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“When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them”

[Rewilding is] a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble problems. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [which] 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.

Worth reading: “We Need To Rewild The Internet”, an essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon published two days ago on Noema Magazine’s site. Came across it via the ever-excellent Today in Tabs.

An essay about improving the internet that kicks off with an Ursula K. Le Guin quote is always going to have me from the start.

Salient bolded lessons from ecologists that technologists should adopt:

  • shifting baselines are real
  • complexity is not the enemy, it’s the goal
  • diversity is resiliance

Also, they raise an extremely important but often-neglected point that standards development organizations (SDOs) are “increasingly under the control of a few companies; so what appear to be “voluntary” standards are often the business choices of the biggest firms.”

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Related reads:

See this Noema essay by Cory Doctorow.

Pls read “The Fediverse of Things”, a blog post by Terence Eden. Can’t remember who boosted this in to my Fedi timeline last week, but thank you whoever you are.

On the topic of infrastructure bottlenecks and maintenance: “The Cloud Under The Sea” by Josh Dzieza for The Verge. It’s about the undersea cables that form a large part of the internet’s infrastructure, told through the lens of a repair ship crew’s activities before and after the 9.1-scale earthquake that devastated Japan in 2011. Like they say in the rewilding article, redundancy !== diversity. Off the back of this article, I need to read “Rethinking Repair” by professor Steven Jackson.

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Mandatory interoperability, federated “social” accounts for infrastructure and public services, levying major search engines to publicly finance key internet infrastructure, user-enabled global privacy control for all… a girl can dream.

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To read: “Maintenance and Care” by Shannon Mattern for Places

Read the article “Maintenance and Care: A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations” by Shannon Mattern for Places, published in November 2018.

Yet even if we build an army of repair robots (a longtime sci-fi dream) and maintenance AIs, their hardware and software will still require upkeep. They’ll still depend upon well-maintained, interoperable technical infrastructures. They’ll still require cleaning staff — “industrial hygienists” — to maintain pristine conditions for their manufacture. We’ll need curators to clean the data and supervisors for the robot cleaning crew. Labor is essential to maintenance.

As Jay Owens reminds us,

There will be dust. There is always dust. By that I mean there is always time, and materiality, and decay. Decomposition and damage are inescapable. There is always the body, with its smears and secretions and messy flaking bits off. There is always waste and it always has to be dealt with, and shipping it out of sight overseas to the developing world does not change the fact this work has to be done (and it is dirty, dangerous work that demands its pound of flesh).

That’s true whether we’re talking about ditch-digging or dam-building or data-diving. Maintenance at any particular site, or on any particular body or object, requires the maintenance of an entire ecology: attending to supply chains, instruments, protocols, social infrastructures, and environmental conditions.

A lot of this relates to the push and pull between maintenance and innovation, how much more attractive innovation, the shiny and new, is in the public consciousness.

This brings me back, yet again, to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. The heroic versus the contemplative, the careful. The spear versus the receptacle. The linear versus the cyclical. Resolution versus the infinite.

What about a Carrier Bag Theory of Everything?