The internet needs ecologists

Not just engineers.

This is a guest essay by Matthew Prebeg for Internet Sovereignty, nine writers exploring the future of the internet. Collect the essay collection as a digital or print edition. 👇🏻

It was the third grade, a run-of-the-mill afternoon. Our science class was interrupted by a guest speaker—an employee from the national park on the other side of town. He took time off work to talk about ecosystems to a couple dozen chatty kids shifting in their seats, waiting for the bell. I must admit, I was surely no more engrossed than the others in his lecture about energy flows and nutrient cycles. That is, until he pulled a bottle from his briefcase.

A 2L plastic bottle, probably once filled with Pepsi or some other form of liquid gold. It was now packed with soil, rocks, moss, a few small plants, and who knows what else. Mr. National Park explained he built a closed terrarium: a self-contained ecosystem that mimics Earth’s water cycle to sustain the life inside the bottle without any outside interference. He said it hadn’t been opened in 3 years. 3 years! That’s, like, an eternity in kid terms. To third-grade me, he was a god holding the world in his hands. It was pure magic.

I went home, begging my brother to get off the family computer so that I could google everything I needed to know about making my own terrarium. I gathered my supplies: a printed WikiHow article, one of my mother’s mason jars, and an assortment of Outside Things I gathered from the garden. I stuffed the jar, sealed the lid, set my terrarium on my bedside table, and waited. Unfortunately for third grade me, all the plants became shrivelled and gray after a week or so. The gardening forums told me it was root rot, or mold, or the wrong plants, or a combination of everything. Watching that tiny world fail was my first lesson in how fragile ecosystems really are. They’re precise. Every part depends on every other part, and any small disruption ripples outward.

Fast forward to the winter of 2024. I was asked to give my first lecture as part of a new social education program in the city. To me, art and science were two sides of the same coin. Julian Klein, the head of Institute of Artistic Research Berlin, describes research as a process of not-yet-knowing, and the desire for knowledge—an experience that surely applies to the arts as well. He explains that art and science both exist in the same cultural space, on the balance between tradition and innovation.

The lecture was titled The Internet’s Root System, an exploration of how our digital space functions as an ecosystem, and what hidden life sustains it. I was pleasantly surprised to hear it had reached capacity. To meet interest, I hosted the lecture as a free webinar, which had more than 250 registrants. It was clear: people wanted to know how to rethink their relationship with the internet and learn how we may tend to it as a system of care.

Eventually, I aim to develop a comprehensive guide for how to care for our internet ecosystems. Here, I will share an amuse-bouche of sorts as to why learning from nature is more important for our digital selves than ever.

The internet’s root system

I wouldn’t be the first to describe the internet as an ecosystem. In fact, tech bros love nature metaphors to domesticate technology. Data flows, attention streams, growth driven by venture capitalists is organic. Nature is emotionally soothing, and using its metaphors removes moral responsibility. It lets tech companies present human-made systems as inevitable environments, rather than the contested political spaces they are. In the article The Environment is Not a System, Tega Brain explains how the oversaturation of these metaphors in technology changes how we think about the ecological world. It makes environments seem knowable and optimizable, inviting technological interventions that claim to “solve” environmental issues. Brain draws on Anna Tsing’s conception of environments as open-ended assemblages, where “the question of how the varied species influence each other—if at all—is never settled.”

Perhaps the value of the term ecosystem is as a pedagogical tool, rather than an ontological one. Although subject to oversimplification, ecosystems invite us to think about interdependence, diversity, and fragility of the spaces we occupy. In my work, I think this is especially important for our digital spaces. The internet has completely overhauled what it means to connect with humans and non-humans. It is a space where interactions between different players are constantly shifting and culminate non-linearly. In fact, the field of platform studies reveals the abundance of ways that the “thingness” of hardware and software shape our media landscape, from concepts like platform time to connective memory. Further, in Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace, Sue Thomas explains that humans have a tendency to make sense of complexity through nature metaphors, which may actually reinforce our connection to nature and contribute to a greater tech-nature balance. Despite its limitations, seeing the internet as an ecosystem is a starting point to engage with its complexity and realize the role of care in sustaining it.

What do we know about ecosystems?

Coined by British botanist Arthur Tansley in 1935, an ecosystem refers to a space where organisms interact with their environment. Tansley rejected ecological terms that were prevalent at the time, such as “complex organism” and “biotic community,” because these did not fully represent the interactivity between living and non-living components. In The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts, he described the fundamental conception as “the whole system, including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment (p. 299).”

Ecosystems are dynamic. They are subject to constant change and lack predefined edges. Tansley described ecosystems as mental isolates; arbitrary objects we categorize for the sake of understanding. One ecosystem may overlap and interact with one another. As much as a forest can be an ecosystem, so can a single oak tree. The question is: does the internet qualify as an ecosystem? Well, if ecosystems have no predefined edges, then we can interpret it as one for the sake of understanding.

In The Closing Circle: Nature, Man & Technology, ecologist Barry Commoner describes four laws of ecology: (1) Everything is connected to everything else, (2) Everything must go somewhere, (3) Nature knows best, and (4) There is no such thing as a free lunch. These laws provide us with a lens to ask questions about how the internet collectively behaves, and we want to behave within it. Let us walk through each law, and explore how the internet exhibits it.

Everything is connected to everything else. Online, nothing exists in isolation. Each platform, algorithm, community, and user influences one another. Take the rise of TikTok and short-form video: the creator economy reorganized itself around it, and so did the way we consume media. Celebrities and brands began to overhaul their marketing schemes to be digital-first, and suddenly the Duolingo owl is commenting on every popular video. Shortly after, other social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube adopted the same format for their Reels and Shorts. In the span of 6-8 years, short-form video content completely changed our digital public spaces, not by itself but by rippling throughout the ecosystem.

Everything must go somewhere. One of the greatest tricks of modern information technology is the illusion of ghostliness. In Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the paradox of software: how it is both visible and invisible. Interfaces make things look simple, but underneath them are complex systems designed to store, track, and make everything retrievable. Software also structures social life and transforms how we behave and make choices. Even in the sense of all software being reliant on hardware—like cloud memory stored in data centres—digital traces persist.

Nature knows best. Although an increasing proportion of our digital spaces are owned by “Big Tech” corporations (more on this later), certain behaviours emerge in uncontrollable or unpredictable ways. Fandoms, for example—communities of fans who bond on social media over a particular celebrity or topic—often evolve organically. Memes often go viral randomly, without influence. Like in the physical world, subcultures, norms, and communities emerge in response to sociocultural undercurrents. The rising distrust in Big Tech, and the subsequent developments in new platforms and online discourse, is a prime example of how emergent behaviours resist top-down control and reshape the digital ecosystem.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Every action has trade-offs. Although most social media websites are monetarily free to scroll on, you’re paying with your attention and data. You watch ads, or engage with sponsored content, and platforms collect usage data to improve their platforms and, sometimes, sell. Just like natural ecosystems, the internet is a culmination of its resources.

Cultivating technobiodiversity

As mentioned, it is no surprise that there is a growing weariness in Big Tech corporations, like Google, Netflix, and Meta. Numbers vary by report, but estimates suggest they account for 40-60% of global internet traffic. Of course, this is concerning. Concentration of control at that scale means that a handful of companies—without our best interests necessarily in mind—have tremendous influence over what we say and share. Outages and other infrastructural vulnerabilities have large-scale effects, cutting off access to services we have become dependent on. Algorithmic systems influence our personal wellbeing by shaping our attentions and reinforcing social biases. It often feels scary, and for good reason.

Though, we may also critique the narratives that reinforce fear and helplessness, that tell us the internet is doomed, which stand to benefit from the same neoliberal systems they criticize. Like in nature, ecosystems are fragile and subject to external pressures, and dynamic and resilient. It’s possible, and perhaps necessary, to critique the structures that govern our digital ecosystems while also zooming out to see the creativity and community that thrive despite this.

When I think of the internet, I think of all the incredible, creative, and talented people I have met—yes, even through social media. I think about the poetic web and the imaginative and experimental projects that artists and designers have made. I think about the vast array of open-source knowledge available beyond borders. I think about the messy, scary, corporatized spaces, and how communities have emerged to navigate and resist them. As the title of my lecture alluded to, this is what I conceptualize as the internet’s root system—the unseen networks that sustain life online. And it’s what keeps me logging back on.

Ultimately, ecosystem thinking is a reclamation of our digital public spaces. It’s a refusal of inevitability, of helplessness. These spaces play a crucial role in the ways that we organize, socialize, advocate, and experience culture. Without them, without an ecosystem, we limit the diversity of voices, practices, and experiences that emerge in the commons. Allowing these spaces to erode would lose us the dissent and solidarity that reveal our values as an online community. And listen: we have a lot of work to do. Our public spaces are far from perfect, but they are worth saving. To think like an ecologist is to stay engaged, to pay attention, and to steward the internet toward a more human and resilient future.