It all started with an inkling, a seed of an idea: “What if we related to the space of the Internet the way indigenous peoples relate to their own spaces?" What began as a half-baked thought tweeted at 7PM quickly snowballed into an entire Are.na board, now 28 blocks strong at the time of writing. It's far from finished, but I wanted to share with you what I've found, as well as my process of inquiry.
Some quotes, I think, are a good jumping-off point. I discovered a quote from John Gray in his book on philosophy Straw Dogs. He says:
Cities are no more artificial than Bee-hives. The internet is as natural as a spider’s web. We ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival — we are part of an intricate network that comes from the original takeover of the Earth. Our power and intelligence do not belong specifically to us, but to all life.
I definitely zeroed in on the second sentence. It connects with an article I found by Udit Vira, "A field guide to the living Internet", which proposes the idea of seeing the Internet as a living infrastructure. He likens it to the Khasi people's practice of cultivating Indian rubber trees, building bridges out of their growing roots. Vira points out that seeing the Internet as an organism might help us nurture it into something healthier through various perspectives, from the social to the technological and even the environmental.
Claire L. Evans puts forward one such way to cultivate the Internet in a preview of her article "The word for web is forest" - the concept of "Mother nodes". Mother nodes are the online version of public libraries, transmitters of memory and knowledge. They're named after Mother Trees, the oldest trees in a forest that care for the younger trees connected to them by sharing resources like water and carbon. Mother Trees are decentralized and have overlapping areas of responsibility - Evans suggests that the Internet emulate them, pushing for collaboration and care rather than competition.
All this talk about nature can also be linked to the concept of digital gardens, exploratory, connected notes made public, ever works-in-progress. They're messy, disorderly, and imperfect, but also constantly open to further growth - just like actual gardens! This brings me to another question I'd like to pose: "How might we cultivate our digital gardens the same way indigenous peoples cultivate their environment?"
Let's leave that open for now. From location, let's move to time - situating ourselves in the greater narrative of history. Indigenous peoples are experts at this, living out centuries-old tradition through the various aspects of their way of life. One aspect is storytelling - a lot of groups have folk epics and oral tradition that belong to the group as a whole, rather than being authored by a single person.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin talks about this in an interview, titled "Decentralized storytelling, from Native tradition to the metaverse". She says it quite beautifully:
My mom is a traditional storyteller from our tribe. Being a storyteller for the Seneca-Cayuga Nation is something that is a cross between being a historian, being a performer, being a creative writer, and being a leader within the culture.
Winger-Bearskin also emphasizes the importance of decentralized storytelling as a way of passing on our ancestors' values to the generations to come. She then notes that decentralized storytelling is nothing new to this generation, as seen in game worlds (she uses the example of Minecraft); we'd rather participate in the storytelling in our own way rather than just passively receiving it through a single source.
What stories and histories, then, should we keep in mind when it comes to the Internet? Asking this brought me to the days of Web 1.0 - the 90's Internet, as Nadya Primak puts it. She takes a trip down memory lane in her article, aptly titled "Why I Miss the Early Internet". Primak talks about how the Internet, though inaccessible during that time, felt magical - something to explore and experiment with. Like a Wild West. Digging deeper led me to the concept of Bulletin Board Systems, presented as “social media's dial-up ancestor” in this article. BBSs were, as the name suggests, online bulletin boards, originally serving as an archive of club newsletters for Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist’s Exchange starting in the 1970's. The terminology is a bit too technical for my pay grade, so I'll have to look into it later with the help of a friend.
Lastly, let me talk about community. Aside from a strong sense of place and time, indigenous peoples also have a strong sense of who they are as a group. For the Are.na board, I found a quote by André Staltz from his talk "Reinvent the social web". Says he:
Humanity is a technology, too. Primitive homo sapiens took a long time to discover how to do community, and we cannot risk losing that skill for the internet era.
This snippet is actually in line with something I previously jotted down on the board: “What if we organized our communities online the way indigenous peoples organize theirs? How would they be structured? What would be their guiding principles?" We can go back to Winger-Bearskin, who hopes that the gaming community could take a page from the indigenous values of inclusion and care - letting people in and allowing them to participate. We can also look to Hawa Arsala's article "The Ambient Well", which explores the metaphor of the Internet and its information as a well of water - again, drawing from our understanding of nature.
She examines the potential of the Internet as a well, not of water, but of consciousness in a world where are psyches are controlled and colonized. From her article:
The ambient well to me is a place that holds life force for the community, that relies on collaboration to exist and is a resting space for our collective awakening. A place that holds alternate realities until something new can blossom.
Arsala puts forward the term “infrastructure of care” - something I find very exciting. Care, I believe, is at the core of community - what is a community if not a group of people tending to one another?
This inquiry is far from finished. Something I'd like to tackle in the future in this exploration is Web 3.0 - there's still a long way to go, both for it and this article. As with my other work, I do hope this was as fun for you to read as it was for me to write.
On a personal note, I'd love to hear your thoughts - maybe even questions or insights! You can reach out to my Twitter. You can also support my work by buying me a coffee. Until next time, and happy rabbit-holing!
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