This article draws connection between the two parallel ecosystems we live in - the garden and the internet. The author, a website designer, questions the materiality of the latter, where the reality of cloud storage and computing is far from that of a natural "cloud-like" occurrence.

"It is underpaid workers. It is environmental damage. It depletes the environment that holds it and all of us in order to feed the growing network of the internet and its architecture."

While we reminisce on the early HTML days where "digital gardening" was a common practice, Horobin-Worley poignantly points out that mainstream digital and media platforms have taken over these capacities and premises, shrinking the size of our digital worlds, despite the illusion of better connectivity.

I found this paragraph particularly illuminating to my own digital usage over the years. "Early pioneers used HTML to craft love letters, shrines, rants and erotica. From cyberfeminist collectives, to Geocities, to MySpace, people cultivated their own spaces like their own little patches of real estate on the web. And the idea of ‘digital gardening’ itself is not new. Yet the average person’s relationship to the internet has become more and more passive, and our digital world smaller, with more than half of EU web traffic going through just 6 companies."

Harriet Horobin-Worley ⋱ Anne Lee Steele (are.na)