CONCEPT
The Mesh
Morton's image for radical interconnectedness — the web of relationships among all entities, with infinite connections and infinitesimal differences, no center, no hierarchy.
The mesh is Morton's central image from The Ecological Thought (2010) — 'the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things, consisting of infinite connections and infinitesimal differences.' Not a network (which implies a designer or center) but a mesh: a web so dense, so entangled, so recursively constituted that no node can be understood in isolation and no intervention at any node can be contained. Pull one thread and the entire fabric shifts. Perturb one relationship and the perturbation propagates through cascading interactions producing effects at distances and timescales exceeding prediction. Applied to AI, the mesh replaces Segal's river metaphor with something more accurate and more disorienting: intelligence is not flowing in one direction but vibrating omnidirectionally through relationships extending everywhere simultaneously.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Segal describes intelligence as a river flowing for 13.8 billion years — from hydrogen to consciousness to computation. The river conveys continuity, force, direction, inevitability. It suggests intelligence has a current that can be studied, respected, redirected by dams placed at critical