Call for abstracts: Rewilding the Web: diversity and resilience in digital infrastructure

University of Edinburgh, UK; May 28th-29th

Submission deadline: 13th March

Organizers: @kathrynnave.bsky.social Dave Ward

Inspired by visions of nature as an ecosystem of self-regulating feedback loops, the 20th-century architects of the internet proposed that a perfectly interconnected world would allow free individuals to spontaneously self-organise into harmonious networks of exchange, without any need for top-down control.

Fifty years later, the internet is a monoculture. Google accounts for 84% of all search queries, while 50% of cloud computing is provided by Amazon and Microsoft alone. Accordingly, technologists are increasingly calling for a ‘rewilding’ via the decentralisation of core services, in order to restore the cybernetic vision of a harmonious digital ecology. Yet if decentralisation alone were sufficient to ensure a flourishing ecosystem, then how could these tech monopolies have arisen in the first place? For the re-wilding of internet infrastructure to succeed, it must move beyond an outdated view of biological systems, which abstracts from the inherent mutability and precarity of organisms to treat them as no more than complex machines seeking a stable equilibrium. Fortunately, other philosophies of nature are available.

Aims

This workshop will bring together ecologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and technologists to discuss how contemporary insights from theoretical biology and ecology can provide a richer understanding of what makes for a thriving biosphere, and how this might provide inspiration for cultivating sociotechnical infrastructure that is more resilient against co-option by monopolising tendencies.

Invited Speakers

@robin.berjon.com — Senior Fellow, Future of Technology Institute

@ohalpern.bsky.social — Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures, TU Dresden

@anil.recoil.org — Professor of Planetary Computing, University of Cambridge

Maria Mancilla Garcia — Environmental Humanities Chair, Université Libre de Bruxelles

Elena Rovenskaya — Program Director Advancing Systems Analysis Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

@shannonvallor.bsky.social (Discussant) — Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh

There are 3-4 slots available for contributed talks that showcase research from any discipline that furthers the workshop's aims.

If you have work you would like to present, please email a detailed abstract of 1000 words (excluding references), to:

Dave.Ward@ed.ac.uk/Kate.Nave@ed.ac.uk by Friday 13th March, including 'Re-wilding the Web' in the subject line.

Prospective talks should be suitable for presentation in 30 minutes, allowing for 15 minutes for questions.