Rewilding the Web

A poem by Audrey Tang

A button on my phone.

One word: “Migrate.”

~

I pressed it.

From Bluesky to W —

and I kept what mattered.

My posts, my follows, the years of conversation:

still reachable.

~

The ones who stayed could still find me.

The networks interoperate.

I left the forest and kept my friends.

~

The free software movement made one promise,

a long time ago: “free as in freedom.”

A path is that promise kept —

freedom of movement between networks,

without leaving your life behind.

~

And it is arriving.

Even the largest platforms feel it now.

“A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable,”

Satya Nadella has written.

~

So, Big Tech may pave the path itself.

Of course, it will.

A path costs the landlord next to nothing,

especially when it runs in circles.

~

But a path is not yet a living system.

~

Here, under one word — “Rewilding” —

is the part the platforms will never hand us.

Ecologists know how a degraded landscape bounces back.

You need redoubts, places kept wild on purpose.

~

We have those:

the sanctuaries of the early web,

the federated commons,

though for now you need

a kind of privilege to enter them.

~

You need paths, so life can reach them.

Those are arriving.

And you need one more thing.

The one everybody flinches at.

~

You need the carnivores.

~

Not the wolf on the warning label.

The ecologist’s wolves:

the pack whose presence rearranges a room

without emptying it.

~

You know the Yellowstone story:

the wolves came back in 1995,

and the story spread that they changed the rivers.

~

Ecologists still argue how much of that is true.

Strip away what is disputed, and the hard kernel holds:

the wolves changed where the elk would linger.

The elk stopped grazing the banks bare.

Presence, not slaughter, was enough.

~

The willows came back.

And the birds that could never fight

for their own ground

came back with them.

~

The carnivore the web needs

is us, organised.

Not the pile-on.

Not the lone wolf howling into the feed.

~

A pack is something else.

Ten people, finding the uncommon ground between them.

Then ten thousand, setting a public agenda:

showing up where the decisions are made,

from Taiwan to California.

~

It does not break the platforms.

It changes how they move — toward care —

because they can no longer fence in those

who are free to leave.

~

This is the part of “Rewilding”

no one can buy, download, or order for us.

The redoubts are being built.

The paths are opening.

The wolves, we become ourselves.

~

And becoming them was never the point.

Only what their presence brings back.

The wolf returns

for the weakest in the valley, not the strongest:

the willows, the songbirds, the banks made whole again,

for the ones who could never leave.

~

So, press the button, when it comes.

Then ask who still cannot.

~

A path is only real

when the grandmother

whose whole world is one family chat

can walk it too, and keep her neighbours.

~

We still have to build

the handrail she can hold.

Do not arrive alone.

~

The river came back.

It never came back for the wolves.

It came back for everyone who could not leave.

License: CC BY 4.0