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Moving Beyond the “Natural vs. Synthetic” Binary
The 2024–2026 Consensus and the Emergence of Technonature
The conceptual framework of “sustainability” has reached a point of decay. The binary that once structured environmental and technological discourse—“pristine nature” versus “technological environment”—no longer functions as a viable ontology.
Within contemporary philosophy of science, digital geography, and media theory, a different consensus has consolidated: the human is already a cyborg, and the environment in which this cyborg operates is best understood as Technonature (or Digital Nature).
The Human as Cyborg
In media theory, the figure of the cyborg has been operative since Donna Haraway’s
A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). Haraway demonstrated that the boundary between organism and machine had already been dissolved—not as speculative fiction, but as material and political condition.
Gilles Deleuze’s later formulation of the
dividual (Deleuze, 1990) extends this insight: the indivisible individual of disciplinary societies gives way to a subject distributed across networks, data streams, and algorithmic agents. What remained philosophical in Haraway has become everyday infrastructural engineering. Biosensors, AI agents, and continuous digital footprints no longer operate as metaphors; they constitute the operational substrate of agency and subjectivity.
Technonatures / Digital Natures
This dissolution of the nature/digitalization binary is formalized in recent work in digital geography, most notably the 2024 special issue introduction
Digital natures: New ontologies, new politics? (Luque-Ayala, Machen & Nost, 2024).
The digital, the authors argue, does not merely mediate a pre-existing Nature; it actively reconfigures the ontological status of the natural itself. When thirty thousand plants, soil microphones, LiDAR arrays, and a multi-channel sound system are integrated into a single computational engine—as in the Qualia Ibiza garden (Bibo Park)—the resulting assemblage ceases to be “a garden augmented by technology.” It becomes a paradigmatic instance of technonature: an environment in which biological and technical agencies are no longer separable.
Multi-Scalar Instances
Three cases illustrate the scalar range of this condition:
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Micro: Charlie Gerard’s
Overgrown browser extension (Gerard, 2026), in which abandoned tabs are progressively colonized by algorithmic vines until the user must actively intervene.
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Meso: Qualia Ibiza / Bibo Park, where botanical mass, sensor networks, and spatial audio converge into a unified bio-computational system.
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Macro: BioReverb Mangroove (NOTEP, 2026), a live sonification of mangrove electrical signals in Thailand, rendering the forest itself an active sonic agent.
Research Vectors: Cyborg Botany and Material Ecology
At the MIT Media Lab, Harpreet Sareen and Pattie Maes have developed Cyborg Botany—a practice that inserts microelectrodes and conductive polymers into the vascular systems of living plants, converting them into sensors, antennas, and interfaces (Sareen, Zheng & Maes, 2019). The 2026 review
Cyborg plants are coming to a city near you (Ramirez, 2026) situates this work within emerging urban infrastructures, where plants function not as decoration but as distributed environmental sensing systems.
Parallel to this, Neri Oxman’s Material Ecology (Mediated Matter Group, MIT; MoMA retrospective, 2020) shifts design methodology from biomimicry—the formal imitation of organic structures in inert materials—toward direct co-authorship with living agents: chitosan, mycelium, bacteria, silkworms. Computation and biology are treated as co-constitutive rather than hierarchical.
Colony versus Extraction
The biological pattern is instructive: bacteria and fungal spores do not persist as isolated units; they form colonies. This same tension—between colonial organization and extractive hierarchy—reappears across domains.
Jason White (@microbes_vibes), former Head of R&D and Fermentation at Noma, articulated the paradox from within one of gastronomy’s most celebrated institutions: the aesthetics of microbial symbiosis on the plate were sustained by an extractive regime applied to researchers and interns (White, 2026; see also Moskin / New Yorker coverage, 2026). White’s subsequent practice—building open fermentation laboratories and transnational networks for the circulation of fermentation knowledge—reorients the field away from vertical extraction toward distributed, colony-like infrastructures.
An analogous shift is observable in machine learning. Corporate foundation models remain extractive by design, training on the farming of scraped data under centralized control. In contrast, frameworks such as PopuLoRA (Castanyer et al., 2026) instantiate population-based asymmetric self-play: dynamic cohorts of “teacher” and “student” LoRA adapters co-evolve under verifiable rewards, generating open-ended complexity without collapsing into local maxima. The architecture explicitly models co-evolution rather than unilateral optimization—functioning, in effect, as a computational mycelium.
Conclusion
The choice between “natural” and “artificial” is no longer available in either spatial or digital environments. We already inhabit Technonature, and we ourselves operate as its cyborg agents.
The critical task is therefore not the defense of an external Nature against digitalization, but the design of colonial rather than extractive systems—whether biological, computational, or institutional.
Sandbox mode / onwards.
References