Jingqi Kay Liu

Before humans ever separated “technology” from “nature,” the world was already a shifting mesh of relations—mountains have characters, winds have temperament, tools have intent. Animism is not mysticism; it is an older, sharper, more intuitive model of reality: agency has never belonged exclusively to living organisms, but circulates across materials, environments, and bodies.

在人类尚未区分“技术”与“自然”的时代，世界本身就是一张流动的关系网：山有性格，风有脾气，器物有意志。泛灵论并不是神秘主义，而是一种更古老、更敏锐、更直觉的世界模型：能动性从来不是生命体的专利，而是散布在材料、环境与身体之间的相互作用。

Contemporary cognitive science simply brings this back into focus. Embodied intelligence shows us that cognition is not an algorithm sealed inside the brain, but an ecological performance continuously computed by body, material, and environment in tandem. Tools shape our modes of production. Architecture conditions our rhythms of inhabitation. Technology moderates our patterns of thought.

当代认知科学已经重新证明了这一点。具身智能告诉我们：智能不是装在大脑里的算法，而是一种由身体、材料与环境实时共同计算的生态行为。工具重塑我们的生产方式，建筑调试我们的栖居节奏，技术调变我们的思维轨迹。

Furthermore, planetary sapience is emerging as a new consensus: sentience and intelligence are not the properties of one species, but the emergent behavior of Earth systems themselves. Atmospheres, currents, infrastructures, microbes—together they form a distributed sensing organism, a kind of planetary mind we are losing the ability to hear, yet urgently need to learn from again. And still, design and technology discourse clings to exhausted binaries—human/object, natural/artificial, subject/tool. These frameworks can no longer describe where we actually stand: technology is no longer an object, but a force entering the scene; no longer something we use, but an agent participating in how the world is made.

进一步讲，行星知性（planetary sapience）正在成为新共识：感知和智慧不是单一物种的属性，而是地球系统自身涌现的产物。大气、海流、城市基础设施与微生物共同构成一个分布式的感知体，一个我们正在失去却必须重新学习倾听的“地球大脑”。然而，设计与技术话语依旧被“人/物”“自然/人工”“主体/工具”的旧二元绑架，无法描述我们所处的现实：技术已不再是对象，而是进场的力量；不是被使用的物，而是参与世界生成的能动体。

To understand this multi-actor reality now taking shape, the concept of Techno-Animism arises. It is neither a turn to primitivism nor an act of romanticization, but a forward-facing theoretical stance: to acknowledge that technologies have tendencies, behaviors, temperaments; that materials and environments are collaborators; that design is the negotiation of distributed agencies rather than the command of passive matter. In an era of volatile climates, entangled systems, and bodies inseparable from their technical atmospheres, Techno-Animism is not a metaphor. It is a necessary methodology—a way of understanding the planetary intelligence we co-inhabit with technology.

为理解这一正在成形的多主体现实，“科技泛灵论”（Techno-Animism）由此而生。科技泛灵论既非返古化，也非浪漫化，而是一种面向未来的理论姿态：承认技术拥有行为、倾向与气质；承认材料与环境是协作者；承认设计是在协商多方能动性，而非控制它们。在气候剧烈、系统互绑、身体与技术不可分割的今天，科技泛灵论不是一个诗意比喻，而是一种迫切的现实方法论——去理解我们与技术共同栖居的行星智慧。