Regretful Ontologies

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the mass extinction of “authentic” animals makes ownership and care for them a valuable commodity—and a penitence. Dick’s characters are reckoning with a world after failure, contending with regret. The development and implementation of artificial creatures across all aspects of human experience is symptomatic of the mass disruption of our own ecosphere and of our troubled preexisting relationship with the nonhuman. As our planet empties and our spaces fill with artificial simulacra, the value of “authentic” beings will shift, and we will have to face down our prior marginalizations of creaturely experience.