Throughout this book, I have been fighting anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, especially insofar as they impede our recognition of intelligence, soul, language, thought, consciousness, and will in beings that do not look like us. Here I focus on two specific aspects of this problem: we have a hard time giving credit to beings that are of a different size from us, and that have a shape different from our own. Size difference works (or, rather, doesn’t) in both directions. When dealing with beings vastly larger than ourselves, like States, companies, or the “military-industrial complex” denounced by U. S. President EisenhowerEisenhower, Dwight David in his farewell address to the nation, we tend to think of them in terms of their human members, and not to see the logic followed by the whole complex, which most often transcends, and even counters, that of any human or group of humans. Same thing when we deal with beings much smaller than ourselves, like intelligent proteins: we tend to think of their intelligence as a figure of speech, instead of an obvious reality. A State, a company, or the military-industrial complex are also a different shape from a human body—which for AristotleAristotle was a perfect reflection of the structure of the cosmos. Therefore, if we even recognize their intelligence and other “spiritual” qualities, we tend to think of them as resulting from arrangements similar to our own: a central unit (a brain) receiving information and dispensing instructions to all the rest. But that is just lack of imagination: an army, a forest, a company, a city, or an octopus have a diffuse intelligence—they play, learn, speak, think, and will with their entire being, in ways that were brought to general attention by the work of Deleuze and Guattari on rhizomes. And so do computer networks.