That atrophy is something I consider often, not with regard to my own use necessarily, but how this comes back to the short-termism I hope we can collectively overcome. More often than not, these tools sell us on efficiency and productivity to save time in the here-and-now (with a vast majority of AI serving corporate interests); but if they create long-term atrophies in the future like muscles that need to be intentionally worked out in a new creative gym, then it's like we're solving problems with the same way of thinking that got us here in the first place (one of my favourite lines, attributed to Einstein). To be humane today is to be slow and intentional and surrounded by context, like a forest in perpetual growth within cycles of life and death to allow for renewal. Being 'left behind' in some ways is a choice to be part of the forests can grow slowly and strongly together in the fragments that decided not to become caught within the madness or atrophy of the centre. Being sold acceleration with no pause, removes the creative process and we must fight for it by protecting the places where we can mutually be in that space together. Think alternative spaces online, like the cosy web and its' communities or offline communities that are reciprocal and supportive in some way (basically, non-extractive).

As a geographer, I am always curious in the linkages between human behavioural dynamics that can be found within ecosystem dynamics. In ecology, an ecotone is the transition zone between two ecosystems – think between forest and grassland, land and sea, riverbank and terrestrial terrain. 'Edge effects' often indicate how these zones can host greater biodiversity, produce higher species interaction, generate novel behaviours and adaptations, and contain both cooperation and tension as sites of instability and emergence. In complex adaptive systems, innovation rarely comes from the centre, rather it comes from the margins, because margins are less regulated, less optimised, and therefore allow mutation. Yet in studying edge effects, we often see that these mutations without support collapse.

Historically, artists occupy similar edges. They live and work in economic peripheries (warehouses, temporary studios, informal venues, illegal spaces) often preceding urban redevelopment in what’s known as the “creative class” paradox. They sit between disciplines (art, design, science, technology, activism) and function as translators between dominant systems. In this sense, artists inhabit cultural, economic, and political ecotones: spaces of heightened interaction and possibility, where new forms emerge, but where precarity mirrors the instability of ecological edges when they are not structurally protected. With this in mind, I ask if and how emerging technology might be designed and deployed to serve humanity in this way?

Teju Cole