When Cyberpunks Became Ecologists
The current effects of us millennials, particularly life scientists/ecologists/naturalists reaching adulthood who grew up during the dawn of the world wide web, and furthermore, 90's hacker culture, is really interesting. (Also the synergy of 70’s/80’s phreak/hack culture and gaming console culture with so-called ‘environmentalist’ or earth-based perspectives too—don’t want to leave out my Gen X kin!) I haven't seen these talked about much, at least in popular culture, as it seems so many of us are still working through the problems bestowed upon us by the splitting of nature/culture, artificial/natural, etc.
As someone who currently works in the nature-based education realm, I often have felt hesitant to bring up how much I (and Queer Nature co-founder Pinar) both, in different ways, grew up immersed in technology and don't have a strictly negative critique of it. To deal with this weird elephant in the room I’ve resorted to writing about these themes more on my personal instagram @cyberpunkecology (formerly @borealfaun) and here on this newer blog (a sort of spiritual sequel to my earlier “Green Hermeneutics” blog that focused more specifically on cybernetics), because often people are like "WOt does this have 2 do with nature.” Now I’ve tentatively started to also write about these themes on @queernature too as a way to push back against certain pressures in the “environmentalist” space. This isn't techno-utopianism either, no. I read the Cyborg Manifesto in college and I do appreciate Haraway but it doesn't quite hit queer coming-of-age and it doesn't quite inhabit the hacker perspective. Fringe internet culture and online echo chambers have exploded since the 90's. There's a lot out there that I would never wish for people to "come of age" within. But, well, it’s happening, and we have to treat it as a Real Thing that’s part of mythic consciousness.
To bring some of this aesthetic, somatic, and intellectual lineage into the light, I wanted to share a poem I wrote about "Coming of Age in Cyberspace" (previously published in the poetry section of this website) a few years ago.
"Coming of Age in Cyberspace
I grew up in an unfurling wilderness
of interconnected machines
—the 90’s.
No one taught me to hunt deer
so I hunted for modems,
memorized the tones of
analog phones
instead of bird song.
Carrier signals
were like the calls of rare
and elusive
creatures
obscured by a vegetation of wire.
IP addresses
glowed on screens
like footprints
winding through terminals of text,
laying trails
that could be followed.
.
No one taught me to dream with the earth
or be possessed by the spirits
of the animals,
so I was haunted
by the strange wildness
of networks.
A virtual ecology
with its own terrain
yet animated by that original pump,
the heart.
In a brilliant dystopian mythos
the disembodied soul
was the animal I hunted,
the one whose movements
I longed to understand.
.
Eventually, after years
of tracing circuits
with my finger
like braille
—the promise of meaning
looming in the dark—
I found a path
leading back
(or maybe forward?)
into the eco-system
a green world
of soft borders
and furry logic.
.
Trailing a deer
in desert twilight
we became spirits
chasing the horizon
like a dream.
Cloven tracks glow darkly
on the sand,
their magnetism
like the static fuzz
of those glass screens
that flooded the bedroom
of my youth
with foreign light.
The medium
has changed
but the potent dazzle
of mystery
is the same,
and the green-tinged window
to the Other-world
remains.
.
it was a network
of machines
that taught me
relationship is the
magical substance
of our world."
