Rewilding the Web: Diversity & Resilience in Sociotechnical Infrastructure

Inspired by visions of nature as an ecosystem of self-regulating feedback loops, the 20th-century architects of the internet proposed that a perfectly interconnected world would allow free individuals to spontaneously self-organise into harmonious networks of exchange, without any need for top-down control.

Fifty years later, the internet is a monoculture. Google accounts for 84% of all search queries, while 50% of cloud computing is provided by Amazon and Microsoft alone. Accordingly, technologists are increasingly calling for a ‘rewilding’ via the decentralisation of core services, in order to restore the cybernetic vision of a harmonious digital ecology. Yet if decentralisation alone were sufficient to ensure a flourishing ecosystem, then how could these tech monopolies have arisen in the first place? For the re-wilding of internet infrastructure to succeed, it must move beyond an outdated view of biological systems, which abstracts from the inherent mutability and precarity of organisms to treat them as no more than complex machines seeking a stable equilibrium. Fortunately, other philosophies of nature are available.

This workshop brings together technologists, ecologists, philosophers and cultural theorists to discuss how contemporary insights from theoretical biology and ecology can provide a richer understanding of what makes for a thriving biosphere, and how this might provide inspiration for cultivating sociotechnical infrastructure that is more resilient against co-option by monopolising tendencies.

Invited Speakers

• Orit Halpern — Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures, TU Dresden
• Robin Berjon — Senior Fellow, Future of Technology Institute
• Anil Madhavapeddy — Professor of Planetary Computing, University of Cambridge
• Maria Mancilla Garcia — Environmental Humanities Chair, Université Libre de Bruxelles
• Elena Rovenskaya — Program Director Advancing Systems Analysis Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

With Funding from the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

Header photo by Cameron Russell

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Host or Publisher The University of Edinburgh School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and the Edinburgh Futures Institue