The current effects of people, particularly life scientists/naturalists/environmentalists reaching adulthood who grew up during the dawn of the world wide web (a more specific thing than 'the internet' in general), and furthermore, 90's hacker culture, is really interesting. I haven't seen it talked about much, at least in popular culture, as it seems so many of us are still working through the problems bestowed upon us by the splitting of nature/culture, artificial/natural, etc. As someone who currently works in the nature-based education realm, I often have felt hesitant to bring up how much I (and my fellow Queer Nature co-founder) both, in different ways, grew up immersed in technology and don't have a strictly negative critique of it. To bring some of this aesthetic, somatic, and intellectual lineage into the light, I wanted to share a poem I wrote about "Coming of Age in Cyberspace" a few years ago.
"Coming of Age in Cyberspace
I grew up in an unfurling wilderness
of interconnected machines
—the 90’s.
No one taught me to hunt deer
so I hunted for modems,
memorized the tones of
analog phones
instead of bird song.
Carrier signals
were like the calls of rare
and elusive
creatures
obscured by a vegetation of wire.
IP addresses
glowed on screens
like footprints
winding through terminals of text,
laying trails
that could be followed.
.
No one taught me to dream with the earth
or be possessed by the spirits
of the animals,
so I was haunted
by the strange wildness
of networks.
A virtual ecology
with its own terrain
yet animated by that original pump,
the heart.
In a brilliant dystopian mythos
the disembodied soul
was the animal I hunted,
the one whose movements
I longed to understand.
.
Eventually, after years
of tracing circuits
with my finger
like braille
—the promise of meaning
looming in the dark—
I found a path
leading back
(or maybe forward?)
into the eco-system
a green world
of soft borders
and furry logic.
.
Trailing a deer
in desert twilight
we became spirits
chasing the horizon
like a dream.
Cloven tracks glow darkly
on the sand,
their magnetism
like the static fuzz
of those glass screens
that flooded the bedroom
of my youth
with foreign light.
The medium
has changed
but the potent dazzle
of mystery
is the same,
and the green-tinged window
to the Other-world
remains.
.
it was a network
of machines
that taught me
relationship is the
magical substance
of our world."