0.4 It breaks my heart, my soul, my body

This essay was initially titled "Introducing Diome" and published on Substack on November 6th, 2022. It was intended to be the introductory post to the Diome blog/newsletter, which has now become this website.

Over the last two years I’ve spent recovering from a persistent and painful back injury, I’ve often wondered whether I’ll ever be truly well again. This injury was not the cause of some unexpected accident. Like many of our modern ailments, it was the result of bad habits: a lifetime in front of a screen consuming and creating pixels.

Growing up glued to a television trained me for an adolescence lost online to a seemingly endless flow of Japanese animation and early internet memes. Over the years, the internet creeped beyond entertainment to become not just the essence of my livelihood, but part of my identity.

For years I aspired to the dream of being a digital entrepreneur. What better way to prove myself than to create a scalable digital business that helped ‘change the world’? I fell in love with the mantra of innovation, believing that I had what it took to solve global problems with a touch of empathy and a spark of ingenuity. As I learnt how to build a successful startup, I styled myself as a product strategist, making a living studying human needs to solve business problems for clients I only ever met through a screen. 

I wanted my work to have a positive impact, but finding the right projects proved elusive. It wasn’t just me, it seemed like the whole world was searching far and wide for technology solutions to solve our growing problems: from climate change to social inequality. But no matter where I looked, the tech industry seemed to be filled with collateral damage and empty promises. 

While the backbone of our society shook from a global pandemic, my body strained from the pressure. Spending my quarantine days mapping out human-centered apps seemed trivial while the fate of humanity itself was in question. In my spare time, I worked tirelessly to build the perfect consulting brand, sure that if I could just nail the value proposition I could finally unlock the kind of tech-for-good projects that would truly make a difference. The stress of sitting at a computer all day, everyday for months had a traumatic effect on my already overworked spine.

When the slightest wrong move left me unable to walk down the stairs, I was forced to stop ignoring what my body had been trying to tell me for months. Several rounds of CT scans showed the damage was worse than I thought, but I was assured that a full recovery was within grasp. All I needed to do was retrain my body from the ground up, changing my posture, work habits and exercise routine. 

Determined to get better quickly, I committed to a daily yoga practice and trained as hard as I could. I timed myself carefully at work to ensure I got out of my chair regularly to stretch. As I started to improve, life always got in the way of my regime: a stressful week at work, travel plans or simply lack of motivation. Every time I slipped up I was back to square zero, my back more painful than ever. It seemed impossible to find a balance between my physical health and the lifestyle I led. 

A cloud of hopelessness and anxiety crept over me when I saw that the inability to stop hurting my body in the present meant sacrificing the opportunity for a flourishing future. It wasn’t just my own body that was falling apart. The cloud was there when I found out that toxic chemicals had been found in even the most remote water sources on Earth. It was there when I read that Venezuela, my native country, was causing irreversible damage to the Amazon in search of gold through desperate human laborers exploited at the barrel of a gun. As facism and authoritarianism regained its footing in Europe, my home, the cloud got ever more threatening. 

My commitment to building a tech-for-good consulting business felt empty in the shadow of this looming cloud. How can an HR app boost employee retention when those employees were undervalued and underpaid? How can a healthcare app improve outcomes when the service provision prioritizes efficiency above actually caring? How can internet access open up economic opportunities when the communities in question have been denied even basic human needs for generations? 

Digital technology was supposed to usher in a new era of equality and democratization, but more often than not it has served to perpetuate the status quo. The lofty ideals coded into the mission statements of major tech companies sound almost ironic considering the societal problems they have advanced: “bringing people closer together,” “creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere,” or being “Earth’s best employer.” (Yes, that last one is Amazon.)

The internet revolutionised the way we communicate and collaborate, making the world seem smaller than ever. However, it’s also further fragmenting us from our environment, our communities and even our own bodies. Images of the future being conjured up by tech elites ignore the breakdown of our living systems, offering a concerning vision of escaping into a metaverse dominated by corporations while AI makes humans irrelevant. It’s hard not to feel hopeless in a world where technological innovation goes hand in hand with financial gain for the few, and exploitation for the rest.

Reluctantly, I accepted that to understand how my work could create real lasting change, I needed to put my old goals aside. Instead, I set forth on a journey to understand the wider forces that shaped digital technologies, and their impact on our ailing world.  As Jenny Odell asks in her book How To Do Nothing with the question: “What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?” What does it mean to construct digital worlds while my own body is crumbling beneath me? 

Reflecting on that same book, I realised something that shifted my perception of my back injury and its relationship to the world(s) at large. Odell explains two distinct ways of seeing proposed by philosopher Martin Buber, which he refers to as I-It and I-Thou. When we understand the other only as something to be used, a means to an end, that constitutes an I-It view. Only when we cease to interpret the other as an instrument and instead see them as an equal can we experience an I-Thou relationship.

The nature of my relationship with my body became abundantly clear as I came back to the yoga studio after a particularly discouraging relapse of my back injury. As always, I was determined to get back on track quickly. Though I struggled to get into positions I’d previously found simple, I persisted with a stubborn determination to conquer my body’s shortcomings. 

My teacher was furious. When she threatened to kick me out if I didn’t start treating myself with respect, it finally clicked. I had been seeing my body as an It, existing to serve the wishes of I-as-a-mind. Throughout my attempts at healing, I-as-a-mind was primarily motivated by improving the body’s performance as a tool for living, rather than understanding the body as the experience of life itself. 

Of course I saw the importance of keeping my body healthy, but my sense of self and self-worth, not to mention my economic prosperity, were deeply tied to the value it could produce. From a productivity perspective, my body’s urges to dance around the room or jump into the sea were fun but frivolous distractions from the serious task of pushing pixels around. Every time I ignored my body’s needs in favour of achieving an arbitrary ‘life’ goal, I pushed it closer to collapse. Exercising was a way to minimise the damage without questioning the destructive patterns that had twisted me out of shape in the first place. 

Adopting an I-Thou mindset with my body seemed almost ridiculous considering the ‘Thou’ in question was really just me. Real healing could only begin by expanding my definition of Self beyond I-as-a-mind, to include the interconnected cells, tissues and life forms that make up my body. The most important work I can do is to sustain the life of those organisms, no matter how ordinary or unacknowledged the job might seem. 

I understood that this is not an individual experience but part of a collective process of rediscovery. For centuries, we’ve had an I-It relationship with the world around us, seeing ourselves as separate from and above nature. In this view, the ‘rational’ human mind is the definition of life, whereas bodies, from the human to the planetary, are nothing but machines to be exploited for material gain. 

Even though we’re facing a devastating climate crisis that is already killing, displacing and otherwise harming countless living beings, human and otherwise, we are unable to stop burning fossil fuels. This is because our society defines value as what can be measured, with economic outputs above all else. The short-term harm to our economies that quitting fossil fuels would produce is highly visible through these value systems, but the past, present and future harm to the health of our ecosystems is not. 

“Our main metric for measuring value today — Gross Domestic Product, or GDP — counts something as valuable only if money is spent on it. GDP tracks how much is spent, but not why. GDP sees spending $1,000onafamilyvacationand$1,000 on a divorce attorney as the same. According to GDP, an ideal citizen is someone who drives an SUV, has cancer (chemotherapy can be very GDP‐positive), is getting divorced, and eats out every night.

This also means the only value that platforms like Google and Twitter provide according to GDP are the ad units they sell. Data-targeted advertising is very valuable but the dissemination of knowledge isn’t. (Neither is verifying it, part of why platforms don’t do it.) The worst aspects of social media are what our current concept of value sees as being what’s most valuable about them.” Yancey Strickler, Post-capitalism For Realists

In our singular quest to extract economic value as efficiently as possible, we’re optimising away the essential functions that sustain our ecosystems. Social media has become a highly visible representation of this, but it’s only a fraction of the problem. They say data is the new oil: just like oil, data has become an economic imperative to be extracted and exploited at all costs. From the workers being paid poverty wages to train AI that make tech companies millions, to the use of deepfakes to promote misinformation, examples of the destructive effects of the data industry are everywhere.

Initiatives to slow down the spread of misinformation or pay data workers living wages are important. However, as long as the underlying systems of our institutions serve the primary purpose of extracting profits to concentrate power in the hands of a few, creating truly transformative outcomes through technology will not be possible. At best, Tech for Good initiatives are a bandaid on a gushing wound. In many cases, they serve as a form of greenwashing that hides abuses of power under well-meaning platitudes.

To escape the extraction economy, what we need to change first and foremost is not the world, but ourselves. Healing the multiple injuries and illnesses in our ecosystems begins with understanding life as complex and interconnected rather than fragmented and optimizable. It means understanding nature not as the backdrop of the human world, but as an active global community of both human and more-than-human members. It means expanding our sense of Self beyond the individual, to include what we previously thought of as our ‘environment’.

“I can lose my hands and still live. I can lose my legs and still live. I can lose my eyes and still live… . But if I lose the air I die. If I lose the sun I die. If I lose the earth I die. If I lose the water I die. If I lose the plants and animals I die. All of these things are more a part of me, more essential to my every breath, than is my so-called body. What is my real body?” Jack D. Forbes, Indigenous Americans: Spirituality and Ecos

As I discover what it means to act as my complete Self and focus my actions on maintaining my long-term health, I see a movement building around me exploring what this can look like on a planetary scale. Learning from indigenous cultures, the regenerative movement measures success not through balance sheets, but through the more abstract concepts of health and vitality. It’s about reconnection: with our bodies, our communities, the places we inhabit, the global ecosystem and the more-than-human world.

If co-creating life-sustaining conditions is the primary purpose of human activity, then our technology needs to reflect this. Ursula Le Guin wrote that “technology is the active human interface with the material world.” Rather than extraction and disruption, this interface must be based on the principles of care, maintenance and regeneration.

When working regeneratively, the goal is not to identify technological solutions to commercial, bureaucratic or even social problems. It starts by establishing a deep understanding of life and the relationships that support it, in order to devise design challenges to promote the ecosystem’s health, flourishing and generativity.

“If we are to address the wholesale despoliation of the planet, and our growing helplessness in the face of vast computational power, then we must find ways to reconcile our technological prowess and sense of human uniqueness with an earthy sensibility and an attentiveness to the interconnectedness of all things. We must learn to live with the world, rather than seek to dominate it. In short, we must discover an ecology of technology.” James Bridle, Ways of Being

Diome was born as a place to explore the ecology of digital technology, and how this paradigm can help us embody our planetary Self. It will begin by collecting knowledge on regenerative principles, and how they are being applied both online and offline. Ultimately, the aim of the project is to uncover and experiment with new language, processes, and philosophies that can support the creation of a regenerative digital ecology. 

The term diome represents the paradigm shift between technology as a mechanism for exploitation, and technology as an ecological process. A biome is an area that hosts biological communities that depend on each other for survival, and the forces that act on them. The diome is an expanded ecosystem of both physical and digital spaces, and the interconnected biological, mechanical and digital beings that inhabit it.

As with all ecologies, the success of Diome is dependent on complex networks of interconnected relationships and forces. Therefore, one of the goals of this project is to bring together a range of voices and ideas. Any form of participation is welcome, whether it takes the form of a short message, a conversation or a long-term collaboration. If you’re as excited as me about reframing our relationship with digital technology, don’t hesitate to reach out. Thank you for being a part of this journey.