Introducing Ecologies of Entanglement

This is the introductory essay to a new interview series we’re doing with Dark Properties, a newsletter by Willa Köerner that connects personal and planetary ecologies.

There is this particular feeling one can get on sunny days when, despite the nice weather, you’re stuck inside on your computer. If your livelihood, like ours, is tied to the number of hours spent sitting face to face with a glowing screen, you may recognize this tension: there’s the slick, professionalized, technologically networked world inside your computer, and then there’s the shimmering, wild, organically spawning world just beyond your doorstep. It’s enough to make you wonder, to which realm do you belong?

While nature and technology tend to feel wholly separate from, even incompatible with, one another, they are both ecologies: spaces of profound interrelation, sociality, and ever-evolving capabilities. If you look at the two closely, in both you’ll see nodes of connection, architectures of shared ideas and resources, and webs of aliveness.

The entanglement between your computer, the natural environment, and you is actually quite profound—especially as we look to the future. With this idea in mind, Are.na Editorial and Dark Properties are collaborating on a new series exploring natural ecologies, networked technologies, and those of us caught in the web of both. 

Right now, the convergence between realms is becoming more obvious, as new technologies like decentralized protocols, artificial intelligence, and biomimicry take direct inspiration from living systems. Similarly, natural ecologies can benefit from new approaches to technologies like satellite imagery, using DAOs to organize ecosystem restoration, or navigational tools that attune us to our natural surroundings, rather than pull our attention away from them.

In our series of forthcoming interviews, we’ll talk to Claire L. Evans, Austin Wade Smith, Agnes Cameron, Casey Tang, and Cortney Cassidy about the various ways they locate their work (and themselves) between natural and technological realms. Each piece will spotlight a developing area of overlap—including biocomputing, regenerative decentralized frameworks, Indigenous cybernetics, and remote sensing, to name a few—and will be published every other week on Are.na Editorial, plus sent out in email form through the Dark Properties newsletter (subscribe here!).

While highlighting evolving areas of scientific and technologic inquiry, we also aim to examine the felt division between natural and digital realms, and consider how we might better harmonize our own experiences of both. As people who spend much of our time “logged on” to our computers, social media, and all the other apps and devices that connect (and control) us, what might it mean to better bridge digital experiences with the wild world outside? How can we feel more seamlessly connected to the organic ecosystems of which we’re a part, and which, to put it bluntly, need much more of our care, attention, and advocacy?

In the seminal book, The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben writes, “A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a ‘wood wide web’ of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods.” Becoming more like plants and fungi, humans have come to depend on networked technologies for our own webs of information, goods, and sustenance—and this dependence is only increasing. 

We see the internet and its associated technologies as a massive leap forward in human evolution, as it has enabled our species to mimic resilient, interconnected forest networks—while simultaneously working and thinking across space and time. From this expansion of collective intelligence, new possibilities are already emerging.

At the same time, there is a mounting sense of doom inside of networked, technology-driven spaces, as climate catastrophe and unending humanitarian crises fill our feeds and our minds. The outside realm calls as a balm, but it is similarly riddled with its own network of maladies. Scorching, unending heat has plagued many parts of the globe this summer; the air is often heavy with harmful particulates. Natural disasters are becoming more numerous, and more powerful. It can make us feel unsafe in both realms, like aliens within disparate spaces, both with their own terrors. So where do we turn?

With this series, we propose turning towards tangled, intertwined webs of life—and nurturing them both on and offline. As Austin Wade Smith writes in their essay Commons Sense, “Amidst the unraveling of ecological webs critical to planetary stability, there is simultaneously a great multiplication of new kinds of webs, and new forms of social life native to them.” Structurally, new digital webs become stronger when they mirror the diverse, decentralized structures of the more-than-human world. And, as Esme G. Murdock writes in Mirroring Nature, often “the most effective, and least destructive, technologies come from slow, careful, and meticulous attention to nature.”

Meanwhile, as the internet and its associated technologies have expanded our access to information and to each other, we are finally (re)learning how to care for our world. With both new inventions and a renewed understanding of age-old indigenous knowledge, we are beginning to lean into interdependence, to mitigate the harm we’ve caused since the Industrial Revolution, to collaborate with natural systems and cycles—and, importantly, to relinquish some control. Similarly, we’re starting to see that technologies of surveillance can be subverted to offer new ways of seeing and understanding—not just a long view of our interlinking crises, but also the new, generative pathways for dealing with them. 

With this vast convergence, new ideas and frameworks are emerging; new ways of living and interrelating are waiting to be born. “There are all kinds of possibilities,” says writer Claire L. Evans in her forthcoming interview, “but unless they're modeled back to you, sometimes it's difficult to imagine them.” We hope that while reading this series on your computer or phone, as the lush late summer beckons you outside, you’ll start to feel less of a division between the digital and the natural, and less compulsion to choose only one realm. Most of all, we hope you’ll find new ways of orienting, building, and imagining what can be born from the entanglement of both. Because, as you’ll hear over and over again in this series: Nothing flourishes in isolation.

The first part of Ecologies of Entanglement will be published next Sunday, August 4. Subscribe to Dark Properties and Are.na Editorial to make sure you don’t miss it.