The Internet of Gardens
I grew up in a small town, right on the border with another country. I read all the computer books in our little library, about 50 of them altogether at the time. I felt I knew so little. It wasn’t until when reached my teens that my family received a telephone line — right about the time when the World Wide Web was born, also in the Alps, just a few valleys away from me.
A kind and supportive CEO gifted me a modem, a device allowing my computer to connect to other computers through phone lines. The sky opened for me: I was now attached to a loosely connected web of bulletin boards operated by volunteers and small companies. I could learn, I could communicate.
The connection was a road that led through the countryside of village communities. Some farmers grow food, others grow ideas. These farmers tended gardens of ideas. The intellectual and aesthetic fruit of those gardens were eaten by travelers like me, and some of us were inspired to plant seeds. To plant the seed is a hallmark of a farmer.
Farmers pick fruit, travel with them, find appropriate plots of land, plant seeds, and nurture young trees through generations. In return, the trees give them fruit. That’s coevolution: farmers evolve together with the trees. A tree with poisonous fruit will kill the farmer but then lose his protection. A farmer who ruins his tree will starve. A farmer feeds his dog, and the dog protects farmer’s family at night. A farmer feeds his pigs, and pigs feed the farmer.
Anything living is born, gets cared for, lives and dies. There’s nothing unusual about death: death is inevitable, sacrifice is expected. One can be alive for a while, but never for very long. But to truly be living means virtual immortality in the evolving chain of generations. Each generation takes care of the next. To live requires a community of codependent individuals that participate together, mixing and matching in the eternal dance of life of a species.
Just as farmers grow trees, farmers also grow people. We spend much effort on selecting the right partner. A husband cares for his wife and children. And his wife cares for the husband and her children. There can be good and bad luck in all endeavors, yet villagers watch each other. They know who’s working and who’s stealing: not everyone’s the same. They help each other in trouble and share their good luck. Villages of helpful farmers usually grow and prosper. Towns of envious, selfish ones often collapse.
It’s not just people that do farming. Trees have also been coevolving with generations of bees, who playing winged matchmakers between rooted, immovable trees, transmitting love letters from one tree to the next, taking payment in nectar. Other trees feed squirrels with nuts, and in return, squirrels plant nuts in the soil.
But let’s return to the gardens of the Internet. The lushness of the villages and the ease of travel by road attracted many others, millions, and billions of people. Yes, some were farmers, but there were also many consumers. Consumers didn’t respect the communities they visited. Many came with their own personal or political agendas, and nature wasn’t their concern. They took the fruit and ate it, throwing the seeds away, trampling over the young trees.
The internet companies also came, built noisy highways through the orchards for the consumers. Consumers whizz by villages, snatching “free” fruit from trees without having to stop to talk to or support the farmers tending the open gardens. The highway is lined with advertisements for expensive dreams and hopes, which is the only thing consumers spend money for — not for the fruit sustaining them.
As a result of snatching, farmers in some villages went hungry. Others had to build fences and charge entrance fees, but it was a bold thing to do: highway operators often cut access to fenced villages. Saying that fruit isn’t free is also often shunned: some consumers boldly proclaimed that the trees belong to everyone, especially the neediest! And highway operators helped to feed the needy. So, many farmers gave up farming, forgot farming altogether, and themselves became needy.
There aren’t many open gardens anymore, there’s a need for food. Copiers clipped branches from the farmers’ trees, grafting them onto their tree stumps inside their fenced orchards, taking the hard work of breeding that generations of farmers had done in the past, and even having the nerve to claim the sole credit for the fruit.
Workers are toiling inside these orchards owned by the highway operators and cloners for a token payment of peanuts, “likes” and an undying hope of celebrity. Copiers aren’t giving anything back to the trees, denying the trees from living. A tree is only living if it’s evolving. Copying doesn’t allow the tree to live, merely to be alive. But it’s a lot cheaper to keep a tree alive than to let it live.
If the poor tree copies fall sick, copiers drench them in poison. The poison kills the bees. They don’t care. They wax the fruit to shine, put smiley face stickers over the sickness on the fruit, and sell it along the highway. Soon, copiers will be able to afford to leave the small village of supposedly backward farmers and go live on a tropical island along with the operators of the highway, the dream they got from advertising.
Copying might keep an idea alive, but it might not be living. Enshrining a thought, printing it in a book doesn’t give it life. A genuinely living set of ideas co-evolves with its farmers, who understand it, feed it, discuss it, test it, combine it. The ideas protect the farmers, and the farmers protect the ideas.
So consumers eat the waxed fruit they buy along the highway, from the copiers’ and operators’ plantations. They can eat without having to understand the fruit or know the farmer. They don’t want to know about how fruit is borne, and they don’t know how to respect the seed. They don’t care about the lineage of the tree. They don’t understand the trees’ need for a love life. Not to feel lonely, they buy pets and put them into the cages of city apartments. Pets might be alive but aren’t living.
Consumers try to live for as long as possible as individuals, instead of recognizing the cycle of birth, growth, love, rebirth, nurturing and death. The sacrifices of creating a family conflict with their individualistic dreams and hopes. So consumers themselves aren’t living either, they’re merely alive.
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Far away, there’s a hidden village. There, the farmers will appoint a representative. All representatives from different communities will get together, elect a leader. The leader will protect farmers, and farmers will support the leader. The wise leader will enforce respect for life within its borders.
There have always been good and bad farmers, there have been copiers, consumers, and thieves. The only way to have a lush countryside of villages in this world is to have a state which welcomes and protects farmers, effectively taxes copiers and consumers, while ensuring that thieves’ cost to society is minimal.
With good governance, things will get better, and then that will be taken for granted. Because of that, it will then get worse, and the cycle will repeat.
Dr. Aleks Jakulin
June 2018
