<nettime> From Gut to Gaia: The Internet of Things and Earth Repair

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The following text appears in the inaugural edition of Ding, a new
magazine about the Internet and things, published by the Mozilla
Foundation. Ding will be launched at MozFest in London on 27-29 October.
------------------------------------

John Thackara

https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/from-gut-to-gaia-the-internet-of-things-and-earth-repair/2017/11/03


On a recent visit to @IAAC in Barcelona, I was charmed by their Smart
Citizen platform that enables citizens to monitor levels of air or noise
pollution around their home or business.

The system connects data, people and knowledge based on their location;
the device’s low power consumption allows it to be placed on balconies
and windowsills where power is provided by a solar panel or battery.

Smart Citizen is just one among a growing array of devices that can
sense everything from the health of a tomato in Brazil, to bacteria in
the stomach of a cow in Perthshire – remotely.

Low-cost sensing technologies allow citizens to assess the state of
distant environments directly. We can also measure oil contamination in
our local river with a smartphone. Thousands of people are monitoring
the air they breathe using Air Quality Eggs.

This innovation is intriguing, but leaves a difficult question
unanswered: Under what circumstances will possession of this data
contribute to the system transformation that we so urgently need?
Info-Eco Scenarios

When we first posed that foundational question at our third Doors of
Perception conference in 1995,  when our theme was “Info-Eco”,
ecological monitoring and remote sensing were the most popular scenarios
to be proposed.

Twenty two years later, the proliferation of tools and platforms is
glorious – but our journey is only half complete. Remote sensing and
monitoring have turned not, on their own, to be agents of system change.

Or not yet. Twenty two years is not that long when compared to the scale
of transformation we are embarked on.

Over centuries, our cultures have been rendered cognitively blind by a
metabolic rift between people and the earth. Paved surfaces, and
pervasive media – developed over generations – now shield us from direct
experience of the damage we’re inflicting on soils, oceans and forests.

This metabolic rift explains how we’re able put the health of ‘the
economy’ above all other concerns. We invest immense effort and
resources in a quest for speed, perfection and control but, because we
inhabit an abstract, digitally diminished world, we’re blind to the true
costs of our activities.

The energy we use  is literally invisible. The destructive impacts
caused by resource extraction are usually felt by other people,
somewhere else.

For the philosopher John Zerzan our planet-wide dissociative mental
state began when we placed language, art, and number above other ways of
knowing the world. Every representation, he argued, both simplifies, and
distances, earthly reality. Our reliance on data underpins a concept of
progress in which embdied, analogue local knowledge is downgraded and
often disregarded.
Vital knowledge

We once knew better. For much of human history, the idea that the world
around us is ‘vital’ was literally common knowledge. Greek philosophers
known as ‘hylozoists’ made no distinction between animate and inanimate,
spirit and matter. Roman sages thought likewise.

In his epic work On The Nature of Things, the poet Lucretius argued that
everything is connected, deep down, in a world of matter and energy.
Chinese philosophers, too, believed that the ultimate reality of the
world is intrinsically connective; in the Tao, everything in the
universe, whether animate or inanimate, is embedded in the continuous
flow and change.

Buddhist texts, too, evoke a universe that’s in a state of ceaseless
movement and connection. And as recently as the seventeenth century, in
Europe, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza conceived of existence as a
continuum, an inseparable tangle of body, mind, ideas and matter.

The belief that matter matters, so to speak, was then obscured – for two
intense centuries up until about now  – by two developments: the fire
and smoke of the thermo-industrial economy, and, more recently,  by
global communication networks.

Now, as this self-devouring system unravels, the healing idea that that
we are part of a world of living things, not separate from it, is
resurfacing.

This reconnection with suppressed knowledge is not superstitious.
Developments in science are confirming confirm the understanding in
wisdom traditions that no organism is truly autonomous.

In systems thinking and resilience science, and from the study of
sub-microscopic viruses, yeasts, bacteria in our gut, ants, mosses,
lichen, slime moulds and mycorrhizae, trees, rivers and climate systems,
old and new narratives are converging: our planet is a web of
interdependent ecosystems.

These natural phenomena are not only connected; their very essence is to
be in relationship with other things – including us. On a molecular,
atomic and viral level, humanity and ‘the environment’ literally merge
with one another, forging biological alliances as a matter of course.

The importance of this new perspective is profound. The division between
the thinking self, and the natural world – a division which underpins
the whole of modern thought – is beginning to dissolve. It follows that
the great work of our time – and an answer to the value question that
has so perplexed the Internet of Things –  is to re-connect us –
viscerally, and emotionally – with the living systems we’ve lost touch with.

But how?

Going forward, our work needs to focus on three things.

First, we need to work with scientists to develop benchmarks against
which to compare the data being collected. There’s plenty of knowledge
to connect with.  An ecology metrics list on Github lists an astonishing
three thousand terms – from molecular phylogenetics to microrefugia. And
a European platform called Everyaware combines sensing technologies,
networking applications and data-processing tools in one platform. The
proposition is that connecting people with their environment creates
“more effective and optimized relationships”.

A second success factor for reconnection  is a bioregional narrative.
Connecting the dots, revealing system-level patterns, and searching for
root causes, will be most meaningful, as well as just interesting,
within a framework of bioregional stewardship. A bioregion re-connects
us with living systems, and each other, through the places where we
live, and through our bodies  – not just through our ever-active minds.

A bioregional focus reminds us that we live among watersheds, foodsheds,
and fibersheds– not just  in cities, towns, or ‘the countryside’.Growth,
in a bioregion, is redefined in a healthier way, too –  as improvements
to the health and carrying capacity of the land, and the resilience of
communities. And because value is created by stewardship, not
extraction, a bioregion  frames the next economy, not the dying one we
have now.

Third: in our ongoing search for new and better ways of knowing – and
being – we have huge amounts to learn from non-literate and indigenous
cultures whose experience of the world is more direct than our own.

The way ahead will be based on a combination of knowledge obtained
remotely, using modern tools and devioces, and ways of knowing that are
local, experienced directly, contextual, and embodied.

When we connect with living systems emotionally, and not just
rationally, and focus on the informal, the local and the conversational
– things will really begin to change.

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