Under Current
ed. Alice dos Reis
Smart Oceans, Alien Times:
Octopi Engineering
One day, an object appeared in the waters. It was only
about 30 cm in length, flat, long and possibly made of
metal. Heavily encrusted but otherwise unidentified.
The object was not aquatic in origin. It came from somewhere else – from the outer space. The object was made by
humans. Cephalopods gathered around it like the hominoids in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had around
the black monolith. Deemed in the Cambridge Declaration
to possesses consciousness similar to humans, manifest in
the ability to recognize agency in themselves and others,
octopuses often figure for us the tentacular alien. But in
this story, it is us who are the aliens, the extra-aquatarians.
The object in question is real. In 2009, scientists in Jervis
Bay, Australia discovered a community of gloomy octopuses living around a small, human-made artefact in the
ocean, possibly a lose part that fell out of a ship.1 Up to this
point believed to be solitary animals, Octopus tetricus began
engineering the environment around the object, with a
small group of between two and sixteen of them observed
occupying the space since its discovery.2 Upon the object,
the octopuses erected structures engineered out of piles
of shells, leftover from their prey. Dens were shaped out
of clam or scallop remains and sponge fragments but also
‘beer bottles, research cameras, fishing gear, and other
bits of human refuse.’ 3 The place was dubbed Octopolis.
Bogna M. Konior
1
David Scheel, Stephanie Chancellor, Martin Hing, Matthew Lawrence, Stefan Linquist
& Peter Godfrey-Smith, ‘A second site occupied by Octopus tetricus at high densities, with
notes on their ecology and behavior’, Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology,
vol. 50, no. 4 (2017), pp. 285–91.
2
Ibid.
3
David Scheel, P. Godfrey-Smith, S. Linquist, S. Chancellor, M. Hing & M. Lawrence,
‘Octopus engineering, intentional and inadvertent’, Communicative & Integrative Biology,
vol. 11, no. 1 (2018), pp. 1–4.
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Smart Oceans, Alien Times: Octopi Engineering
Bogna M. Konior
A few years later, a few hundred metres away, the same
research team found another communal space constructed
similarly. It was called Octlantis. In both places, octopuses
exhibited both convivial and aggressive social behaviours not previously registered. It was initially suggested
that this hitherto unstudied conduct – construction of
shell dens, new types of interaction – was caused by the
presence of the unidentified object. This theory has since
been disregarded because no human-made object was present in Octlantis. Nevertheless, since the object’s arrival in
Octopolis, something has changed, either in their behaviour
or in our observational capacities.
The ocean, long imagined as the realm beyond
human knowledge, darkness under our feet from which
life itself sprung, is no longer invisible to us. We have
augmented our eyes and where we cannot go, we send our
machines. Intelligence comes to us from the under space
and the outer space and the cephalopod is its primary
figure, from the akkorokamui to the kraken, from H.P.
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu to Nnedi Okorafor’s jellyfish intelligence in the Binti trilogy, or the tentacular time-altering
aliens in Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life. An international
research team recently concluded that octopuses are
extra-terrestrial in origin, building on the thesis that their
ancestors arrived on a comet rather than evolving spontaneously on the Earth.4 ‘The idea that in the whole universe
life is unique to the Earth is essentially pre-Copernican.’ 5
Unlike other species that have seen their populations
diminish rapidly because of industrial human activity,
cephalopods are thriving:
Numerous studies demonstrate that cephalopod
populations are highly responsive to environmental change, with anthropogenic climate change,
especially ocean warming, a plausible driver of the
observed increase [in their numbers]. Elevated
temperatures . . . accelerate the life cycles of cephalopods [and] the global depletion of fish stocks . . . could
be driving the growth in cephalopod populations.6
Contrary to the straightforward story of the Homo sapiens’
fall from grace, or the tale of our failure in taking care of
other animals as God ordered us to in the Book of Genesis,
tentacular intelligence adapts to new industrial conditions.
The prophecy of the Anthropocene – ‘you will come down
in a freaked-out ecosystem, where the jellyfish and the
slime will sting you to oblivion’ 7 and where the weight of
plastic in the oceans will be more than its marine life 8 – has
humans grasping at straws in renewed calls for ‘ecological
awareness’ if only to remain relevant as Gaia’s chthonic
sister Medea takes charge of the planetary ship.9 The mythical monster of free-market capitalism, the Leviathan that
4
E.J. Steele, Shirwan Al-Mufti, Kenneth A. Augustyn, ‘Cause of Cambrian Explosion:
Terrestrial or Cosmic?’, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, vol. 136 (Aug. 2018),
pp. 3–23.
5
F. Hoyle and N.C. Wickramasinghe, Life Cloud, London: J.M. Dent, 1978.
6
Zoë Doubleday, Thomas Prowse, Alexander Arkhipkin, Graham Pierce, Jayson
Semmens, Michael Steer, Stephen Leporati, Sílvia Lourenço, Antoni Quetglas, Warwick
Sauer & Bronwyn Gillanders, ‘Global Proliferation of Cephalopods’, Current Biology, vol. 26,
no. 10 (May 2016), p. 407.
7
Donna Haraway, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing &
Nils Bubandt, ‘Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene’, Ethnos, vol. 81,
no. 3 (2016), pp. 535–64.
8
Graeme Wearden, ‘More Plastic Than Fish in the Sea by 2050, Says Ellen MacArthur’,
The Guardian, 19 Jan. 2016, www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/19/more-plasticthan-fish-in-the-sea-by-2050-warns-ellen -macarthur
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Bogna M. Konior
devours traditional human bonds and has no regard for
formations such as families and states, is imagined as an
aquatic intelligence as well. The cephalopods seem to prosper among this disintegration.
Humans, of course, are not the only engineers around
and not the only species adapting to this planetary becoming. Despite the frequent moralising calls to not separate
nature from culture and do away with anthropocentric
thinking, many still tend to differentiate between nature
and technology. ‘Technology’ is presented as at odds
with the world or even single-handedly contributing to
its destruction, suffocating Mother Nature in the cloud
of toxic smoke. But is technology not a wholly natural
activity of tool usage common across the animal kingdom,
including the Homo sapiens monkey? Octopuses, like other
animals, are ecosystem engineers, ‘organisms that modulate
availability of resources to other species and to their own
species by causing physical state changes in materials.’ 10
In Octopolis, ecosystem engineering with and around
human artefacts meant that shell beds were more bountiful than in other locations, which in turn attracted gazers,
fish and sharks, creating new predatory feedback loops
between species. Yet the research team that christened
Octopolis and Octlantis shies away from calling these sites
‘cities’ because, they claim, ‘an aggregation of individual
dwellings, even where each is intentionally constructed,
is not a city. A city is a center not just of population but
of commerce, culture and design. Cities are cooperatively
constructed and maintained communities.’ 11
But this claim is at odds with how we think about cities
and ecosystem engineering today in human and social
sciences. In Benjamin Bratton’s model of ‘the stack’, a
planetary-scale computational structure with both human
and nonhuman users, social and chemical interactions are
multi-lateral and multi-agential, not easily reducible to
‘consciousness’, ‘intent’ or ‘culture’.12 Jennifer Gabrys tells
us that our planet has become computable and the environment itself is a sensing aggregate, filled with technologies
that collect and analyse data, record and share images,
interpret and respond to noise.13 The ocean is a fitting place
for observing that, not in the least because of the underwater cities created by octopuses out of human rubble.
While our imagination of digital technologies is wireless,
‘it is submarine systems, rather than satellites, that carry
most of the Internet across the oceans’.14 Our digital lives are
already underwater. What is a city, anyway, for us to deny this
term to the octopuses reconfiguring their landscapes around
the objects that humans discarded? A distinction between
cities and the planet does not seem that relevant anymore.
It should not be controversial to assume that animals,
including us, make technologies, are part of technologies
In the Medea Hypothesis of palaeontologist Peter Ward, the Earth understood as
a multicellular organism is suicidal rather than life-sustaining, and microbes seek to
return the Earth to its microbe-dominated state through mass extinction events. Peter
Ward, The Medea Hypothesis: Is life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009.
10
David Scheel, Peter Godfrey-Smith., Matthew Lawrence, ‘Octopus tetricus (Mollusca:
Cephalopoda) as an ecosystem engineer’, Scientia Marina, vol. 78, no. 4 (Dec 2014), pp. 521–28.
11
David Scheel, P. Godfrey-Smith, S. Linquist, S. Chancellor, M. Hing & M. Lawrence,
‘Octopus engineering, intentional and inadvertent’, Communicative & Integrative Biology,
vol. 11, no. 1 (2018), pp. 1–4.
12
Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Cambridge, CA: MIT Press, 2016.
13
Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making
of a Computational Planet, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
14
Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network, Durham & London: Duke University
Press, 2015, p. 1.
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Smart Oceans, Alien Times: Octopi Engineering
Bogna M. Konior
and are themselves sensing technologies. Historically, we
associate octopuses with the most advanced technologies
of the times. They are a darling of the steampunk genre
as symbols of the Industrial Revolution and the rail.15
Like a steam engine, these fastest of all invertebrates use
water propulsion to move. Today, just as how we talk about
our minds has changed, we describe octopuses’ brains as
a computing system, a distributed cognition with remote
control terminals, each tentacle working like a parallel
processor.16 Skin and brain are one intelligent, sensing,
biomorphic structure. It is high time that we realise that
our fear of ‘anthropomorphic’ language is masking a deeply
defensive ideological effort to attribute technology, culture,
sociality, and language to the human ape exclusively.
The scientists discarded the proposition that with
the object’s arrival in Octopolis something has changed.
When Octlantis was discovered a few hundred meters
away, they rejoiced at the fact that no such man-made
object was present there – this meant that the octopuses’
behaviour was not artificial but ‘natural’. But the desire to
preserve the fetishized otherness of animals at the expenses
of the collective evolution of intelligence is a choice rather
than the natural order of things. The invention of any
technology is an invention of an unexpected accident.17
Octopuses are already building dens out of our garbage and
adapting to our industrial world, they are surrounded by
underwater GoPro cameras, and tiny tripods, and internet
cables, and plastic, and probes, and submarines. They are
kidnapped out of their underwater homes on our (space)
ships and lead postmodern, surreal lives in aquariums and
labs, where their captors perform experiments on them.
They are already artificial but we would rather preserve
them as symbolically timeless, ‘natural’ rather than – just
like us – historically conditioned by technological realities. And why should that surprise us? Our technological
evolution did not happen in isolation from other species:
we made advances in medicine thanks to rodents, evolved
trade routes thanks to horses, communication systems
thanks to pigeons, and now we model robots after octopuses. Why should we not play the same part for them?
We like to keep animals on the altars of otherness, we
like to embody them through art and fiction, we like
to imagine what it is like to be them, all the while we
refuse to do for them what they have been doing for us all
along – accelerate their technological evolution. Our technologies have already become their prostheses. ‘We should
learn to crave what would ensue’ 18 when the full extent of
our technologies is shared with other animals, not only
as surprising accidents but as conscious experiments in
interspecies engineering. Imagine what cities we could
build together.
15
In Frank Norris’ 1901 novel, the titular octopus represents a hyper-modern railroad
monopoly. Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901), in Frank Norris, Novels and Essays, ed. Donald
Pizer, Library of America, vol. 33 (1985).
16
A recent book that examines octopus intelligence is Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other
Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness., New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2016.
17
Paul Virilio, ‘The Museum of Accidents’ (1986), trans. Chris Turner, International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (July 2006). http://www.ubishops.ca/
baudrillardstudies/vol3_2/virilio.htm.
18
Benjamin Bratton, ‘The City Wears Us: Notes on the Scope of Distributed Sensing
and Sensation’, The Glass Bead journal, Site 1. Logic Gate: The Politics of the Artifactual
Mind, 2017.
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