‎ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ

We Need To Rewild The Internet

“It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or ‘forest death,’ was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis.

...That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the ‘pathology of command and control.’ Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests. The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity.

...Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

...the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers...determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.

...The internet made the tech giants possible. Their services have scaled globally, via its open, interoperable core. But for the past decade, they’ve also worked to enclose the varied, competing and often open-source or collectively provided services the internet is built on into their proprietary domains. Although this improves their operational efficiency, it also ensures that the flourishing conditions of their own emergence aren’t repeated by potential competitors.

...Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control. They can afford to, using the vast wealth reaped in their one-off harvest of collective, global wealth.

...Infrastructure is not just what we see on the surface; it’s the forces below, that make mountains and power tsunamis. Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.

...Consolidation doesn’t just squeeze out competition. It narrows the kinds of relationships possible between operators of different services. As Daigle put it: 'The more proprietary solutions are built and deployed instead of collaborative open standards-based ones, the less the internet survives as a platform for future innovation.' Consolidation kills collaboration between service providers through the stack by rearranging an array of different relationships — competitive, collaborative — into a single predatory one.

...what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday 'hyperobject,' but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at [the internet] not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it."

tbc

reflecting on abolition and the PIC...we have to watch out for being punitive with each other/policing each other...abolition isnt just about prisons...its our personal lives and how we treat each other/handle conflict...understanding abolition will help develop TJRJ practices...like abolition, TJRJ is building what we want/need now, not waiting around for the systems we have now to do the right thing, but building new systems ourselves because we have to
 

slide 17: TJ "uses an abolitionist framework. engaging in harm reduction to lesson the violence, works to connect incidences of violence to the conditions that create and perpetuate them, community-based, collective responsibility when it comes to violence, not simply the absence of state violence but the existence of the values, practices, relationships, and world that we want"

slide 18: TJ is “responding to violence and harm without creating more violence and harm” Mia Mingus

slide 20: "how do we build our personal and collective capacity to respond to trauma and support accountability?" and "how can we shift our response to violence so that we are supporting survivors and their self determination, as well as supporting people to fundamentally change their abusive behaviors?"

slide 21: "harm exists and will continue to exist. but the frameworks communities can use to address that harm are not static and can be improved. transformative justice provides space to explore and react to individual situations as they arise" Reina Sultan

seems that TJ came about because the RJ definition was lacking, the TJ definition is more refined to include addressing the social and institutional components of ppl being violent or unhealthy

"why pods? we must create what we need: if we are not going to rely on the current violent, dangerous and woefully inadequate systems around us, then that means it is us who will have to be able to respond to harm, violence and crisis...us and our communities who will need to be able to prevent harm, address acute and active harm in real time, as well as heal and transform past harms that have left an aftermath of destruction and pain in their wake. it is easy to talk about abolition or call for “no prisons and police” in a tweet or on a sign at a protest. it is much harder to do the work to build the kind of community infrastructure that we will need to make those things a reality. pods is one critical piece of that work."

"creating accountability pods can help us to more effectively practice accountability in our everyday lives or in acute instances of harm. typically, people have less people in their lives they can call on to take accountability for harm theyve done than harm that happened to them. this is common because of the punitive culture we live in, which teaches us that only “bad people do bad things,” so if someone does something harmful they must be a bad person who is incapable of change. in addition, harm makes us uncomfortable because it often kicks up the places inside of us that we do not want to face or address. and because of that we genuinely dont know what to do when harm happens, so we distance ourselves from the situations and people we deem harmful, toxic or just plain uncomfortable."

"we see building our pods as a concrete way to prepare and build resources for transformative justice in our communities. building pods is also a way to practice and cultivate liberation through values such as care, support, healing, accountability, community, love, interdependence, repair, belonging, trust, courage and possibility. pods invites us into a more connected way of living that resists isolation, fear and hopelessness, some of the many factors that allow for harm to occur. if everyone had a pod, imagine how much more resourced and supported we would all be. imagine how much more accountable and brave we might attempt to be. imagine what could be possible inside of our communities, neighborhoods, cities and movements for justice."