Encountering the Technological Frontier

What nature can reveal about our digital environment.

Recently I had the opportunity to go on an overnight hike on the Appalachian Trail.

While I was out there, I was struck by what it must have been like to be in that place when it was unmapped and unexplored. To walk across the landscape and not know what lay around the next tree-covered hill, to not have a path to walk on, to stand at the crest of a mountain looking out across the range, and not know what lay beyond the horizon.

That lead me to think about all the people that traveled that same path before me to that place, that even out there as “in nature” as I ever am, that the whole experience is mediated by all the equipment and knowledge of those who have gone before that I relied on to be able to do a hike like that. That I'm only setting foot where others have already gone, and I that thanks to technology I can view the whole thing with a birds-eye perspective and a clear destination. Even in nature, even with my phone tucked away in airplane mode (gone are the days where simply going into the mountains meant you didn’t have a cell signal) it’s nearly impossible to escape the perspective shift that technology has afforded us.

But to go out there into the mountains I had to leave a world that is unexplored. Every day in modern life each of us is navigating a landscape that nobody has traversed before. A digital landscape that holds its own dangers, its own unique features. One that is alive with creatures that behave in ways we don’t completely understand and are constantly changing. The landscape itself might be crafted by humans in its individual components, but as a whole, it is unmapped and untamed.

Out on the trail, I was living closer to the way most humans have lived throughout history- following in the footsteps of those who have gone before, finding our way in nature. It felt out of the ordinary and adventurous for me.

But coming back here to the Anthropocene and Technopocene, I am an explorer. We are all explorers, charting new territory. Space was not the final frontier— We face a new digital frontier, one that snuck up on us because we played a role in its creation, and that we’re only recently realizing we’re woefully unequipped to face.

There is no guidebook, there are no trails. We stand on the crest of the mountain, looking out across the range of our technological future, and none of us know what lies beyond the horizon. Together we must plot the course and find the path.