Hayduke’s mission lies at the intersection of many different disciplines. A FAQ is in order. So this is one of a series of FAQ posts exploring basic concepts with examples to as to set the table for Hayduke’s approach to the design space.
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NB: This post was originally published under this name. As I’ve begun the FAQ posts, I realized that a post on the Climate Emergency is just duplicating work. Since this piece discusses it in greater detail, I thought I’d repurpose it to serve as the FAQ for the Climate Emergency as part of the introductory series to Hayduke.
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Why the “Climate Emergency”?
Hayduke is a challenging concept, especially to myself. The best I can describe it right now is that it’s a project, a vehicle to connect with like-minded individuals, open source projects, movements, non-profits, NGOs and so on. Leave the “what” aside. The why of Hayduke is the right place to start.
And the why is simple enough, “The Internet Will Not Save Us” … from the chaos of the climate emergency. From a recent and particularly chilling poll, the experts are not optimistic. “Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.” The tremendous chaos both ecological and social has already begun and will continue to accelerate. Indeed, the UN Sec Gen Guterres has called last year’s IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”
So where does the internet come in to this tale of woe? Like almost all technologies, the internet is spoken of as a futurist, fetishized catalyst that can, together with renewable technologies, achieve some sort of “sustainability” that can save us from having to adapt and change human civilization. Examples of this abound, but this recent blog post from the World Economic Forum suffices. The role of <insert innovation buzz> technology vis-a-vis climate is in “risk analytics and climate-proofing supply chains, responding to emergencies and powering R&D to discover the next generation of climate technologies.” Their often used phrase, climate adaptation, simply means reinforcing and protecting the exploitative global economic structure. The adjacent human suffering and chaos is, as always, the cost of doing business.
Enterprise network tools and the public internet monoculture won’t save us. The hope that the monolithic operators of today’s internet will suddenly give up strip mining us of our data and privacy is naive. But the dominant model of networked innovation is exactly the problem, yet more proprietary solutions, more user and data harvesting. The current channels of technology innovation were built to accelerate.
Ironically, Leslie Daigle in her magisterial’s study “The Invariants,” likens this exact situation to the climate crisis and the internet to a dying ecosystem. “This is ‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem: absent concrete action to address the departure of the application infrastructure of the Internet from the ideal outlined in the Invariants, the experience of the Internet going forward will not feature such a rich diversity of solutions to the needs of the world’s population.” Just one of the many vital global ecosystems, the internet is becoming unable to provide the needs to sustain us, to sustain our human rights.
Fruitfully extending the ecosystem analogy, Maria Farrell and Robin Bergen this spring articulated a bold, actionable framework for Rewilding the Internet. I can’t recommend this highly enough. Their framework was clarifying moment for Hayduke, and affirming in the feeling of intellectual kinship personally.
Building off the ecological rewilding which, from the IUCN, “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces.” Weaving ecology, data infrastructure and critique of power, Farrell and Bergen firmly situate the current state of our data infrastructure and the climate catastrophe, “Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached.” Their prescription is to work to re-wild parts of the internet as we would an ailing ecosystem.
It would be easy to mistake this as an exercise in nostalgia, an attempt to recapture and preserve against change, some falsely remembered “good old days” of the internet. You don’t need to look far to find nostalgia projects. This is something different.
We have to be careful to not mistake the character of the open, decentralized internet from the principles that allowed it to take root. Not all wild ecosystems are the same, but they all arise from complexity driven by diversity. That is something we need to recognize and carry from those early days of terminals and dial-up.
The What …
But Hayduke will go a step further, while keeping the ecology analogy. Instead of attempting to conserve some “managed” park-like ecosystem of internet solutions, it’s essential to “dynamically maintain, restore and create ecosystems” that are capable of adapting to contingencies of the climate emergency. Gardner and Buller provide a careful analysis of a type of “survival ecology,” an effort that above all seeks “retain into the future an Earth system in which life (including human life) can flourish.”
Hayduke proposes to practice network and solution architecture as a survival ecology, an essential design discipline in the face of catastrophe and instability. It’s the work of relearning and uncovering the design constraints of the climate emergency. These design constraints are not limiting, rather they are liberating in that they point to a praxis of network solutions that work in concert retain into the future a system in which life can adapt and survive.