My unease to be with being with. (and an attempt to be with being with)
For some still unknown reason I feel/ felt my back hairs erect when ever i hear someone using the word being with as a noun. I do being with, i like being with, i’d like to practise being with etc. I think it’s quite probably an extremely important term so i would really like my back hairs to be in good terms with it.
So, for me being with (as a verb) means interconnectedness: something is somewhere with something else (or with everything…). Being with is being aware of this connection, and embracing it in what ever way.
So, if i look at being with as a noun it obviously becomes objectified, it becomes a thing in itself. Being with is neither of the things which are being (with) but something else, something extra-human, extra-object? Perhaps it could be named as an independent abstract entity which comes to be when things begin to be with each other (can being with be one directional, one sided action?). So also, my unease with being with being with is neither about being with being with or about myself but something which arises from this togetherness.
But why do we be with in the first place?
Some thinkers and artists refer to Darwin and to his idea of attraction as a force keeping evolutions, mutations etc. enfolding. To think attraction as an abstraction of an evolutionary force pulling weird things towards each other to push these things to evolve in ever more complex patterns is to think that the more attention one gets (from what/ who?) the more evolutionary potential it has.
Colourful flowers and fruits, bright construction worker clothes, birds singing and dancing, flashy internet ads, cat videos…
So perhaps being with (as a noun) could be seen as that same force, which comes to be at the same time as sexual reproduction. (Red algae 1200 million years ago, Funisia 550 million years ago) Before that reproduction happened by organisms creating genetically similar or identical copies of themselves without the contribution of genetic material from another organism, so attraction in that sense meant different things back then. (if such thing as meaning did exist…)
Following that, perhaps being with as a noun is actually the apparatus which creates the dichotomy between asexually- and sexually reproducing entities. (The extremely simplified view is that sexual reproduction takes a lot more energy, but it produces more variation, thus adaptability.)
And to be with (being with) is to be with what makes the difference between sexually and asexually reproducing species? And how and why that split happened.
One can only imagine how the asexually reproducing species understand concepts of time, but it might not be too far out to say that the basis for linear concepts of time emerged at the same moment when things started the sexual. One no longer cloned oneself, but reproduced something which was partly you and partly something else, so actually something completely different yet familiar. Perhaps even the whole debate about differences between cyclical and linear time made no sense back then since it was the only way to understand time anyway, or was it?
To pull things back together, being with being with is to be in that moment when the split between sexually and asexually reproducing species separated. To be with attraction and the difference between linear and non-linear understanding of time.

So perhaps being with is not the hardware, software or the person using these (a professional color grading system) but a need to do that (an idea of how films or videos should look like… ?)

Being with is the force which makes the person behind the camera to take exactly this picture. (or the graphic designer to use this picture in this specific content…)
And not the newspaper (from which this picture is from) nor Manuel Castells (who’s in the picture) but a need to know or see towards a future trough visionary theorists or academics (the newspaper has it’s own right wing-ish, neoliberal idea about the future…) And how technologically advanced countries will determine that…
