Trail Trials

Cycling is one of the most efficient modes of transport there is. On a flat, smooth surface, the effort required to cycle is almost negligible. Mountain biking, by contrast, is a sport involving the use of bicycles on terrain unsuitable for bicycles. It can qualify as an ‘extreme sport’, at least insofar as it entails risks of injury and even death, when going down a mountain rather than up. Naturally, it requires a few thousand pounds of specialist equipment, not to mention lycra clothing. God forbid that one should take an ordinary bicycle to a mountain – one lacking suspension, disc brakes, titanium this, specially reinforced that, and Shimano the other – or wear street clothes.

There are, I imagine, many schools of thought as to what mountain biking is all about. To me, unqualified though I may be to comment, if one takes a bicycle to a place unfit for bicycles in order to test one’s bicycling skills, then there should be in the mind of cyclist a degree of acceptance of the unsuitability of the terrain. In other words, rather than wishing the terrain were other than it is, the ‘true’ mountain biker negotiates it successfully through their exceptional dexterity and mastery of the bicycle. If you’re going to wish the terrain were different, then surely you would be better off cycling elsewhere than in the, for want of a better word, wilderness.

An alternative perspective on what mountain biking is all about is evidenced by the introduction of special mountain biking trails in areas fortunate enough to feature appropriate topography. Here, what there is of ‘nature’ is simply a backdrop to a manufactured cycleway that has been engineered to provide the cyclist with the means to self-administer a dose of adrenalin. Berms, jumps, table-tops, and drop-offs are all constructed and maintained, and at quite some expense, with the usual justifications of providing an ‘experience’ and a ‘destination’ that will boost the local economy, put the location on the map, and so forth. Multiple such trails then compete with each other for the attention of the local, regional, national and even global community of adrenalin-junkies to parade their respective equipment, lycra, sunglasses, death-wishes and mid-life crises. Were it not for the skills and mastery of the bicycle that are also required to navigate them without injury, such trails might as well be roller-coasters. Both are fun, though.

This is what ‘nature’ can become. Not a place to be, not a place to adapt to, but a place to be adapted so that people can have a thrilling ‘experience’ from educating themselves to risking their lives, usually signed by some idiotic flapping sail-shaped signs and accompanied by a cafeteria, gift shop and/or visitor centre. Somewhere to ‘go to’ with your bikes strapped to the roof of your SUV, wearing special clothes you wouldn’t wear every day. Or which you do wear every day as a sign to others that you’re the kind of person who might head off on an adventure at any minute, or have just come back from one.

The two different attitudes to mountain biking, then, reflect a fundamental dichotomy in how we relate to nature as humans. In one, we learn to accept what is there and work with it. In the other, what is there is not good enough, and we change it so that it fulfils its ‘purpose’ to us better. The former is how we live in nature and see ourselves as part of it; the latter is a trail to the ecocyborg we have already ridden a long way along.

Cognition and Hypocognition

With my colleague, Bruce Edmonds, I have finally managed to publish a paper mentioning the ecocyborg. Putting a concept that has, to some extent been something personal, into a scientific article — particularly a co-written one — felt a bit like an ‘exposure’. Was this thought something that could withstand the scrutiny of peer review? Seemingly yes (though not without major revisions…).

How on earth did I end up writing the piece with Bruce? The context is a special issue of Futures on ‘Simulation and Dissimulation’ put together in the Covid crisis, in which various governments from local to national used computer simulations as part of the decision-making process. Though a potential source of consternation, it seemed important to emphasize that decision-making processes not using simulation are no less potentially flawed. After all, in complex systems, whatever makes us think humans necessarily have the cognitive wherewithal to make ‘the right’ decisions? ‘Hypocognition’ is a term apparently coined by social anthropologist Robert Levy in a study of Tahitians. It has been adopted by Kruger and Dunning to describe the psychological phenomenon in which people with insufficient knowledge can overestimate their capability. It is where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes from. It seemed a bit hypocognitive to implicitly assume that humans would definitely make good decisions without computers by raising the issue of dis-simulations in the first place. (Not that we should necessarily trust computer simulations any more than we should trust other humans…)

That’s all very well, but where does the ecocyborg come in? Once we accept that we need to augment our cognition with computer simulations, we have crossed a line. Computers have become embedded in decisions about humans’ relationships with the environment. We think and behave differently in the environment as a result, and the environment itself is then other than it would have been had we not used computers. This isn’t necessarily full ecocyborg yet, but it’s certainly a step on the path.

It felt a bit like a ‘revelation’ that there were no social-ecological systems as such — when microplastics exist at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the top of Mount Everest, and in placentas, technology has embedded itself everywhere. Just as there are no ‘pristine’ ecosystems untouched by humanity, there are no ‘pure’ social-ecological systems untouched by technology. That seems to be a radical claim to make, but I realize as I write this that I believe it.

The surprising bit of the article to me was the conclusion. It was Bruce who wrote the text for the concluding sentence of the article, “An alternative to being prejudiced against these strange new beings is to embrace them and educate them to be well-adjusted and useful members of our society.” This was so different to my instinctive reactions, which I think could be largely characterized as fear and grief. But however much we may be afraid of the power of technology (most major human innovations from agriculture to the internet have been the subject of anxiety) and grieve the loss of Nature, there needs to be an acceptance that we are all, through our daily choices and behaviours, eliminating Nature, changing the climate, and radically altering our relationship with the environment. Wouldn’t it be better to do that mindfully, rather than by ‘accident’ as a by-product of making our lives more convenient and comfortable? And if our minds are not up to the job, is it so wrong to augment our cognition with computation?

Becoming gods

The other day I was a virtual attendee at a workshop in Colorado. The main topic of discussion was ‘climate intervention‘. Climate intervention is deliberate human activity aimed at changing the climate – typically with a view to ameliorating the effects of climate change. There are various technologies that could be used for this purpose, from planting trees through injecting chemicals (such as sulfur dioxide) into the stratosphere, to putting giant reflectors in space.

I was not ready for the impact the discussion of all this would have on my emotional state. Though I have attended academic events on the general theme of sustainability for several years, this was the first climate change specific event I’d been to. Though I see from my smartwatch data that my heart rate was no greater than normal when working, I did find myself experiencing a rising sense of panic. A lump was in my throat, and I could not settle in the evening. I did not want us to undertake these interventions.

Neil Stephenson‘s book ‘Termination Shock‘ explores a scenario around geoengineering. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but the main point I want to make anyway is that this meeting I was attending was essentially discussing seriously something that has been the subject of a relatively recent science fiction novel. Neil Stephenson foresaw the metaverse in my favourite book, Snow Crash. I hope Termination Shock isn’t another dystopian prophesy.

The motivation for undertaking such drastic action is clear in the opening passages of another cli-fi book, The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. These passages contain a scene in which millions are killed by a heat wave that is unsurvivable without air conditioning, which leads to a power cut. We concentrate a lot on temperature when discussing the climate. It is 1.5C we are trying to limit ourselves to, and when we fail as we are expected to do before the end of the decade, every 0.1C of mean annual global surface temperature increase we prevent is still important. No mention of humidity, however, which is important for two reasons. First, increasing mean annual temperature and increasing humidity are expected to coincide as warmer air can hold more moisture. Second, the combination of heat and humidity is what kills us through hyperthermia.

So-called ‘wet bulb’ temperatures above 35C lead to the human body being unable to cool itself through sweating, and breaching this threashold is made more likely through climate change. Of course, it’s not like a 34.9C wet-bulb temperature is fine, and 35C is fatal. Heatwaves with 28C wet bulb temperature led to high excess deaths in Europe. However, 35C wet bulb is the point at which even a healthy person cannot maintain their body at the right temperature due simply to the laws of physics, with death in hours.

There is, then, a risk as the climate warms, that more parts of the world will become uninhabitable to humans without appropriate accommodation and technology. Since higher humidity is associated with coastal areas, where many of the world’s largest cities are located, these problems will be faced by more populous areas, creating pressure for migration, building and infrastructure design, energy use, technology development, and geoengineering. Essentially, we build ecocyborgs in these areas, people living there run away to more inhabitable parts of the world, and/or we modify the whole world’s climate in the opposite direction to that we’ve been doing since the Industrial Revolution. Of these, only migration avoids choices that entail learning how to make uninhabitable areas inhabitable on the kind of large scale that would be needed for humans to live on other planets than Earth. Our behaviour is putting us into a corner in which ecocyborgs and planetary-scale geoengineering become necessary for our survival.

Non-sense

A bear’s sense of smell is several hundred times better than a human’s. An eagle’s eyesight 4-5 times better. Birds can sense the earth’s magnetic field. Dolphins, bats and elephants have amazing hearing. The superior senses of various animals to those of humans emphasize to me how much more embedded they are in their environment. If we do not sense our environment in such depth, we cannot process information about it. If we cannot process information about it, what are we perceiving? How ‘off’ can our perceptions be and us still expect to survive in the environment?

Living ‘in’ the environment rather than ‘on‘ it means perceiving it in depth, and responding to those perceptions. Yet in comparison with non-human animals, it seems our perceptions of the environment are anything but deep. However, there is a fascinating podcast about spiders I highly recommend. In it, we learn about how a spider’s web is part of its ‘umwelt‘, an extension to its body that enhances its perception of the environment. The web is, in other words, a part of the spider — even if it seems separate. Technology has done the same to us. I can know about a fire or a flood on the other side of the world through the internet (the World-Wide Web). That web is part of my umwelt, and my senses extend far beyond the immediate environment my eyes can see, my skin can feel, my nose can smell, or my ears can hear. In a way, technology has corrected for the lack of sensory depth provided by nature. If I so choose, I can learn about the environment from the microbial to the galactic, all through the internet. There is even a livestream of the view of the earth from the space station — something no non-human animal could ever have seen.

The separateness of the spider and its web emphasizes a further point: while we may see cyborgs in sci-fi as the melding of meatware and hardware, there is in fact no need to go as far as surgical implants to become a cyborg. We can extend our umwelt through physical interaction with external technology. Thus, using technology, be it a land-line phone, radio, television, or the internet, already makes us cyborgs: our sensory perceptions have been enhanced; neurones in our brains are storing knowledge we could not access without these technologies, as well as information on how to use them. Humans began to become cyborgs with the invention of the telegraph.

There is another, more interesting lesson from the spider and its web. Unlike spiders, we share the technology used to extend our umwelt. Hence, in a way that was never possible previously, our umwelts intersect. Specifically, if a web is part of the spider’s sensory machinery — not to be seen as separate from the spider, and the internet is similarly part of ours, then since we don’t each have our own internet, we are now parts of each other, and the internet has made us so. Our consciousnesses are now interconnected. This is an astonishing thing for me to find myself writing — a sort of techno-mysticism (I am not the first to coin that term).

To separate us from the internet is to deprive us of a sense, like losing a sense of smell. But more than this, it deprives us of a connectivity with each other that is now part of our everyday existence. No wonder people joke about WiFi (and, funnily enough, battery life — something only a cyborg would worry about) needing to be added to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I suggested earlier that we can have superior, deep, senses of the environment through technology, emphasizing ‘if we so choose’. The internet also contains a huge amount of material that is nothing to do with sensing or learning about the environment; indeed it contains active misinformation, as well as fantasy. The internet can be used to escape from the environment rather than perceive it in greater depth. It can subsitute our senses of the environment with senses of alternative realities — non-sense. These alternative realities are now parts of our realities, affecting our neural wiring, discourse and behaviour. As much as the internet can enhance our awareness of the environment, then, it can also enhance our misperception of it, and how ‘off’ our behaviour is, as I raised in the opening paragraph. The question remains, then, of whether we can still expect to survive in the environment…

Dysembodiment

When I first encountered mind-body dualism as a philosophy, I pictured monks frustrated with their bodies wishing their minds could be dissociated from them so that they could avoid the ‘temptations’ associated with ‘the flesh’. Supposedly ‘pure’ minds are not troubled by the need for food and water, thermal comfort, sexual fantasies, or urgent needs to defacate while trying to concentrate on something. No wonder religions tend to idealize a disembodied afterlife where our souls persist after our flesh decays. Remembering that, in evolutionary terms at least, the various parts of our bodies are the emergent products of networks of interdependent collaborations among cells that have specialized their functions, it is not difficult to imagine that one part of the body might become irritated with the behaviour of another. But mind and body seem to be a particularly vulnerable fault line.

When I become ill, or my tinnitus worsens, or whatever internal pipework in my face it is that means I hear my breathing rather like the space-walk scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I feel that irritation intensely. Sometimes, there is even no bodily provocation for such irritation at all. I have wished I didn’t have to breathe, that my heart would stop beating, that I didn’t need sleep, or that my body would cease causing me the discomforts associated with the symptoms of illness. If I had a robot body, for example, then a malfunctioning part could simply be replaced using a few spanners and a bit of solder. It would be a routine occurrence, perhaps as part of an annual service one could do oneself, rather than some major, potentially life-threatening undertaking requiring specialist skills.

The experience of some form of dysembodiment, as we might term a persistent desire to inhabit a different body, is prevalent in contemporary society, and causes significant psychological discomfort, and in the worst cases, severe mental illness. The concept of dysembodiment cannot distinguish among the sources of the problem: be they in the mind, the body, the environment, or some combination of these. For example, a long-term medical problem that might make one wish one had a different body could be caused by an inherited condition, stress, social norms about what people’s bodies should look like, and/or pollution. Whatever the cause, the issue would be addressed by living in a different body. Though I could hardly say I suffer much from dysembodiment, when I do find myself whimsically wishing I had a different body because of some inconvenience or another, I tend to imagine it being a machine rather than flesh. Why replace my body parts with some other randomly emergent meat, as opposed to carefully designed, precision engineered, and, critically, replacable and perhaps even upgradable machined parts?

Another alternative could be to do away with embodiment altogether. However, if we imagine brains as information processing machines, ‘pure mind’ is computation with no physical engine making it happen — I cannot conceive of a means by which such a thing would be possible. If this isn’t just my limited imagination, but a fundamental law of the universe, then one way or another, embodiment is something minds must accept in order to be minds at all. Then, if nothing else, increasing entropy means that the body will decay. Bodies allow minds to exist, but they also malfunction and need maintenance, which irritates minds and makes them wish they didn’t have bodies.

Time Travel

Einsteinian physics apparently tells us to conceive spacetime as a single concept rather than space and time as distinct. Even so, it seems to be the case that we can choose to travel in space in a way that we cannot do in time. The human sensory experience of spacetime is, at first glance, one in which there are at least practical differences between space and time as concepts.

Storm Arwen, which swept down the UK from the north on Friday 26 November 2021 gave me an opportunity to look again at the experience of space and time. Winds gusting at 150km/h and more from an atyical direction (gales usually come from the southwest) blew trees down near powerlines, and hundreds of thousands of people, including me, lost electricity for several days. The trees’ suicidal protest against the ecocyborg saw them entangling themselves in wires, posts and transformers throughout Scotland, but especially in the northeast.

The loss of electricity meant different things for different people, but for me: no lighting, heating, hot water, cooker, internet, television, or mobile phone signal. Burning wood in the open fireplace provided a little heat, and we could toast crumpets on the fire. Candles provided a little light in the long nights of the late Scottish autumn. The Storm had taken us back in time over a hundred years, to when houses had no electricity.

While the ecocyborg frantically repairs itself to restore what we might laughably (given its unrecognizability to our ancestors) call ‘normality’, it doesn’t need to take a storm to travel back (and hence also forward) in time in similar ways. Mobile phone signal coverage on various bands means you can travel in space and go back to a time when you couldn’t stream films on a mobile phone, further back to when you could barely use the internet, or further still to when communication of any kind with a mobile phone was not possible.

Travel further in space, and you can reach times when households in the UK typically had no electricity. For millions of people, mainly in the Global South, life without electricity is just life. Access to safe drinking water is also a daily reality for one in three people globally, while two thirds of children aged 3-17 have no internet access at home. Hence, from a sensory experience perspective as humans, we can travel to the future and to the past simply by moving in space over the surface of the planet.

Clearly, people have lived, and do live, their whole lives without facilities that I take for granted, and find myself struggling when they are taken away. The technology permeating our everyday environments changes who we are, what we do, and what we expect. It shifts our skillset and adjusts our thinking. We are physically and mentally different as a result of technology in comparison with a counterfactual world where that technology is absent. Technology, through supposedly empowering us, also changes us: it is not, then, our pre-technology selves that are empowered; that self ‘dies’. Rather, it is our post-technology selves that are empowered – who that self is, is a function not only of the pre-technology self, but also of the technology itself, and in ways we do not control.

At some point, we may find ourselves in a position whereby the pre-technology self cannot be rediscovered. For example, if we did not have a fireplace in our house, or anywhere outside where a fire could be lit, or indeed anything to burn, or if lighting fires were illegal, then we could not ‘rediscover’ selves that used fire rather than electricity to keep warm and cook food; the skills and knowledge would eventually be lost. This critical threshold is the transition to cyborghood, and we become entirely dependent on the ecocyborg to maintain us. We are simulacra, being simulated on the ecocyborg.

3%

The Brazilian dystopian sci-fi series 3% imagines a future where selection for a life of luxury (as opposed to one of squalor for the 97%) is based on a supposedly meritocratic ‘Process’ taken by twenty year-olds each year. The Process reminded me of taking exams and going to job interviews, with the Krypton Factor and the Hunger Games thrown into the mix. The desperation to succeed, with all that meant for a relatively easy life, is certainly reminiscent of the pressure young people are put under to find their place in society. Thankfully some of the more sadistic and potentially fatal elements of the Process are not typically part of the process of getting qualifications and a job in contemporary society.

But I was less interested in what might be seen as a commentary on our shared ‘belief’ in the system that ends up with a few having lives of privilege and many not. It was the architecture that fascinated me. The Wikipedia page on 3% says the location for filming scenes depicting the Process are at a stadium in São Paolo called Neo Química Arena. The Process is brutal — it seems amazing the eponymous 3% who make it through don’t spend the rest of their supposedly privileged lives needing therapy for PTSD. What I found interesting was how believable it was that such a Process could take place in the building depicted.

I doubt there are many buildings that have not, at some point or another, been the scenes of one or more acts of violence or dehumanization. But clearly, to me at least, some buildings provide a context in which such things are more plausible. There’s more to it than that, however. While any house, even ones depicted on chocolate boxes, could be places where domestic abuse happens, only certain buildings get the special status of being places where systemic dehumanization occurs: where people are given identification numbers, and are measured, assessed, quantified, and traded off against each other. To me, rightly or wrongly, such buildings are scrupulously tidy, with glass, concrete and steel much in evidence. There are long corridors, big spaces, high ceilings, and the audible ‘clop-clop’ of power-dressed women strutting about in high-heels.

Does architecture beget violence? At the risk of tripping myself up over Godwin’s Law, Nazis (and fascists generally) had distinctive architectural styles, as indeed did Stalinists. Minimally, it’s supportable that architecture and politics are not orthogonal. Space can be used to manipulate your feelings. Maybe large spaces make you feel smaller. Often you have to be careful what you say in such spaces because the sound carries so well. These diminish your ego that bit more — you restrain yourself; who knows whether that might be just enough to topple you over into docility? Perhaps tidy spaces make you anxious about your humanity — the shed skin, hair, snot, burst spots, sweat, farts and earwax you cannot help but leave in a trail behind you everywhere you go. And you adopt behaviours and routines that diminish that anxiety in response; behaviours you would not otherwise have done. The design of the space has made you do that. The architect has controlled you without ever having met you.

Interestingly, however, research by Stephan Trüby reported in an Archinect article points out that right-wing extremists often like remote rural areas, where they can enclose themselves away from the multicultural complexity of urban life. The same article also cites a study by Neeraj Bhatia correlating population density with support for Hilary Clinton in the 2016 US election, and lack thereof with support for Donald Trump. Indeed, in the UK, the results of general elections when depicted on a map often look like a sea of blue (the colour of the Conservative Party) in rural constituencies with a few dots of red (the colour of the Labour Party) in urban areas, even when Labour wins.

Are we then to infer that rural scenery — forests, meadows, marshes, mountains, bogs, lakes, hills, rivers, beaches and fields — somehow inspire right-wing sentiments? Is God a Tory? Nature can make you feel small, but not in a way that is dehumanizing, I think. At least the ‘trail’ I referred to before that you leave behind you is welcomed in natural environments as something will feed on your detritus. I suspect other factors are at play in why rural areas have more right-wing politics. But then, can I sustain the argument that buildings can turn us into compliant little fascists?

Before rushing to the conclusion that violence is everywhere, regardless of space, and besides observing that the emotions and feelings natural environments inspire in us should not automatically be seen as ‘good’, it’s worth asking about the alternative. If we can design spaces that make us violent, can we design spaces that make us peaceful? From a quick search of the internet, it seems this question has been the subject of a conference in 2019, and an initiative in California, with an interesting leaflet articulating some of the ways people are psychologically affected by space, and the potential for them to be discriminatory. Interestingly, that leaflet suggests that views of nature reduce stress and anxiety, making people less inclined to violence.

With apologies to those who are right-leaning politically, as I regret to say I cannot dissociate violence, dehumanization and environmental destruction with such views, it then seems all the more remarkable that those in rural areas would be more rather than less Conservative. I can understand a desire to conserve (with a small ‘c’) the nature that surrounds them every day, and perhaps the fear is that ‘others’ will destroy the nature they hold dear. Another view would be that insofar as such people are lords and masters of all they survey (even if that is just a large garden), they have lost all sense of anything other than themselves. Besides, rural areas are not all natural landscapes; instead (in the UK at least) they are mostly industrial. Nature is no less subdued by insecticides, artificial fertilizers, fungicides, weed killers, muirburn, ploughs and chainsaws than it is by concrete and tarmac. In that sense, rural is just another kind of urban — urban with different materials — and we should ask the same questions about the effects these environments have on our psyche that we do of architects and the environments they design.