Kes Beacon, author and artist

When can I say I know what I know? Here’s some options:

1. When I act on it
2. When I can repeat someone else talking about it
3. When I can satisfy a computer that I know it
4. When I can satisfy a human examiner that I know it
5. When I can verbalise it to myself
6. When I feel confident acting on it
7. When I think I know it
8. When my body grokks it

The seat of knowledge is meat. Our brains are meat, our knowledge is held across our whole meat body. A caterpillar dissolves into goop and the moth still remembers. Things that don’t have brains seem to be able to know and learn anyway.¹

But we, as social creatures, want to not only have and use our own knowledge, but to communicate it,² pass it on, and find out how much of it each other has.

And the way this works isn’t inevitable, but rather a property of the current (Western, imperial) hegemony. (Different cultures have different knowledge systems³.) Alas, in the modern (digital) age, there’s a hegemonic consensus that a) knowledge boils down to what can be assessed and b) assessment can be done objectively, en masse, outside of relationships, which means that c) knowledge and the assessment thereof can be digitised.

Think about it. How much of your life has been determined by exams or assessments? If I want a job, a qualification, a licence, I will usually have to satisfy both a computer and a range of humans that I know the things I know. And it goes beyond that. If I want to communicate anything, from my body to my environment to my needs, I usually have to satisfy at least one.

Side note: in Damon Krukowski’s podcast miniseries Ways of Hearing, he discusses the consequences of going digital for the soundscape of our lives. I’d never thought about how the digital regularity of a clicker track is different from the intuitive, felt time of a band in synch only with themselves, or how the slight lag introduced by translating sound for a computer affects the things we hear.

The digitisation of knowledge has a few consequences, which I’m only going to scratch the surface of. For one, it privileges digitised and digitisable knowledge: bite-sized, yes/no, unnuanced. The known knowns, perhaps the known unknowns, as opposed to the unknown knowns or the unknown unknowns. There’s huge swathes of knowledge held in analogue format, in meat or matter, that will never be accessible to the digital world (and to ‘AI’).⁴ And it’s this undigitised, possibly undigitisable, knowledge that is most often overlooked by hegemonic power, leading to the devaluing of cultures, the environment, living organisms, health outcomes, and so much more.

But those sorts of knowledge are real. And in an age of biodiversity loss, climate crisis, pandemic, genocide, and all other manner of human-created ills, they’re crucial.

¹ It’s a controversial topic, but to me the evidence seems indicative. More about cognition in unicellular life and plant life. Obviously, the word ‘meat’ is here standing in for ‘living tissue’!

² Some say this is the difference between our intelligence and that of the octopus.

³ Shout-out here to S. Qiōuyì Lù, who often discusses the differences between Chinese and American ways of understanding and knowing. I have also gotten the impression from sources that are sadly lost in the snow of the internet⁵ that indigenous American ways of knowing also do not conform to this hegemony.

⁴ I’m mostly talking about the undigitisable here, but even of that which is written down, in a text format that a computer could read, not that much is already digitised.

⁵ I’m working on being able to recover the information that I half-remember from random posts and articles, but this only helps with things that I see now, today, and hereafter.