From Silicon to Slime

This interview is part of Ecologies of Entanglement, a collaborative series between Are.na Editorial and Dark Properties.

I first came to know Claire L. Evans through her 2018 book, Broad Band, which tells the untold story of the women who made the internet. It’s a great book (you should read it!), but I have to say, I’m even more excited about her current body of research and writing: A mind-bending, ultra-futuristic conglomeration of topics, from slime mold computers, to evolutionary simulations, to programmable organisms. When taken together, there is a central question that emerges from these far-out areas of inquiry: How does computing shape our lives—and how will it shape our future?

To understand the expansiveness of the above question, it’s important to know that for Claire, “computing” is not something merely done by silica-based computers. On the contrary, the act of computing can be applied to almost anything that is dynamically operating in the world—and, in turn, shaping reality. As Claire writes in GROW Magazine, “The sheer multiplicity of approaches is enough to make you think that computing is not so much an industry as a way of seeing — an interpretation of the world.” With this in mind, we can agree that modern-day laptops and iPhones are perhaps a quite limited manifestation of this idea of a “computer.” So much more is possible, and as a science fiction editor, tech reporter, and writer, Claire is one of the best people I can think of to help us all imagine it.

For this series, Ecologies of Entanglement, we wanted to explore the growing overlap between nature and technology, and to see where we mortal humans fit in. Perhaps we were pulled in this direction because of the way that analyzing this particular overlap starts to unravel many of life’s biggest questions—from consciousness to the nature of reality and what it means to be alive. I’m happy to report that in the below interview, Claire takes us dancing through these cosmic unknowns, all while keeping us grounded in reality and, importantly, excited for a future where computers aren’t just made of rocks, but made of the slimy, oozy stuff of life.

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Willa Köerner: To start things off, what are you growing these days? Do you keep a garden?

Claire L. Evans: I’m fortunate enough to have a backyard in Southern California. It’s 90% feral, overgrown with native plantings that I started when I moved in. I do prune things occasionally, but it’s such a sanctuary for the creatures in my very asphalt-heavy neighborhood that I feel guilty moving a single leaf.

There is a portion of my yard that used to be a vegetable garden. I started trying to grow food during COVID, like a lot of people, but it was a process with a lot of failure. I would get emotionally invested, and blame myself when plants struggled. So, a couple of years ago, I mentally rebranded my vegetable garden as a “sprout lab.” This has taken off the pressure, and now whatever happens, happens. It’s just a place where I get to learn what shape plants take as they grow.

This year I’ve ended up with poppies, some random potatoes, some tragic mint, and some greens that are still hanging on. This is also the first year that I’ve had tomatoes that aren’t diseased in some way. I credit that entirely to the fact that I got the seedlings from a neighbor, so I suspect they were already acclimated to the environment. I also have a fig tree that I propagated from a cutting, which I’m really proud of. This is the first year that I’m going to have figs.

Overall, I think subsistence gardening appeals to a fantasy of wanting to live off the grid, but that can also be a bit isolationist. We live in a world of profound dependence on one another. So instead of growing food for survival purposes, I treat my garden as something to have a relationship with.

Willa: I’d love to chat about the new body of research you’ve been working on. It seems to commingle this unlikely terrain between consciousness and life, on the one side, and then computation and technology on the other. How do you define this vortex of ideas?

Claire: Well, I spent many years as a semi-traditional tech writer. That was interesting and fruitful, but I got to a point where I was just not interested in Silicon Valley anymore. However, I’m still very much a computer person. I’m fascinated by moving symbols around on screens, and how computers order our view of the world.

While writing about technology, I developed an interest in biotechnology, and in biology more generally. Right now there’s this intersection between computing and biology emerging simultaneously across disciplines. There are people creating artificial intelligence from the top-down, using traditional machine-learning methods, but there are also people working towards generating life from code from the bottom-up, using evolutionary methods. There are synthetic biologists programming cells like code, roboticists working with living matter, and researchers drawing inspiration from living systems—swarms of fish, flocks of birds, slime molds, or seedling roots—to imagine new computing architectures. Even traditional biologists are increasingly using terms like “computation” and “information processing” to talk about phenomena they observe in nature.

Maybe because I’m someone who reads a lot of science fiction, it just seems clear to me that there’s a convergence ahead. At some point I think we’ll fully realize that what’s happening in the natural world is more computationally efficient, inventive, and resilient than anything we could create from silicon. So then the question becomes: what can we do with those capacities? Can biology teach us how to create new computing architectures that aren’t so extractive? We’re literally running out of sand. What’s the new substrate going to be? Could it be alive?

Willa: It feels like no matter which way you come at these ideas—using technology to simulate aliveness, or meddling with biology to make living matter computable—you end up hitting a wall where you have to ask, “When are our models of life really alive? When does a model of consciousness become conscious?”

Claire: I think we can learn a lot from trying to model natural systems. It’s only by attempting it that we realize how staggeringly complex even the simplest life forms are, and how completely bonkers it is that a single process could have brought us from a single cell to all the diversity of life on Earth. We’ll never be smart enough to create an algorithm with that kind of open-ended generative power, although it’s precisely its evolutionary creativity that brought us intelligence to begin with. For me, the ongoing life force that resists entropy—whatever it is that organizes living systems and makes them capable of complex emergent behaviors—is the most mystical thing. Thinking about it is as close as I get to religious feeling. It’s at the center of everything.

I’m fascinated by the fact that every living thing processes information, or computes, in a sense. Living things are each perfect computers that only do one thing—run themselves—and even the simplest ones are so complex they’re impossible to model fully. There’s a really interesting open-source project going on right now to create a computational model of a microscopic roundworm with only a thousand cells. Even that is considered an ambitious, long-term goal. Like, maybe someday we can build a faithful model of a worm in the computer. And that’s just one organism! And life is about relationships, the dynamic interactions between organisms. So the best we can do is sample here and there. Because ecologies are so complex, and because they operate at different scales simultaneously, and across time, the only way to get any understanding is to create a number of different models and see where they might overlap. That’s where the truth is, if it exists.

Willa: I’d love to segue into another mind-bending topic: The past versus the future. Broad Band, your first book, looks back on the women who made the internet. With this new body of research, you’re looking to the future instead of the past. Can you speak to the differences or similarities you’ve found between looking forwards versus backwards?

Claire: It’s funny—my relationship to history is about finding the untravelled paths. Writing Broad Band, I was looking at transitional moments in the development of technology to then ask, “What if women had been listened to? What if this other line of inquiry had been activated and acted upon? Would we be living in a different world today?”

I’ve always had a recursive relationship to writing about history. I’m looking for things that can help us recontextualize the present, while also creating new pathways towards a different, better future. I think this approach comes from being a little bit dreamy about alternate realities and possibilities, again, as a longtime science fiction reader. For me, seeking latent possibilities—or using writing as a way to reorganize time—feels natural. With my next book project, I’ll probably take a similar approach to writing about these newer, on-the-cusp technologies. Overall, I want to be able to find the people, projects, and interventions that are happening at the intersection of biology and computation, and imagine what they might lead to.

Willa: I find it pretty perfect that you’re operating in this realm between extrapolating on the implications of scientific research, and then writing and editing speculative fiction. To me, it all feels connected. Do you feel like reporting and writing creatively converge in your practice?

Claire: I’m always trying to coax scientists into making projections about the implications of their work, or to interpret what it means on a philosophical level, but they’re generally quite constrained about what they’re willing to say. I do appreciate the rigor of science writing, because you really have to make sure that you are representing the work and its scope realistically. But personally, I can’t help myself from wanting to tumble along the timeline and imagine where these things might go. Or where they might have gone, for that matter.

Look at, for example, the history of analog computers [which rely on physical components to process data, versus processing data digitally, as today’s computers do]. These computers were very common in the ‘50s and even ‘60s, and they worked as a direct electromechanical analogy to natural phenomena. Now we use digital computers, but that was an entirely different conceptual framework for how we interfaced with the world around us, one that was much more direct and responsive, not to mention more energy-efficient. Analog computing is really effective for certain things, like predicting tides and modeling chaos, for example. What if we’d gone down a different timeline—one where analog computers continued to develop alongside the digital? What does the endpoint of that extrapolation look like? That’s science fiction, but it’s also history. There are latent possibilities everywhere.

Willa: I like to think about how sci-fi books, shows, and movies can warm us up for imagining other possibilities. Often, you need to see something or read something before you can imagine it in high-fidelity.

Claire: Right. There are all kinds of possibilities, but unless they’re modeled back to you, sometimes it’s difficult to imagine them, or to begin to partially inhabit them.

Willa: Perhaps imagination is its own kind of computer, where we’re modeling something to ourselves as a way to experiment with it.

Claire: Totally. Think about fiction—from the same description, every reader is going to imagine something different. I was just thinking about AI in this context, actually. The same prompt entered into different generative systems will generate different outputs based on that system’s training data. In a sense the output, the imagination, is a model. It’s rooted in something descriptive, but it’s just one picture of the world, among many.

Willa: In a piece of speculative fiction you sent me, After the Metabiome, writer Andy Gonzalez imagines everything as alive: his bed made of mushroom, his sheets made of spider silk, his smartphone replaced with “a beautiful organic ecosystem with fluorescent proteins arranged to display the news.” That way of reimagining the components of everyday life as living entities got me excited, but also a little freaked. Do you think that, if we went all in on biodesign and biocomputing, it would completely remake the building blocks of our reality?

Claire: It might not be so different from how things already are. We’re all just aggregates of bacteria, yeasts, fungi, and cells. Bacteria outnumber our cells ten to one, and they have their own cognitive capacities. We’re already swarming with life, and if we could actually perceive everything happening within our own bodies, we’d probably be horrified. Every material surface is a porous point of contact between our biomes and the world. This is actually something I have sort of appreciated about the COVID era, being reminded how every surface is crawling with life.

If you start thinking about things at an even smaller scale, really, nothing is solid. Everything is porous. I’m obsessed with this book by Laura Tripaldi, a nanotechnologist who writes about the intelligence of materials and what happens when they come into contact with one another. Nanotechnologists don’t talk about hard divisions between surfaces. They talk about “interfaces,” because where materials touch, on the nano-scale, there’s no strict surface. It’s all interactions of particles, which act on and transform each other. So really, at every scale, we’re already in a state of flux. We just don’t see it.

I guess I’m just excited by ways of understanding the world that implicate us in the mess of it all. It proves in an irrefutable way that the modular, isolationist human framework of reality is an inaccurate representation of life on Earth.

Willa: To look a little closer at this idea of a computer made of slime mold: How could that possibly come into being? What might it look like?

Claire: It’s a difficult thing to wrap your head around, because we only have our existing model of what a computer looks like, and what a computer can do. Because of that, when you hear “computer made of slime mold,” you can’t help but imagine a MacBook with, like, goo coming out of it. But if we take the proposition of biocomputing seriously, and we iterate on it with the same attention and resources that we’ve invested into developing silicon-based computers, whatever emerges from that research will be very different than anything we could possibly imagine now.

I certainly don’t know—but I imagine that our sense of what computers are for, and what their capacities are, might change and evolve. An ant colony, or a model of one, could be a computer. A tree could be a computer, its roots functionalized to measure changes in the soil and report back to us. A cluster of brain cells hooked up to sensors could be a computer. A computer could be liquid, or bacterial. If we could throw out our existing paradigms and look farther afield, we might really be surprised. Intelligence is everywhere, in different degrees and combinations. The question is finding applications that are suitable and mutually-beneficial.

I’m very interested in science that seriously engages with the natural capabilities, affordances, and desires of living systems. If you look at what bacteria wants to do naturally—what inputs will make them thrive, what environments they evolved to survive—it’s only by being conscious of meeting those conditions that we can get the bacteria to do what we want it to do. Because it’s alive, if we want to have a productive relationship, we have to understand its context, and accommodate its needs. This is something people in biomanufacturing know well.

But I think that’s a poignant way of thinking about everything. How can we align our interests with what living organisms and systems naturally do? How can we yoke ourselves to what they’re doing so that our relationship is no longer exploitative, but rather one where we’re putting existing capabilities to productive ends? That might mean adapting how we work, how we think, and what we’re building. But I can guarantee that whatever comes out of that approach will be more fascinating, generative, and sustainable long-term than what we have now.

Willa: Are there any key points or takeaways from your research that keep coming up? Any parting thoughts?

Claire: The main thing I keep coming back to is that nothing flourishes in isolation. Neurons first evolved around the same time that animals started eating each other: that is to say, the fact that we have thought at all emerges from an evolutionary necessity to be aware of the presence of other animals. That doesn’t mean intelligence has its origins in hostility; in so many cases, evading predation is a question of collaboration. Anything in the living world that survives and thrives does so with the cooperation of other living entities. It’s a totally human construction to imagine that we could take something and put it in a petri dish and hope that it’s going to, in isolation, reveal the secrets of life. It can’t possibly, because everything in life—everything on Earth—evolved through a complex evolutionary process involving relations with its environment, with other organisms, and with other species. To put it simply: Everything exists in relation to everything else—inescapably so.

The next interview from Ecologies of Entanglement will be published on Sunday, August 18. Subscribe to Dark Properties and Are.na Editorial to make sure you don’t miss it.