Everything Speaks—How Do We Listen?

I am thinking about distributed centrality (dis-cent), an ethical value term for the equal centrality of every being, place, and event. On the surface of our planet, the center happens at every point, and every point speaks whether with or without what we recognize or allocate as a voice.

Distributed centrality is a term that came to me in considering ontological, ecological, and political value within transplace as location. Here I'm thinking about how dis-cent registers how to give, and how to have, voice. In planetary being, how do we listen to the centrality of the other?

Distributed centrality harmonizes with the "distributed cognition" values that focus on continuing thought-work. In that sense, dis-cent performs a potential of the digitas, the perfusing digital living we make with our habitus, the civitas, and the digits of our hands. If the digitas encourages exclusionary centrality, in which "hits" constitute value, then even net neutrality is not enough to make room for all the centralities of speaking. In the ontological transit zones of the digitas, how do we listen to the voices of distributed centrality?

Dis-cent names the necessary dis-connect of equally distributed value. Since nothing is everything and no one is everywhere, it is possible to let go of the idea that value is made in some kind of universal accounting. Distributed centrality is a term for acting so that the center is everywhere.

Dis-cent contrasts with practices of exclusionary centrality that distract from the real demands of action. Exclusionary centrality can emanate from things like power shoring up borders and from leftover colonialism gazing for the next horizon. If you think the important speaking is happening somewhere else, you might think you are mute or deaf. But speaking is central everywhere.

Distributed centrality emphasizes how we recognize the stone, how we recognize every being (animate/inanimate), place (named/unnamed), and event (macro/submolecular), not how it recognizes us. These are human values we write, and their difficult opportunities are our conditions. If you know that everything is equally central, the importance of your own action is clear.