Philosophies

This article explains how material practices and naming shape collective agency in organizations that depend on artificial intelligence. It addresses an apparent tension. An AI system can be a constitutive condition of what an organization can do at a given time. The same system can remain replaceable across the organization’s history. This distinction separates present agency from persistence through change. This article develops affordance facts as an analytically distinct category within explanations of social facts. These facts concern the possibilities for action that a material or computational arrangement makes available to situated users. They differ from anchoring facts because they do not establish the rules that ground a social fact. Naming has a related but narrower role; it supports recognition and coordinates claims of continuity, yet it is neither necessary nor sufficient for organizational identity. A revised thought experiment on structural relocation shows that continuity cannot be determined by an AI system alone. Brief illustrations involving IBM Watson Health and Google DeepMind support this claim. The resulting view avoids technological determinism because it treats agency as relational. AI systems can shape organizational capacities without becoming autonomous identity bearers. They are often constitutive conditions of present activity and contingent operational infrastructures across time. This framework clarifies how responsibility can remain with an organization even when an AI system has become indispensable to its current operations.

This paper explores the openness of the future by prioritizing lived experience over traditional ontological frameworks like eternalism or presentism. Rejecting the “branching roads” model as a misguided spatialization of time, the author argues that objective temporality is best understood through the phenomenal character of hope and the sentiment of randomness. Central to this investigation is the concept of abstract hope, an unstructured faith that manifests the future’s genuine openness in reality. The author further redefines randomness as “unfixable unaccountable unpredictability” (UUU). Rather than viewing randomness as the source of openness, this paper posits that our understanding of random events—including quantum phenomena—is grounded in the experiential origin of acting without bias, where an agent makes a choice despite having no determining factors. Ultimately, this paper contends that hope and unbiased action are not merely psychological states but register objective features of the world. By treating the future as truly open, the author defends a form of realism where human decisions and random occurrences actively shape reality rather than serving as mere epiphenomena of a predetermined causal chain.

Growing academic research and popular interest in critical plant studies have brought vegetality out of the shadows of plant blindness. Yet, plants labeled as invasive continue to receive disproportionately negative attention in non-native contexts due to their detrimental effects on desirable native ecological processes. They have often been antagonized as unfair players in ecological harmony as well as a symptom of human negligence and an uncontrollably changing climate. They are charismatic in the sense that they incite a ‘collective turning towards’ ecological voice, although they are often misunderstood, as evidenced by misplaced antagonistic responses. The language surrounding many of today’s pressing environmental issues tends to estrange us from whom we should be fighting for and with, while ignoring the metastatic drivers of ecological dis-ease. The intention of this paper is to illuminate the characteristics and implications of what I call the ‘invasive register’. Invasive species demonstrate a vocal, charismatic, and passive activism, pointing to and flooding ecological wounds through adaptive physiological mechanisms. Their refusal to stand down in the face of conventional management methods demonstrates an insistence on collective responsiveness to that which they attend to and speak for, and with. The invasive register, as argued in this paper, is romantically intertwined with landscape, selflessly ego-centric through the proliferation of biomass, provocative as a facilitator of collective agency, a metabolic invigorator, and an expression of the legibility of landscape.