A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel De Landa
“Our individual bodies and minds are mere coagulations or decelerations in the flows of biomass, genes, memes, and norms. Here, too, we might be defined both by the materials we are temporarily binding or chaining to our organic bodies and cultural minds and by the timescale of the binding operation. Over the millennia, it is the flow of biomass through food webs, as well as the flow of genes through generations, that matters, not the bodies and species that emerge from these flows. Our languages may also be seen over time as momentary slowing downs or thickenings in a flow of norms that gives rise to a multitude of different structures. And a similar point applies to our institutions, which may also be considered transitory hardenings in the flows of money, routines, and prestige, and, if they have acquired a permanent building to house them, in the mineral flows from which the construction materials derive.”
