Rewilding for Resilience
The systems approach to repair and renewal
(a speculative retrospective)
It started everywhere all at once, but it also started in some places more than others, and definitely at different speeds.
In some ways it started with bacteria.
It’s the year 2020, and big pharma has finally jumped the shark. Having lost all the battles to patent genes, all but one of the biggest firms are selling off their genomic R&D capabilities (to tech giants, Native American tribes, and a few VC conglomerates, looks like), and, for all their talk of “moving beyond the pill,” have begun obsessively competing over the most efficacious way to introduce bacteria into the human body.
(Fecal transplants have been an uphill battle — commercially speaking of course, but there are obvious logistical and adherence hurdles with refrigerated capsule probiotics, and the FDA is still shuffling its feet on nanotech. In trials, the shelf-stabilized stuff performs only marginally better than anti-depressants for most conditions, so now they’re mucking about with carbon nanotubes trying to design temperature self-regulating packaging that doesn’t get aspirated to pulmonary toxicity with proper dosage. But I digress.)
Deeply distrustful of antibiotics (whose use is anyway now restricted to life-threatening conditions), aluminum adjuvant vaccines, and pharmaceuticals in general (in the end, the baby has been thrown away with the bathwater), consumers are swallowing record high amounts of greek yogurt, and record low numbers of Z-packs. (Luckily, Chobani has billions to deal with the acid whey problem; no one is particularly surprised or concerned by the scope of the crisis. It’s now pretty well understood that nothing profits this much without poisoning something somewhere else.) But ultimately it was the payers who convinced the drug manufacturers to eat their own dog food.
Germ theory, if only partially debunked, is officially dead.
Pharma, of course, is a microcosm of the much bigger shift now well underway. Health is one of the main places it starts, because the cost of chronic disease and preventable deaths were breaking the system, and besides, that’s where the science had led us by the nose. Dewilding of the microbiome through antimicrobial misuse was conclusively connected to everything from mental health to autoimmune disease. So it is that in 2020, the average health-literate patient would sooner ask her doctor about a poop transplant than take antbiotics for a bad cold.
The Hybrid Arts
Science itself has begun to shift.
Experimental results (both those that could be replicated, and those that couldn’t) had been hinting at a broken framework for a long time, but the tactical work of a methodological sea change started in behavioral science. Dr. Eric Hekler (of ASU and Agile Science) and colleagues had begun to develop approaches that would produce not capital-T Truth, but truth-in-context. Others had been experimenting with apple research kit, the new ethics of participatory research, and designing tools that brought the process of research down from the sterile ivory tower lab into the squalor of lived reality. These days I visualize scientific praxis like the Titanic turning around just in time (we hope), reimagining what it would look like to study context and convergence instead of isolated variables in linear causal relationships. Positivism is on the retreat. Systems thinking is finally finding its home within basic scientific inquiry.
But the change was triggered much further back, visible in disciplines as diverse as anthropology and quantum mechanics. Decades ago, historians of science debunked the very existence of modernity, thoroughly critiquing the basis for human exceptionalism and planetary domination. And physics, a “pure science” whose tradition had been to seek to understand the building blocks of reality at an increasingly granular scale, arrived at the quantum level and found things began to get disturbingly weird. By the time clickbait articles were in the habit of periodically claiming the universe was a simulation (but before we accepted that it wouldn’t matter if it was), the entire concept of an objective reality was on shakier ground than ever before.
So hybridization was already well underway in many fields of both science and technology (now increasingly understood as seamless sectors; indistinct is the new black) — genomics had brought us Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996, absurdly expensive meat that had never lived in 2013; AI brought us chatbots that mocked us with our own casual racism and tools that could beat us at our own games without learning from us how to play them… The robot headlines were writing themselves — about everything from genocidal cyborg citizenship to sentient clothing to gloating over the corpse of mall-cop-R2D2. Biomimicry was now much more than just a technological term of art.
Art, of course, had been both seed and catalyst along the way; the original scientific discipline to “get it.”
But I like to think it was that perfect upset in microbial biology; with its rich broth of schadenfreude for practitioners of eastern philosophy and alternative medicine, that microcosmic gradual-then-sudden recognition in medicine and then everywhere else that we need diversity to survive that symbolically turned the tide. When we began to realize what we had swallowed and started hoping it wasn’t too late.
When are we?
So by the turn of the century mass-metanoia was already well underway, but the last gasps of the cult(ure) of dewilding-as-progress were acute and traumatic. Multiple and in many cases interconnected crises (antibiotic resistance, the encroaching storms and sea levels of climate change, dystopic garbage islands and shocking deforestation, rampant addiction (the logical consequence of consumerism) to sugar/caffeine/opioids/insert-toxin-here, othering-based criminalization and hatred-based marginalization of minority difference, biodiversity loss from monoculturization, chemical die-offs (RIP bees), etc. etc.) were painfully apparent but so unevenly distributed — this also being “one of the most peaceful times in history” as sovereignty wars, resource wars, proxy wars (in some places more than others), and oil wars had all given way to cold information and influence wars.
Data and digital dollars (the latter imaginary, but then they had been for a long time) were flowing, communities of consumers, while not particularly civically engaged, were connected and consuming like never before, genetic modification of crops was reliably expanding the planet’s carrying capacity just as lab-grown meat was approaching technical (if not economic) viability. Nanotech + microbial + proteomic research promised an “age of abundance” (but — abundance for who?). Political pendulums swung back and forth even more quickly than usual as party lines became increasingly meaningless; astute observers noted that left/right was dissolving in the face of institutionalist/insurrectionist. And, of course, regardless of it all, the rich were growing more rich, and yet also more concerned. What hath man wrought.
May you live in interesting times — Chinese blessing/curse (apocryphal)
Because it’s important to give credit where it’s due, helping to seed, visualize, and enact the change have been legions of hackers (bio-hackers, web-hackers, culture-jammers, reality-hackers), artists (hybrid artists, speculative designers, new media experimentalists), myriad “midwives to new myths.” Seamlessly inhabiting the archetypal role of tricksters, their imagination, mischief, and meme-making had been crucial drivers in both shaking things up and making things real. So even garden-variety trolls, in retrospect, had played their part.
And as “fake news” found new ways to grab attention, sow distrust in institutions, emphasize narrative fragmentation, and breed chaos, it also delivered a new skill-set for interrogating the manipulation of reality. Prior to hybridization reaching crisis proportions, media literacy had operated in binaries (trust google, not wikipedia; trust reputable sources, not ones designed to look like them; and so on). Like other strategies, it had taken time and effort to adapt to the new multiversal, hybridized, complex-causal, rewilded reality. But things are moving faster these days. This is what evolution looks like in real-time. Every day feels similar enough to the last, and yet it is happening fast enough to see in a lifetime, and though access to front-row seats is (you guessed it) unevenly distributed, we have all been given a ticket to watch.
As described by WJT Mitchell in What do Pictures Want?, “We live in a time that is best described as a limbo of continually deferred expectations and anxieties. Everything is about to happen, or perhaps it has already happened without our noticing it…” We are thus in need of a “paleontology of the present” — the now being even more remote from our understanding than the past. We need to “rethink our condition in the perspective of deep time.”
And so, having appreciated our forbears’ thorough critiques of all previous revolutions stretching back to the agricultural, some of us are working on problematizing the ongoing one. They call us “creasearchers” or “public interest technologists,” among other names. We are trying to make sense of just what exactly is going on here, while appreciating that we cannot possibly accomplish that goal in real time. Current thinking is that somewhere at the nexus of the attention economy, surveillance capitalism, CRISPR-Cas9, and climate change, we are witnessing the breakdown of some of the fundamental “Great Divides” that had been propping us up for hundreds or thousands of years as we went about domineering, “domesticating,” and destroying the planet. We are witness and shepherd to rewilding.
Instead of trying to debug economic and societal codes that in fact function as features, we are engaged in a collaborative and distributed project to uncover the deepest fallacies on which we’ve architected, in order to see if we might be able to restructure around different values. We’re working to make both the new and the original algorithms of civilization more transparent, fair, and accountable. We are playing dress-up and encouraging experimentation with the diversity of hats available to wear interchangeably one-quarter into the 21st century — not just consumer, but citizen, critic, collaborator, connector, creator…More than trying to solve, we’re trying to systematize.
Seeing systems move
In 2020, thanks to advances in adolescent development science, theory of mind is no longer just understood as something you acquire by age 5 when you realize you are not the center of the universe, but as something that develops into adulthood as a nuanced appreciation of multiple possible frames and perspectives on reality. And, perhaps even more importantly, it is understood to encourage reflexive understanding of not just linear consequences but unintended ones too. Increasingly, in 2020, good leadership is thoughtful and empathic and gentle. It examines its own assumptions and biases, listens carefully, thinks ahead, anticipates the unintended, and engages broadly in planning and implementation. Leaders are asking a new set of questions, about what’s at stake in shifting systems and in dissolving binaries, about whose values are being encoded into which tools, and in service of what goals. Because those who are successful at leading are those who are adapting to a complex and hybridized reality.
(Examples are everywhere in every discipline, but development science has also produced parallel early-childhood insights now being deployed as a precursor to leadership development. This is primarily driven by an understanding that individual resilience forms through supported exposure to a diversity of developmental experiences. Children who are sheltered have outcomes comparable to those who suffer the toxic stress of abuse or neglect. Structral work is underway to provide spaces for safe exploration, communication, and discovery (guidance counseling is an expanding field for the first time in decades). The market, too, has been quick to respond. We always thought synthetic memories would be for synthetic people, but their first commercial application is in VR games that allow kids to transport to other cultures, pantomime coming of age rituals, try on different careers, and be guided through difficult conversations by the wisdom of a crowd of therapists now algorithmically delivered through a headset. It’s not yet clear whether goggles equitably replace authentic experience, but avatars are turning out to be freakishly influential tools, and startups are rapidly developing complementary technologies and experiences in pursuit of optimized immersion: “smellovision,” indoor “dirt pits” that expose bare feet to electromagnetism and microbial diversity, wearable haptic feedback packs, and more.)
Diffuse, blurry, and uneven in most disciplines, the shift came more conspicuously to social justice work. In a field engaged most fundamentally in funding experiments to discover what makes the needle move (and well-versed in differentiating a moving needle from a shifting pendulum), funders and practitioners were early adopters of the work of mapping ecosystems, valuing diversity, and pursuing complex strategies for change. They remain at the forefront of studying sideways to track change in real-time. They are investing in both networks that affect systems at scale, as well as place-based collective action strategies that prove diverse coalitions can accomplish real wins in specific contexts. And as collectivism is renewed locally through a confluence of forces both philanthropic and philosophical, big funders are not the only contributors to the change. Community-level redistribution and funding campaigns, employee and community organizing, and diverse coalition-building are thriving. The change in civil society we expected to see through the internet in retrospect only started there — it is moving offline (for precision’s sake, it’s worth noting there is less and less of a discernible difference).
It’s still just 2020, and, like power itself, the revolution is unevenly distributed. China has just launched the full-scale version of its “social credit system,” meant to “increase trust” between “citizens,” but already having the opposite — and also several unintended — effects. “Consumer behavior” is down, which means social control is down. A market for grey zones and new methods is emerging by which people can lead new-normal lives in the face of overt and almost total surveillance. China is the first place where a “VR dark web” takes root. Human computer interface research has gone underground and is speeding ahead. And — you might have seen this coming — it is increasingly difficult to maintain and police the boundaries between things like “cyber space,” “virtual reality,” and “real life.” There is already talk of a “lost generation,” but many are finding themselves cloaked in new forms of well-deserved privacy. In China, the pendulum is swinging hard in response to firm pressures, and those who have been pushing are just beginning to realize how much was at stake all along.
Elsewhere, evidence of the shift has been more local and less publicized. In the jungles of Sumatra, where years earlier Willie Smits engaged villagers to provide a proof-of-concept of what literal rewilding could look like, things are looking up. Networks are being mobilized to spread the good word of systemic interventions that might be able to scale, accounting for context and community engagement. For a world primed to build “smart cities” around old ideals of efficiency and control, it has been surprising to see the change come first to small communities who are rallying around rights (not just human ones either) and justice. In other places, the shift is coming frustratingly late, and new climate realities are inspiring both adaptive innovation and mass migration.
It can feel (and often does), that for every step forward there is a slide back. This is how complex adaptive systems move. Edging forward in dizzying circular spurts.
But everywhere one thing is clear: there is no going back. The boundaries of fundamental systems are already shifting, and with them the shape of their impacts. Capitalism is being renavigated and rethought as norms shift, such that inequality in its many forms is no longer something power is able to mumble about and ignore. As people become woke to not only inequality among people but the full scope of global hybridization and complexity, civil society is surging in new and more inclusive forms, years after digitization and consumerization conspired to police its shrinking boundaries and threaten its influence. In healthcare, old tools have found renewed purpose in rethinking what we thought we knew about what was making us sick, and what or who might be able to make us better. Everywhere, synthesis abounds. At uneven rates but in new and increasing ways: Equity is achievable. Diversity is mandated. Inclusion is adaptive.
In 2020, we now understand what the bacteria were trying to tell us, and so we are going where the wild things are.
There is a future, and it does differ from the past. But where once it was a matter of hundreds and thousands, now millions and billions have to be accommodated — billions of people, of course, but also billions of animals, stars, prions, cows, robots, chips, and bytes…
Instead of two powers, one hidden and indisputable (nature), and the other disputable and despised (politics), we will have two different tasks in the same collective. The first task will be to answer the question: How many humans and nonhumans are to be taken into account? The second will be to answer the most difficult of all questions: Are you ready, and at the price of what sacrifice, to live the good life together?
That this highest of political and moral questions could have been raised, for so many centuries, by so many bright minds, for humans only without the nonhumans that make them up, will soon appear, I have no doubt, as extravagant as when the Founding Fathers denied slaves and women the vote.
— Bruno Latour, in Pandora’s Hope
Note: This bit of Sunday afternoon armchair anticipatory anthropology / speculative (non)fiction is dedicated to many thought partners I am lucky to read and engage with, many of whose work is cited throughout. Apologies to future me; I should have known (Amara’s law) that change is both slower and faster than we expect. I hope to see the radical impacts of ongoing shifts within my lifetime. As always, all views are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
