Talk: (Re)configuring the Network Utopia: Ansibles, Internet & Ecological Cybernetics | Anja Lind |Social Ecology Summer Gathering 2025 | 27th September 2025

Reconfiguration of the 'network utopia' in Ruthanna Emrys' A Half-Built Garden

Tracing the history of the 'network utopia,' from its configuration in the critical utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 The Dispossessed and Norman Spinrad's 1980 Songs from the Stars, responding each to Cold War tensions with the imperative for free, open and expansive communication as an inimitable component of unbuilding walls, unsettling hierarchies, and, in the last analysis, avoiding catastrophe. The networks in these novels are not only textured by nascent developments in computing, but by the particular rise in cybernetics and its deep application to ecology after the Second World War. It is impossible not to read these novels today from the vantage point of the internet, a manifestation of their call for unbounded communication that has become anything but utopian. It is the urgent task of social ecological thinking today to reconfigure the network utopia in a way that remains emancipatory, to salvage, that is, the utopian imperative from the networks of internet and cybernetics both. Such a move, I argue, finds paradigmatic expression in Ruthanna Emrys' 2022 A Half-Built Garden—a reconfiguration that does not try to avoid the inevitable biases corrupting networks, but builds for them consciously. Emrys imagines a network that is itself ecological, and one that, in turn, helps produce a social ecology.

Panel: Recovering the Utopian Imperative 

Moderator: Brian Tokar (ISE, Central Vermont)

Talks: Brian Tokar (ISE, Central Vermont); Max Puchalsky (Solarpunk Surf Club, Lexington, KY), Anja Lind (TU Dresden)