De-fossilising our vocabulary.
A new way of talking, to support a new way of thinking.
Data is not oil. It’s not the remnants of dead fish being pumped back into the atmosphere to kill more fish. It’s reusable and renewable. We need to stop talking about data as something that is mined and extracted for our own use. We’ve done enough of that. Now is the time to love and care for our Earth.
Data is like soil: we sink our roots deep into it and flourish, as long as it’s not poisoned or extracted from us. And the whole earth benefits when we nourish it and build whole ecosystems where benefits are shared across huge communities.
We don’t make ideas more concrete, poured out into reinforced rectangular blocks to slowly crumble away after a few decades of use. We should be thinking more agile, flexible and organic; adopting more plant-inspired methods and learning from plants as experts in developing resilient, complex networks for exchanging things over millenia.
We don’t need superchargers or turboboosts, to be fuelled up or ignited; the tortoise didn’t beat the hare by moving quickly and rashly. Thought and care are important to make sure the ultimate end goal is reached as soon as possible.
Our teams aren’t well oiled machines. They could be a colony of ants, working to support the hive now and in the future. They could be networks of fungus sharing knowledge across hundreds of individuals. They could be the forest ecosystems, with their thousands of niches allowing every kind of species to thrive.
We don’t have tools in our armoury, data as our ammunition; we’ve spent too long at war (with all our human and non-human neighbours). It’s time for collaboration, not competition. We listen to the individual, not just their words or behaviours, and we offer ideas not solutions.
In code we have a root and branches, but shouldn’t we have a trunk instead of a master branch? Microservices and tests are surely the phloem and xylem, the essential networks linking everything together and circulating essential nutrients.
This was a thought experiment I had while sipping a coffee this morning. It’s funny how industrial capitalism is so pervasive that we use its language as metaphor in everyday life. That’s a big deal. When modern humans so regularly fall on industrial language to describe our activities, we perpetuate that system. Our imagination of the world is so contaminated by the idea of oil and concrete and steel, of competition and extraction, that we can’t help but use those words to describe what we do.
The result is that something else is left out. As I try to point out in this short poem, there is ample imagery in plant-rooted sources. Just maybe, if we try to express ourselves with more organic language, our imaginations stop excluding the non-human. And from there comes empathy and understanding.
Understanding that there’s so much of the world we are blind to and ignore.
Understanding of the full scale of the crisis of late capitalism and how our whole world will be affected.
Understanding that there’s another way…
So I challenge you to let nature back in. Think like a plant, not like a fossil.
