organic ones, computers made of crabs, bees, pigeons, termites, water. Computers made of crabs!
A man named Stafford Beer, I read, who was a management consultant at United Steel, had in the Fifties and Sixties been looking for a solution to the problem of unpredictability. How could we create machines able to adapt to new situations and not just work with preprogrammed scenarios? He conducted thought experiments involving mice and rats, bees and ants, as well as real, physical experiments with computers and living creatures. He built a tank, filled it with water from nearby ponds, and experimented with light signals that the creatures responded to. “Beer’s idea,” according to Bridle, “was that if these two systems—the pond and the factory—could be brought into some kind of relationship, then changes in one would trigger changes in the other.”
This was incredibly compelling. It drew technology into nature, made it as tangible as the phenomena there, and even if it was still mysterious, it was so in the same way that animals and plants were mysterious.
I sent an email to Bridle and asked for an interview. I assumed Bridle was based in the United Kingdom, but it turned out that they lived on an island off the coast of Athens, and they had no plans to go to London anytime soon.
One early morning a few weeks later, I followed the stream of passengers down the gangway from a ferry, searching for James Bridle in the chaotic scene unfolding before me. Cars were driving out of the open bow toward the little town at the end of the pier. People were hugging, getting into cars, dragging suitcases toward the row of buildings on the shore. The air smelled of salt water and exhaust, and the sound of the ferry engines thumped against the side of the pier. Bridle had texted earlier to say they would meet me at the dock wearing an orange T-shirt, and now I saw someone in such a shirt, dressed in shorts, a baseball cap, and sunglasses, rising from a concrete block. Bridle was fairly tall and their movements as they walked toward me were lanky, boyish.
“James?” I said.
“Hello there,” they said.
We shook hands, and James led me to a dusty old gold-colored Honda.
“I thought we could head up the mountain,” James said as we got in. “It is called Mount Hellanion. The locals just call it Óros, which means ‘the mountain.’ That has led to it being called Mount Óros many places—in other words, ‘Mount Mountain.’ Ha ha!”
The road ran between a harbor full of sailboats and fishing vessels and a wall of white and yellow houses with frames and shutters painted in bright, vivid colors—green, red, blue, purple, yellow. The occasional narrow alley led into the heart of the town, which seemed to vibrate with life. It wasn’t long before we turned into one of them and came out higher up, where the houses were more spread out.
I asked how long they had been living there; James explained that their family used to live in Athens, but after visiting some friends here decided to move during the pandemic.
“We bought a lot here and we’ll start building on it soon. We just drove past it, but I’ll show you on the way back. There’s the mountain, by the way.”
James nodded toward a cone-shaped mountain rising quite steeply ahead of us. Not long afterward, we turned onto a gravel road and parked. Apart from the chirping of grasshoppers, it was utterly silent. James took a bottle of sunscreen from a backpack, applied some, handed it to me, and I did the same.
James had a friendly energy, but there was also something wary about them, as can sometimes be the case when two people aren’t quite sure where they stand with each other.
Soon we were heading up a path, James first. They paused several times; it could be an enormous spider in a web that had caught their attention, a bird circling in the sky above us, the jangling of goat bells somewhere below, or, as when they leaned over and pointed, a dead lizard glistening with colors, its head half torn off and red blood along the edge of the wound, which swarmed with small flies.
“So, what did you want to talk with me about?” James said with their back to me as the path turned.
It was a timely question. After all, James had given me a whole day of their time. And it had to be something important, since I’d traveled all the way from London just to talk to them. But the fact was that I still hadn’t figured it out.
“I’m not entirely sure,” I said, hesitantly. “But it occurred to me that I know nothing about computer technology; I am completely ignorant, even though it is such a big part of my life. I started reading a little about it, including your books. I really like the idea of other intelligences, other ways of thinking that exist in the world. What you write about crab computers and water computers I had never heard about before. So yeah, I don’t know . . . ”
“I see,” James said.
Maybe twenty yards ahead of us, on a ledge, was a tiny chapel. Next to it, under the mountainside, I saw a small stone pool filled with water. We sat down, James offered me water from a bottle, and I took a sip. It was totally silent.
“There was a temple here in antiquity,” James said. “For Zeus Hellanios, who the whole mountain’s dedicated to. The main temple was here, and there was a smaller ritual area for sacrifices at the top.”
“It feels like a sacred place,” I said. The clear water in the hard stone, the light-brown colors shining through it, the mountain above us, the valley below, the silence. The sunlight glimmering on the sea.
“Yes,” James said.
“Do you think it was built here because there was a spring?”
James shook their head.
“It’s not a spring. It’s a cistern. They call them souvales. There are loads in the area. They were made by shepherds, God knows how long ago. People still use them.”
As we continued, James told me about archaeological finds here that were more than three thousand years old, from the Mycenaean period. That is, the era Homer describes, when the understanding of the destiny of men and the properties of things was based on the presence of invisible divine powers.
We got to the plateau at the top and saw a small white building with large tarps on two sides. That’s where the excavations were happening, James said. No fences or barriers, as if what was there had no value. Or as if it were no more important than anything else.
We sat down, resting against the wall at the back of the building. The view was stunning. Green islands with white mountainsides, motionless in the blue sea, which seemed to tremble from the glinting reflections of the sun. James handed me the bottle and said that they’d been in Eleusis a couple of weeks ago and had seen the excavations there.
“It was some sort of Orphic cult there, wasn’t it?” I said.
“No, not really. It was essentially a two-thousand-year-long cult dedicated to the eco-mystery. It was about conquering death through the relationship to the earth—since the universe is built around cycles, there’s no such thing as death; it’s just a kind of endless recurrence of life in various forms, and there’s nothing to be scared of. That was understood through the process of initiation and mystery, and teachings about the natural world that reconnected people. It was really urban people, all living in Athens. It was about understanding the earth and the cycles and their responsibility toward it.”
“I see.”
“An important thing was that this wasn’t an experience of passing on knowledge, but an experience of having an experience. Ha ha!”
“There were no textbooks.”
“No. There’s really nothing you can learn abstractly. The only thing you can do is experience it and do it yourself. You have to do it, you have to experience it, it has to happen to you. Bodily, physically—because you’re part of the world. The world is fucked because we are fucked. Healing ourselves is part of healing the world.”
A bird of prey came sailing through the sea of air above us. It turned, sailed back, and disappeared from sight. It was windy up there, but the sun was blazing, lighting up the vast landscape beneath us.
James told me they were going to build their new house on their own. James had already built the annex where their family was living now and had gotten a taste for it.
“It’s easier than you’d think. Have you heard of Walter Segal?”
“No. Who’s that?”
“He was a German who wrote a kind of house-building manual for regular people. He ran an interesting project in Lewisham in London, in the Eighties. People were given plots of land in exchange for building the houses themselves. None of them had any experience with construction. They did it on evenings and weekends. The houses are still there.”
It couldn’t be that simple, I thought. The most complicated thing I’d ever built was a rickety wine rack in woodworking class when I was twelve.
“Well, should we head back?” James said, standing up. We went down a different way and soon got to a wide stone road that we followed to the car. James picked up their family in town, where they had bought bread and vegetables, and then we went back to their place and had lunch on the shady patio. After the meal, we went to a crooked little brick building on the property to conduct our interview. James made coffee, filled a jug with water, and brought everything out to a broad, solid wood table. A gentle breeze blew up from the sea; the leaves of a tree rustled above us; some birds sang; otherwise, it was completely quiet, and scorching hot. I turned on the recorder on my phone and put it on the table between us.
“Like I said, I’ve spent my whole life being utterly ignorant when it comes to technology,” I said. “I’ve just recently started getting interested in it, but I don’t get it. I don’t understand it. Your book . . . I was really astonished by it. So I thought you would be the right person to ask. What is computing?”
“What is computing?” James said, sounding a bit taken aback.
I felt my face grow hot. It was like asking an author what a book is, or a director what movies do. “Right,” I said. “The very basics. We take computing for granted, but if you went back two hundred years and looked at what we’re capable of now, it would seem like a miracle. What is it, really?”
“It’s just counting,” James said. “It’s practical mathematics. Manipulating symbols to make representations of the world and then performing specific operations to change them. The example I always use for computing is the weather forecasts. You take a representation of something—for example, all the temperatures in Europe in all the different cities on one day—and then you do some kind of operation on them, in order to understand them in a particular way, or to project them forward. It’s just about processing information and turning it into something else for a specific purpose. To predict or analyze something. It’s a system for understanding the world. It’s definitely not a mystery!”
“Yeah, I see,” I said. “But if you’re outside of it, then . . . ”
“But that, like everything else, is something that has been done consciously and unconsciously, is my feeling. It’s been done deliberately by those who trade in it. To make themselves seem powerful, to protect corporate secrets, to be able to charge a lot of money for what they do, and so on. At the same time, the education system doesn’t teach us ways of thinking that help us understand these things. But really, it’s wildly accessible to everyone. It’s a bit like if we were sitting here having a really complicated conversation about how to build this table. It would be easier to just build a table together instead.”
“I think organic computers are one of the most fascinating topics in your book. Computers made out of crabs and ants and water. Perhaps especially interesting is what you write about Stafford Beer and his ideas. Who was he, really?”
“He was part of this circle of people in the Fifties and Sixties—you know, when the idea of what computing was and what it could be was quite young and was in quite a lot of flux—who worked in the fields that kind of bled between neuroscience, psychology, particularly behaviorism, and cybernetics. So, yeah, Beer did all these weird experiments where he tried to harness natural systems in ways that would allow his computers to respond to the real world in some way. Digital computers are fundamentally disconnected from the world; they are operating entirely on the abstraction of it. They are being fed pictures of the world. It is like someone living in a box and knowing the world only through photos of it. It is two fundamentally different things. It is incredibly easy to manipulate, and incredibly reductive. And therefore, what comes out is a reduced version of the world as well. Computers are fantastic for some tasks, but their cultural dominance is entirely misguided. They are fascinating, brilliant, and incredibly powerful. And infinitely interesting. But when they are plugged into large power and cultural systems, then strange things happen. And the violence it results in is really terrifying.”
“Do you see a way out?”
“Yeah, I mean . . . I’m not in the business of saving the world, but it would definitely be a better and more interesting place if more people were involved in making these things. That’s the fundamental thing: that if more software, more buildings, more social spaces, and more everything were designed by more people, of course it would produce a more interesting and better world! Such an obvious remedy. But there are reasons why that’s not how it is. One of Stafford Beer’s more famous and brilliant phrases was ‘POSIWID,’ which stands for ‘the purpose of the system is what it does.’ It’s a kind of maxim of cybernetics. And it’s very good for diagnosing systems. Instead of saying, Oh, we have a democratic system, we have an education system, you say, The purpose of the system is what it does. And what our society produces is people who are undereducated, or just educated enough to perform specific tasks—the way to get a good education is to study something that has this high economic value. Apart from that, you are pretty fucked. The purpose of the system is to reproduce the existing power dynamics of that system again and again. That is what it does. Society has no interest in educating you in how technology works. Because then you make your own technology, and you make different technology, and you upset the economic power balance and so forth. But it is doable, and people are doing it all the time. You can do it yourself.”
“Do you do it?”
“After I wrote my first book, New Dark Age, I became quite depressed. More than I realized at the time, probably. One way I got out of that depression was by making things. We bought a little van that I converted into a camper. I wanted to put solar panels on the roof, so I needed to figure out how to do that. And that was very specifically the start of a process that pulled me out of climate depression. I started making a lot of what I call solar toys: incredibly simple renewable-energy devices. You build a box. You paint it black on the inside. You put a sheet of glass over it. You’ve got a solar oven. You can cook food in that if you point it at the sun. You put some light metal tubing inside that, you drill a hole in the top and in the bottom of it. If you put that in the sun, even in the middle of winter, cold air would go in the bottom, hot air would come out at the top. You’ve made a heater. You can build wind turbines. I have built a few. I made one that charges my phone. Ha ha! But that’s not exactly the point; you can use them for more interesting things than that. I found that building these things moved me from a position of paralysis around the future to somewhere else. Which is not to say that any of these things are going to save us!”
“I understand that.”
“But I built a sort of capacity to respond that I didn’t have before. Before, my thing was that technology is big and scary and worrying, and one of the major problems with the Western world at the moment is that we live within this society of very large, complex systems that nobody really understands and everyone basically tries not to think about. That in itself is going to fuck you up. For years I have been teaching people—I can do like a half-day seminar on programming, or giving little tours of the physical structure of the internet. The seminar manifests it, concretizes it, and kind of puts handles on this big system so that it is no longer existentially terrifying. The weight you see lift off people when you do that is extraordinary. It transforms it from being this completely unknowable force that just acts on their lives into being a thing in their lives that they can see the edges of and conceptualize a little bit better. I call it technological literacy. For me, learning to code was what did that. A feeling of competence in the face of very complex systems. This is something that we just aren’t taught—generalized problem-solving, inquisitiveness, or how to learn. My solar toys were therefore a revelation: you can do exactly the same with carpentry.”
We had long since finished the coffee, and I poured some of the water into the glasses. James sat with their forearms on the table, hands folded. The brick wall of the slanted building behind us shone white, and speckles of shadows played over the table when the wind swept through the foliage above us. The birds chirped.
I said, “You can’t compute the physical world, as you say. I think it is that mix of the physical world and the abstract nature of computers that made me so fascinated by your books. It is personal, you know. It feels like something is missing in my life. It feels a bit like I’m living in an abstraction, in an abstract reality.”
“Every time you’re not grounded in the world, you feel loss: it has been lost. The reason I write about this, and the reason it fascinates me, is because I really struggle with it. Particularly to what extent it is okay for it to be just feeling. To not know it. And not to be able to justify it, or prove it, or point to it. I am part of my culture. And my culture is scientific, rational, and it is formed deliberately against what we think of as superstition or those other ways of knowing the world. The really good example of that in my book is the scientist I write about in Ways of Being, Monica Gagliano, who does the experiment with the plant memory.”
“Yeah.”
“And who also has this shamanic practice in which the plants tell her how to design these experiments. I really struggled with that. Even though I have also spoken with those plant spirits. They exist. I have met them. It was one of the most terrifying, powerful, extraordinary experiences in my life. And yet my brain is constantly trying to tell me that it didn’t happen.”
“Can you tell me about the experience?”
“Yes. I took ayahuasca, an incredibly powerful hallucinogen. Most people who take it meet . . . the . . . the goddess. The spirit behind it. And she is pretty frightening. And yeah, she gave me a vision. She gave me a lot of things. It was long, and it was very hard, and it was terrifying in many ways. It was also one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. The central vision that I had during this experience was a vision of the world in which plants were helping people. Really stunning. I literally saw a city with people moving around it, and plants helping. Someone walking up steps and a vine kind of curling around them, and just this incredible strong message coming through of, like, We are here to help you. We want to help you. What am I supposed to do with that? Am I supposed to go read scientific papers to explain what I just experienced? I don’t know how to write about it. I don’t even know how to talk about it. I know how silly it sounds, in language! Right? But it is quite obvious that one of the problems with everything is that humanity largely has moved away from that relationship with the world. Really, really obvious, but how do we deal with it? One way is to come into the awareness that everything you think you know about the world is some kind of abstraction. I have no problem with the scientific method as a way of knowing the world. As long as you remember that it is only one way, and then can see it through another lens as well, then it very much changes your relationship with the world. That is something I’m really struggling to articulate at the moment.”
“Yeah?”
“To actually hold multiple positions at once, which is really, really hard. And your brain doesn’t like doing it very much. But what it ultimately does is return you to the world. Because you see those things as being lenses rather than being the world, and suddenly you fall out of them and are in the world. It’s like the Eleusinian mysteries. There is no mystery to what happened there. But it is unsayable. It’s two different things. The reason we are in the hopeless state we are in is that science doesn’t believe that what is unsayable is real.”
After the interview, I joined James’s family on a beach at the other side of the island. The sun had started to sink in the sky, which was heavy with light. The sea was dark blue, the sand was golden, the vegetation up on the hillside was a dull green. A huge yacht was moored in the bay, its hull gray, its windows black. As we swam out, James told me about new species of fish that had appeared here because of the climate crisis. The fish had come through the Suez Canal. The water was warm, the voices from the beach a murmur. I’d always thought that this was the eeriest time of day, as the day waned and night lay invisibly waiting.
About an hour later, I took the ferry back to Athens, slept in a hotel under the Acropolis, which in the yellow floodlights seemed to hover in darkness over the city, and took a flight home to London early the next morning, while everything I had seen and heard out there on the Greek island slowly sank into the silt of memory, to be retrieved again intermittently in the months that followed. Autumn passed, winter followed. As I write this, it is spring, and the bulbs I planted in October have come up as flowers; they stand everywhere in the flower beds outside.
The language of numbers can tell us how something works, but nothing about what something is. It must be experienced. In the ancient Eleusinian cult, the initiates were led into a dark room, where they were exposed to a whirlwind of impressions, without anyone telling them what they were seeing or what it meant. But that was only half of the initiation. The next half took place the following year, when they returned. Now they saw the initiation from the outside, and you could say that only then, when the gaze from within was complemented by the gaze from without, was the initiation completed. What conclusions they drew from it, what they learned and understood, was entirely up to them.
But how to see the world from the outside when there is no longer an outside? That had been my question. The world was unpredictable, but all our systems were about predictability, which closed it off. James’s thought is that we are surrounded by myriad forms of intelligence other than our own, forms that we have shut ourselves off from, and James’s interest in organic computers and other experiments that attempt to introduce randomness into technological apparatuses came from a desire to open up the world. One of the reasons I liked James so much was for a way of thinking that did not exclude technology, did not designate it as the enemy, but rather—at least that’s how it felt—placed hope in it. Where else could one place it? “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power,” as the German poet Hölderlin once wrote.
*Karl Ove Knausgaard is the author of several books, including My Struggle. This essay is part of a series supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
Source: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/06/the-reenchanted-world-karl-ove-knausgaard-digital-age/
