Cybernetics is a Type of Ecology

“Ecologies should be seen as the original cybernetic systems.” That was more or less the motto of my dorky (and somewhat cringeworthy at times) cyberpunk environmentalist themed blog started back in 2008. But these echo views that have been around since at least the 70s. Ecology and cybernetics are really quite similar, I think more than they are different, because cybernetics is a type of ecology.

Cybernetics refers to how information flows through systems (though it does connote governance and control to a certain extent), and was originally applied more toward artificial systems such as computers. Though, in the view of #biosemiotics, information, even data, is not just a thing humans create and store. Human generated information is merely one type of information that exists in the universe. Natural ecologies are also #biosemiotic systems, but they were not created by someONE in the strict sense (though many of them the world over have been stewarded and tended by Indigenous peoples… that’s really important to remember). They are rather, self-governing, if we want to use a word more comfortable in cybernetic theory. Moreover, they are “governed” through distributed agencies that blurs the boundaries between our notions of self and not self.

Information can exist as molecules on a surface, as some fur on a scratching post or as an anal gland secretion on an otter’s scent mound. Biologists first thought that canines scratching the ground—depositing scent from their interdigital glands—was just an olfactory signal, but now an emerging view is that it also could be a visual signal. From witnessing dozens of coyote scrapes and mountain lion scratches in the field, it is obvious to me that they can “track” in ways more similar to humans than we’re ready to admit, even if we admit that they may track through different dominant sense modalities than us. Visual tracking scares us sometimes when non-humans do it. Sometimes we act like we’re the only species with eyes, or at least with forward facing ones. When the coyote is watching you and not running away, some people would assume there must be a sinister intention behind it, they must be plotting to eat your dog. The more likely reality is that coyotes can be extremely curious and actually enjoy watching things without a particular agenda!

I digress. However, we must take care to not over simplify ecologies by just superimposing what we know about how computers work onto them. More on that later. But, drawing from the work of Barbara King, an animal studies scholar who has also made some much needed contributions to religious studies, we must resist the temptation to see organic relations as computational in nature. Meaning is created inside encounters rather than transported as ‘packet’ from Being A to Being B. We know this to be true in our emotional bodies! We thus move more into the realm of dynamical systems theory and connectionism, from the older more linear views of agency, communication, and meaning granted to us by computation. In a dynamical view, it’s relations/relationships all the way down, and ‘coupled’ phenomena (at least two things interacting) is how life, thought, and information get generated. The explosion of research into holobionts (plant and animal biomes) and the revelations of how really, we are more like multi-species events rather than individual entities, is also a thread we could weave in here.

Tracking, enchanted science, & place-based witnessing through multi-species/transbiology/animist lenses especially is a way to consider how meaning & signification can actually be a more-than-human category, unlike what we often hear from human exceptionalists or cynics who are like “LOL look at humans pointlessly trying to find the meaning of life.” Curiosity is not worth shaming, rather, what is worth reconsidering is that we’re the only species that are curious in that way or that engage in, as Teya Pribac writes, a “dancing with animacy,” and also a mapping of subjective worlds. Perhaps if we felt some sort of spiritual solidarity with other animals we’d be less resentful about our own lot. Many land-based cosmologies, too, as well as the crypto-animism of Ancient Greece that has been mostly (but not totally) eclipsed by later worldviews, acknowledge things like voices, stories, songs, personhood, etc. that are located or have their origin in non-human subjects, topoi (places), or Things. (All of us who work at these intersections are deeply indebted to Indigenous scientists, naturalists, & ecophilosophers who have been weaving in these ways all along! E.g. Enrique Salmon, Dennis Martinez, Robin W. Kimmerer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and many others)

—

Perhaps it is repetitive to say this at this point, but this aforementioned motto is not the same as saying “biological systems are computers.” No no. Those classic cyberpunk tropes have been done and played out—we are interested in a post-cyberpunk view grounded in ecology. It’s more like computers are simplified echoes of biological systems, similarly to how a garden is a simplified ecosystem. However, these “simplified” systems outsource a lot of complexity onto their tenders and stewards. And once you put them in networks, they can be very, very complicated! I do not want to downplay that at all.One reason why we all get so exhausted on social media if we aren’t careful. So in some ways their simplicity conceals a wider complexity. One of the shortcomings of the cyberpunk genre was the comparison of brains to computers as if computers were the parent metaphor. Really it should be the other way around. The parent metaphor is ecology, and ecology simply means “the logic of the home.” There’s nothing specifically deliberating *what* has the be the subject of relations in that word. In a similar way, technologies don’t just refer to human created devices or machines, they refer to any fabricated, improvised, or ritual way of achieving a task.

__

When some people think about practitioners of place/earth-based skills they often assume these folks hold very dualistic views of the world. Like oh yeah, those people who want us to “go back to this or that state of human history” or get rid of computers, etc. Not all of us! Place-based technologies and practices are not “primitive,” nor do they have to uphold culture/nature, artificial/natural binaries. They can also be futuristic! That’s also why we like to say forward to the land instead of back to the land, because our politics are different from the latter movement, and we recognize the present and future as technologically hybrid or monstrous. Monstrous not connoting “scary /bad” but rather connoting unexpected assemblages that challenge dominant views of personhood, agency, life, and yep, identity. As one of our artist friends printed on an anarchist patch, “no system but the ecosystem,” but if you think that means we’re just talking about green things you’re mistaken.