a-life and online nature

Cyberspace habitually adopts the image of nature. Gene Youngblood proposed ÒThe Intermedia Network as NatureÓ in 1972; twenty years later Douglas Rushkoff coins the ÒdatasphereÓ and populates it with viral memetic replicators. A handful of parallel devleopments suggest that somehow, these metaphors are being literalised. The web has been infested with a population of agents, virii, bots and crawlers; virtual spaces have begun to sprout artificial life, and a-life itself has begun to talk about the net as a prospective habitat, a virtual ecosystem. 

Implicit in these phenomena is an unstated fantasy of virtual nature, an online garden formed as two imaginary spaces merge Ð as cyberspace meets the simulation-space of a-life. At its most extreme this fantasy promises a virtual Eden infused with evolutionary autonomy, a space with all cyberspaceÕs aspirations to be ubiquitous, communal and transparently accessable. It would mean an end to cyberspace as an artefact, a construction; rather it acquires its own internal, natural logic. This would be the ultimate garden: a natural space where nobody gets hurt; plentiful, complex, immersive and utterly benign. We could safely thrill at its autonomy, its emergent behavioural surprises, because it would be safely, computationally caged. And this fantasy eliminates the uncomfortable conflict between the forces of capital and the wellbeing of nature; in fact, capital buys computer power, and with more power you get more simulated detail, higher resolution, a richer artificial ecosystem. Virtual nature can be unproblematically bought and sold: the lion lies down with the lamb: a-life thrives beside secure credit-card transactions; our computers serve banner ads and render foliage while they burn fossil fuel.

Attacking this fantasy is easy because itÕs an overstatement, a rhetorical overconstruction, an attempt to solidify a nebulous conjunction. But whatÕs interesting about a-life is the way the ideas underlying it slip away from this critique, based as it is on an opposition between the artificial and the natural. The dynamics of complex systems, their properties of self-organisation and emergent structure, suggest an immanent machinism, a way of understanding the flows of matter and energy which simultaneously produce ÒnatureÓ and ÒcultureÓ. A-life in this paradigm is just another self-organising flow, tightly connected to specific flows of culture, technology and capital. Contemporary net.culture uses a-life as a container for a romantic, idealised notion of Nature; the imaginary online Garden grows as naive toy-natures intersect with the rush towards life in cyberspace, and answer cybertopian desires for an anthroponature. But the more cyberculture invests in a simulated life-space the more it will be distracted from the dynamics of its own concrete life-space, and the complex processes which ground one in the other. 

mitchell whitelaw
mitchell@symbiotic.org