If we want to bend tech towards people and planet, the study of soil can be our teacher, writes Greg Frey

By Compost Mentis Coop

Greg Frey: An Earthy Technology

IN London, a group of radical soil scientists, community food growers, and composters are setting up a mobile soil health clinic, called Compost Mentis.

They’re pooling knowledge, microscopes and other typically prohibitively expensive tools, to create a place where everyone can get to know their land more intimately. They’re asking, what other suboptical communities live here? How is our work supporting them? And what histories are hidden in the chemical compositions of this place?

I love this project. I love it for the obvious reason that helping people understand their world is always a good thing, but also because the project holds open some much-needed hope about the tools that mediate our interactions with the world.

I spend a lot of time hating technology. I’m always either utterly alienated by processes beyond my understanding, or I’m in strained resistance to some new form of dopamine-hacking screen compulsion. Tech-free idylls (a charming life in a lighthouse with only my books) beckon. In reality, the options are slim: either we attempt to drop out, and sacrifice many important parts of life now dominated by technology (like these rad New York kids) or—more commonly—we seethe and resign ourselves.

How do we crack this stalemate? Our soil lovers chart a path. Despite how deep down the rabbit hole we are, there are ways of approaching technology that might return us a little agency and even deepen our connection to the world.

The central lesson is that the relationships that surround the tools matter. The Community Soil Health Clinic is not a soil lab where people can send off samples to. Nor is it a university department to consult with. It’s a group of people with a shared need, organising to co-own the tools and skills to approach life in a mutually enriching way.

The clinic aspires to organise itself using cooperative principles, paying careful attention to how these tools can be made as accessible for as many people as possible.

At the centre of their project is opening up who gets to produce knowledge about land and for whom. Which means being open to the many different ways of knowing a thing. The taxonomising, dissecting, Cartesian kind will be only one among many. This is science—but collective, liberatory and open. It’s technology coopted to weave us back into the world. 

This approach has a lot in common with Donna Haraway’s calls for reclaiming technology in service to life. In the 90s, baffled by the resurgence of an anti-technological ecofeminist movement, led by pagan ritualists like Starhawk (no shade on the pagan ritualists btw), Haraway spelt out the ways that technology, despite being coded as masculine, has also always also been a tool for connection with and care for the world. We have always been entangled with the world via our tools. Or as she put it, we have always been cyborgs.

The problem from this perspective isn’t that we construct tools for mediating our interaction with the world. It’s who does it, how they do it and why. It’s also not that technology is politically neutral (lest we fall into the NRA’s ‘guns don’t kill people…’ bullshit). Our technology leads us into certain kinds of relationships with the world.

In our case, technology created by industries that seek to capture our attention for profit, tend to lead us towards individualised, compulsive and detached relationships with the world. But this is challengeable.

As James Bridle, an artist and writer on technology, explains in Ways of Being, published late last year, technologies designed for extraction or exploitation can be reappropriated to connect us with the world. To begin with, there are other hidden histories in the development of our most common tools that point to radically different possibilities for their use. 

There are forms of computing, for instance, that instead of relying on closed, binary systems, interact with the world in a dynamic way to enable much more open-ended, detailed and useful forms of knowledge.

For example, one machine Bridle describes, feeds data generated by voice records into motors which disturb a bucket of standing water. The patterns generated are then fed back into the machine which is much more easily able to process the patterned water than the raw voice data.

Or to get even weirder, there’s the computing capacities of Physarum polycephalum, a slime mould. This intelligent creature is able solve complex logistical challenges, like finding the most efficient route a subway should take through a city, which modern machines still finds extremely challenging.

Then there’s the tools which, although originally developed with extraction or domination in mind, are repurposed to serve connection. The internet, originally developed by the US military, was hijacked for utopian democratic purposes (although sadly it was then hijacked again by corporations).

And Bridle tells the story of the world’s most powerful telescopes, originally developed by the CIA to spy on the USSR during the Cold War, turned outwards to look into the most distant parts of the cosmos. 

These stories open up the world, and deflate the tired, cynical and defensive reaction to tech. If it wasn’t created in the image of extractive, profit-driven corporations or militarised states, technology could be something to get excited about.

If we think of technology as James Bridle says as “our interface with the material world”, then it becomes the “human practice which most closely ties us to our context and our environment.” Tech could be a tool to connect us to, rather than disconnect us from, the world.

These alternative histories become politically potent when combined with new, local, community-oriented forms of organising, to challenge the deadening machines we’ve been lumped with.

Cooperation Jackson, the radical black grassroots movement building a solidarity economy in Mississippi, knows this. Part of their program is de-alienating people from the technology that runs the world. They have set up community labs and cooperatives that teach people how to do 3D printing, coding and other kinds of engineering so that we are no longer at the mercy of a technologically skilled elite.

This is central to their project of building autonomous communities and a new economy based on solidarity rather than exploitation. In the UK we have similar movements for community ‘maker spaces’. Though there isn’t the same grounding in an economic transition that Cooperation Jackson has. It makes you wonder, how much could we achieve if we could design our own platforms and reclaim our networks? 

The idea of technology as facilitating radical connection and new forms of democracy isn’t new. In fact, it’s the same idea that seduced us into this failed revolution. The 90s utopia of a new networked era in human evolution has failed to materialise. We have woken from WIRED magazine’s californian dreaming to a new millennia of suicide in Chinese factories and a global teenage mental health epidemic. 

And in this aftermath we find that common symptom of revolutionary collapse: reaction. Not reaction as in responding to an event, but reaction as in yearning for a long-lost and stable social order. At its best, this is a way of finding refuge in a disorientating world (see the Cottagecore aesthetic): at its worst, it becomes entangled with a return to rigid and oppressive ideas of gender, race and social dominance (see Andrew Tate).

In a cruel twist, much of our online content is built to profit from reactions like this. William Davies nicely connects this reaction economy with the rise of reactionary worldviews. It’s not hard to see how it works: as we become more and more enraged, disconnected and disoriented by the algocratically selected stream of information, we long for a sense of order and control.

This longing is then temporarily sated, if not by regressive worldviews, then by quaint online retreats, all of which are turned into harvestable data points.

This is all very new but it also follows old patterns of extraction. The academics and tech justice activists Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias call it Data Colonialism. The way platforms are built puts vast parts of our social lives on the market for commodification.

It is enabling an unprecedented appropriation of human life, in a way that is analogous to colonialism’s historical theft of land, labour and culture. This, Couldry and Mejias say, could well be the early appropriative stage of a new form of capitalism that we cannot yet comprehend.

In light of all this, the loud anti-tech chorus makes sense. When popular environmentalist writers like Paul Kingsnorth lump technology, capitalism and colonialism all together as “The Machine”, I get it. Technology is so entangled with extractive capitalism that the two are almost indistinguishable.

Meanwhile, optimism about technology is the province of CEOs and ‘sustainability managers’ of global extraction who rely on it to justify their ransacking of the earth. Some future technological invention, they say, will save us from catastrophe, and in the process, (they pray) absolve them from their crimes against humanity.

I don’t want to get anywhere near that brand of techno-utopianism. But what do we cede when we throw up our hands in resignation? If technology is, at its core, just the tools we craft to facilitate our interaction with the world, what do we lose by abandoning and condemning any hope in these tools? And when we blame technology for our crises, like Kingsnorth, don’t we let the ruling classes off a little too lightly?

James Bridle, Donna Haraway and the Community Soil Health Clinic say we can do better.  There are still thousands of ways we can coopt, reassemble, and generally tinker with the tools that we have. So that instead of pacification, commodification and disconnection, they can help us connect with the rest of the world and help that world connect with us.

Front page of Compost Mentis website

I was talking to one of the organisers of the soil clinic recently and they described how the microscope, as well as being a tool for quantifying and categorising microbes in the soil, can also facilitate profound spiritual experiences.

It is one thing to know that in terms of genetic variation, we are vastly outweighed by the microorganisms we host. It is another thing to make contact with these organisms, to see them regularly, and to get to know them. This kind of experience changes your understanding of your ‘self’ in relation to the world, in a way that words can’t.

Since we’ve lost hacking culture to the entrepreneurial neoliberal, there’s a space for something new: a cautious, non-millenarian, dogged reclamation of these tools, with a militant attention to whether they’re connecting us or not.

We can reclaim a technology that, as Bridle puts it, “exemplifies and performs the most central characteristics of ecology: complexity, interrelatedness, interdependence, distribution of control and agency, even a closeness to the earth and the sky; on, under and out of which we fashion our tools.”

If you’re interested in getting involved in or learning more about the Community Soil Health Clinic please get in touch with them at soilhealthclinic@compost-mentis.com.

Greg Frey’s Substack blog is In The Belly Of The Whale, and you can financially support it here