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How often do you address your soul? Or the soul an object? Or piece of fruit? Do wood chip remnants have a soul?

There is something to be said about reflecting on the soulof materials that nourish us, provide surfaces for the food we eat and a shelter above our heads. Whether materials are edible or non-edible, animate or inanimate, raw or synthetic, permanent or impermanent, an attitude of animism could provide enormous potential for increasing our respect and care for the materials we use and how we treat them.

Animism is defined as: the attribution of a living soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena. It is an ancient belief system prominent in many Indigenous cultures, as well as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and Shintoism. Animism is by no means the sole solution to our consumer throw-away culture and environmental crisis. However, the practice of animism could open up conversation and considerations around our approach to design and how we care for objects and materials that allow us to live healthy, safe and creatively fulfilling lives.

The technologist and designer John Maeda, in his book The Laws of Simplicity explains animism in relation to the Japanese term 'aichaku' which is based on caring for an object:

Aichaku (ahy-chaw-koo) is the Japanese term for the sense of attachment one can feel for an object. When written by its own two kanji characters, you can see that the first character means "love" and the second one means "fit." "Love-fit" describes a deeper kind of emotional attachment that a person can feel for an object. It is a kind of symbiotic love for an object that deserves affection not for what it does, but for what it is. Acknowledging the existence of aichacku in our built environment helps us to aspire to design artifacts that people will feel for, care for, and own for a lifetime." John Maeda

Similarly, Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and author of Gathering Moss and Braiding Sweetgrass, discusses the intelligence of plants in Krista Tippet's OnBeing Podcast. Kimmerer describes how in the Potawatomi Nation languageAnishinaabe mohan,it is impossible to use the term "it" to describe other beings that provide us with sources of nourishment and life. Could we argue that natural phenomena, objects, animate or inanimate, are made up of energies and matter that are beings in their own right?

Even so, it is important to note that attributing a soul or spiritual power to natural phenomena does not necessarily guarantee greater care for a certain material or life source.

Take for example, how activist Vimlandu Jha in conversation with Poala Antonelli in MoMA's Broken Nature podcast, describes how despite the fact that India's Yamuna river is worshipped as female Goddess Mother Yamuna, she has been abused, abandoned and poisoned for decades, often even in the name of faith. Although animism is a belief that spirits inhabit natural objects or phenomena while religion is the belief in and worship of a supernatural controlling power-especially a personal god or gods-believing in the soul of natural objects can encourage humans to care and protect them to varying degrees. In 2017 the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, considered sacred by more than one billion Indians, became the first non-human entities in India to be granted the same legal rights as living human entities. However as Vimlandu Jha elaborates, despite their legal protection the rivers continue to suffer pollution at the hands of human activity and worship.

Animism's effects on behavioural change are unclear and in turn may not guarantee greater care for a life source or object. However, animism in relation to a "love-fit" and a personal relationship that needs to be nourished, has potential to increase our respect and treatment towards the materials we use, how we interact with our day to day objects, and a way of working against our throwaway culture. Creative processes such as ideation, experimentation and interaction are commonly associated with varying degrees of material extraction and waste generation. With this in mind, below are two "what if" scenarios that frame animism's potential to encourage environmental care and duration in design and purchasing decisions.

Through animism...

...would our design processes be less wasteful?

For example, could we create a world in which the fundamental prototyping process in design education, from architecture to product design, relies primarily on repurposed and recycled materials to improve the integrity and quality of the final project? Architect Barbara Buser may not consider the souls of old sinks and steel beams but is a champion of reusing scrap building material for her buildings. Listen to Buser's BBC World Service podcast here.

...would we be more inclined to associate quality with regifting previously loved objects instead of relying on buying new ones?

For example, in the aftermath of the Christmas season, could we embrace the attitude of aichaku to create new "love-fits" for family and friends to enjoy previously loved second hand objects? And if all objects were assumed to live a second life, how would that affect the way we design and care for objects?

The above questions, although distinct in nature and scale, present possible applications for animism to increase the value for a previously loved material or object. The trickier part of the argument for animism in light of environmental behavioural change is asking ourselves, where do we draw the line of what is considered reusable, continuously valuable and worthy of long lasting love? Take for instance Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa's concept of Supernormal, which determines the high value of an object according to our daily dependency on it, to the point that the object subsequently becomes anonymous in its ability to act as an extension of ourselves. This type of long lasting love of an inanimate object does not tap into the conscious effort of animism, but rather a subconscious relationship with the objects we use with effortlessness and ease, day in day out.

Does an object have to form part of our daily lives to merit long lasting love? Maybe.

Does plastic packaging embody a soul in the same way an endangered river does? Are they both worthy of the same care? Maybe. Or Perhaps not.

Should a discarded sink be valued more than a new one? Maybe.

Can waste material gain new life through beautiful reuse? Yes.

Hayao Miyazaki's films including the infamous Spirited Away remind us of the power of animistic traditions such as Shintoism. In essence, Miyazaki's stories show us that the souls and energies that make up our lives do not exist on a separate plane. There is no "other world." Only this one. So whether or not we believe in the inherent soul of plants, inanimate objects or waste (valuable) material, may we revolutionise how we treat the world around us and what we consider worthy of our care and respect.

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Animism: A Love Story for Longevity - MOLD :: Designing the Future of Food

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How often do you address your soul? Or the soul an object? Or piece of fruit? Do wood chip remnants have a soul? There is something to be said about [...]

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In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.

So-called "scientific forestry" was that century's growth hacking. It made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the understory bare.

Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, with hopes of extending the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchy and order, James C. Scott, know what happened next.

It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or "forest death," was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease - even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered.

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren't obvious until it's too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the "pathology of command and control." Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet's 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet's initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They're plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet's infrastructure - the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.

They've concentrated into a series of near-planetary duopolies. For example, as of April 2024, Google and Apple's internet browsers have captured almost 85% of the world market share, Microsoft and Apple's two desktop operating systems over 80%. Google runs 84% of global search and Microsoft 3%. Slightly more than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung, while over 99% of mobile operating systems run on Google or Apple software.Two cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure make up over 50% of the global market. Apple and Google's email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests.

Two kinds of everything may be enough to fill a fictional ark and repopulate a ruined world, but can't run an open, global "network of networks" where everyone has the same chance to innovate and compete. No wonder internet engineer Leslie Daigle termed the concentration and consolidation of the internet's technical architecture "'climate change' of the Internet ecosystem."

Walled Gardens Have Deep Roots

The internet made the tech giants possible. Their services have scaled globally, via its open, interoperable core. But for the past decade, they've also worked to enclose the varied, competing and often open-source or collectively provided services the internet is built on into their proprietary domains. Although this improves their operational efficiency, it also ensures that the flourishing conditions of their own emergence aren't repeated by potential competitors. For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It's a zoo.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control. They can afford to, using the vast wealth reaped in their one-off harvest of collective, global wealth.

Taken together, the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures. Internet people like to talk about "the stack," or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It's a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design: Key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience, generality and create room for innovation.

Initially funded by the U.S. military and designed by academic researchers to function in wartime, the internet evolved to work anywhere, in any condition, operated by anyone who wanted to connect. But what was a dynamic, ever-evolving game of Tetris with distinct " players" and "layers " is today hardening into a continent-spanning system of compacted tectonic plates. Infrastructure is not just what we see on the surface; it's the forces below, that make mountains and power tsunamis. Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we're still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.

In 2019, some internet engineers in the global standards-setting body, the Internet Engineering Task Force, raised the alarm. Daigle, a respected engineer who had previously chaired its oversight committee and internet architecture board, wrote in a policy brief that consolidation meant network structures were ossifying throughout the stack, making incumbents harder to dislodge and violating a core principle of the internet: that it does not create "permanent favorites." Consolidation doesn't just squeeze out competition. It narrows the kinds of relationships possible between operators of different services.

As Daigle put it: "The more proprietary solutions are built and deployed instead of collaborative open standards-based ones, the less the internet survives as a platform for future innovation." Consolidation kills collaboration between service providers through the stack by rearranging an array of different relationships - competitive, collaborative - into a single predatory one.

Since then, standards development organizations started several initiatives to name and tackle infrastructure consolidation, but these floundered. Bogged down in technical minutiae, unable to separate themselves from their employers' interests and deeply held professional values of simplification and control, most internet engineers simply couldn't see the forest for the trees.

Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday " hyperobject," but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?

Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it's too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don't need to repair the internet's infrastructure. We need to rewild it.

What Is Rewilding?

Rewilding "aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces," according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More ambitious and risk-tolerant than traditional conservation, it targets entire ecosystems to make space for complex food webs and the emergence of unexpected interspecies relations. It's less interested in saving specific endangered species. Individual species are just ecosystem components, and focusing on components loses sight of the whole. Ecosystems flourish through multiple points of contact between their many elements, just like computer networks. And like in computer networks, ecosystem interactions are multifaceted and generative.

Rewilding has much to offer people who care about the internet. As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in their book "Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery," rewilding pays attention "to the emergent properties of interactions between 'things' in ecosystems ... a move from linear to systems thinking."

It's a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble. It doesn't micromanage. It creates room for "ecological processes [that] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems." Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: Hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It's the opposite of command and control.

Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It's a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn't just an intellectual problem. It's an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?

Rewilding is a positive vision for the networks we want to live inside, and a shared story for how we get there. It grafts a new tree onto technology's tired old stock.

What Ecology Knows

Ecology knows plenty about complex systems that technologists can benefit from. First, it knows that shifting baselines are real.

If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents' car than on your own. Global land-dwelling insect populations are dropping about 9% a decade. If you're a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the same five websites. You may have even written your own blog.

But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web) is normal. As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are "where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before." Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural.

Ecology knows that shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides. People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they're nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It's fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who've been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. If the internet for you is the massive sky-scraping silo you happen to live inside and the only thing you can see outside is the single, other massive sky-scraping silo, then how can you imagine anything else?

Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached. What scale is needed for rewilding to succeed? It's one thing to reintroduce wolves to the 3,472 square miles of Yellowstone, and quite another to cordon off about 20 square miles of a polder (land reclaimed from a body of water) known as Oostvaardersplassen near Amsterdam. Large and diverse Yellowstone is likely complex enough to adapt to change, but Oostvaardersplassen has struggled.

In the 1980s, the Dutch government attempted to regenerate a section of the overgrown Oostvaardersplassen. An independent-minded government ecologist, Frans Vera, said reeds and scrub would dominate unless now-extinct herbivores grazed them. In place of ancient aurochs, the state forest management agency introduced the famously bad-tempered German Heck cattle and in place of an extinct steppe pony, a Polish semi-feral breed.

Some 30 years on, with no natural predators, and after plans for a wildlife corridor to another reserve came to nothing, there were many more animals than the limited winter vegetation could sustain. People were horrified by starving cows and ponies, and beginning in 2018, government agencies instituted animal welfare checks and culling.

Just turning the clock back was insufficient. The segment of Oostvaardersplassen was too small and too disconnected to be rewilded. Because the animals had nowhere else to go, overgrazing and collapse was inevitable, an embarrassing but necessary lesson. Rewilding is a work in progress. It's not about trying to revert ecosystems to a mythical Eden. Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity. But rewilding, itself a human intervention, can take several turns to get right.

We don't know what the future holds. Our job is to keep open as much opportunity as we can, trusting that those who come later will use it. Instead of setting purity tests for which kind of internet is most like the original, we can test changes against the values of the original design. Do new standards protect the network's "generality," i.e. its ability to support multiple uses, or is functionality limited to optimize efficiency for the biggest tech firms?

As early as 1985, plant ecologists Steward T.A. Pickett and Peter S. White wrote in "The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics," that an "essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change." Some internet engineers know this. David Clark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who worked on some of the internet's earliest protocols, wrote an entire book about other network architectures that might have been built if different values, like security or centralized management, had been prioritized by the internet's creators.

But our internet took off because it was designed as a general-purpose network, built to connect anyone.

Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine. When we interviewed Clark, he told us that "'complex' implies a system in which you have emergent behavior, a system in which you can't model the outcomes. Your intuitions may be wrong. But a system that's too simple means lost opportunities."Everything we collectively make that's worthwhile is complex and thereby a little messier. The cracks are where new people and ideas get in.

Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today's top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours.

As Jacobs wrote: "As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge."As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.

Ecosystems endure because species serve as checks and balances on each other. They have different modes of interaction, not just extraction, but mutualism, commensalism, competition and predation. In flourishing ecosystems, predators are subject to limits. They're just one part of a complex web that passes calories around, not a one-way ticket to the end of evolution.

Ecologists know that diversity is resilience.

On July 18, 2001, 11 carriages of a 60-car freight train derailed in the Howard Street Tunnel under Mid-Town Belvedere, a neighborhood just north of downtown Baltimore. Within minutes, one carriage containing a highly flammable chemical was punctured. The escaping chemical ignited, and soon, adjacent carriages were alight in a fire that took about five days to put out. The disaster multiplied and spread. Thick, brick tunnel walls acted like an oven, and temperatures rose to nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A more than three-foot-wide water main above the tunnels burst, flooding the tunnel with millions of gallons within hours. It only cooled a little. Three weeks later, an explosion linked to the combustible chemical blew out manhole covers located as far as two miles away.

WorldCom, then the second largest long-distance phone company in the U.S., had fiber-optic cables in the tunnel carrying high volumes of phone and internet traffic. However, according to Clark, the MIT professor, WorldCom's resilience planning meant traffic was spread over different fiber networks in anticipation of just this kind of event.

On paper, WorldCom had network redundancy. But almost immediately, U.S. internet traffic slowed, and WorldCom's East Coast and transatlantic phone lines went down. The region's narrow physical topography had concentrated all those different fiber networks into a single chokepoint, the Howard Street Tunnel. WorldCom's resilience was, quite literally, incinerated. It had technological redundancy, but not diversity. Sometimes we don't notice concentration until it's too late.

Clark tells the story of the Howard Street Tunnel fire to show that bottlenecks aren't always obvious, especially at the operational level, and huge systems that seem secure, due to their size and resources, can unexpectedly crumble.

In today's internet, much traffic passes through tech firms' private networks, for example, Google and Meta's own undersea cables. Much internet traffic is served from a few dominant content distribution networks, like Cloudflare and Akamai, who run their own networks of proxy servers and data centers. Similarly, that traffic goes through an increasingly small number of domain name system (DNS) resolvers, which work like phone books for the internet, linking website names to their numeric address.

All of this improves network speed and efficiency but creates new and non-obvious bottlenecks like the Howard Street Tunnel. Centralized service providers say they're better resourced and skilled at attacks and failures, but they are also large, attractive targets for attackers and possible single points of system failure.

On Oct. 21, 2016, dozens of major U.S. websites suddenly stopped working. Domain names belonging to Airbnb, Amazon, PayPal, CNN and The New York Times simply didn't resolve. All were clients of the commercial DNS service provider, Dyn, which had been hit by a cyberattack. Hackers infected tens of thousands of internet-enabled devices with malicious software, creating a network of hijacked devices, or a botnet, that they used to bombard Dyn with queries until it collapsed. America's biggest internet brands were brought down by nothing more than a network of baby monitors, security webcams and other consumer devices. Although they all likely had resilience planning and redundancies, they went down because a single chokepoint - in one crucial layer of infrastructure - failed.

Widespread outages due to centralized chokepoints have become so common that investors even use them to identify opportunities. When a failure by cloud provider Fastly took high-profile websites offline in 2021, its share price surged. Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service.To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn't look like fragility but like a chance to profit.

The result of infrastructural narrowness is baked-in fragility that we only notice after a breakdown. But monoculture is also highly visible in our search and browser tools. Search, browsing and social media are how we find and share knowledge and how we communicate. They're a critical, global epistemic and democratic infrastructure, controlled by just a few U.S. companies. Crashes, fires and floods may simply be entropy in action, but systemically concentrated and risky infrastructures are choices made manifest - and we can make better ones.

The Look & Feel Of A Rewilded Internet

A rewilded internet will have many more service choices. Some services like search and social media will be broken up, as AT&T eventually was. Instead of tech firms extracting and selling people's personal data, different payment models will fund the infrastructure we need. Right now, there is little explicit provision for public goods like internet protocols and browsers, essential to making the internet work. The biggest tech firms subsidize and profoundly influence them.

Part of rewilding means taking what's been pulled into the big tech stack back out of it, and paying for the true costs of connectivity. Some things like basic connectivity we will continue to pay for directly, and others, like browsers, we will support indirectly but transparently, as described below. The rewilded internet will have an abundance of ways to connect and relate to each other. There won't be just one or two numbers to call if leaders of a political coup decide to shut the internet down in the middle of the night, as has happened in places like Egypt and Myanmar. No one entity will permanently be on top. A rewilded internet will be a more interesting, usable, stable and enjoyable place to be.

Through extensive research, Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom found that "when individuals are well informed about the problem they face and about who else is involved, and can build settings where trust and reciprocity can emerge, grow, and be sustained over time, costly and positive actions are frequently taken without waiting for an external authority to impose rules, monitor compliance, and assess penalties." Ostrom found people spontaneously organizing to manage natural resources - from water company cooperation in California to Maine lobster fishermen organizing to prevent overfishing.

Self-organization also exists as part of a key internet function: traffic coordination. Internet exchange points ( IXPs) are an example of common-pool resource management, where internet service providers (ISPs) collectively agree to carry each other's data for low or no cost. Network operators of all kinds - telecoms companies, large tech firms, universities, governments and broadcasters - all need to send large amounts of data through other ISPs' networks so that it gets to its destination.

If they managed this separately through individual contracts, they'd spend much more time and money. Instead, they often form IXPs, typically as independent, not-for-profit associations. As well as managing traffic, IXPs have, in many - and especially developing - countries, formed the backbone of a flourishing technical community that further drives economic development.

Both between people and on the internet, connections are generative. From technical standards to common-pool resource management and even to more localized broadband networks known as "altnets," internet rewilding already has a deep toolbox of collective action ready to be deployed.

The New Drive For Antitrust & Competition

The list of infrastructures to be diversified is long. As well as pipes and protocols, there are operating systems, browsers, search engines, the Domain Name System, social media, advertising, cloud providers, app stores, AI companies and more. And these technologies also intertwined.

But showing what can be done in one area creates opportunities in others. First, let's start with regulation.

You don't always need a big new idea like rewilding to frame and motivate major structural change. Sometimes reviving an old idea will do. President Biden's 2021 " Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy" revived the original, pro-worker, trust-busting scope and urgency of the early 20th-century legal activist and Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, along with rules and framings that date back to before the 1930s New Deal.

It's why governments just stood aside as 21st-century tech firms romped to oligopoly. If a regulator's sole criterion for action is to make sure consumers don't pay a penny more, then the free or data-subsidized services of tech platforms don't even register. (Of course, consumers pay in other ways, as these tech giants exploit their personal information for profit.) This laissez-faire approach allowed the biggest firms to choke off competition by acquiring their competitors and vertically integrating service providers, creating the problems we have today.

In his 2021 signing of the executive order on competition, President Biden said: "Capitalism without competition isn't capitalism; it's exploitation." Biden's enforcers are changing the kinds of cases they take up and widening the applicable legal theories on harm that they bring to judges. Instead of the traditionally narrow focus on consumer prices, today's cases argue that the economic harms perpetrated by dominant firms include those suffered by their workers, small companies and the market as a whole.

Khan and Kanter have jettisoned narrow and abstruse models of market behavior for real-world experiences of healthcare workers, farmers and writers. They get that shutting off economic opportunity fuels far-right extremism. They've made antitrust enforcement and competition policy explicitly about coercion versus choice, power versus democracy. Kanter told a recent conference in Brussels that "excessive concentration of power is a threat ... it's not just about prices or output but it's about freedom, liberty and opportunity."

Enforcers in Washington and Brussels are starting to preemptively block tech firms from using dominance in one realm to take over another. After scrutiny by the U.S. FTC and European Commission, Amazon recently abandoned its plan to acquire the home appliance manufacturer, iRobot. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have also moved to stop Apple from using its iPhone platform dominance to squeeze app store competition and dominate future markets through, for example, pushing the usage of CarPlay on automakers and limiting access to its tap-to-pay digital wallet in the financial services sector.

Still, so far, their enforcement actions have focused on the consumer-facing, highly visible parts of the tech giants' exploitative and proprietary internet. The few, narrow measures of the 2021 executive order that aim to reduce infrastructure-based monopolies, only prevent future abuses like radio spectrum-hogging, not those already locked in. Sure, the best way to deal with monopolies is to stop them from happening in the first place. But unless regulators and enforcers eradicate the existing dominance of these giants now, we'll be living in today's infrastructure monopoly for decades, perhaps even a century.

Even activist regulators have shied away from applying the toughest remedies for concentration in long-consolidated markets, such as non-discrimination requirements, functional interoperability and structural separations, i.e. breaking companies up. And declaring that search and social media monopolies are actually public utilities - and forcing them to act as common carriers open to all - is still too extreme for most.

But rewilding a built environment isn't just sitting back and seeing what tender, living thing can force its way through the concrete. It's razing to the ground the structures that block out light for everyone not rich enough to live on the top floor.

When the writer and activist Cory Doctorow wrote about how to free ourselves from the clutches of Big Tech, he said that though breaking up big companies will likely take decades, providing strong and mandatory interoperability would open up innovative space and slow the flow of money to the largest firms - money they would otherwise use to deepen their moats.

Doctorow describes "comcom," or competitive compatibility, as a kind of "guerrilla interoperability, achieved through reverse engineering, bots, scraping and other permissionless tactics." Before a thicket of invasive laws sprung up to strangle it, comcom was how people figured out how to fix cars and tractors or re-write software. Comcom drives the try-every-tactic-until-one-works behavior you see in a flourishing ecosystem.

In an ecosystem, diversity of species is another way of saying "diversity of tactics," as each successful new tactic creates a new niche to occupy. Whether it's an octopus camouflaging itself as a sea snake, a cuckoo smuggling her chicks into another bird's nest, orchids producing flowers that look just like a female bee, or parasites influencing rodent hosts to take life-ending risks, each evolutionary micro-niche is created by a successful tactic. Comcom is simply tactical diversity; it's how organisms interact in complex, dynamic systems. And humans have demonstrated the epitome of short-term thinking by enabling the oligarchs who are trying to end it.

Efforts are underway. The EU already has several years of experience with interoperability mandates and precious insight into how determined firms work to circumvent such laws. The U.S., however, is still in its early days of ensuring software interoperability, for example, for videoconferencing.

Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators' efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.

Next Steps

Instead, we need more publicly funded tech research with publicly released findings. Such research should investigate power concentration in the internet ecosystem and practical alternatives to it. We need to recognize that much of the internet's infrastructure is a de facto utility that we must regain control of.

We must ensure regulatory and financial incentives and support for alternatives including common-pool resource management, community networks, and the myriad other collaborative mechanisms people have used to provide essential public goods like roads, defense and clean water.

All this takes money. Governments are starved of tax revenue by the once-in-history windfalls seized by today's tech giants, so it's clear where the money is. We need to get it back.

We know all this, but still find it so hard to collectively act. Why?

Herded into rigid tech plantations rather than functioning, diverse ecosystems, it's tough to imagine alternatives. Even those who can see clearly may feel helpless and alone. Rewilding unites everything we know we need to do and brings with it a whole new toolbox and vision.

Ecologists face the same systems of exploitation and are organizing urgently, at scale and across domains. They see clearly that the issues aren't isolated but are instances of the same pathology of command and control, extraction and domination that political anthropologist Scott first noticed in scientific forestry. The solutions are the same in ecology and technology: aggressively use the rule of law to level out unequal capital and power, then rush in to fill the gaps with better ways of doing things.

Keep The Internet, The Internet

Susan Leigh Star, a sociologist and theorist of infrastructure and networks, wrote in her 1999 influential paper, "The Ethnography of Infrastructure":

"Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power. Study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change."

The technical protocols and standards that underlie the internet's infrastructure are ostensibly developed in open, collaborative standards development organizations (SDOs), but are also increasingly under the control of a few companies. What appear to be "voluntary" standards are often the business choices of the biggest firms.

The dominance of SDOs by big firms also shapes what does not get standardized - for example, search, which is effectively a global monopoly. While efforts to directly address internet consolidation have been raised repeatedly within SDOs, little progress has been made. This is damaging SDOs' credibility, especially outside the U.S. SDOs must radically change or they will lose their implicit global mandate to steward the future of the internet.

We need internet standards to be global, open and generative. They're the wire models that give the internet its planetary form, the gossamer-thin but steely-strong threads holding together its interoperability against fragmentation and permanent dominance.

Make Laws & Standards Work Together

In 2018, a small group of Californians maneuvered the Legislature into passing the California Consumer Privacy Act. Nested in the statute was an unassuming provision, the "right to opt out of sale or sharing" your personal information via a "user-enabled global privacy control" or GPC signal that would create an automated method for doing so. The law didn't define how GPC would work. Because a technical standard was required for browsers, businesses and providers to speak the same language, the signal's details were delegated to a group of experts.

GPC is not the first legally mandated open standard, but it was deliberately designed from day one to bridge policymaking and standards-setting. The idea is gaining ground. A recent United Nations Human Rights Council report recommends that states delegate "regulatory functions to standard-setting organizations."

Make Service-Providers - Not Users - Transparent

Today's internet offers minimal transparency of key internet infrastructure providers. For example, browsers are highly complex pieces of infrastructure that determine how billions of people use the web, yet they are provided for free. That's because the most commonly used search engines enter into opaque financial deals with browsers, paying them to be set as the default. Since few people change their default search engine, browsers like Safari and Firefox make money by defaulting the search bar to Google, locking in its dominance even as the search engine's quality of output declines.

This creates a quandary. If antitrust enforcers were to impose competition, browsers would lose their main source of income. Infrastructure requires money, but the planetary nature of the internet challenges our public funding model, leaving the door open to private capture. However, if we see the current opaque system as what it is, a kind of non-state taxation, then we can craft an alternative.

Search engines are a logical place for governments to mandate the collection of a levy that supports browsers and other key internet infrastructure, which could be financed transparently under open, transnational, multistakeholder oversight.

Make Space To Grow

We need to stop thinking of internet infrastructure as too hard to fix. It's the underlying system we use for nearly everything we do. The former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, and former Canadian deputy foreign minister, Gordon Smith, wrote in 2016 that the internet was becoming "the infrastructure of all infrastructure."It's how we organize, connect and build knowledge, even - perhaps - planetary intelligence. Right now, it's concentrated, fragile and utterly toxic.

Ecologists have reoriented their field as a " crisis discipline," a field of study that's not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It's a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built.

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The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

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Memory in Uncertainty: Web Preservation in the Polycrisis

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A deep research report documenting the threats and opportunities for web preservation practice and tooling in a changing world.

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BIO-DEGRADABLE OUTCOME

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RESEARCH gardening? rewilding?

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Eileen White on Instagram: "‘Transmutation’  2023

@royalcollegeofart #gradshow #rca2023 @trumanbrewery 
15 & 16 July 12:00-18:00

Collaged silver gelatin prints, using consumer waste/photographic packaging

Size 90 x 120 cm

The propagation area at the Chelsea Physic Garden is a hidden space away from the public’s gaze but underpins the garden in terms of importance. It is where the plants are propagated and nurtured,  and where the weeds and dead matter are transformed into life-giving compost. This is then fed, turned and reintroduced into the garden and wider biosphere.
‘Transmutation’ shows different aspects of this part of the garden. It is where I based my portable studio during my years residency. 

It was a place to pay attention. 

Using an antique field camera dating back to 1850, a time of great horticultural importance, due to the adventurous expeditions of plant hunters to various parts of the world, I quietly and slowly photographed in and around this area of the garden. Using hand-coated glass slides which I made from old charity shop finds, images were transformed in the darkroom using a homemade compost developer. The terroir of the landscape specific to this place was embedded onto the surface of the glass. 

Converting consumer waste in the form of photographic packaging into alternative light-sensitive substrates, before ‘stitching’ them together to create larger pieces, has been a mediative labour of love and reparation. The work carries these marks of making, with many inconsistencies, imperfections and accidents visible. It is a deliberate attempt to imbue the work with material agency and entanglements with the non-human. A leaning towards symbiosis, reciprocity and exchange.

See bio for link to shop

@chelseaphysicgarden
#embodiedmaking
#nature
#environmentalart
#ecology
#chance
#durational 
#temporal
#wellbeing
#analoguephotography
#alternativephotography
#cameralessphotography
#relationalpractice
#alternativedarkroom
#sustainabledarkroom
#newmaterialism
#slowmovement
#domestic
#plantdeveloper"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
247 likes, 7 comments - eileenwhiteart on July 15, 2023: "‘Transmutation’  2023

@royalcollegeofart #gradshow #rca2023 @trumanbrewery 
15 & 16 July 12:00-18:00

Collaged silver gelatin prints, using consumer waste/photographic packaging

Size 90 x 120 cm

The propagation area at the Chelsea Physic Garden is a hidden space away from the public’s gaze but underpins the garden in terms of importance. It is where the plants are propagated and nurtured,  and where the weeds and dead matter are transformed into life-giving compost. This is then fed, turned and reintroduced into the garden and wider biosphere.
‘Transmutation’ shows different aspects of this part of the garden. It is where I based my portable studio during my years residency. 

It was a place to pay attention. 

Using an antique field camera dating back to 1850, a time of great horticultural importance, due to the adventurous expeditions of plant hunters to various parts of the world, I quietly and slowly photographed in and around this area of the garden. Using hand-coated glass slides which I made from old charity shop finds, images were transformed in the darkroom using a homemade compost developer. The terroir of the landscape specific to this place was embedded onto the surface of the glass. 

Converting consumer waste in the form of photographic packaging into alternative light-sensitive substrates, before ‘stitching’ them together to create larger pieces, has been a mediative labour of love and reparation. The work carries these marks of making, with many inconsistencies, imperfections and accidents visible. It is a deliberate attempt to imbue the work with material agency and entanglements with the non-human. A leaning towards symbiosis, reciprocity and exchange.

See bio for link to shop

@chelseaphysicgarden
#embodiedmaking
#nature
#environmentalart
#ecology
#chance
#durational 
#temporal
#wellbeing
#analoguephotography
#alternativephotography
#cameralessphotography
#relationalpractice
#alternativedarkroom
#sustainabledarkroom
#newmaterialism
#slowmovement
#domestic
#plantdeveloper". 

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Eileen White (@eileenwhiteart)

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Not your everyday gardening book!

Through the metaphor of gardening, this book offers insights on the convergence of nature and culture, ecology, climate, and care for the environment, with themes such as Arcadia, Control, Ecofascism, Guerilla Gardening, Queer Ecology

Selected as one of the Best Dutch Book Designs 2021 and winner of the Golden Letter 2022!

Editor: Laurie Cluitmans
Contributors: Maria Barnas, Jonny Bruce, Laurie Cluitmans, Thiëmo Heilbron, Liesbeth M. Helmus, Erik A. de Jong, René de Kam, Alhena Katsof, Jamaica Kincaid, Bart Rutten, Catriona Sandilands, Patricia de Vries
Design: Bart de Baets

June 2021, Valiz in collaboration with Centraal Museum, Utrecht | supported by Creative Industries Fund NL, Stichting Jaap Harten Fonds, De Gijselaar-Hintzenfonds NL, dr. Hendrik Mullerfonds | Pb | 240 pp. | 32 x 24 cm (h x w) | English | ISBN 978-94-93246-00-3 | € 29,90

Laurie Cluitmans (b. 1984, NL) works as a curator of contemporary art for the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and is also an independent art critic. In 2016 she received the Prize for Young Art Criticism for her essay on the garden by Derek Jarman and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

On the Necessity of Gardening appears simultaneous with the exhibition The botanical revolution, on the necessity of art and gardening that will be on view from 11 September 2021 to 9 January 2022 in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht (NL). The publication is categorically not an exhibition catalogue, but is positioned as an autonomous project. Both the exhibition and publication stem from a longer-term research by Laurie Cluitmans into the development of the cultural-historical, philosophical and social significance of the garden in relation to our current way of life.
Press

- Click here to read the review of On the Necessity of Gardening in Ark (no. 3/2022)
- (Only in Dutch) Click here to read the recommendation of On the Necessity of Gardening in HRLM (May 2022)
- (Only in Dutch) Click here to read the review of On the Necessity of Gardening in Onze Eigen Tuin (Winter 2021/2022)
- (Only in Italian) Click here to read the review of On the Necessity of Gardening on the website of frizzifrizzi (9 February 2022)
- On the Necessity of Gardening is included in the list The Best Coffee-Table Books to Gift This Season (1 December 2021)
- On the Necessity of Gardening is included in the list The Best Art Books to Buy as Holiday Gifts by Artnews (17 November 2021)
- Click here to listen to the podcast De botanische revolutie by Centraal Museum, Nest and Valiz (only in Dutch)
- Click here to read the piece about On the Necessity of Gardening on the website of étapes (19 October 2021)
-(Only in Dutch) Click here to listen to the interview with Laurie Cluitmans at OPIUM (20 September 2021)
- Click here to read an essay by Laurie Cluitmans in Pleasant Place (October 2022)
- On the Necessity of Gardening in Het Parool (October 2022)

For centuries, the garden has been regarded as a mirror of society, a microcosm, in which the broader relationships between nature and culture are played out on small scale. From this long cultural tradition also raises a call for a new awareness of our relationship with the Earth.

On the Necessity of Gardening tells the story of the garden as a rich source of inspiration. Over the centuries, artists, writers, poets and thinkers have each described, depicted and designed the garden in different ways. In medieval art, the garden was a reflection of paradise, a place of harmony and fertility, shielded from worldly problems.

However, the garden is not just a neutral place and intended solely for personal pastime, it is a place where the world manifests itself and where the relationship between culture and nature is expressed. In the eighteenth century this image shifted: the garden became a symbol of worldly power and politics. The Anthropocene, the era in which man completely dominates nature with disastrous consequences, is forcing us to radically rethink the role we have given nature in recent decades.

There is a renewed interest in the theme of the garden among contemporary makers. It is not a romantic desire that drives them, but rather a call for a new awareness of our relationship with the earth, by connecting different fields of activity in landscape, art and culture. Through many different essays and an extensive abecedarium, On the Necessity of Gardening reflects on the garden as a metaphor for society, through concepts such as botanomania and capitalocene, from guerrilla gardening to queer ecology and zen garden.

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Not your everyday gardening book! Through the metaphor of gardening, this book offers insights on the convergence of nature and culture, ecology, climate, and care for the environment, with themes such as Arcadia, Control, Ecofascism, Guerilla Gardening, Queer Ecology Selected as one of the Best Dutch Book Designs 2021 and winner of the Golden Letter 2022!

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Having to get from one to page another through links.

Searching actively, rather than passively scrolling through what the algorithm wants you to see.

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hermit in a rich mans garden

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When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them,

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open source~? = communal

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Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.”

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https://kuloans.kingston.ac.uk/connect2/wizard/resourcedetail.aspx?id=286

https://kuloans.kingston.ac.uk/connect2/wizard/resourcedetail.aspx?id=811

https://kuloans.kingston.ac.uk/connect2/wizard/resourcedetail.aspx?id=7187

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Hyperconnected Culture And Its Discontents | NOEMA

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Digital connectivity’s democratizing impact on the production, circulation and consumption of culture has been greatly exaggerated.

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Speak the Wind, Hoda Afshar’s photography

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In the islands of the Strait of Hormuz, a distinctive local culture has emerged as the result of many centuries of cultural and economic exchange.

# data[].attributes.body
For centuries, the garden has been regarded as a mirror of society, a microcosm, in which the broader relationships between nature and culture are played out on small scale. From this long cultural tradition also raises a call for a new awareness of our relationship with the Earth.

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‘“There are no secrets in this house, do you hear? Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame, and shame is something we can do without.’”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Micah Lexier on Instagram: "These two printed bags are from a “Things of Science” boxed science kit. This particular kit is called “Life Cycle of a Can” and is about the history of various metals. Bag 1 contains iron ore and bag 2 contains Bauxite.

The “Things of Science” series was a subscription series where you were sent a different science kit every month. It was started in the 1940s and they produced hundreds of different kits over the 50-year run. Most of the kits came in these distinctive blue boxes, but others were sent in slim envelopes. In addition to the “things” inside there was often a printed booklet that directed you how to carry out the experiment. 

The attention to detail was amazing, as exemplified by these printed envelopes. They are the original ‘multiples’ and I wouldn’t be surprised if some Fluxus artists grew up with them or were inspired by them."

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763 likes, 5 comments - micahlexier on January 6, 2024: "These two printed bags are from a “Things of Science” boxed science kit. This particular kit is called “Life Cycle of a Can” and is about the history of various metals. Bag 1 contains iron ore and bag 2 contains Bauxite.

The “Things of Science” series was a subscription series where you were sent a different science kit every month. It was started in the 1940s and they produced hundreds of different kits over the 50-year run. Most of the kits came in these distinctive blue boxes, but others were sent in slim envelopes. In addition to the “things” inside there was often a printed booklet that directed you how to carry out the experiment. 

The attention to detail was amazing, as exemplified by these printed envelopes. They are the original ‘multiples’ and I wouldn’t be surprised if some Fluxus artists grew up with them or were inspired by them.". 

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Micah Lexier on Instagram: "Vitrine display detail featuring some studio tests by @daltmejd, metal shapes by @okay_tom, magic trick cutlery and coin stacks."

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421 likes, 0 comments - micahlexier on November 21, 2022: "Vitrine display detail featuring some studio tests by @daltmejd, metal shapes by @okay_tom, magic trick cutlery and coin stacks.". 

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Hong Hao, Book – Keeping of 2007 A, Beijing, 2008.

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archive / preserve / diverse

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Midway: Message from the Gyre, Chris Jordan's photography

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On Midway Atoll, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses.

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Browsing through a history of online public messaging last week, I came across a magical photograph from 1989 or 1990. It shows the world's first web server. It was Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT workstation in Cern, the international physics research lab, where he worked at the time. On the case is a tattered sticky label, on which is scribbled, in red ink, "This machine is a server DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"

Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, had come up with the idea for a "world wide web" as a way of locating and accessing documents that were scattered all over the internet. With a small group of colleagues he envisaged, designed and implemented it in the late 1980s and eventually put the whole thing - protocols, server and browser software, HTML specification, etc. - on one of Cern's internet servers, and in doing so changed the world.

He was able to do this because the internet, which had been publicly available since January 1983, enabled it. The network had no central ownership or controller; and it did only one thing - transfer data packets from one edge of the network to their destination at another edge. If you were smart enough to build an application that used data packets, then the internet would do it for you, no questions asked.

The result was an extraordinary explosion of creativity, and the emergence of what was, essentially, a kind of global commons. At that point in its history, the internet was, as one scholar later described it, "an architecture for permissionless innovation" or, more prosaically, a global machine for springing surprises. The first such surprise was the web. And because it was decided the web would grow better without profit considerations, Berners-Lee released it as a platform that would also enable permissionless innovation.

However, the next generation of innovators to benefit from this freedom - Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple et al - saw no reason to extend it to anyone else. They built fabulously profitable enterprises on the platform that Berners-Lee had created. The creative commons of the internet has been gradually and inexorably enclosed, much as agricultural land was by parliamentary acts from 1600 onwards in England.

The result, as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon put it in a striking essay in Noema magazine, is that our online spaces are no longer open ecosystems. Instead "they're plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farms that madden the creatures trapped within".

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The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture

And these industrial farms have concentrated into a series of duopolies. Google and Apple's browsers have nearly 85% of the world market share. Microsoft and Apple's two desktop operating systems have almost 90%. Google runs about 90% of global search. More than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung, while 99% of mobile operating systems are from Google or Apple. Apple and Google's email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. GoDaddy and Cloudflare serve about 50% of global domain name system requests. And so on.

One of the consequences of this concentration, say Farrell and Berjon, is that the creative possibilities of permissionless innovation have become increasingly constrained. "Two kinds of everything may be enough to fill a fictional ark," they write, "but can't run an open, global 'network of networks' where everyone has the same chance to innovate."

"The internet", Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Google, famously observed, "is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had." Since Dr Schmidt once ran the Google plantation, what he regards as anarchy is doubtless what ecologists would call diversity.

And of course for a plantation owner, diversity is a bug, not a feature. Farrell and Berjon make intriguing use of this metaphor. Their essay opens with an account of the notion of "scientific forestry" took hold in late 18th century Prussia and Saxony when officials began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees: "Owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled labourers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the undergrowth bare."

You can guess how this panned out. The first felling of the tidy trees yielded vast profits. Fresh trees were then planted, but were attacked by pests and disease. "The first magnificent bounty," write Farrell and Berjon, "had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered." As we Irish discovered in the great famine of 1845-49, monocultures are generally not a good idea and we abandon biodiversity at our peril.

Farrell and Berjon make the same point about our online world: the internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. We can revitalise it, but only by "rewilding" it - hence the title of their essay. I guess it will be as attractive to Silicon Valley as George Monbiot is to the National Farmers' Union.

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The internet is in decline - it needs rewilding | John Naughton

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The online world was meant to be an open system but has become dominated by huge corporations. If we are to revive it, that must end

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On Digital Gardens: Tending to Our Collective Multiplicity

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"Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength-in search of my mother's garden, I found my own."

-Alice Walker, In Search of our Mothers' Gardens, 1967

"How do you take a walk with someone on the internet?"

I grew up in two locations: gardens and the internet. In both spaces, I'm learning what it means to tend to my individual and our collective dreams. My family has a lineage of gardening and techno-exploration, going as far back (in cataloged archive at least) as the garden my great-great-grandmother rooted in her 1920s Oakland home. I grew up tending both the tomato plants in our backyard and my digital art pieces in Kid Pix, later turning to online worlds like Neopets and my on-keyboard safe space of Tumblr. As a kid, gardens and the internet both offered a place to dream, create, and play.

But that was then. Today, the internet is an omnipresent force that organizes the ways we learn, connect, and love-often in ways that are more nefarious than virtuous. The internet is a place, and that place has largely been led by those who value the accumulation of capital over its users' access to safety, connection, or care.

Nature and technology are often only associated as the other's antithesis. Nature is alive, fluid, complex. Technology is machine, predictable, streamlined. The social media idiom "go touch some grass" encourages users to leave the internet for nature, the former supplying illusion and the latter providing truth. I don't disagree with this spectrum. Today, the imagination behind the internet is dominantly shaped by militarization, consumerism, and surveillance. Given the options, I understand the desire to log off and dream in greener places.

But perhaps the separatism between technology and the principles of nature is part of what led us towards this techno-doom reality. I'd offer that the space between digital worlds and nature is one we should linger in. Brand and product designer Frank Chimero noted in a 2018 talk at the Substans Conference in Bergen, Norway, that "if we're setting out to change the character of technology in our lives, we'd be wise to learn from the character of places."*

What can the design of online worlds learn from the location of nature? What possibilities are lingering in the seeds of the digital garden?

Digital gardens have largely been understood as websites that allow users to explore and publish thoughts in more fluid and unpolished ways. The term "digital garden" is not new. It's been shaped by almost two decades of pondering, from early tinkerings in Mark Bernstein's 1998 essay "Hypertext Gardens" to Mike Caulfield's 2015 talk "The Garden and the Stream," which is credited with the term's first solid definition. Where so many of our feeds are designed around linear time, all major social networks and blogs follow a reverse chronological order, and everything we post is under pressure to be a perfected piece, digital gardens embrace the weird. Many have explored creating digital gardens through sections on personal websites that are dedicated to in-progress and non-linear ideas. My own blog has a digital garden: a page that is specifically for concepts I'm slowly mulling over without alignment to a particular goal or timeline. This behavior is succinctly described in Paul Ford's 2016 article "Reboot the World": "Everyone tends [their] own little epistemological garden, growing ideas from seed and sharing them with anyone who comes by."*

These explorations have been critical for maintaining online spaces that embrace cyclical and ever-shifting thinking. In a techno-social world that is dominantly organized by the pressures of linear feeds, we need digital spaces and frameworks that celebrate the ideas that are seeds just as much as the fully formed blooms.

At the same time, as I wander the internet, I wonder where the digital gardens are that will connect me to fellow gardeners more deeply. More often than not, the digital gardens of today are botanic-privately owned online spaces made for visitors to fawn over while a "do not touch" sign looms in view. These private gardens are generative for our personal learning, but they are far from the communal gardens I grew up in that valued collective work and knowledge. Where are the digital gardens that lead us towards collective learning, play, and dreaming?

To that end, alongside many in the design sphere who are imagining digital worlds rooted in deeper learning, justice, and care, I offer my own fluid, ever-shifting definition of digital gardens.

"Today, the imagination behind the internet is dominantly shaped by militarization, consumerism, and surveillance. Given the options, I understand the desire to log off and dream in greener places."

A digital garden is a framework for speculation around how online space can be designed from the imagination of gardens. Here, the values of gardens, pluralism, interdependence, sustainability, adaptation, and discovery are centered in the design process of technosocial spaces. A garden is made up of the following parts:

Seeds: the content contributed by gardeners,
such as text, photos, video, audio, or other digital media.

Gardeners: the users that invest in tending to and growing the garden.

Soil: the framework, meaning the design system and processes the garden is rooted in.

Elements for growth (such as water, sunlight, and the wellbeing of the gardeners): the design values that guide that garden.

Below are eight values that have guided my own understanding. (Note: this is by no means a complete list; any gardener knows that the lessons gardens offer are endless. Look at this as a collection of beginning seedlings, and an offering to tend to some of your own).

Digital gardens are ecosystems that:
1. Dream past the colonial imaginings of gardens
Across time, gardens have been locations of colonization, classism, anti-Blackness, and racism, from the history of botany as a tool for colonization to the structural lack of access low-income Black neighborhoods have to public green spaces. Digital gardens take time to understand the complex ways systematic oppression appears in the material technoreality of digital spaces. Rather than design in opposition, digital gardens look towards frameworks outside the confines of supremacy, or to decolonized models of thought that have long existed.
2. Value pluralism and interdependence
Digital gardens are designed to value the contributions of multiple gardeners. Their design does not reward hierarchy. They strategize around design systems that allow interdependent care to be possible, consensually applied, and mutually given and received.
3. Invest in cyclical growth and sustainability

Digital gardens believe slow time is beautiful. They are designed to support us in reclaiming our time rather than being organized by it. Digital gardens reject the information highway for the clock where minutes are the lengths of easeful breath.
4. Reject linear time
Digital gardens believe time moves cyclically. They are bored of the reverse chronological feed that is the norm for the majority of social networks. They value iterative learning and adjust from conclusion as needed. They believe we should have easy access to our archives.

5. Embrace weed
Digital gardens do not believe in nor aspire to Garden of Eden-style utopias. Digital gardens reject utopias, as they both ignore the realities of our intersecting positions of power and deny the cyclical existence of harm. We all will harm and be harmed. Instead, digital gardens recognize that periods of rot, weeds, and even death are natural parts of the ecosystem cycle. They value practice over perfection.

6. Stay adaptable
Digital gardens embrace that gardens and their gardeners are ever-shifting and complex. The design of digital gardens evolves to adapt and value complexity. They embrace the design challenge of clarity that is not at the expense of its users' dynamicism.

7. Hold safety at the fore-front, not after-front
A garden is not without tools to ensure its safety. Boundaries, defined by Kamra Sadia Hakim in their work, Care Manual, are containers housing needs and the distance at which mutual love exists. Boundaries are necessary for communal safety to be possible. Digital gardens create such protocols and give their users access to boundaries that enable transformation rather than carcerality and avoidance.

8. Look towards wonder
Digital gardens hold a component of discovery where gardeners may be delighted or surprised by what they may find. They are designed to embrace a culture of learning, where one may be open to be changed by ideas.

Digital gardens are not about creating utopias. Rather, they design towards the small and slow progress of protopias, as defined by futurist Kevin Kelly as "a state that is better today than yesterday." We need protopias, alternatives, and the seeds of gardens. We need space to dream, and for that dreaming to connect to concrete action.

The roots of digital gardens have long been growing, and many have arrived. We see their leaves in places like Somewhere Good, a social audio app for community conversations, are.na, a social network designed for slow learning and archiving, virtual care lab, a series of creative experiments in remote togetherness, and endless other seeds. Alongside one another, we believe in each other's collective smallness, and pull in digital gardens rooted in care, imagination, and joy.

Annika Hansteen-Izora (they/she/he) is a multidisciplinary designer and artist. They explore the intersections of design, radical Black imagination, art, and technology to create ecosystems rooted in care.

*These quotes are a part of designer Laurel Schwulst's "Sparrows talking about the future of the web." You can find the full collection of quotes at are.na.

Annika was also a speaker at our inaugural "Designing for Dignity" symposium with the MCA Chicago in March. Find footage of their presentation on the practice of dignity here.

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On Digital Gardens: Tending to Our Collective Multiplicity - Deem

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On Digital Gardens: Tending to Our Collective Multiplicity

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Scapegoat 1/7 ByCharles Johnson

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Contemporary artists working in new technology today often look to the natural world as the site of enquiry and extraction, partially to catalogue how the forces of nature and the world may shift as we plunge into deeper crises.

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Sian Davey is a documentary and editorial photographer based in the UK.

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Another day, another exhortation to join an "ecosystem" that's anything but. I could pick a hundred examples, but one that recently caught my eye was an ad placed in the Financial Times by the Singapore stock exchange, SGX Group, promising "multiple growth avenues, one trusted ecosystem". SGX wants companies to list on its exchange rather than, say, the Hong Kong one which has more or less the same exclusive offer. SGX promises "access (to) Asia through our trusted ecosystem anchored in Singapore." Ecosystems can be a lot of things. 'Trusted', by which they mean centrally policed to achieve defined, lower-risk outcomes, is not one of them. Calling built environments 'ecosystems' is common everywhere from financial services to supply chains to - quite a stretch, here - a retirement living complex. But it's most often used in the tech world to describe the relations between software, services and hardware typically owned by a single company. For example, it's how Google describes everything that hangs off the Android operating system. These kinds of proprietary and deterministic architectures are called ecosystems so often that we've stopped noticing. And that's kind of the point. We need to start seeing this metaphor again, and what it's hiding in plain sight. But first, a reminder of what an ecosystem actually is.

An ecosystem is a set of unbidden organisms and the physical environment with and in which they interact. It's constantly evolving, and the real interest, value and drive for change all come from the emergent properties of the relations between its many parts. An ecosystem is not the plaything of a pampered princeling, like Meta, but a set of living, striving things, both competitive and cooperative, and the place they live. The two kinds of system are almost impossibly different. One is biological, the other technological. One is complex and adaptive, the other only pretends to be.

Why are the maddening, built environments that certain investors and their pet CEOs want us to spend our lives inside called ecosystems, when they're the very opposite of anything truly alive? It may be that to people with a radically simplifying and totalising mindset, a tech maze governed by decision tree really does seem wild. Adding a few menu options makes a walled garden into the savannah, to someone who believes freedom is a luxury product. But whatever it says about the denuded imaginations of system-owners, the use of ecosystem as a pure marketing term has a strong halo effect. 'Ecosystem' implies competition, dynamism and choice, even as the systems it describes are restrictive and monopolising. It invokes our natural world, even as it conjures a stampeding flight from it. As a PR strategy, the misused metaphor is a sleight of hand. But it's more than that.

By subtly invoking both competition and containment, 'tech ecosystem' enacts an inner conflict that many in those companies may be only unconsciously aware of. They're driven to be global, but in a rigidly parochial, imperialist way that serves the cultural values and geopolitical interests of just one country. They need constant acceleration, but only along rigidly determined axes. They invoke a sense of limitlessness while herding people - 'users' - into feeding lots. They want to be the whole world, the ultimate everything app, but also to edit out unprofitable activities and externalise their own negative consequences. They say ecosystem. They mean snow-globe. It's not at all clear if they understand these are different kinds of thing.

Calling your company's assets an ecosystem in this slyly limited way is a trick to divert attention and responsibility. It redefines what's inside the ecosystem - profit, control - and what's outside - the costs to all of us. It's also a Trojan horse for the insidious idea that technology systems are sovereign and discrete, whole worlds unto themselves, less subject to the ties and constraints that bind us all. Yes, I can see why the owners of these constructs wish us to think of them as ecosystems.

There are two responses to the ubiquity and insidious violence of this metaphor. The short one: tech platforms and proprietary software environments are not ecosystems, so don't call them that. Call them built environments, i.e. designed, rules-based systems that explicitly structure interests to secure specific intended outcomes. It does no good - for journalists in particular - to transmit the suggestion that a walled garden is the same as a living forest. That an app market-place is the same kind of thing as an open protocol. We don't just serve the interests of system-owners when we repeat the pretty lie. We shut down an essential way to imagine alternatives. So what if, every time we read 'ecosystem', we instead say 'plantation'?

A plantation is a hierarchical, exploitative monoculture. In agriculture, it's "an .. estate, generally centred on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop". Google's interlinked extractive systems are plantations whose single crop is data for ads. They're designed environments; their parent company, Alphabet, a conurbation of control. Amazon's warehouses and proprietary, spyware-based web services arm are plantations, with all the connotations of colonialism and coerced labour the metaphor carries. Its marketplace for sellers binds them into literal share-cropping, an exploitative type of tenancy that binds farmers to land they'll never own. Facebook's hard-right political pollution of each country it operates in echoes the ecological damage of how single crop, intensive plantations do great secondary damage, destroying habitats and biodiversity, while generating vast profits for a tiny ownership class. We already have metaphors that describe exactly what these companies do. We need to use them.

Accepting the ecosystem metaphor for technology firms distorts our discourse. It implies there is dynamic competition and choice when in fact we live in a world of infrastructure chokepoints and application-level global duopoly. The way we currently 'internet' is based on a single mode; surveillance and advertising. It's not just that we have little choice, as individuals, but that the organisations ostensibly battling for our custom (or servitude) compete only on marginal operational differences in the same basic strategy. They have the same business model, the same financial backers, and the same drive for what they call growth and scale, but which is merely old-fashioned monopoly. The Internet as most people experience it is not even a walled garden, but just another kind of industrialised agriculture. Calling it an ecosystem subliminally green-washes the damage these and other less well-known companies do, including to our physical environment.

Metaphors shine a light (see what I did there?) on an aspect of something that might otherwise remain unseen. But they can also flatten or even subtract meaning, or just outright lie. Like with the counter-accusations of toxic narcissists, the ecosystem metaphor unwittingly reveals that the systems it describes do the precise opposite of what it implies. It's a monumental tell. I'm struck by how, at the precise moment of this civilisation's greatest harm (yet) to the actual, real-life ecosystems we depend on, the term has been appropriated to describe not just merely its own opposite, but the purest form of their destruction.

The second response to how the term ecosystem is used by its enemies to describe its opposite is to see what else the metaphor might reveal. If it didn't work so well, both for those who employ it and we who receive it, it wouldn't be used so much. I think it also expresses something many of us deeply desire but can barely articulate. It is seen everywhere but experienced almost nowhere. It's surfaced so often to suggest but instantly cauterise our longing for another way to build and experience the internet. But that's useful. We can use it both to see what's really there and to suggest what might yet be made.

The people who originally came up with the term 'digital ecosystem' knew this, and defined it as "a distributed, adaptive, open socio-technical system with properties of self-organisation, scalability and sustainability inspired from natural ecosystems." That is clearly a very different kind of environment to the dominant platforms! There are three key ways in which our current tech "ecosystems" differ from real ones. I describe them here not to keep making the trivially obvious point that what we're currently offered are not actually ecosystems, but to suggest what a real digital ecosystem would be like. We are so far down the road of 'there is no alternative' kinds of systems -political, economic and technological - that it can seem near impossible to imagine alternatives. But they really exist. They're not just metaphors. This is just a beginning.

Diversity
Functioning ecosystems tend towards biological abundance, both in quantity and diversity. In contrast, plantations have high volume but concentrate on only one or two things, often with secondary damage to the actual ecosystems nearby. However, since the 1970s, the decline of biological abundance has accelerated. Insect biomass in Germany is down to a quarter of what it was then, US farm birds down by 3 billion, global freshwater creatures down to 15%. Since the early 2000's, the Internet's diversity has contracted, too. Designed as an open and emergent communications architecture, the Internet in the US now has two, maybe three wildly dominant content distribution networks, and just a couple of DNS providers. (The emergence of these network-level middle-boxes at all, and how they concentrate and ostensibly speed up traffic is itself an admission of failure, and their evolution into oligopolies an indictment.) From its invisible infrastructure to the consumer-facing internet that we can all see, our network and information systems are becoming monocultures.

But the antithesis of biological abundance isn't just biological paucity. It's the excess growth of one thing at the expense of all others. Looking at the internet like a real ecosystem reveals that the torrents of disinformation and logarithmic rage cultivated by social media platforms uncannily mimic the lurid, obscene algal blooms in rivers and estuaries force-fed by agricultural effluent. Tech platforms push the growth accelerant of 'engagement' just as intensive farming sprays fertilisers packed with far more phosphate and nitrogen than soil can absorb, and with little care for the run-off and its consequences elsewhere. Social media literally maddens people. We know that. Thinking of it as a cultivated system that pollution has driven into eutrophication - when algal blooms consume all the oxygen and kill off other species - reveals more of what's really happening. It lets us see the phenomenon a little differently, and also reminds us that this kind of problem isn't new. Nor are its solutions.

At its core, environmental regulation pushes costs that have been externalised right back at the entity that's produced them. We know how to deal with effluent. We know how to stop acid rain. Building the political coalitions to punish and disincentivise polluters is still incredibly hard, but people manage it all the time. Tech activists have much to learn from our environmental brethren, and perhaps some things to share, too. But first, we need to recognise that our information sphere is a eutrophication dead zone. It's a literal disaster. That framing communicates the urgency of the problem and the scale of its reach, but also puts it in the category of problems we already know how to solve.

Value
In a real ecosystem, value is generated by the relationships between different parts of the system. The relationships between plants, animals, fungus, etc. and their physical environment have so many more facets than we can easily capture, each with its own inherent value. But in a tech plantation, value is something to be extracted from the simplified, observable and manipulable parts of the system by the people who design and own it, typically tech bros and their VC backers. They manipulate how the parts of - or people in - the system interact so they can maximise the data generated, ads served and revenue extracted. That much is obvious. But looking afresh through the lens of a real ecosystem refocuses our attention on where and what value is, and to whom.

In a platform system, value is generated by forcing the constituent parts to interact with each other in a radically simplified way, and funnelling the revenue generated to a tiny number of system owners. (The costs - from the bruised lives of victims of image-based abuse, to mortally wounded democracies, to inciting and equipping actual genocide - are externalised.) But the value of an ecosystem is generated in one to one and many to many interactions, thrown off willy nilly to the organisms and environment of the ecosystem itself. The 'value' generated moment to moment in an ecosystem is multi-valent and often far from obvious. To use the Yellowstone wolf rewilding story many of us know, reintroducing a keystone or functional species caused positive, unpredicted and cascading changes in the relations between other organisms. Wolves preying on elk meant the elk moved around more and ate less river-edge willow, which meant more willow for beavers to build dams, which meant more stable river flow, more and healthier fish, and bigger habitats for water-adjacent songbirds. The profound, indirect and cascading impacts of wolf reintroduction surprised pretty much everyone. The 'value' in a real, functioning ecosystem is not a simplified, hierarchical, bro-tastic chain of predation, but a set of multi-faceted relationships where the smallest, plainest organisms can be just as important. Or, as Robin Berjon has put it, "in an ecosystem everything is infrastructure for everything else." The relations between the different species are where the 'value' is. Food is not a radically legible chain. It's a web, with drops of glittering dew on each thread refracting sunlight in every colour, every direction.

I love how the Yellowstone wolf story works in two directions. It highlights the importance of 'capstone' or functional species like a large predator, but shows this animal's significance is how it sets off a multiplicative ripple of changes in the relations beween scores of other kinds of organism to subtly to change the ecosystem as a whole. It starts with an almost hyper-masculine fixation on the 'apex' predator and its kills, but - and we're still only in the middle of that particular story - changes quickly to being about grazing and walking, swimming and singing, fear and possibility. It works as a fable both of agency and chaos, of taking directive action while holding space for myriad trickledowns. It's an anthem to the possibilities for acting, and the wholly unpredictable delights in store when we do.

What would an ecological value generation model look like on the Internet? Well, many would say it's what we had in the early, decentralised days of the Internet and well into the world wide web, before the current business model monoculture took hold. But the multivalent value generation of the food web is still with us. It's just, as the man said, unevenly distributed. You can see it in the traffic co-opetition model of many Internet exchange points (IXPs), the federated instances of Mastodon and the like, in community networks and municipal ISPs and indigenous connectivity networks, in standards work to decentralise internet functions. It's even in attribution model of the photo I used at the top of this piece. And it's increasingly in people's consciousness. The hostile takeover of Twitter has prompted many, not just tech policy specialists, to now understand and demand social media interoperability and the true autonomy and choice it might bring. People now get this, in mind and heart, in a way they did not just a month ago.

One way ecologists conceive of ecosystems is as flows of food energy and material. An ecosystem in more or less stable equilibrium will have a steady amount of biomass (the total mass of living matter), with the same amount of energy circulating from one moment to the next. Roughly speaking, it's a cycle; a more complex version of the yin and yang of how the equations for photosynthesis and respiration fit together. From this perspective, our tech platforms don't look like an energy cycle. They generate a huge amount of energy - i.e. data and money - but systematically suck it out. Data is hoarded; almost none is shared with the people it's about, and the only transfers are when it's sold or rented to other wealthy actors, or shared with governments. Money is channelled out of local economies and tax systems to be parked in nation-sized tax dodges or jet-sprayed at tiny, dysfunctional locales such as San Francisco. Seen as energy systems, tech platforms are simply extractors who shove a violently distorting amount of catalyst into what were once organically occurring reactions, and capture most of the energy created to spend - or hoard - elsewhere. It's not an equation. It's sure as hell not the circle of life. It's simply a subtraction.

Outside the maddening, extractive current system of how we currently produce and reproduce the Internet, people are not a chain gang, not a one-way, extractable resource. We're not a commodity. We're multi-faceted. We give and gain and often unwittingly generate all sorts of value - monetary and otherwise - in our interactions with everyone and everything we touch. We cannot be reduced to what someone can extract from us. And none of us is intrinsically worth more than the others. We feel and act and interact like the elements of an ecosystem, because that's what we are. It stands to reason that shoving us into a plantation brings out the worst of us. It also implicitly puts most of us into a subordinate position, based on how much value we produce for the system owners. It takes looking at the Internet as a real ecosystem to see the weirdness of how its energy is generated and where it's flowing, and how distorted it is that much of the value it generates is funnelled out by owners, not bounced around between the different elements of the system, i.e. us.

So much of human life and worth is missing from the stripped down and hyped up way we currently internet. There are ways we can fix that, and first among them is halting the drive to re-engineer our societies and economies to fit into these built and extractive systems. But there's also a 'not seeing the wood for the trees' side of it. The way we currently internet is made maddening by the perceived need to pay for it with ads. At the heart of our current system is an absolute monoculture of business models; we trade advertising and the data it depends on to provide us with content and subsidise our connectivity. That's it. That's literally the sole business model for the internet. Billions of people on the planet, trillions of unique ideas, but only one acceptably "scalable" concept to connect them. The vast system this single business model built extracts far more money than most of us can imagine (and will continue to do so even now the internet economy is contracting, just at a lower rate). We might get the same connectivity, content and services - if not more - by keeping the value generated by the internet system in the system. We've just never yet had the chance to try.

Control
In the most trivially obvious way, tech platforms are designed systems of hierarchical control, while ecosystems are sets of complex, emergent, multi-valent interaction where each organism is held in check by the others and their overall environment. Ecosystems don't police themselves, nor do they have intentional checks and balances. But with all that food and energy flowing about, there will always be a new, competitive niche just begging to be filled. The first computer simulation I ever saw was a simple, dynamic graph that ran on a ZX Spectrum 48k, called 'rabbits and foxes'. (It was designed to show how those tiny but versatile machines could run differential equations to model predator-prey interaction.) The x-axis showed population numbers of each species, while time ran along y-axis. It was quite a slow simulation, if my memory is correct. The rabbits bred like ... rabbits, so their line tracked up, point by point, followed by the foxes who ate them and thus also increased. But then the many foxes would eat too many rabbits, so the rabbits tracked down again, followed - as swiftly as a 1983 era personal computer could manage - by the foxes. This undulating duet travelled on indefinitely as a soft-arced double sine wave. It left a deep impression on me. Firstly and most obviously, that the predator only looks like they're in charge. Also, that nothing lasts forever. And perhaps, though this came much later, that at a big enough scale predation starts to look more like competition, starts to look more like cooperation.

In contrast to a functioning ecosystem, app stores are centrally controlled by a single power. Innovation runs along pre-set rails. Apps compete with each other, but only on criteria set by the system owners. Users choose only from what the controllers make available. The money, data and power generated in the app store flow disproportionately back to the owner. It's emphatically not an ecosystem but a hierarchy that permits ritualistic competition to drain off the energies of potential competitors, like tame opposition parties in places like Singapore, or the jangled extremism of parliamentary factions in Russia. Functioning ecosystems have three types of fundamental interactions between organisms; competition, predation, and what we might call cooperation, but in the absence of each organism having a theory of mind about the others it interacts with is more accurately termed facilitation. It's clear that competition in technology plantations is limited and performative, and cooperation is similarly constrained. Just ask a tech worker trying to unionise or make real interoperability work. But these systems don't just use fake competition to hide the absence of the real thing. They obscure how the primary way the system owners interact with us is predation.

We don't live in competitive tech systems but in primarily predatory ones. And unlike in an actual ecosystem, where predators bounce up against limits - be they competitors, territorial conditions or the adaptive behaviour of prey - our platform predators have few limits. They're richer than most governments, so rarely face competition from other types of predator. They use their scale, wealth and power to shape the environment in which they operate - through lobbying, withholding tax to denude public services of resources, and then privatising them, and by eliminating alternatives or opposition through acquisitions, the destruction of media, the corruption of the academy and the purchase of tame non-profits or their erstwhile employees. Perhaps more importantly, they shape the mental world of everyone who might some day oppose them or build an alternative. No apex predator could dream of subtly convincing her prey that it's better for them to simply not run away. I guess that, fundamentally, is what makes us human.

It's not the wildly disproportionate amount of power platform that controllers hold that's most dangerous, it's how they wield it to prevent us imagining alternatives. That's why the ecosystem metaphor must be shot down everywhere it pops up. We don't live in a technology ecosystem. It's more like a zoo crossed with a detention centre. Or, to use an image that also conveys the beautiful lies that hold us in place, we live in a snow globe. It's a pretty albeit ersatz version of what a town is, and its limits aren't visible until you run right into them and smash your face on the glass. Who's holding the snow globe, peering in?

Recently the FT ran a chilling piece of business reporting about Apple in China; 'Apple trades acquiescence for access to factories and consumers in China'. Apple is the ultimate closed system in tech. (I should know. I'm writing this on one.) Apple's manufacturing is concentrated in a single region of China, and the company does what it has to do to keep that working. If that means hosting all customer data where the government can directly access it, sure. Shutting down airdrop between anonymous machines when people started using it to organise protests? Fine. Removing apps, pre-emptively censoring people's words, banning encrypted communications - absolutely. A predator instinctively corners its prey, shuts down any chance of escape. The only thing a predator fears and respects is another predator. Apple's closed and controlling environment fits hand in glove with its global enabler, the CCP. The article concludes with the words of Nathan Freitas, a developer of secure and decentralised communications systems:
"Apple's vision of a controlled, locked down ecosystem ... maps into the same vision, the same control that the Communist party wants to have in China. They see eye to eye on what, for a harmonious society you need. It's just one is a phone ecosystem, the other is a nation."
Conclusions
What might it be like to live in an actual digital ecosystem, one that shared the key characteristics of functioning biological ecosystems? Functioning ecosystems are defined by competition, predation and cooperation (or facilitation). Each of these is a building block to complex and adaptive communities. So, it wouldn't always be pretty. It would be messy, and sometimes we would lose. Sometimes, but not all the time. That's the difference.

Taking up the challenge to think of technology systems and their version of the internet as an ecosystem reveals that ecosystem to be profoundly damaged. It also focuses our attention on the arbitrary lines these systems have drawn between what's inside them and what's outside. Costs and harms are externalised, but value flows out, too. For an ecosystem, this looks aberrant and downright weird. But as a civilisation we've already come up with ways to tackle these kinds of problem and the people and organisations that make them. We know how to re-internalise costs. We know how to break monopolies. We know how to punish facilitators of harm.

Ecologists are beginning to know how to create the conditions for real-life ecosystems to repair themselves. Sometimes that means reintroducing functional species, especially large grazers. Sometimes it means ripping out invasive species - in much of Ireland, that means rhododendron, a beautiful flowering shrub that permits nothing to grow in its shade - and letting shrub and then native trees re-establish themselves, which they do surprisingly quickly. (I'm always wary of mentioning 'invasive species'. It's a biological analogy poised to sprint out of context and into a deeply unsavoury metaphor.) The first step is to see things, even pretty, useful things, for what they really are. George Monbiot points out that the beauty we perceive in landscapes denuded of trees - for example, Dartmoor or the Scottish highlands - is a falsehood unless we read the clear, undulating lines of naked hills as landscapes whose saplings are repeatedly ripped out. Ecological repair requires us to put away myths and metaphors, and see bare biological facts. Both ecological and technological repair need us to recognise that the 'shifting baselines' of impoverishment we think of as normal may just be a generational adjustment to a worsening situation we must urgently arrest.

For technologists, the challenge is to resist the taught, aesthetic preference for centralisation, simplification and control. These values serve the interests of owners obsessed with permanent, eutrophic growth, but have no fundamental, over-riding value of their own. Computing and engineering have a monoculture of values that needs to be cut down so that others can grow. They have so much to learn from other fields. The way in is through the childlike curiosity and delight that brought us all into this space.

Metaphors work best when we consciously use them as tools to look with, rather than as the whole thing we're seeing. Tech systems - plantations - are of course not ecosystems, and we can refuse the invitation to uncritically see them that way. But we can do more; we can think ecologically about how to fix the harms of these controlling systems. And, vitally, we can start to fulfil the broken promise of what we truly need them to be.

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Another day, another exhortation to join an "ecosystem" that's anything but. I could pick a hundred examples, but one that recently caught my eye was an ad placed in the Financial Times by the Sing...

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But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?

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Prints on leaves

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The Pigment Change uses photographic processes naturally occurring in plants and organic matter, such as photoperiodism and photobleaching, to create photographic artwork, and explores photography in relation to other art forms including video, performance and installation.

The Pigment Change comprehends four chapters: Faire une photo, The act of producing, Family Album and Offspring where plants and organic matter are exposed to specific amounts of light and particular wavelengths to produce image-objects and photographic experiences that promote an expansive sense of the medium.

Using organic matter as photographic substrate, this project researches sustainable forms and materials in photography as part of a wider reflection sustainability. The four chapters represent Almudena's views on producing or causing existence, sometimes making a clear statement on maternity, sometimes focusing on the act of producing as such.

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The Pigment Change uses photographic processes naturally occurring in plants and organic matter, such as photoperiodism and photobleaching, to create photographic artwork, and explores photography in relation to other art forms including video, performance and installation.

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Crouch, D., & Ward, C. (1997). The allotment : its landscape and culture. Five Leaves.

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Crouch, D., & Ward, C. (1997). The allotment : its landscape and culture. Five Leaves.

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Key themes:

Popularity of allotments, community, culture, fulfilment, recreational activity, landscape

Quotes:

“There has also been an enormous growth in popularity of allotments amongst new groups of enthusiasts and on television. In the same period garden sizes in the average new house have decreased - housing densities are higher, yet gardening remains the most participated way of people spending their leisure time.”

“We can begin to fit these elements together. The Allotment is a metaphor itself, about working the land, holding onto the ground, being close to the earth, about caring, about contesting space we cultivate, sharing space with other people, and about ways of making movement through which we construct our knowledge of the world around us.”

“It is possible to buy a packet of frozen food and cook it instantly without knowing where or how or by whom it was produced. And this is less expensive than seeding, nurturing and harvesting the food yourself. Why, then, does the allotment garden continue to flourish? The answer must lie in its image, in the role of communal effort, in the feelings growers have in feeding a family through their own efforts.”

“The allotment in history has been both peasant and proletarian. However, like Pissarro's work the allotment is not quaint and is not a representation of 'nature unspoilt'. It is, today, an essentially urban phenomenon (at least, there are simply many more allotments in town and city than in county areas and for the best part of this century it was the urban proletariat that used it, that made the allotment its own landscape. Landscape is not usually a proletarian product, and as such the allotment breaks the rules: it fails to comply with the accepted image.”

“For over half a million households the allotment is part of their everyday life. It is a recreation, and used to be important in the survival of thousands of poor families. Today, it may offer a way in which we can realize individual potential and endowments that find no room or recognition in our culture, in the outside world. It may be part of the choice we make to do something that is no longer with the grain' of our mainstream culture, as we select activities that correspond with our values, and with what may have become familiar parts of our local culture and of our family life. It is partly a matter of the way we choose to use places, buildings and land. In these choices we derive identity, from our surroundings, from the people and the place."

“The meaning of leisure is a mixture of intrinsic satisfaction, emanating from the support and cohesion existing within the participatory group, community or sub-culture, and providing for the development of our own and our friends' identity.”

“The landscape wherein a particular activity takes place can play a significant role in the presentation and promotion of that activity”

“The allotment is part of a tradition of criticism of modern urban industrial society and the kinds of surroundings it creates.”

“The way that people create structures and use the ground in the allotment represents something of their own culture - and, thereby, what that piece of land, and the activities on it, mean to them. The allotment is a collective undertaking, conceived through shared labour, and containing many idiosyncratic elements. The plot-holders thus create their own landscape.”

“There were no intended aesthetics, and so there were no rules of appearance to which to conform.”

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"After reading it, you can take your omikuji with you. However, if you had bad luck, it is common to tie the omikuji inside the shrine.

It is said that tying your omikuji to the branch of a tree would link it to the life force of the tree, and thus have your wishes granted. However, in order not to damage the trees, many shrines have set up places dedicated for this practice."

https://tomo.life/en/blogs/shinto-and-shrines/omikuji?srsltid=AfmBOoqEHbR6K2uMJd9Dsudpx2XrQSQ5BQOHxbiNojMjmWNB7e5Cz0fo

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供TOMO 玄米コーヒーオンラインストア

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The History of Omikuji - Easy Explanation of Japanese Fortune Telling – 供TOMO 玄米コーヒーオンラインストア

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After praying at the shrine, many people are attracted by small papers called “omikuji”, offered near the office selling good luck charms. Omikuji can be interpreted as the manifestation of the Shinto deities. Originally, omikuji became popular in Japan during the Heian period under the name of…

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The Art Of sustainability

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As concerns around climate change and environmental sustainability grow, artists are increasingly looking for ways to create art that is both beautiful and eco-friendly. In this post, we'll explore some of the innovative sustainable art practices and materials that artists are using to create impactful and meaningful art. As the art world becomes more environmentally conscious, artists are exploring new ways to incorporate sustainable materials into their work. Here are some of the materials that artists are using to create sustainable art:

Recycled paper

Many artists are using recycled paper to create beautiful artwork. By using recycled paper, artists can reduce waste and prevent the need for new trees to be cut down. Some artists are even using recycled paper to create 3D sculptures and installations.

One example of an artist who works with recycled paper is the American artist and papermaker, May Babcock. Babcock is known for her intricate paper sculptures and installations, which are made from recycled paper. Babcock uses a variety of recycled paper sources, including junk mail, newspapers, and discarded books, in combination with other natural materials to create her artworks. She transforms the paper through a process of shredding, pulping, and forming, creating unique and textured sheets of paper that she then uses to construct her sculptures and installations.

Babcock's work often explores themes of memory, identity, and the natural world, and she uses recycled paper to create pieces that are both beautiful and environmentally conscious. By using recycled paper in her work, Babcock is able to reduce waste and promote sustainability, while also creating meaningful and impactful art.

"I set a task to take a new look at the south Louisiana landscape. The spaces most powerful were leftover, abandoned and forbidden industrial places, including an old lock, stretches of the levee along the Mississippi River, highway underpasses and chemical, energy and sugar cane processing plants. Working from observational sketches and using local materials such as river mud and plant fibres for papermaking, I made prints on handmade paper, books, and videos that bring this latent landscape into view. Images and surfaces become primitive, disorienting, psychological, dark and changing landscapes" - May Babcock

Natural dyes:

Many artists are exploring the use of natural dyes in their work as a sustainable alternative to synthetic dyes. Natural dyes are made from plant-based materials such as flowers, leaves, roots, and bark, and have been used for centuries to dye textiles and other materials. By using natural dyes, artists can create beautiful and sustainable artworks that promote environmental consciousness and reduce the negative impact of synthetic dyes on the planet and on human health.

Some of the benefits of natural dyes include:

Sustainability: Natural dyes are made from renewable resources and are biodegradable, which makes them a more sustainable choice than synthetic dyes.

Non-toxic: Natural dyes do not contain the harsh chemicals and heavy metals found in synthetic dyes, which can be harmful to the environment and to the people who work with them.

Unique colours and textures: Natural dyes can produce a wide range of colours and textures, and can create unique variations in the final product.

Some common natural dye materials include:

Indigo: Indigo is a plant-based dye that has been used for centuries to create deep blue shades. It is often used to dye denim and other fabrics.

Madder: Madder is a root that produces shades of red and orange.

Turmeric: Turmeric is a spice that can be used to create bright yellow dyes.

Cochineal: Cochineal is a small insect that produces a red dye, and has been used since ancient times to dye textiles.

Living Colour is a pioneering biodesign research project that explores the potential of using natural and sustainable methods for textile dyeing. The project focuses on using pigment-producing bacteria as an alternative to toxic textile dyes, producing biodegradable pigments that are safe for the environment and for human health.

Unlike traditional dyeing processes, Living Colour's bacterial dyeing process requires no toxic chemicals, minimal water, and low temperatures. In fact, this process could even add beneficial characteristics such as anti-bacterial properties to fabrics.

One unique method that Living Colour uses is "live dyeing," where bacteria are cultivated directly on the fabric, resulting in distinct visual growth patterns that are unique to each dye batch. While this approach is currently labour-intensive and time-consuming, it allows for truly experimental designs, as seen in collaborations with companies like PUMA and The Exploded View.

Living Colour combines traditional artisanal techniques with cutting-edge biodesign innovations, making it both highly innovative and eco-friendly. By using bacteria as a natural dye factory, Living Colour is leading the way in developing more sustainable and responsible ways to colour the world.

Reclaimed wood

Reclaimed wood is a popular choice for artists who are interested in incorporating sustainable materials into their work. Reclaimed wood is wood that has been salvaged from old buildings, bridges, or other structures that are no longer in use. By using reclaimed wood, artists are able to repurpose materials that would otherwise end up in a landfill or be burned. Reclaimed wood is not only eco-friendly, but it also adds a unique and rustic element to art pieces. The patina and weathered texture of the wood can create a one-of-a-kind aesthetic that cannot be replicated with new wood.

By using reclaimed wood, artists are able to create sustainable and meaningful works of art that honour the history and character of the materials they use. Additionally, using reclaimed wood promotes the importance of recycling and repurposing materials, reducing the waste and environmental impact of art production.

An artist who has worked extensively with reclaimed wood is Richard Long. Long is a British sculptor and land artist who is known for creating works that incorporate natural materials such as stones, mud, and wood. He often uses materials that he finds while on walks in nature, and he has created a number of works that feature reclaimed wood. He has created numerous sculptures using reclaimed wood, such as "Wood Line," which he created in 2010 by arranging a line of salvaged eucalyptus branches in a park in San Francisco.

Long's work with reclaimed wood highlights the beauty and potential of discarded materials, encouraging viewers to see the value in repurposing and reusing resources. Through his use of natural and reclaimed materials, Long creates works that not only reflect his love of nature but also emphasize the importance of sustainability and environmental consciousness.

Found objects, also known as "readymades," are everyday objects that artists collect and repurpose in their work. These objects can include anything from discarded trash to old machine parts to vintage clothing. By incorporating found objects into their art, artists are able to give new meaning and significance to objects that might otherwise be overlooked or discarded.

Using found objects in art is often associated with the Dada art movement of the early 20th century, which sought to challenge traditional notions of art and creativity. Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray used found objects to create works that were provocative, humorous, and often nonsensical. For example, Duchamp's "Fountain" (1917) was simply a porcelain urinal that he signed with a pseudonym and submitted to an art exhibition.

By using found objects, artists are able to create works that are not only visually interesting but also thought-provoking and meaningful. The use of found objects promotes the importance of recycling and repurposing materials, encouraging viewers to think about the objects they use and the impact they have on the environment and society.

Sustainable art is a growing movement that seeks to create art that is not only aesthetically pleasing but also environmentally and socially responsible. Through the use of sustainable materials such as reclaimed wood, natural dyes, and found objects, artists are able to create works that not only showcase their creativity but also raise awareness about important issues such as waste reduction, pollution, and social justice. By promoting sustainability in their art, artists are contributing to a larger movement towards a more responsible and sustainable world. As viewers, we can appreciate and support these efforts by seeking out sustainable art and considering the environmental and social impact of the art we choose to create and consume.

As concerns around climate change and environmental sustainability grow, artists are increasingly looking for ways to create art that is both beautiful and eco-friendly. In this post, we'll explore some of the innovative sustainable art practices and materials that artists are using to create impactful and meaningful art. As the art world becomes more environmentally conscious, artists are exploring new ways to incorporate sustainable materials into their work. Here are some of the materials that artists are using to create sustainable art:

Recycled paper

Many artists are using recycled paper to create beautiful artwork. By using recycled paper, artists can reduce waste and prevent the need for new trees to be cut down. Some artists are even using recycled paper to create 3D sculptures and installations.

One example of an artist who works with recycled paper is the American artist and papermaker, May Babcock. Babcock is known for her intricate paper sculptures and installations, which are made from recycled paper. Babcock uses a variety of recycled paper sources, including junk mail, newspapers, and discarded books, in combination with other natural materials to create her artworks. She transforms the paper through a process of shredding, pulping, and forming, creating unique and textured sheets of paper that she then uses to construct her sculptures and installations.

Babcock's work often explores themes of memory, identity, and the natural world, and she uses recycled paper to create pieces that are both beautiful and environmentally conscious. By using recycled paper in her work, Babcock is able to reduce waste and promote sustainability, while also creating meaningful and impactful art.

"I set a task to take a new look at the south Louisiana landscape. The spaces most powerful were leftover, abandoned and forbidden industrial places, including an old lock, stretches of the levee along the Mississippi River, highway underpasses and chemical, energy and sugar cane processing plants. Working from observational sketches and using local materials such as river mud and plant fibres for papermaking, I made prints on handmade paper, books, and videos that bring this latent landscape into view. Images and surfaces become primitive, disorienting, psychological, dark and changing landscapes" - May Babcock

Natural dyes:

Many artists are exploring the use of natural dyes in their work as a sustainable alternative to synthetic dyes. Natural dyes are made from plant-based materials such as flowers, leaves, roots, and bark, and have been used for centuries to dye textiles and other materials. By using natural dyes, artists can create beautiful and sustainable artworks that promote environmental consciousness and reduce the negative impact of synthetic dyes on the planet and on human health.

Some of the benefits of natural dyes include:

Sustainability: Natural dyes are made from renewable resources and are biodegradable, which makes them a more sustainable choice than synthetic dyes.

Non-toxic: Natural dyes do not contain the harsh chemicals and heavy metals found in synthetic dyes, which can be harmful to the environment and to the people who work with them.

Unique colours and textures: Natural dyes can produce a wide range of colours and textures, and can create unique variations in the final product.

Some common natural dye materials include:

Indigo: Indigo is a plant-based dye that has been used for centuries to create deep blue shades. It is often used to dye denim and other fabrics.

Madder: Madder is a root that produces shades of red and orange.

Turmeric: Turmeric is a spice that can be used to create bright yellow dyes.

Cochineal: Cochineal is a small insect that produces a red dye, and has been used since ancient times to dye textiles.

Living Colour is a pioneering biodesign research project that explores the potential of using natural and sustainable methods for textile dyeing. The project focuses on using pigment-producing bacteria as an alternative to toxic textile dyes, producing biodegradable pigments that are safe for the environment and for human health.

Unlike traditional dyeing processes, Living Colour's bacterial dyeing process requires no toxic chemicals, minimal water, and low temperatures. In fact, this process could even add beneficial characteristics such as anti-bacterial properties to fabrics.

One unique method that Living Colour uses is "live dyeing," where bacteria are cultivated directly on the fabric, resulting in distinct visual growth patterns that are unique to each dye batch. While this approach is currently labour-intensive and time-consuming, it allows for truly experimental designs, as seen in collaborations with companies like PUMA and The Exploded View.

Living Colour combines traditional artisanal techniques with cutting-edge biodesign innovations, making it both highly innovative and eco-friendly. By using bacteria as a natural dye factory, Living Colour is leading the way in developing more sustainable and responsible ways to colour the world.

Reclaimed wood

Reclaimed wood is a popular choice for artists who are interested in incorporating sustainable materials into their work. Reclaimed wood is wood that has been salvaged from old buildings, bridges, or other structures that are no longer in use. By using reclaimed wood, artists are able to repurpose materials that would otherwise end up in a landfill or be burned. Reclaimed wood is not only eco-friendly, but it also adds a unique and rustic element to art pieces. The patina and weathered texture of the wood can create a one-of-a-kind aesthetic that cannot be replicated with new wood.

By using reclaimed wood, artists are able to create sustainable and meaningful works of art that honour the history and character of the materials they use. Additionally, using reclaimed wood promotes the importance of recycling and repurposing materials, reducing the waste and environmental impact of art production.

An artist who has worked extensively with reclaimed wood is Richard Long. Long is a British sculptor and land artist who is known for creating works that incorporate natural materials such as stones, mud, and wood. He often uses materials that he finds while on walks in nature, and he has created a number of works that feature reclaimed wood. He has created numerous sculptures using reclaimed wood, such as "Wood Line," which he created in 2010 by arranging a line of salvaged eucalyptus branches in a park in San Francisco.

Long's work with reclaimed wood highlights the beauty and potential of discarded materials, encouraging viewers to see the value in repurposing and reusing resources. Through his use of natural and reclaimed materials, Long creates works that not only reflect his love of nature but also emphasize the importance of sustainability and environmental consciousness.

Found objects, also known as "readymades," are everyday objects that artists collect and repurpose in their work. These objects can include anything from discarded trash to old machine parts to vintage clothing. By incorporating found objects into their art, artists are able to give new meaning and significance to objects that might otherwise be overlooked or discarded.

Using found objects in art is often associated with the Dada art movement of the early 20th century, which sought to challenge traditional notions of art and creativity. Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray used found objects to create works that were provocative, humorous, and often nonsensical. For example, Duchamp's "Fountain" (1917) was simply a porcelain urinal that he signed with a pseudonym and submitted to an art exhibition.

By using found objects, artists are able to create works that are not only visually interesting but also thought-provoking and meaningful. The use of found objects promotes the importance of recycling and repurposing materials, encouraging viewers to think about the objects they use and the impact they have on the environment and society.

Sustainable art is a growing movement that seeks to create art that is not only aesthetically pleasing but also environmentally and socially responsible. Through the use of sustainable materials such as reclaimed wood, natural dyes, and found objects, artists are able to create works that not only showcase their creativity but also raise awareness about important issues such as waste reduction, pollution, and social justice. By promoting sustainability in their art, artists are contributing to a larger movement towards a more responsible and sustainable world. As viewers, we can appreciate and support these efforts by seeking out sustainable art and considering the environmental and social impact of the art we choose to create and consume.

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The Art of Sustainability: How artists are have used eco-friendly materials - Hotel Elephant Workspace

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As concerns around climate change and environmental sustainability grow, artists are increasingly looking for ways to create art that is both beautiful and eco-friendly. In this post, we'll explore some of the innovative sustainable art practices and materials that artists are using to create impact

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Biodiversity and Design

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Regenerative Art and Design

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Sustainability: Art and Ecology

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Cultural Sustainability in Art-Based Interdisciplinary Dialogue