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 For the re-wilding of internet infrastructure to succeed, it must move beyond an outdated view of biological systems, which abstracts from the inherent mutability and precarity of organisms to treat them as no more than complex machines seeking a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
• Elena Rovenskaya — Program Director Advancing Systems Analysis Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

09:30–10:30 — Elena Rovenskaya Multi-layered co-opetition: How complex adaptive systems survive and thrive

10:30–11:00 · Break

11:00–12:00 — Kathryn Nave The Principle of Excessive Variety

12:05–12:50 — Donna Holford-Lovell Digital Change for Climate Justice: Digital Infrastructures for Bioregional Justice in Tayside

12:50–14:15 · Lunch

14:15–15:15 — Anil Madhavapeddy & Jon Crowcroft Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet

15:20–16:05 — Gary Smith Ecological Epistemology and Re-Wilding The Online Epistemic Environment

16:05–16:30 · Coffee

16:30–17:15 — Georgie Newson Beyond 'Self-Organisation': Libertarian Ecologies, Right and Left

09:30–10:00 · Coffee

10:00–11:00 — Robin Berjon Jackpot Cybernetics: Don't Let A Good Polycrisis Go To Waste

11:05–11:50 — Blaine Cook Diversity in Relation: Divergence, Reconvergence, and the Conditions for Cultural Diversity in Decentralized Infrastructure

11:55–12:40 — J. Albert Yoo Cultural Incest: Global Connectivity and the Collapse of the Cultural Gene Pool

12:40–13:40 · Lunch

13:40–14:25 — Ruthanna Emrys Imagining Digital Diversity: Ecofiction of the Internet

14:30–15:15 — Sonia Sobrino Ralston (virtual) Uncommon Knowledge: Practices and Protocols for Environmental Information

15:15–15:45 · Coffee

15:45–16:45 — Orit Halpern Planetary Experiments: Notes to a Theory of Technospheric Governance

16:45–17:15 — Closing Discussion

With Funding from the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, the Edinburgh Futures Institute and the Scots Philosophical Association

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