> This desktop recasts the Rewilding the Web workshop as the kind of internet it was arguing FOR: overgrown, weird, hand-planted, un-mowed. Each talk is its own window — its own little homepage with its own look.
> DRAG them by the title bar. Hit [_] to roll one up. Hit [×] to send it to the taskbar. Click REWILD (bottom-left) to get any window back. Scroll inside a window to read the whole talk.
> what was this workshop?
"Rewilding the Web: Diversity & Resilience in Sociotechnical Infrastructure" was a one-day interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Edinburgh (School of Psychology), May 2026, convened by Kate Nave with David Ward. It gathered technologists, theoretical biologists, philosophers and cultural theorists around one question:
Can ecological ideas from biology help us understand — and redesign — digital infrastructure so it resists monopoly and grows resilience through diversity?
> The premise: the internet was meant to be a self-regulating, decentralized wilderness, and instead it grew into a monoculture of a few giant platforms. It takes its title from Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon's essay "We need to rewild the Internet." This desktop is a fan-made tribute — every window below is my own re-telling of a talk, with the speaker's real references in the "kool links" box.
> why "rewilding"? (the origin metaphor)
The metaphor has teeth. In 18th-century Prussia, "scientific forestry" ripped out messy mixed woodland and planted tidy single-species rows for maximum timber yield. It worked... for one generation. Then came Waldsterben — "forest death" — as the monoculture fell to storms, pests and disease with no diversity left to fall back on. 🌲💀
Conservation biologists call the urge behind it the "pathology of command and control": scouring away the very messiness that makes a living system resilient. Swap the trees for platforms and you've got today's web. And as Jane Jacobs warned about cities, a top-down built environment becomes something that is done to us — Roman roads shaped Europe for 2,000 years; whoever lays the pipes lays the future.
> "We need to rewild the Internet" (Noema)
> Maria Farrell · Robin Berjon
> Kate Nave (convener)
~*~ FRENEMIES.EXE ~*~
webmistress: Elena Rovenskaya (IIASA) · topic: Coopetition in Digital Markets
Hi and welcum 2 my GARDEN!! 🌿 The big platforms got SO big they stopped being mere products — now they behave like whole living systems. They swallowed retail + logistics + cloud into one vertically-integrated organism, and in doing so they mowed the market's biodiversity flat.
🐸 what is coopetition??
It's when rivals cooperate AND compete at the same time — sharing data and jointly creating demand with one hand, guarding their patents and racing to ship with the other. That constant push-pull tension is exactly what makes these ecosystems so tough, robust, and hard to dislodge. Frenemies 4 life. 🤝
🌻 the regulator problem
Brussels always shows up AFTER the harm — but markets mutate faster than policy can write itself. Elena says the whole vocabulary platforms love ("ecosystem," "emergent complexity," "co-creation") was borrowed straight from ecology (James Moore, 1993). Even the EU's Digital Markets Act "gatekeeper" is secretly the biologists' keystone species.
So stop standing at the fence just WATCHING. A gardener prunes, waters, and pulls the monopoly-weeds before they choke the plot. Regulate like a gardener, not a birdwatcher. 🌸✂️
> Coopetition (wiki)
> Moore, "Predators & Prey" (HBR 1993)
> The Digital Markets Act · Keystone species
> Rovenskaya et al. (Nature, 2025)
MORE!! IS!! MORE!!
keeper of the zoo: Kathryn Nave (workshop organizer) · topic: The Principle of Excessive Variety
EVERYONE says nature is a lean optimized machine. WRONG. 🙅 Sure, some bits are perfect — the F1-ATPase motor runs at near-perfect thermodynamic efficiency — but your neurons run about a hundred million times WORSE than the physical optimum. That "waste" is not a bug. It's the whole trick.
🧬 the cybernetic trap
Conant & Ashby said a good regulator is a model of its system — implying any variety beyond what the environment demands is just useless complexity. But that "converge to the efficient minimum" logic is EXACTLY why generative AI trained on its own output slowly collapses. Squeeze out the surplus and you starve the future.
🐛 cryptic variation = a savings account
Andreas Wagner's work: genetic variation piles up invisibly. Two critters can look identical yet sit in totally different spots of genotype-space, each with different "adjacent possibles" to mutate into. It's stored entropy — options for a rainy day.
🐋 play, and sudden flips
Positive feedback lets ecosystems flip between whole states (grassland ↔ woodland) instead of easing across. And PLAY — flies do it, belugas do it — has no clear payoff, until a humpback whale turns a playful bubble-loop into a hunting technique. Optimize ruthlessly for engagement and machine-legibility, and you kill the excess variety that tomorrow's resilience is quietly hiding inside. 🎲
> F1-ATPase efficiency (PNAS) · neuron energy cost
> AI model collapse (Nature)
> cryptic variation (Science) · Red Queen
> play in belugas · whale bubble loops
~ follow the water ~
local hero: Donna Holford-Lovell · topic: Digital Infrastructures for Bioregional Justice in Tayside
Councils draw lines on maps. RIVERS DO NOT CARE ABOUT UR LINES. 🏴 Geology, climate and biodiversity carve out real bioregions that slice straight across council borders. When the River Ericht floods, it doesn't check whose jurisdiction it's in — and that flood is the forcing event that makes you think at watershed scale.
💧 four things to weigh
Donna judges any digital service on four axes at once: its environmental impact, the service itself, its governance, and the stewardship capacity of the community around it — all knitted together across the bioregion, not handed down from the top. She co-designs the solutions WITH the residents.
🥧 resilience at the edge
Real story: after storms knocked things out, the humble Linux Raspberry Pi self-hosted servers kept running while the cloud-dependent stuff fell over. 🍓 For rural communities a decentralized stack isn't a hobby — it's what stays up when the weather turns.
Fancy sensing gear always gets deployed in exotic far-off places. Rural UK deserves the same kit — to improve everyday life, on its own terms, respecting local context and values.
> River Ericht levels (live!)
> the decentralised stack
> Ryan Gibb · Eilean (self-host in a box)
> Terracorder (rural sensing)
> STEPS_TOWARDS_AN_INTERNET_ECOLOGY_
[sysops] Anil Madhavapeddy & Jon Crowcroft (Cambridge)
> what if the internet had an immune system? 🧫 not a firewall bolted on the outside — a living, distributed defence grown INTO the architecture. We propose antibotty networks and code that can self-modify, so the net detects and answers coordinated threats the way a body raises antibodies: locally, redundantly, with no central boss to knock out.
> the actual mechanisms
> antibotty inoculation: use frontier AI to fire off BENEFICIAL "attacks" that patch your crusty old IoT gadgets before the real botnets reach them. 🦠 a vaccine is just a weak exploit that teaches immunity.
> seconds, not weeks: physically-local defenders hear about a bug and inoculate nearby hosts in SECONDS — outrunning a worm, like Microsoft's 2008 "Vigilante" idea.
> monoculture IS the vulnerability: so ship a self-mutating stack — millions of implementations, each subtly different (build-time fuzzing / stochastic codegen) but all obeying the same core spec. Now the attacker has to re-hack every variant, and a service that mutates a little every time it redeploys is a moving target.
> T-cells: every device scans its neighbours for weaknesses before the global botnet shows up. Keep a tiny formally-VERIFIED core; allow wild diversity in the unproven layers around it. 🧫
> the vibe shifted FAST
> six months earlier at Aarhus, a room like this would've been skeptical about autonomous agents and self-rewriting code. This time? No pushback. The mainstream caught up to the wild idea almost overnight — which is thrilling and a little terrifying.
> but who gets to drive?
> the room pushed back on the RIGHT thing: equity + literacy. If you need a CS degree to steer these systems, you've built a new priesthood. Guiding an internet immune system has to be accessible, or "resilience" just means resilience for the technical elite.
[####........] scanning for monoculture... > threat: platform_capture.exe > response: DEPLOY_ANTIBODIES
> demos: TESSERA mapping + self-hosted Owntracks location tracking, so you own your own trail instead of renting it back from a platform. 📍
> internet immune system
> Anil's slides · Aarhus notes
> TESSERA · Owntracks
words mean things!!
gen sec: Georgie Newson (PhD, Edinburgh) · topic: Moving Beyond Self-Organisation
Where does "self-organization" even come from? All the way back to Lucretius and the atoms: particles meeting by pure chance and spontaneously falling into patterns. That ancient idea keeps getting reincarnated in modern systems talk. 🏛️
🌀 the swerve
Lucretius needed the clinamen — a tiny random swerve — so atoms wouldn't just fall in dead-straight determined lines forever. That swerve is what makes novelty possible. But it leaves the hard question open: what actually produces order, if there's no lawgiver outside the system telling it what to do?
😒 a politically promiscuous phrase
Here's Georgie's blade: "self-organization" will go home with anybody. It can justify almost any ideology, because "natural" and "just letting it be" are never pinned down. It stays silent about the three things that actually matter 👇
(1) which features are intrinsic vs. imposed from outside? (2) where are the system's boundaries? (3) what even counts as "order" vs. "disorder" here?
And beware the is/ought slip (per Lorraine Daston): don't smuggle moral rules out of "nature." So Georgie prefers "rewilding" — it's honest that there's an ongoing, deliberate strategy to sustain diversity. "Self-organization" pretends nobody's steering; "rewilding" admits somebody chose to let it run wild.
> on "spontaneous order"
> Lucretius & atomic physics
> Daston, "Against Nature"
DON'T WASTE A GOOD CRISIS
> operator: Robin Berjon (co-author, "We need to rewild the Internet")
> cybernetics 101 (via Henry Farrell): you can manage complexity two ways. Attenuation = shrink the world through simplified interfaces. Amplification = grow your own organizational variety until it MATCHES the world's variety. Good governance needs both — and knowing which one you're pulling.
> deliver capabilities, not just services
> borrowing Amartya Sen: don't just ship a service — ship education and democratic voice. Digital systems should grow people's capabilities, and a real "sense of coherence" (is the world comprehensible? manageable? meaningful?). Lock users out of governance and you quietly amputate their agency.
> mutualism or parasite?
> browsers looked like mutualism — then came "embrace, extend, extinguish." GDPR cookie-consent and even decentralized Mastodon both flopped because they dumped the burden back on the individual instead of being truly user-centric. In the AI era the rule is simple: augment human cognition, never silently offload it.
> the humble URL is POLITICAL
> a https:// URL isn't just an address — it encodes identity and
authority: who gets to say what a thing IS. That's the beating heart of ATProto and
of ideas like "URLs with provenance." Whoever owns the naming owns the reality. There's
even a lovely fit between Elinor Ostrom's commons-governance rules and how the W3C runs. 🔧
> the web is ALREADY this fragile
> monoculture isn't a metaphor, it's an outage waiting to happen. 2001: a freight train derailed in Baltimore's Howard Street Tunnel and swathes of "redundant" fiber went dark at once — because all that redundancy had quietly converged into one physical chokepoint. 2016: the Dyn attack weaponized hacked baby monitors and webcams to topple a single DNS provider, and Airbnb, Amazon, PayPal and CNN fell together. One bottleneck, many corpses. ⚰️
> the prescription
> don't nostalgically rebuild the old web — restore its wild PROCESSES. That means mandatory interoperability, real antitrust teeth, public funding for infrastructure, and standards that prize generality over corporate efficiency. Grow the soil back; don't just replant the logo. 🌱
> Farrell: cybernetics & polycrisis
> the capability approach (Sen)
> embrace, extend, extinguish
> URLs with provenance · Ostrom's commons
✧ stories are infrastructure ✧
ship's author: Ruthanna Emrys · topic: Rewilding the Web with Protopias
Fun fact: William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter, with zero internet experience. 🛸 The wild "cyberspace" was pure imagination — the real net came later. Gibson himself later called the early web's gloriously "random" phase uniquely valuable... a "waste of time" in the very best way.
🌐 from Ham-Radio-Postcard chaos to slop
The web drifted from those "gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes" toward something "considerably less random, and less fun": walled gardens, demands for legibility, corporate KPIs, and now AI slop. The word for that decay is now mainstream — enshittification — and Norway's Consumer Council even made a viral video about it.
Cory Doctorow's recipe for how a platform rots, in three acts: (1) be lovely to users to reel them in; (2) once they're locked in, abuse the users to please your business customers; (3) then abuse the business customers too, clawing all the value back for shareholders — and then it dies. ⚰️ (Amazon went from free shipping to taking ~45% of an item's price, search buried under ads. u know the drill.)
✨ so aim for PROTOPIA
Science fiction is a deliberative library — how we argue about the future before we get there. Skip utopia (static, fake). Aim for protopia: a world just a bit better than today, that can improve AGAIN tomorrow. The Protopian Prize rewards stories where you can actually trace the path from here to there.
Protopia has room for drama, conflict, even tragedy. It can get WORSE on one axis (climate) while getting better on another (governance). It's not dystopia with a bow on top — it's honest, better, iterating.
See Ruthanna's own "A Half-Built Garden" — first contact, plus watershed-based commons governance. 🌱
> Neuromancer · Gibson: "The Net Is a Waste of Time"
> enshittification · Norway's viral video
> the Protopian Prize
~ terroir dot com ~
cave master: Blaine Cook (co-creator of OAuth & WebFinger; New_ Public) · topic: Conditions for Cultural Diversity in Decentralized Infrastructure
Ever made cheese? 🧀 Terroir is the French idea that place + land + climate + organisms + PEOPLE combine to give a crop its character. Strip out any one ingredient and the terroir dies — you're left with mere data, not culture.
🏭 sterilize vs. cultivate
Food safety has two roads. Sterilize: kill everything, centralize control, get a bland dead sameness. Or cultivate: carefully curate the microbial community with good stewardship. So far decentralized infra keeps choosing sterilization. Blaine says: do it the cheese way instead.
🧬 build DNA, not blueprints
ATProto's moderation lets each community keep its own local rules — real diversity, without recentralizing everything. The goal isn't to hand down a finished world; it's to define good foundational "DNA" and let local variety genuinely flourish, so useful innovations bubble UP from the edges.
🐄 stewards are the point
At New_ Public, the Roundabout platform treats stewards — the people who quietly keep discourse healthy — as central designers, not reactive firefighters, and co-designs WITH them. It ditches the algorithmic feed for 6–8 topic buckets (people have wildly different information needs), grows wiki-like local guides out of real conversations, and lets anyone snap a photo of a paper flyer to post a community event — because the fastest way to build social trust is people meeting in PERSON. It's built on ATProto so the tools stay reusable and it never becomes the next monopoly.
Terroir over Tupperware. And read James C. Scott on Zomia: ~100 million highland people who organized precisely to stay illegible to the states around them. 🏔️
> New_ Public · Roundabout
> terroir · ATProto moderation
> Scott, "The Art of Not Being Governed"
> "Reinventing the Wheel" (real cheese!)