All my relations
A child of four will tell you the tree is angry today.
She is not being poetic. She is being precise. The tree has a mood, the river has opinions, the dog down the street is sad for reasons that have nothing to do with food. The four-year-old is running the most sophisticated relational software on the planet, attributing interiority to everything, assuming connection as the default state of existence.
Then school happens.
By nine or ten, the animism gets educated out of her. The tree is a tree. It processes CO₂. It has no feelings about this. The river is a hydrological system. The dog is responding to stimuli. She has been promoted, everyone agrees, from enchantment to reason.
Such is the thing.
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The Lakota have a phrase: *Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ.* All my relations. It is said at the beginning and end of prayers, ceremonies, meals, and important conversations. It means: I am not separate from what surrounds me. The tree, the river, the stranger across the fire — we are made of the same stuff, moving through the same story, briefly and improbably together.
This is not sentiment. It is ontology. A complete and coherent account of what existence actually is.
The Western Enlightenment spent four hundred years building a very impressive counter-argument. Individual. Rational. Sovereign. Optimizable. And for a while it worked splendidly — we got antibiotics and aeroplanes and the internet and a rover on Mars.
We also got very, very lonely.
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Here is the thing about automation that nobody in the press release mentions:
When the machines take the jobs — and they will take the jobs, the spreadsheet jobs and the logistics jobs and the jobs that required a human being to sit in a room processing information for eight hours — what is left?
Relation. Actual, embodied, inefficient, unreplicable relation.
You cannot automate the specific texture of Tuesday dinner with someone you find genuinely interesting. You cannot optimize the moment a stranger says something that reorders your understanding of your own life. You cannot prompt-engineer the feeling of being *known* — not profiled, not predicted, but known — by another conscious animal who chose, of their own volition, to pay attention to you.
The machines will do everything else. They will leave us, blinking, with each other.
Most people will find this terrifying. Some will find it like coming home.
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The mycelium doesn't know it's a network. It just does what it does — passing nutrients, sending signals, connecting root to root beneath the visible world. The forest above is the output. The relationship is the infrastructure.
Chickenlist is not trying to be a forest. It is trying to be a small, deliberate patch of mycelium. A place where conscious beings — briefly relieved of the administrative burden of being a productivity unit — remember that they are, first and last, relational creatures.
The four-year-old knew. The Lakota knew. The automation economy is about to remind the rest of us.
We thought we'd get ahead of it.
*All my relations.*
Such is the thing.