Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists know something just as important, too; 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.
Taken together, the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures.
As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.
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.
I’m reading this and thinking we need to rewild culture and society, not just the Internet. Consolidation is no more healthy for the movie industry than it is for tech. Culture is bound up with the Internet, but both the infrastructure side, which this article focuses on, and the policy side around moderation and data control, are important to adapt. The IndieWeb has a role to play in rewilding the Internet, which is part of what I like about the movement.
I see these three concepts arise often lately in conversations about repairing what we have broken: rewilding, queering, and decolonizing. They’re distinct but all a way of interrogating what is normal, who is in power, and what our goals are.
Rewilding an already 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.
Further reading:
Local by Alastair Humphreys
What’s Misunderstood about Indigenous Cultural Fire Is Sovereignty
Nature as a model of abundance
Generated content is an invasive species in the online ecosystem