Fossil Poetry #3: Cloud/Ecosystem
We’re back again with our third edition of Fossil Poetry! This time taking on two different words: Sophie takes us upwards with “Cloud” and Yi-Ling delves into the weeds with “Ecosystem.”
"Book from the Ground,” by Xu Bing
Yi-Ling (Ecosystem):
When I think of the word “ecosystem,” the first image that comes to mind is a lake in the woods — swampy, rich with algae, duckweed and all kinds of strange creatures trying to live together.
Ecosystem implies a shared space and interdependence; it derives from the Greek word oikos, meaning “home.” It was no surprise that I was fascinated by the word in college (so fascinated that I wrote an entire teary-eyed commencement column of the same title.) Campus was an enclosed lake — a messy and fluid swimmy-web of connections, —with everyone densely linked by one degree of separation. “What does your social ecosystem look like?” I used to ask people all the time. Or in other words: Where is your lake in the woods? Or: Where do you belong?
More than a year later, I find myself taking a dip in a lake and figuring out my place in a much larger ecosystem on the opposite end of the world. And here, in Beijing, China, the word has been repurposed for a drastically different context — the landscape of the Chinese internet.
Digital eco-system. Start-up ecosystem. Venture capital eco-system. I might roll my eyes at the next person who extols the virtues of WeChat as a giant, integrated ecosystem. But it’s true, you can do everything on the app, i.e. message people, split the bill and hail a cab but also rent a house, book a karaoke session and get divorced. To friends who have never visited the country, I like to show this NYT video, which animates Chinese cyberspace as — surprise, surprise — a swamp.
The Chinese Internet is an enclosed ecosystem, operating by its own murky rules, opaque to the rest of the world. And the opacity is a problem, because within the Great Firewall, nearly 700 million Chinese netizens are interacting on a handful of platforms, churning out data — algorithmic fuel and fodder for technologies we haven’t even begun to understand. If you’re worried about the power of Google, Amazon and Facebook, start thinking about the trio of domestically-nurtured swamp monsters — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — that will unsettle the global Internet ecosystem in more unpredictable ways.
And those who do know about Chinese cyberspace, understand it through one of two narratives: 1) The story of a China rising. (Ripe for innovation, the country is a goldmine of shiny gems for aspiring VCs to monetise.) 2) The story of a China as Black-Mirror-esque wasteland (the Big Bad authorities and its oppressed citizens on its way to doomsday.)
Both narratives speak in cold numbers, emphasise the monolithic and overlook the particular. They ignore the funky outgrowths: blockchain chickens and the shared basketballs, the countless stories of rural farmers live-streaming their stock to earn extra cash and the aspiring writers launched into fame via serialised online novels.
They suck the humanity out of it all, leaving behind the bed of a lake — dry, barren and devoid of life — when the reality could not be further from the truth.
Sophie (Cloud):
My iCloud storage has run out; my phone keeps reminding me to buy more. I already own a chunk of iCloud but I feel resentful about the idea of buying more space to store photos I don’t really need but can’t bear deleting, and apps I barely use.
What is The Cloud? It’s easy to forget. Something about the word for it allows it to retain a kind of mystique. It sounds extraterrestrial, nebulous, immaterial. It sounds like a dreamy concept, because clouds themselves are dreamy. Cirrus, nimbus, cumulus, stratus—these are words from a middle school science exam that still hold a kind of wonder. They have nothing to do with The Cloud.
In fact, cloud computing is earth-bound, tied to software and servers, often provided as a consumer service by giant companies. It is a way of accessing your data on any device, often using a web browser. Clouds are not free-floating; they’re often sold to you in little pieces, like physical storage space.
The tension between The Cloud, the idea, and clouds in practice—the iCloud, for instance—is related to some of the failed promises of the internet, or at least how it has failed to meet our great expectations. We want to believe in the boundless freedom of the world wide web, a kind of Wild West of open digital space. This is not the reality; it is, like the actual West, much more complicated. It is divided up; it is bought and sold; it is owned.
Writing and Reading
SH
I wrote for The New Yorker about the weird phenomenon of pop-up museums, and for Garage Magazine about video games as Art. And for Popula, I wrote about the social media app Nextdoor and vigilantism between neighbors. I’ve been reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Olivia Laing’s Crudo, and feeling weird resonances between the two.
YL
I wrote for Guernica Magazine on Chengdu hip-hop artists navigating the Great Firewall, for Popula on navigating Beijing life and love (aka Tinder) with a Virtual Private Network, and for STAT News on the rise of genetic testing services in China. I’ve been reading Kai Fu Lee on the future of artificial intelligence in China, listening to this podcast featuring homie Chef Lucas Sin on the changing narrative of Chinese food. Also enjoying “Orlando” by the fav bae Virginia Woolf as well as “The Mysteries of Pittsburg” by new bae Michael Chabon.