https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/
"“The word for world is forest” — Ursula K. Le Guin
In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange
their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees.
Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more
for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state,
they were simply a source of timber.
So-called “scientific forestry” was that century’s growth hacking. It made
timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer
relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with
lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the
monocrop tidy, the understory bare.
Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades
later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by
standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, with hopes of
extending the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchy
and order, James C. Scott, know what happened next.
It was a disaster so bad that a new word,
Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was
minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were
flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were
spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead.
The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but
a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and
symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been
slaughtered.
The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we
simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences
sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.
That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many
conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the
same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the
same fate as the ravaged forests."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
