Rewilding Social Digital Spaces

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram often state that the intended goal of their products is to create community, connect people, and bring the world closer together. However, there’s a lot of controversy nowadays about how social media is taking our attention away from important things, using our data for nefarious purposes and even ‘colonizing our minds’. 

Now more than ever, we need to communicate as a global society and rally around a common goal if we are to address the existential threats we are facing. However, it’s clear that social media as it stands is not up to the task. 

This is because social media is not truly designed to support community creation, it is designed primarily for growth and profit extraction. Social media rewards the loudest and most controversial voices in order to command an ever-growing proportion of our attention.

What does it mean for a community to be alive?

Over the last few decades, we have seen a trend of commercialization in our civic institutions, turning active citizens into passive customers. Rather than being a part of creating outcomes, we expect outcomes to be delivered.

The privatisation policy pursued by the government in recent decades has made a significant contribution to over-individualisation. Citizens have been turned into customers, but customers behave differently from citizens. Customers demand what they have paid for but feel no duty to the community. If people do not feel they are co-owners of the community’s collective goods, such as the local park or their neighborhood, there are no collective standards. As a result, they never question what effect their behaviour has on the community… Instead, citizens have increasingly started deriving their identity, security, and social status from consumption.

Patrick Huntjens, Towards a Natural Social Contract

The same trend is happening online. We are no longer co creators of the online world. Our only path to identity and connection is through consumption. (More to come on this in Social Media Moulds Identities & Relationships.)

*When community was the primary communicative production unit in the early days of the Internet, the outcomes were often informal, yet relational content, such as never-ending discussions in forums, or co-creations that didn’t even have a designated outcome or purpose. We can consider such outcomes as the materialisation of a community “vibe” as they were often produced in a live moment in the community, i.e. when a group of people who resided in the community came together for a topic, and produced instant and intimate exchanges.

Liveness was critical to the existence of an online community, to the extent that the community might be considered “dead” if it lacked active exchanges. The momentary culture formed by a particular group of people in a particular stage of life defines such liveness, directly impacting the communal production of the community and by the community…

For a platform, it’s important to close all the gaps in the process of translating human behaviours into profits, and to make sure all behavioural data is meaningful for the platform’s economic circuits. This purpose also leads platforms to suppress a community vibe, not only because it opens up too many gaps in the productive process, but because it also cannot offer a consistent quantity or quality of outcomes.*

Yin Aiwen, On Platform Design

A culture of monocultures

With the noble purpose of feeding the world, we’ve ploughed over diverse landscapes to plant single crops. The outcome is weakened soils, increased susceptibility to pests and decimated animal and plant populations. In response, we pump the soil full of chemicals, further deteriorating the health of the ecosystem.

We can see this dynamic at play not just in our harmful agricultural practices, but in all human ecosystems, from the design of our cities to the digital worlds we build. Digital technologies are extending the reach of the same destructive practices that are causing our living ecosystems to crumble. 

In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as ‘not useful’ and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go. Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. 

Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing

Rewilding agriculture

Regenerative practices are completely reshaping our agriculture. Today, the dangers of monocultures are widely understood. They destroy the soil, decimate local ecosystems and poison our water supplies. 

Japanese farmer and scientist Masanobu Fukuoka, considered “the father of natural farming”, developed a method called Do-Nothing Farming. Fukuoka developed the technique over 20 years by “drawing from agricultural traditions that were developed over centuries.” It rejects the now standard practices of chemical fertilizer, tilling and monocropping, and instead used natural techniques such as planting nitrogen-fixing plants and covering the soil with rice stalks.

However, Do-Nothing Farming doesn’t mean just leaving crops completely to their own devices. At one point, he tried leaving the trees in his orchard without pruning, and they got tangled in each other and filled with bugs. Part of the art of Do-Nothing Farming is knowing when to intervene to support the flourishing of life.

He proposes that as humans have tried to control nature to increase ‘productivity,’ we’ve actually destroyed nature’s ability to be fertile. Rather than trying to control, Fukuoka learns from nature’s own systems to provide TLC where it’s needed.

In that way, Fukuoka created one of the most productive farms in Japan. Additionally, it gave him more time to read, write and reflect on the beauty of the land.

Rewilding cities

Rebecca Solnit describes our relationship to our city streets perfectly in her book Wanderlust:

The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organised around citizenship – around participation in public life. But just as swathes of our countryside were repurposed for farming, over the past century our city streets have been optimised for one goal: to move people around as quickly as possible, unhindered by anyone using public space for other purposes.”

Some cities are now starting to “rewild”. Barcelona is democratising its public space to include urban patios and parks, reclaiming its streets from traffic. Utrecht recently tore out a highway to turn it back to the canal it once was. Times Square opened up street seating during the pandemic.

In an inspiring talk professor Marco te Brömmelstroet shows a busy intersection in Ansterdam… “without any traffic lights to highlight the benefits of having to negotiate your way through it. It seems chaotic and dangerous at first, but when you zoom in, you see stress-free people engaged in constant conflict-solving and information-sharing with all of their senses.”

According to te Brömmelstroet, when people engage with others in this ‘dance’, they automatically get to enjoy a long list of benefits: a higher sense of influence, integration and neighbouring, a shared emotional connection, a sense of community, citizen participation and place, among others. Most importantly though, it seems to increase the level of trust between one another – between a random, diverse bunch of people. How about that?”

“As people working in tech know too well, human interaction is increasingly designed out of our lives” in the name of efficiency and avoiding conflict.

Rewilding our attention

In order to oppose the monocropping qualities of Big Tech, the concept of rewilding attention has been brought up by writers including Tom Critchlow, CJ Eller & Clive Thompson.

To them, rewilding your attention is about:

• Diving into online rabbit holes of information about non-trending topics.
• Following niche blogs writing about “small weird things”
• Finding like-minded people and groups
• “Writing on your own terms”

This is related to the concepts of the Dark Forest, Cozy Web & Squads:

• The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Yancey Strickler
• The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web by Maggie Appleton
• The Extended Internet Universe by Ventakesh Rao
• Squad Wealth by Otherinternet

But…

A lot of what we hear from internet pundits is that everyone should be building their own reading lists, everyone should be on the lookout for interesting stories themselves, I think that logic is very regressive, backward, anti-democratic and stupid… The newspaper offers… a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. (Source)

Rewilding digital spaces

• What does it mean to rewild a digital space? It could mean: slowing things down, reintroducing context, making space for healthy conflict, doubling down on humanity, not ‘optimizing’. 
• How do we make the experience of rewilding our minds a communal experience?
• How do we embed shared value systems?
• How can we build communal knowledge?
• How do we ensure information is tied to context?
• How do we identify what information is valuable? How can the process of curation of information be transformed beyond the algorithm?
• How does the structure of the spaces suggest social or cultural values or behaviors?
• How can we find the perfect balance between caring and maintenance, and leaving the ecosystem to its own devices?

What are examples of ‘wild’ digital spaces?

Front Porch Forum Digital Garden Are.na Somewhere Good

Front Porch Forum

The site looks like a relic from another era; its website is clean and minimal, without the pictures, reaction buttons or comment fields that most social platforms have implemented today. Users register using their real name and address, and gain access to the forum for their town or neighborhood.” (Source)

Unlike Facebook or Twitter, the forum doesn’t provide members with individual profile pages or allow members to select who their friends are. Just as you can’t choose which neighbors surround you, you’re surrounded by your neighbors online (Source)

Business model in three parts: advertising by businesses, subscription for government officials, donations. Towns raise money to pay for set up costs.

Solely owned and controlled by one person, a member of the community. Focused on slow, sustainable, demand-driven growth.

Not a replacement, but a facilitator of real-life community. Has been used to launch and help run a food bank, post about local history to raise pride in community.

While major social media sites prize speed and volume of interactions, FPF focuses on the quality of discussions by:

• Have tools to help moderation but the process is still human and proactive: moderators train for months on community standards and read every post before it goes live.
• Slowing down positing times: takes 24h for post to show up. This gives people time to cool down in disputes, and people have messaged them to remove posts or have been happy when it hasn’t passed moderation.
• People listing their address helps prevent outsiders coming in to derail conversations or spread misinformation.
• Participants are not allowed to use the forum “in a way counter to its community-building mission.” That means no personal attacks, although critiquing ideas or government decisions is fine. Some complaints about limiting free speech or community members not speaking up about injustice, but mostly this approach has been successful.