Nature as Ecological Infrastructure

Abstract

"I have already said that we think like the world; now I am saying that the world thinks like us." — Michel Serres A number of problematic, all-too contemporary terminologies have emerged of late to attempt description of conditions on a planet Earth that has been rendered the object of human manipulations. In the ‘anthropocene', which precipitates and is precipitated by the ‘technosphere', the earth is manipulable, informational and mediatic relations to nature are turned into an infrastructureal relation of access and exchange. This just as human infrastructures proliferate at reticular scales, making them seem more and more ‘natural.’ Our activities of communication and networking, signal-derivation and algorithmic computation provide ample empirical conditions wherein the difference between the materiality of biospheres, lithospheres and hydrospheres and the media, signaletic and ‘cultural' activities of humans tends toward the in finitesimal. Specifically we witness with increased frequency places and spaces where ’technical infrastructure’ and ‘environmental ecologies’ interact, are antagonistic or are indistinguishable. Our all-over informational environments of data and our situated, earthly geologies of media and communications overlap in a thinking of the world as what it always has been: in-formation. The increased frequency of encounters between nonhuman ecologies and media infrastructures (sharks and undersea cabling, cloud computing servers and actual clouds, AC power transformers and magnetoreceptive ants) recount a geopolitic of the nonhuman and technological that is as violent as it is revealingly constructive. These are ambiguities that need to be operationalised, subverting and reorienting techno-capitalism toward more equitable, polyvocal and ecological means and ends.