The Unisphere is Near

I had a conversation about technology with Marina Psaros the other day that took a curious turn. I met Marina a couple years ago in a community of climate activists who work in the video game industry. She’s co-author of the book Atlas of Disappearing Places, which uses data to envision how climate change will alter our geography, and is Director of Sustainability at the game engine company Unity Technologies. I’ve sought Marina for advice as I’ve worked on the World Integration Loop, and in addition to her being generous and wise, she’s the type of person who can always be relied upon for at least one wisecrack per conversation. I suspect one of the reasons we see eye to eye is that we belong to the same Gen X tech nerd cohort; while I was answering phones at Amazon in the late nineties, Marina was at Netscape. Her career took her through government positions where she found herself immersed in climate data. My career has zig zagged through tech, academia, and the arts. Lately we’ve been talking about connecting the dots between data, AI, the cloud, and the world’s natural systems to further intertwine our digital and natural worlds.

The part of our conversation I keep mulling over was a moment when we both sort of landed on a shared sensation that something important is coming. Neither of us could quite articulate it at the time, but I’ll do my best here.

One entry point to this sensation is to consider our uniquely bifurcated, early 21st century ontological condition. We live within the constraints of physical reality, as beholden to the laws of physics and chemistry as humans have ever been, but we’re also insulated within digitally mediated fantasy realms to a degree that we regard the physical planet we depend upon as disconnected from the tumult of human affairs. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his hair-raising climate catastrophe warning The Uninhabitable Earth, we cling to the delusion that ours is a crisis “of the ‘natural’ world, not the human one; that these two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it…”

Using materials mined from biomes, and following the rules of physics and chemistry that we continue to learn about in greater detail, we’ve transformed raw materials and energy sources supplied by our planet and sun into a suite of interconnected technologies accessible via devices that we carry with us at all times and which we consult frequently throughout the day. These devices — chiefly smart phones, tablets, and laptops — are, as philosopher Andy Clark would suggest, externalized extensions of our brains that we use to interface with the noosphere, the realm of ideas that encapsulates our planet, to which we both passively and actively provide data simply by participating in the quotidian rigamarole of contemporary life.

We typically regard our existence within the biosphere and noosphere as discreetly separate, with our language exposing this delusion. Where I live in Seattle, you can take a break from “screen time” and take a kayak out on a lake or hike some trails to “see some nature.” We speak of acting in a manner that is “eco-friendly” as if our every possible behavior isn’t grounded in ecology. We appear to operate as double agents between digitally mediated and physically bound realities, checking our feeds in the noosphere one moment, feeding ourselves with food grown in the biosphere the next, or doing both simultaneously, all while maintaining the self-negating distinction that artificiality actually exists. The only thing truly artificial in all of creation is the concept of artificiality itself, which, in a world of lyre birds, biomimickry, and the cunning camouflage of undersea predators, might actually be the most natural expression of the natural world there is.

I remember a time when using a computer was a specifically delineated activity. In the nineteen-eighties, my dad had computers at his engineering office that I’d mess around with on weekends. My grade school featured a primitive computer lab of eyeball-assaulting green-on-black monitors where we would go once or twice a week to “learn computers.” For some of us growing up in the late twentieth century, using a computer was one of a variety of activities one could pick and choose from, along with watching TV, reading a book, listening to hair metal on cassette tapes, going to the mall, climbing trees, riding a bike. The context of our lives was pretty easy to grasp. Everyone belonged to some sort of family, kids went to school, parents had jobs, there were political events, occasional scandals, and an albeit limited but constantly replenished supply of entertainment products to enjoy. The natural world was out there doing its thing, trees budding when they were supposed to, bugs crawling around on the ground, flowers blooming, birds flapping around in the sky, volcanoes erupting, etc. etc.

You could point to your television and say, with confidence, that it was a human invention built in a factory in Japan, then point to a mountain and say that it was the result of a complex and mind-blowingly slow geological drama. There were probably other planets beyond our solar system, but we didn’t really know anything about them until our telescopes began detecting rhythmic dimming in the brightness of distant stars during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Scientists were constantly figuring stuff out and changing their minds about what foods were healthy to eat, video games inched toward photorealism year after year, comedians on late night talk shows faithfully delivered their schticks, and we all stumbled over one another for jobs and drugs and lovers and belief systems in a mad scramble to grasp, in the laughably short period of time we’d each been alotted, who we were, what we were supposed to be doing, and how to achieve feats that seemed impossible, like ensuring the persistence of life on a planet we’d brought to a low simmer as if following the recipe of some demented, vengeful industrialist.

The pivot, the change, the shift, or whatever you want to call it that Marina Psaros and I seemed to be observing is that far from being discrete and separate and unaccountable to one another, the biosphere and the technologically fired-up noosphere have always been as one. There is no such thing as an aloof natural world segregated from our technological civilization replete with its engines, undersea cables, and algorithms. Internal combustion, the James Webb telescope, the iPhone and the Xbox — the earth itself made all of these things through us weirdo primates.

[Musical interlude: Hey, hey, we’re the monkeys. People say we destroy the earth.]

But there really is no “destroying” the earth, because despite our most fervent and narcististic misconceptions that humans provide existence with context, there is no escaping that we have always been and will forever be nothing more than a small part of the content of Planet Earth. There’s no such thing as “saving” the planet; there’s only turning or not turning it into a singularly brutal and repugnant place to live. Framing our climate emergency as if the earth is something to be saved puts us in the worst possible position, retooling ancient religious guilt into climate guilt that prevents us from accepting our purpose as earth’s most powerful creation, robbing ourselves of agency to alter the biosphere expressly for our benefit and the benefit of other creatures that happen to appreciate water, clean air, and an abundance of stuff that grows out of the ground.

What’s coming, I’m pretty sure, is an explosion of causality that inextricably binds our digital and physical worlds. The digital world — call it the metaverse if you’re into that sort of thing — and the empirical world of worms, starfishes, and dirt are knitting themselves together so that actions undertaken in one can directly result in positive consequences in the other. My avatar in a game world can harvest digital resources that I can then sell to purchase actual food for my tangible body in physical reality. I can install a solar powered camera trap in a forest and use it to trigger rewards in a game world every time it captures an image of an orangutan or bear. I can plant a tree with a drone in physical reality and as it grows, its digital twin keeps pace, spreading its virtual brances in the metaverse, bearing virtual fruit that feeds my avatar as its physical twin bears fruit that feeds me.

We’ve tricked ourselves into buying the falsehood that in order to enjoy the myriad wonders of industrialized, neoliberal globalization, we have to accept that the byproducts of air travel and the supply chain are just going to have to be somewhat shitty. That’s some straight-up boilerplate from the fossil fuels industry pitch deck. Denial, too, is natural, so naturally this frightened industry is sending its shills to British daytime television to whimper that climate protests that snarl the morning commute are just so incredibly irritating. A climate scientist’s self-immolation exists on a continuum with some airport’s fatuous social media post about Earth Day. Comedian Mark Maron points out that after all these decades in which the science has been screaming in our faces, we’ve decided the best way to confront our looming catastrophe is to take our own bags to the grocery store, and… that’s about it. Precisely at the moment we could use some we’re-all-in-this-together solidarity, the very platforms we use to communicate are splintering us into tribes committed to linguistic weaponization and digging conspiratorial rabbit holes in every corner of the Internet. Just when we need to come together to confront literally the greatest crisis our species has ever faced, we find ourselves luxuriating in an abundance of natural stupidities at the dawn of Artificial Intelligence.

Lately, I’ve been regarding the products of pop culture as if I’m remembering them from some point in the near future. Try explaining to the people who’ll show up with guns to take your water what was so controversial about the Oscars this year. It’s all too easy to moralize and damn a culture that has a lot to say about this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees or what was uttered at the White House Correspondents Dinner as shallow, trivial, and deserving of the coming climatalogical tribulation. And yet. If only we could harness the energy we expend in the perpetual distraction machines of the noosphere and redirect it so that every time we stream a show trees are planted, and every song we listen to extracts a ton of plastic from the ocean, and every book we read pulls carbon from the sky, and the fungi of the forests upload reports on toxins in the soil to the cloud. Driven by insatiable hunger for beauty and abiding love for all living things, we primates may yet evolve into stewards of a planet where the biosphere and noosphere are one and life persists well beyond our star and our century. Imagine no distinction between the world beneath our feet and the world conjured inside our machines; call this the coming of the unisphere. How natural it is.