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The increasing popularity of the ecological concept of ‘rewilding’ reflects our growing understanding that monocultures – whether in agriculture, cities, or industries – are detrimental to our survival.
In We Need To Rewild The Internet, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon make a very compelling and urgent case for aggressively rewilding the internet, as Big Tech monopolies have turned what was once a thriving ecosystem into single-crop 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. … For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.”
Using apt analogies, Farrell and Berjon point to the many dangers of essential infrastructure being controlled by a handful of immensely powerful and profitable companies.
“Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers [American urban planner Robert] 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 a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.”
Borrowing ecological terms works really well here, I think. Those born before the ’90s remember the internet as more of a wild, complex ecosystem, with myriad cultures and subcultures using mostly open protocols in imperfect but creative ways to feed and sustain each other.
Farrell and Berjon eloquently explain how the concept of rewilding could be applied to the internet of today, emphasising the need for strong, proactive government action to bust monopolies on both the visible (e.g. app stores, browsers, search etc.) and invisible levels (e.g. DNS, cables, data centres).
“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. ...”
“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 need to stop talking about ethics and hoping the next generation will do a better job and start making demands of power.“
The focus on strong government policy is crucial. However, I wish Farrell and Berjon had included some criticism of the many people working in the tech industry who blindly follow the latest fad with little regard for its wider implications. The tech world’s continued uncritical adherence to the gospel of venture capitalists not only perpetuates but further fortifies the moated fiefdoms they have created. More of us need to demand and participate in the internet’s rewilding process:
“Ecologists have re-oriented 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.” – Kai
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Apps & Sites
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What sets Agenda apart from the many other notes/to-do apps is that everything is attached to a timeline, so nothing is lost or left behind until you deem it done. It seamlessly integrates your notes with your calendar. The macOS/iOS apps look really well designed, too. It’s free to use with a simple ‘premium’ plan to unlock additional features. Friends of DD enjoy 50% off the first year of premium.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Freezetab is essentially a more powerful browser history. It lets you save open tabs (and their content) quickly. You can tag, search or browse them chronologically.
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If you’re into habit tracking, Habituator will follow you on every Apple device (macOS, iOS and watchOS) and offers tons of stats, filters and graphs that you can display via a range of widgets.
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For lovers of beautiful cookbooks, BAF is a growing directory of books about food (over 1300 titles) and the people involved in making them. Come for the food inspo, stay for the beautiful cover designs.
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Worthy Five: Akna Márquez
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Five recommendations by Venezuelan sustainability architect and materials specialist Akna Márquez
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A video worth watching:
The Sounds of Space is a mesmerising collaboration between musician and filmmaker John Boswell (melodysheep) and the sound podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz. Listen to actual and theoretical sounds of space!
A book worth reading:
Firefighter Zen by Hersch Wilson offers a combination of stories and insights for staying calm and resilient under intense situations – from someone whose job is to do just that.
A recipe worth trying:
Mujaddara is a delicious, protein and fiber-packed meal, made mostly out of three easily accessible and inexpensive ingredients: rice, lentils, and caramelised onions.
A podcast worth listening to:
NPR’s Invisibilia, and in particular the episode called An Unlikely Superpower. It’s mind-blowing how much we may perceive through other senses beyond sight.
A quote worth repeating:
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” by Rachel Carson. When we are feeling pessimistic or hopeless, it’s worth remembering how lucky we are, reconnecting with our surroundings and seeing that we live in systems that also have the power to regenerate.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Akna Márquez in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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Living and working with AI
Described as a thoughtful and pragmatically optimistic introduction to how Generative AI will shape our existence from here onwards, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick argues that we are entering an era of ‘co-intelligence’ where humans and AI systems will (have to) work together in partnership. Mollik thinks we best view AI as a co-worker or collaborator instead of a tool. If, like me, you are generally on the sceptical side, this might balance your views with a more positive outlook for the AI future.
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Fighting the propaganda machine
What if you can’t fight lies with truth? Can a propaganda war ever be won? Author Peter Pomerantsev tells the story of British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer during WWII. Delmer was a radio host who beat Goebbels at his own game. How to Win an Information War is compelling new study of how misinformation is used as a weapon against... misinformation, and how such methods could be used against today’s tyrants.
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Overheard on Mastodon
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Their problem with protestors is not that they ‘disturb the peace’. It’s that they disturb the violence.
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Food for Thought
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In yet another excellent Noema essay, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon make a strong argument for rewilding the internet by breaking up Big Tech companies that have turned what was once a thriving ecosystem into a barren monoculture.
“Rewilding the internet is not a nostalgia project for middle-aged nerds who miss IRC and Usenet. For many people across the generations today, platforms like Facebook or TikTok are the internet. They’ve long dwelled in walled gardens they think are the world. 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. Rewilding is a way to collectively see the counterintuitive truth; today’s internet isn’t too wild, even if it feels like that. It’s simply not wild enough.”
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A great supplemental ready to the above: Thomas Klaffke draws from many interesting writers, activists and intellectuals to describe what he calls ‘an inner rewilding processes’ that could help us embrace a healthier, more harmonious relationship with the world, and ourselves. At the heart of this rewilding are three concepts: re-synchronising with nature, re-humanising, and re-indigenising. One of the many quotes in this piece, this one from David G. Haskell: “The fact that many of the sensory modalities that we use, and other creatures use, are being cut and fragmented now is a crisis on the same level as the crises of chemistry, of pollution, and of species loss. In fact, to speak of them as separate things is a lie, because climate change and species loss and the loss of sensory connection between creatures and sensory diversity are intersecting and tangled with one another. […] If we’re not paying attention through our own senses, we have disengaged from the primary mode in which every creature since the origin of life has connected to its environment.”
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In an interesting experiment with citizen assemblies (see also DD220 and DD209), Belgium selected 60 citizens at random to create a citizens panel on artificial intelligence. They meet regularly over a three-month period and – with the help of a roster of AI experts – deliberate on rules governing AI. “The broader implication of the Belgian experiment is a recognition that there can be other modes of advice and consent in today’s troubled democracies beyond the passive citizenship of periodically voting in elections dominated by partisan strife. Indeed, it is becoming clear that democracy will only survive the fragmenting force of distributed communication technologies if it can find ways to bring the broader civil society into governance through common platforms that enable and encourage the search for social consensus.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Vlad is a Russian street and fine art photographer capturing scenes from the streets of Moscow with beautiful black and white photography.
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Absolutely stunning photos of brutalist churches by photographer Jamie McGregor Smith in his series ‘Sacred Modernity’. “Half a century later, their futuristic unfamiliar forms suggest at an obscure religion, and perhaps predict societies current shift away from organised religion towards an individual spirituality.” There is a photobook and a short, narrated film about the series, too. (via)
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I didn’t know you could create art that looks like a painting made from wool, but that’s the field Finnish artist Elena Bondar specialised in.
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With big, condensed and black shapes, Spektra combines different locations, cultures and ideas as statements around the world and celebrates the differences among them: it’s a multi-script type family that combines five scripts: Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew.
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Notable Numbers
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The fertility rate in the US fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from a year earlier. It is the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking it in the 1930s.
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Taylor Swift continues her streak of record breaking. In fact, she has broken her own record for the most sales of a vinyl album in a week, and did it in just three days, with 700,000 LP copies sold of The Tortured Poets Department over one weekend.
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In the US, Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 EVs it sold in the first three months of the year.
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The Week in a GIF
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