A Short Introduction to Feral Technology
We can make living things.
There are virtually no rocks in the upper Amazon headwaters. No stones nor ore, just an expanse of sediment, rivers, plants, and creatures in closely coupled cycles of respiration and recomposition.
I know this, because over the last 3 years, I've spent time with people and organizations there to co-develop technologies and economic frameworks in service to indigenous sovereignty and ecological regeneration in mega-diverse zones.
One trip, we visited a waterfall or "cascada" a few miles from where we were staying. Waterfalls are rare in that region, and thus particularly significant for the people who call that region home. The reason for their significance comes from the fact that the geology along this section of the Pastaza River is comprised of deep alluvial and fluvial sediments with little to no surface-exposed rock. The splash and gargle where hard exposed minerals punctuate the path of a stream creates a poignant locus for connection and reflection admist the dense and unrelenting humid green.
Narratives around technology and social progress are closely entangled with material culture --the patterns of how we form and reform our sense of ourselves through the physical substrates that make up our world. It's a familiar progression through silica and metals, often expressed in the chapters of archaeology textbooks, and floor plans of natural history museums. We march in pages and footsteps through the mineral lineages that define the prehistory of technology. Stone, bronze, iron... All of them more or less hard and inert, defined by their docility and malleability to our will.
But where there is no bronze, there is no bronze age. This region of the upper Amazon leaves no evidence of progressive technology to eyes whose vantage is shaped by this metallurgical narrative of progress. Yet, the people living in this region have iterated and refined cultural and technical practices unique to their context for thousands of years.
The case of the upper Amazon invites us to consider a lineage of technology expressed through a fundamentally different medium. Rather than advancing through the hardening of matter, it emerges from the chemical and mechanical semiotics that plants, fungi, and creatures use to communicate with one another. Over generations, an immense diversity of living compounds—toxins, inhibitors, stimulators, and signifiers—has been orchestrated, refined, and made useful. The vessel for this technical experimentation is not the forge or the factory, but the space of ritual and ceremony—a kind of tool in itself.
The idea that technology is fundamentally multi-linear—that it develops along many paths, not just one—is the basis of cosmotechnics. It holds that every technology arises from, and is shaped by, the cosmology of a particular people and place. In this view, technology is not universal but plural: it takes on different forms depending on the worlds it emerges from.
In this example, rather than a inscribing life onto inert substances, the cosmology of technology is fundamentally participatory with other living systems and beings. Rather than using the chemical and physical properties of the elements to drive engines (think the "engine" in "engineer"), technology is expressed as structured patterns of meaning and interaction between subjects which includes, but is not exclusive to, human beings. Rather than a technical lineage as first and foremost a motive force to drive the world, technology is a process through which we communicate and see the world.
The reason this is all relevant is because in the 21st century, our dominant technologies—especially computers—are increasingly oriented not toward brute force or mechanical motion, but toward perception, communication, and coordination across subjects. While we still rely on power and motive force, much of what technology does today involves transmitting signals, interpreting patterns, and facilitating interaction between human and non-human subjects. It’s high-frequency networking and pattern recognition, not assembly-line mechanics. In this light, we have much to learn from a lineage of technology that differs from the one most of us were socialized to believe was the only path.
Cars are helpful vehicles to unpack this evolution. Where once we had a combustion engine that pushed people around, we increasingly have an agent, sensing, computing, and networking where and what it is. Effectively brains on wheels. The example of the upper amazon, is a unique lineage of a kind of cognitive technology which feels highly relevant in an era of networked agents and emerging synthetic intelligence.
Lineages of technology in the West are diverse in their own right, and so the point here is not to make caricatures of western vs indigenous cosmotechnics. The point is to offer, however humble, that multiple lineages exist, and that by honoring and nurturing these many traditions we might comprehend our present moment with greater grace and clarity.
This is what makes me interested in the notion of Feral technology. Feral technology is a kind of practice of weaving many lineages of technology together. It invites us to imagine a paradigm of technology and computing that is not complicit with a worldview based on domestication. It doesn't work a 9-5, and its not native to corporate office parks. This is because feral technology is not a service provider, but a means to be better sense and communicate with the world we are within before its too late. It invites us to explore lineages of technology based on anything other than domesticating the world, because it turns out the technology we have built is serving people to corporate interests. What is a technology that isnt a service? What lineages of technology persist, and are not complacent with modernisms dualist edict between people and the environment?
In the process, we might discover that we need a whole world of expressions to explore the degrees and shades of what we presently call artificial... because if we make it, inevitably it is alive and "natural" in some way. We can make living things—we have been for a long time. We can acknowledge that we live in a time of profound synthesis, where many lineages of technology are coming together, and celebrate the diversity of cosmologies they reflect. I think the dire conditions of our present moment require us to.
If you are interested to take a deeper dive into feral technology, check out “Queer Servers and Feral Webs”.
End Note : For the sake of brevity and tone, I’m not populating this work with the scholarly citations, but it deserves them, and I’d like to do so a longer piece in the future that pays better homage. Many people have been thinking about this.
Yuk Hui invented the term cosmotechnics, and has written on the topic thoroughly.
Claude Levi Strauss developed a great deal of in depth thinking in this domain… particularly with “sciences of the concrete”.
Eduardo Kohn explores semiotic networks of communication in Ecuador in “How Forests Think”. There are many more, but consider this a
David Graebber and David Wingrow have challenged linear mythologies of prehistory in their book “Dawn of Everything”.
What is a technology that isn’t a service? Communication and connection, perhaps?
Wow, thinking of the valences of Amazon naming itself Amazon