By Suzie Gray
As digital spaces increasingly mediate the way in which we interact with ourselves and each other, I argue that this dynamic flow of human becoming within digital spaces crystallises as events or spectacles. Attention quickly shifts from one topic or individual to the next; quickly observed, reacted to, and circulated. Content creators are encouraged to perform in a way that perpetuates this cycle with appeals to emotion and rapidly following trends. This is by design, enabled by practices of the online attention economy.
In this article, I’d like to highlight an alternative way of engaging in online spaces as a Zoefuturist practice: the act of creating and maintaining Digital Gardens. These online environments are sites that eschew homogeneity of design or corporate branding, showcasing the personal touches of their creators. Visitors are allowed to carve their own paths (within reason) through these lightly curated spaces that share knowledge and information.
Digital gardening is an act rather than a platform. Examples of these include repositories made on Obsidian, Quartz 4, and sites made on Neocities. The latter can be seen as a nod to website creators on Geocities during the early 2000s; as some might call a different time before the monetisation of online platforms. So how did we get here?
Yanis Varoufakis (2024) makes a distinction between what he calls Internet One and Internet Two; the former he describes as a “capitalism-free zone… a centrally designed, state-owned, non-commercial network.”[1] Emerging from the research project ARPANET (The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, now DARPA) in 1969, this early internet relied on global co-operation by using common/open protocols that were freely available to all participants. What Varoufakis terms as Internet One was a distributed network that was maintained by academic collaboration and public institutions.
However, while the protocol layer remained open, firms within this ecosystem needed sustainable revenue models. With the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s, the digital world had suffered a boom/bust and needed a way to maintain itself. Surviving firms had to prove durable profitability over hype to investors. A pertinent example of this is Google, which over time managed to stay afloat with a model that would change the way we would experience digital and physical spaces. This marked the start of an economic structure focused on the commodification of behavioural prediction: Surveillance Capitalism.
Shoshana Zuboff (2019) states that this was both unprecedented and unbelievably powerful; under the guises of gamification and “free” onboard services, the rendition of our digital behaviour is cloaked in a veil of secrecy. Every click, scroll, and hover becomes the grammar to what she labels the “shadow text” of our characters, producing patterns of user behaviour to sell products back to these generated profiles. These structures, now normalised, begin to take on a more dramatic turn:
Surveillance capitalists’ interests have shifted from using automated machine processes to know about your behaviour to using machine processes to shape your behaviour according to their interests. In other words, this decade-and-a-half trajectory has taken us from automatic information flows about you to automating you.[2]
I theorize that the Ludopticon, a surveillance structure that I have coined as a portmanteau of Ludo, Latin for “I play” and Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon; a physical structure that would enforce strict social behaviour by means of its design. A central watchtower would be erected to make sure its inhabitants always felt that they were being surveilled; they, in turn, would self correct. Byung-Chul Han (2017) explains that unlike the physical panopticon, digital surveillance is aperspectival; lacking the blindspots from analogue optical systems.[3] Secret wishes, thoughts, and desires can be rendered from our subconscious scrollings, harvested from apps whose sole design is to keep you engaged and present. I argue that the Ludopticon has given us a share in compensation in the forms of public platforms and financial opportunities, as long as we keep feeding the machine. Our feelings, behaviours, and thoughts become converted into instrumental values; emotional hooks to drive engagement and value to shareholders.
The increased relevance of social metrics and its conversion to currency created a whole new market; a digital village square where we willingly opt-in to sell our personal selves for a public one. Not only do we play the casino of constant offerings, but we create the panels in the slot machine. This digital performance that thrives on consistency (not only of the act of posting but the topics involved) can reflect our daily lives on and offline. Similar to how a digital audio workstation (or DAW) can quantise raw notes to fit a digital tempo, our behaviours become more easily managed and predicted.
As the use of AI agents becomes more commonplace (bots that can predict our behaviours and make actions on our behalf), what is the end goal to this slow erosion of agency?
Zuboff explains that the goal could be the “right to the future tense” that is being taken from us. It is uncertainty that is incompatible with this model of capitalism:
Uncertainty is not chaos but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense. We choose the fallibility of shared promises and problem solving over the certain tyranny imposed by a dominant power or plan because this is the price we pay for the freedom to will, which founds our right to the future tense. In the absence of this freedom, the freedom collapses into an infinite present of mere behaviour, in which there can be no subjects and no projects: only objects.[4]
In many cases, certainty has its benefits in terms of safety and security; but this is in exchange for our freedoms to the benefit of the market. Surveillance capitalism creates a profile of its user through behavioural surplus who, by means of the Ludopticon, is optimized to be consistent in order to be favoured by the platform’s algorithm. The Ludopticon is therefore at odds with a person’s growth or becoming. They remain frozen within Zuboff’s “infinite present”; defensive and reactive. As patterns of behaviour online can translate into our ways of being offline, the sequence of render and predict can lead us into a world of divided apathy, constructing our own sense of algorithmic determinism or fate.
Inevitablism, Zuboff explains, is the act of relinquishing control in the midst of a manufactured determinism; a concept that “enshrines the apparatus of ubiquity as progress but conceals the realpolitik of surveillance capitalism at work behind the scenes.”[5] So what can be done to combat this, to what she calls the “right to the future tense?” How can we be in control of our timelines, our right to be a process rather than a product?
Enter Zoefuturism, inspired by Zoetology which was coined by Roger Ames. Taking its name from the Greek word Zoe for life (ζωή, zoí), Zoetology explores change as fundamental to nature and provides a world of “boundless becomings.” Inspired by Ancient East Asian philosophy, Ames explains that: “This cosmology is grounded in living (sheng 生 ) as the motive and existential force that enables change, where the ongoing transformation of things is driven by the very nature of life itself to optimize the available conditions for continuing growth.”[6]
How can this apply to technology?
Yuk Hui (2024) explains that “We have to accept that there are a multiplicity of technological thinkings. The process of modernisation is a form of colonisation. Modernisation implies a homogenisation of knowledge and world views.”[7] As a stark contrast to Zuboff’s inevitablism, the link between technology and homogenisation/colonisation can be severed. Maybe our understanding of technology can exist outside of the binary between utopia/dystopia as showcased in many works of Science Fiction; falling somewhere in between, taking into account the multiplicities of minds and values. Han mentions how the canon of this literature has shaped our ideals about the future: “More and more people are trying to understand our future through science fiction. “I find this really disturbing. I’m a big fan of science fiction, but I find this problematic because it means that we fail to analyse our concrete situation.”[8]
One such space that resists the urge of engagement and the frozen present of the Ludopticon is the Digital Garden. Started decades ago in the era of the early internet, this topological space encourages the integrated and transformative present; each seedling of thought is evergreen as it expands and connects through links of information. Maggie Appleton (2020) explains that:
They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing. It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of how websites “should be.” It’s an ethos that is both classically old and newly imagined.[9]
Appleton mentions that the first recorded mention of these digital structures was the 1997 essay on hypertext gardens; written during a period where non-linear navigation and hypertext links were being experimented with. Early web adopters and creators were imagining a balance between agency and mystery: people had the freedom to explore but with signposts in case they became overwhelmed.
I argue that these signposts of agency are being eroded in favour of algorithm–driven incentives. If information is curated for you based on your past behaviour, there is no need to actively seek out new creators or topics. When content is increasingly created and curated for the format of the infinite scroll (Tiktok, Youtube shorts, Instagram reels), there is no need to stop the slots rolling. However, either extreme can be detrimental. As Mark Bernstein mentions in the essay “Hypertext Gardens,” “Today’s Web designers are taught to avoid irregularity, but in a hypertext, as in a garden, it is the artful combination of regularity and irregularity that awakens interest and maintains attention.”[10]
Mike Caulfield (2015), considered the founder of the Digital Gardening movement,[11] described the two different modes of interacting online being the “stream” and the “garden.” Cauldfield explains that the garden exists as a topology of space; it doesn’t collapse into one set of meanings or fixed sequences. If you imagine walking in a physical garden, you choose your path through it; each visitor will have their own unique experience and viewpoint. As an example, he highlights the presence of a bridge in this imagined space and how, within the context of the garden, its meaning is created by the visitor and not just the architect:
The bridge is a bridge is a bridge — a defined thing with given boundaries and a stated purpose. But the multi-linear nature of the garden means that there is no one right view of the bridge, no one correct approach. The architect creates the bridge, but it is the visitors to the park who create the bridge’s meaning. A good bridge supports many approaches, many views, many seasons, maybe many uses, and the meaning of that bridge will even evolve for the architect over time.[12]
The garden, then, can be seen as an example of this Zoefuturist mindset; a fluidity and multiplicity in the act of becoming, allowing cross networks of growth. Repositories of information that resist the extractive structures of platform monopolies are curated in platforms such as TiddlyWiki, Obsidian, and Roam Research. The stream, however, is described as a force that collapses all context into a narrow timeline of events. He explains that:
In other words, the Stream replaces topology with serialization. Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.[13]
Caulfield refers to Mikhail Bahktin’s concept of the utterance when tracing the origin and narrative of the stream; in order to understand a statement in the stream, you have to turn to the chain of events that led to this result. Not only must you consider what was said but who is saying it; but in the world of the Ludopticon where people exist and perform as brand, where emotional engagement and outrage can be converted into an attention based currency, we can see how things can quickly go awry.
However, Caulfield is not calling for us to abandon the stream entirely, stating: “I can’t stress this enough. I’m not here to bury the Stream, I love the Stream. But it’s an incomplete experience, and it’s time we fixed that.”[14] The solution may be then, to spend time cultivating as well as conversing; creating iterative content as well as material to be disposed of or reacted to.
Interestingly enough, it could be the choice between choosing and not choosing in the moment; the multiplicity of the online experience and becomings that may be the formula to reclaim our autonomy in the digital world. The balance between active and passive, between talking and listening should be paramount for community growth and, with a multiplicity of online tools at our disposal, maybe we can find the form that allows the organic flourishing of many voices and minds.
Digital gardens would, of course, be only one such example. Other avenues to access might range from peer-owned server co-ops, communities that own and govern their own internet infrastructure, to federated platforms like Mastodon, a decentralised social network that distributes control across multiple servers. If we consider these forms as viable alternatives, then these can be the soil from which organic structures can grow with less dependence on Big Tech. As Voltaire said in Candide, “we must cultivate our garden.”
Works Cited
Ames, Roger T. Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy. State University of New York Press, 2025.
Appleton, Maggie. “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.” Maggie Appleton, 2020, https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history. Accessed 26 July 2025.
Bernstein, Mark. “Hypertext Gardens.” Hypertext Gardens: Virtue of Irregularity, 1998, https://www.eastgate.com/garden/Virtue_of_Irregularity.html. Accessed 26 July 2025.
Caulfield, Mike. “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.” The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, 2015, https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/. Accessed 24 07 2025.
Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso Books, 2017.
Hui, Yuk. “Yuk Hui: “We are living in a gigantic technological system.”” CCCB LAB, Interview by Victor G. García Castañeda, 16 April 2024, https://lab.cccb.org/en/yuk-hui-we-are-living-in-a-gigantic-technological-system/. Accessed 26 July 2025.
Varoufakis, Yannis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Vintage, 2024.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2019.
[1] Yannis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Vintage, 2024), chap.3, Kobo.
[2] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile Books, 2019), 339.
[3] Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso Books, 2017), 56.
[4] Zuboff, 336.
[5] Zuboff, 226.
[6] Roger T. Ames, Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2025), 4.
[7] Yuk Hui, “Yuk Hui: “We are living in a gigantic technological system.”” CCCB LAB, Interview by Victor G. García Castañeda, 16 April 2024, https://lab.cccb.org/en/yuk-hui-we-are-living-in-a-gigantic-technological-system/.
[8] Hui.
[9] Maggie Appleton, “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.” Maggie Appleton, 2020, https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
[10] Mark Bernstein, “Hypertext Gardens.” Hypertext Gardens: Virtue of Irregularity, 1998, https://www.eastgate.com/garden/Virtue_of_Irregularity.html
[11] Mike Caulfield, “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.” The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, 2015, https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
[12] Caulfield.
[13] Caulfield.
[14] Caulfield.
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