Chapter 2: Amphibiety
This essay follows Death of Species: Part 1
The course of amphibiety takes its first steps in the realm of dreams. In this flooded world, media is the water that surrounds us — a boundless sea of information, images, and stories. It flows through the ruins of old structures, submerging what once stood solid beneath its currents. For some, this deluge brings loss, an overwhelming tide in a world they can no longer recognize. Yet for others, those born into this media-soaked sea, there is no need to fear drowning. They have already grown gills or crafted artificial ways to breathe. They swim with ease, adapting to the liquid reality, finding comfort in its constant presence.
It is only natural, then, for those who thrive in this ocean of media to seek to shape it — to influence and participate in the making of this new world. In the time of air and land, humans built cities and towering architectures, monuments to their control over the environment. But in this submerged existence, it is the water itself — the currents of information, the tides of narrative — that now form the architecture of our world of islands. These currents, invisible yet inescapable, shape the landscapes in which we dwell, more intimately and profoundly than any building of stone or steel.
To survive here is not enough. To float aimlessly with the tide is not the way of the amphibious. One must learn to swim, not merely carried by the currents, but shaping them. Shaping, then, becomes the craft of navigating and influencing the flow of stories, of ideas, of the unseen forces that guide human thought and behavior. In this liquid world, the structures of the past may still exist, but they bend and flow with the tides, no longer holding firm to the earth.
It might seem natural to evolve gills and adapt, but with such rapid fluctuations, even this survival strategy may be as doomed as trying to breathe with lungs in the depths. The world is one of water and air, not of water or air.
This shift marks a new way of design, one that produces and shapes the water itself. Worldbuilding, in the context of media and speculative fiction, becomes the heart of this craft. These worlds, these constructed realities, become engines that not only create new currents but accelerate the rise of the sea itself. Worldbuilding is no longer just an imaginative exercise; it becomes a fundamental design process, shaping the human experience by shaping the waters in which we live.
Yet not all accept this rise. There are those who cling to the shorelines of old beliefs, hoping to hold back the tide, hoping to control the currents rather than adapt to them. Even religious narratives are forms of worldbuilding, attempts to construct meaning and shape the waters to one’s will. But this, too, is an illusion. The burning of books, the stifling of education, the censorship of ideas — these are nothing more than efforts to halt the engines of creation at their source, to still the waters in a sea that will always rise. Such resistance is, at best, temporary.
It is not hard to imagine a distant future where the worlds we build today have long since fallen into ruin, their currents dispersed, their waters evaporated. In this vision, media — once a sea that flooded every corner of life — has receded, leaving only fragments of itself, passed down as scattered oral histories. A world of deserts, where water is scarce and stories are fewer still, a time when humanity has adapted to life without media, without the sea. But that future is far from us now.
We live in the age of the flood, and the challenge is not to resist the water but to learn how to swim, to craft the vessels that will carry us forward. In this world, media is not something to be filtered out or avoided. It is something to be shaped, navigated, and understood. Amphibiety teaches us to survive, but the shaping of the currents — the shaping of media, of stories, of the forces that move through our lives — this is the act of evolution, the aspirational work of creation.
To filter through the noise, to shape the currents that inundate us, is to take control of the worlds we build. It is to recognize that in this vast sea of information, we are not powerless. We can choose our path, set our course, and become not just passengers but creators in this media-soaked world. The rise of the sea is inevitable, but how we navigate it, how we shape it, is ours to decide.
