 It's a real delight to have the opportunity to introduce Matthew Battles, who's a colleague at MetaLab. And I think your official title, well, we've changed it a number of times, but you're listed here as a program fellow, which is a nice sort of abstract description of what Matthew actually does as part of our group. But it really has been a fantastic experience to have Matthew as a collaborator. Matthew is a prolific author of really beautifully written and thoughtful works on a whole range of areas having to do with knowledge and institutions of knowledge. He's a well-regarded writer who has contributed to the Atlantic and a number of other fine monkees and as well as online context, the founder of High Low Brow, the author of the book that actually was, in a sense, the kind of occasion for our meeting and for his joining the MetaLab team, which is the Library on Unquiet History. And when John Palfrey and I started to organize our seminar at the Graduate School of Design at the beginning of this year, and we were hunting around for a really rich panoramic history of the library as an institution, I at least spent a fair amount of time being frustrated by what I found until I happened upon Library on Unquiet History. And Matthew was our first guest in that seminar, and he decided to stay around, which I'm delighted about. He's currently working on a book entitled Letter by Letter, is that correct? Which is a history of writing. You can see a kind of natural extension of some of the other interests. And also the author of a collection of short stories recently published, even more recently presented, right? He's the Sovereignty of Invention, and the title of our talk today has something to do with dogs, I believe. It does, yes, it does. But certainly the dogs and the larger question of the feral as understood in networked culture. Wonderful to have you here. Thank you, Jeffrey. Thank you. Yes, yes, I have a dog up on the screen here, and maybe before I go too far into this, I'm going to share this dog with you, and we'll see if we hear this unplugged in, but I don't think we hear it. But what you should hear right now is a whistling, a high kind of keening whistle on the air, and now the dogs are coming running. And the thing that you need to know about this, and about the title of my talk as well, is that it has to do with the feral. These are feral dogs in New South Wales in Australia, and I love this YouTube video. This was posted by an 11-year-old boy in New South Wales, and he's whistling on top of this hilltop, and the dogs are coming to him. These are dogs that are feral, I mean, they live in the wild. As I'll elaborate, feral has a particular meaning, and any even more particular meaning for me in the context of my experience of online culture that I'm going to try and share with you today. But it's this moment that is so important to me. This dog has a domestic pedigree, and that's what makes it a feral dog. Its ancestor was a cattle dog that was brought to Australia by English settlers in the late 19th century, and yet for generations it's lived in the wild. And still, however, it comes to this whistle. And it gets up here, and it comes up, as if it's coming up to the screen and has this kind of mingled curiosity and fear, which is how I often feel when I'm online. And so it was that video and that image of these feral dogs that began to typify for me a certain kind of experience of online culture. And it's an experience that I'm not going to try to elaborate a kind of rigorous theory for you about, because that's not how it's worked on me. As Jeffrey mentioned, this book that I've just published, The Sovereignty of Invention, is a short story collection. I've written fiction for a long time, but this is my first published volume of fiction. And there are stories that are kind of informed or inspired by a kind of particular experience of technology, the uncanny and the mysterious. I feel like it's, well I feel like I'm in a kind of hybrid place myself. I'm kind of a mongrel myself with respect to these dogs, because I've written a great deal about libraries in the sort of long-duray history of what libraries have meant, not only as institutions, but as a kind of idea, a set of metaphors for memory, for history. I've written for online audiences and in print about language and culture and nature and science and technology a great deal. And in that writing, I manifest an optimism about the affordances of a networked public sphere. And that's why I've been so thrilled to be part of the Berkman Center community. And at the same time, I have this experience like the dogs of not knowing what I'm getting myself into all the time. And I think that it's not one of the affordances of technology to reduce the total amount of mystery in the universe, actually. And from a literary point of view, that's a very good thing. We still will be telling stories, we still will be sorting out our problems, we'll still be in doubts about how the universe works in a technologically mediated world, which is the only world we've ever lived in, we human beings, after all. So that side of the technological experience for me has been easiest to manifest and figure and explore in a kind of artistic, expressive context, in writing stories, rather than in scholarship or criticism or journalism. And that presents a bit of a difficulty as an author. I was telling Jeffrey before the talk that I noticed on Amazon the tags that the Amazon's algorithms have specified for this book include the history of books, bibliography, history of libraries, books about books. This is a book with a story about an ugly unicorn. Let's see, there's a story about astronauts in the far future finding a dumb terminal on a faraway planet that lets them access Wikipedia. And the story at the beginning, which is what I'm going to read from today, a story about dogs deciding to give up on mankind and move into the trees. So these are stories that manifest a relationship with technology in a kind of a loosely specified way, I think is probably the most neutral way to put it. And the story that I'm going to read to you today is probably the most loosely specified with respect to technology of any of the stories. So a part of what I'm going to ask you to do is help me figure out why I've decided to read this story at a Center for Internet and Society. I'm not sure if this exploration will work out. But what I want to do with this story today is to kind of excerpt it, take it apart a little bit and try and frame it in these terms, in terms of a kind of feral dog's experience of networked culture. You remember the old New Yorker cartoon, I didn't bother to pirate it, but a dog and a cat sitting at a monitor and the dog saying, on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog. And the corollary when that was composed, I think in the late 90s that ran in the New Yorker was that nobody knew you weren't a dog. But increasingly the Internet does know that you're a dog. The Internet knows what brand of kibble you eat. The Internet knows where you like to mark your territory and on Google Earth you can find where all the bones are buried. So what we're getting ourselves into in the context of network culture as imperfect questing, uncertain human beings is, I think, I argue, illimitably, irreducibly, a human experience. And it's an experience at the same time that's somewhat akin to that of a feral creature. These feral dogs are an example of what a feral habit is like. It's not an animal that is a wild animal. It's an animal that's a domestic animal forced by circumstance to live in a habitat that's not its own. And that's kind of the habitat that we put ourselves in as human beings all the time. And that's why we have recourse to art to help us explore and plumb and sort out our mysteries. This is going to be as important a factor in the human career in the context of network culture as it ever has been. So I'm going to try and frame this in terms of the experiences of feral dogs. And again, I just want to reiterate before I get too far into this, that this is an artistic project, this is not a kind of theoretical project, I have no data to present. So just lower your defenses and let story take over a little bit. That would be much better for me anyway, I'm sure, in the course of this. I wanted to point out, Paul Ford, who's a writer for New York magazine now, he used to be an editor at Harper's, he helped me feel like maybe I was onto something, at least something anecdotally rich when he used the word feral. Something about Jonathan Fransen's kind of famously Luddite, infamously Luddite commencement address at Kenyon College a couple of years ago where Fransen basically told the students of Kenyon College, the outgoing graduates of Kenyon College that they should put their mobile devices aside and learn to love each other more. And Ford wrote, well he describes this, he describes Fransen's speech. He tells the 21 year olds who were likely texting throughout the ceremony that they need more love. If the sub 30 year olds with whom I've worked, Ford writes, are typical, these young men and women love each other or bands or ideas too much. They love too often with a feral intensity and with the constant assistance of mobile devices. Maybe what he was telling them is that they should be more old. So I think Ford is onto something about a feral experience as well. So I'm going to try and get into this story a little bit and then break out periodically to draw on some more kind of feral experiences in literature, online and in my own experience and see what we make of it. So I'll start with the dogs and the trees and I'll just read a short passage from the beginning of this story. The first sightings of dogs and trees were reported not long after the fall equinox. Early rumor came in the form of videos shot at arm's length on cell phones and hastily uploaded grainy, shaky, made with cock-angled intensity, the palsy depth of field swimming as it sought purchase amidst limbs and leaves. I regarded these lengths with bemused curiosity, reloading and watching again in a couple of instances to search for telltale lumber or wires or other evidence of trickery. But no more than a week had passed before I witnessed the sight firsthand. In a great pin oak by the corner of my street, in the crook of a heavy branch of full thirty feet off the ground, a gray hound, brown as bark, stared at me with that expression of mingled curiosity and resignation which so many dogs are wont to wear. I stood beneath the dog for some while, its coat of dark brindle blended into the background and I had to blink to separate figure from ground. I saw no steps, no rope and pulley set up, no basket or bungee, nor was the trees tightly furrowed bark marred by any trace that claws would have left, as any cannon climbing to such heights would have fought a terrific battle, would have done itself in the tree great violence. But the dog, although somewhat discomfited by the precariousness of its position, showed no other sign of disarrangement or disease. As I stood far below, it broke off staring at me. Beyond, stretched, turned its head demurely and dropped into the kind of haunch-raised crouch that gray hounds seemed to prefer. The great branch ever so slightly shivered to its leafy ends, signaling the shift in weight, the tree registering the unavoidable empirical quiddity of a dog in its midst. So that's how we begin with a little bit of the uncanny, I'd like to say. Let me get to the next slide here, because there's a wonderful vein of uncanny that comes along in the person of Jenna Bush and the rest of her family, who it turns out, according to many online, are members of the reptiloid conspiracy. I'm sure this will not surprise many of us. They seem to share this state with lots of people in local news media, by the way. The reptiloid conspiracies consist of shape-shifting aliens who come to the earth, and they live among us, and they're taking over the media and politics. And fortunately, occasionally, this Gnostic technology allows us to illuminate their presence among us. I'll just let this run for a little while. So here's Jenna Bush. Well, that's not Jenna Bush, but she's coming around on the guitar. And we don't need to hear them, actually. This really specifies narrowly the reptiloid experience. You'll see it happen. I'll continue to talk as they cut back to Jenna periodically. What you discover is that these reptiloids actually have another guy. They have scaly skin. And come on, Jenna, show me your scales. Oh, here it comes. There she is. And sometimes they can't control the shape-shifting. And technology reveals this to us. And it gets really weird. Now, of course, what this is an artifact of is reducing 32-bit video to 8-bit video. And the Kodak doesn't know what to do with all the extra information. So it seems, for some reason, to happen with skin tones. Somebody might have a better explanation. It gets really, really crazy. There she goes. And the interviewers, they aren't bothered by it at all because, of course, they're in on it. He's trying desperately to cover up right now. There are videos like this on YouTube. Some of them have thousands of comments and tens and hundreds of thousands of hits. And these comments manifest a kind of continuous partial credulity about the prospect of the reptiloids. People say, well, maybe it could be. I can't believe it. But it's hard to argue with what's online. There's a wonderful interview with George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton talking about the Clinton Global Initiative. And Clinton is going on and on and on for some while. And the camera, for some reason, cuts back to Bush Pair. And he's sort of nodding. He's sort of starting to fall asleep. And as his eyes close, there's a little flash of light in one of his eyes. And there's a lot of commentary to the effect that this is the presence of a nictitating membrane, which reptiles have, that closes over his eyeball periodically. So this is a kind of rich vein of kind of uncanny, gnostic, continual partial credulity online. And those who are in the know, think of us, most of us, my venture to guess, would prefer a kind of technological glitch-based explanation for this. They have a name for us. They call us Sheep. So I'll read a little bit about how Sheep act. She just keeps getting worse and worse. So I'm going to go back into the story now. And in the story, the narrator is a journalist, go figure. And he's been on the strength of a number of separate incidents of dogs moving into trees. He's been assigned to cover this story. And so he's sent out on a tip to a park where one of these episodes is taking place. Late the following afternoon, on the strength of numerous testimonies, I made my way to a nearby park. Most of the land there, which stretched between two boulevards flowing with traffic, was taken up by a pair of ball fields separated by a grove of trees that followed a long narrow stream through which a bit of slime might trickle on soggy winter days. This day was dry, however, and the trees, mostly Norway maples, stood tall as their bright leaves spiraled down to gather in drifts in the long grass. Hanging like ornaments amidst the boughs, a veritable pack of pooches in all shapes and sizes, nine dogs of various breeds, regarded their growing audience of humans with innocent eyes. Wedged into lichen-spangled, deep-foundationed crooks were a sleek labrador and what I took to be a malamute. Further out, a spaniel set its branch swaying with the wagging of its tail. In the next tree, a wiry-haired mongrel with a lazy eye looked down over its wedge-shaped snout. And two Pomeranians, widest down, seemed to float like clouds netted in the woody tangle. At the farthest extent of several limbs bobbed a cock-eyed chihuahua, a trembling poodle and a pecanese, its hair flowing over the end of the branch almost decoratively. Kerr and purebred alike fastuned the cops like notes on a musical staff, and people pondered them and murmured to one another, sato voce like concert-goers. It was a bright fall day and warm, and the crowd had grown. Office workers were sitting in the grass with their food in their laps. Most were on their phones, either talking or taking pictures. A vendor pulled up at the curb and offered tacos from an insulated box nestled in the trunk of his car. A few children ran here and there. Evidently unconcerned for the dogs is if they alone among the tribe of mankind were unmoved by the strange scene. The dogs watched all this with some interest. It was evident that several were hungry as they licked their lips and quivered to attention while the taco vendor applied his goods. It was afternoon and school was letting out. Among the arriving children some teens lurked, snickering and aloof. Digital natives, I hasten to add. A loose knot of them now broke away to lope towards the dogs, gathering speed as they crossed the grassy hillside. Nearing the trees they launched a salvo of rocks. The dogs were quite high, some topping 75 feet from the ground. The rocks reached apogee and seemed to waver before plunging harmlessly back towards the boys, who dodged and laughed and punched one another. The dogs backed up against the trunks or where no retreat was possible looked left and right in beseeching submission. The crowd had quieted. There was attention as all pondered the question whether to intervene. I stared hard at the dogs themselves, not scrupling to look left or right to those standing with me in the field, sensing the current of avoided eye contact rippling through the crowd. On the boulevards cars flowed without cease, a sibilant breathless hiss. The boys, oblivious of everything but the maddening insistent absurdity of the dogs on high, threw stones with a stiffening intensity, silent now but for their grunts of effort. Together they crackled with the threat that had stopped thinking and was now intent upon its task. And yet the dogs remained just out of rocks reach, their defenses fully deployed. The pack instinct bloomed among them now. They growled and snapped, cowered in vain attempts at sucker or submission. One of the pecanis began to bark, not angrily but plaintively it seemed. Swaying there upon its perch, the boys turned their aim its way with redoubled energy, the rocks now reaching the heights and looping over in sharp, threatening arcs. I nearly called out then, fighting the thickening in my throat, coughing and all but barking myself. When out of the wind fell a flock of starlings, rippling and distending, diving towards the trees. It flowed as a freshet around the boys, who stood frozen in the hurdle of birds swooping upwards, whirling and braiding their passage into the steel blue sky, before settling in an instant upon every branch. At this wordless chastening, the boys dispersed, and the crowd's brittle energy fractured into small shards of conversation. Voices respectfully quiet as in a church or a hospital before the bird beatified dogs. So on line, here's another manifestation of the feral. The call of the wild, and everybody remember the three dogs, or the three wolves, moon shirt rather. At Raffle Con, the last Raffle Con, the one before last actually, the art director of The Mountain, the company that made this shirt, which went viral on the web. I don't know if you remember this or not. But thanks to Amazon reviews, fictionalized Amazon reviews about how awesome the shirt on which this graphic rested was, the shirt became wildly popular. The shirt went viral, in essence. And at Raffle Con, which is an internet culture conference, the last one of which was just held down the street in MIT, two years ago, the art director for the company that made this shirt came to speak. And somebody asked him what they made of this kind of viral popularity of this shirt, which is one of a vast number of shirts they make that have all kinds of wonderful kind of airbrushed artistic genres specified on them. And he said, well, if most of my friends saw one of you guys wearing one of these shirts, he'd kick your ass. But this shirt manifests a kind of call of the wild quality that I think has deep roots in American culture when it comes to feeling the call of the feral, as it were, when it comes to a relationship with, or an imagined relationship with the wild world. And this comes, I think, most strenuously to the fore in the book Call of the Wild by Jack London, which is a book about a feral dog in kind of the most straightforward natural historical terms. I mean, the protagonist buck of Call of the Wild is a domestic dog. In fact, he's owned by a judge. I mean, there's no more domestic dog in the world than this avatar of the law buck. And he's stolen and used as a sled dog in the Klondike. And by a kind of slow tuition is introduced to the kind of bloody-minded violence that, for Jack London, specifies the wild world. That doesn't really ring true to me for this kind of experience of the feral that I've been talking about. I think instead of a story I read in a 19th century book, A Natural History of Dogs from the early 19th century, in which there were entries for all the different breeds of dogs, including the Greenland Eskimo dog. And in that entry, there's an anecdote of a feral Greenland dog was picked up by whalers on the Greenland coast and taken to England. And it got loose in Northumberland and preyed on the sheep in the district. And the book tells an anecdote of this feral dog that illustrates feral life for me in a way that rings true in the context of networked culture. And I'll read a little bit of this to you. So this dog preyed on the sheep in Northumberland. And when he caught a sheep, I'm reading now from the account, he bit a hole in its right side. And after eating a tallow about the kidneys, left it. Several of them, thus lacerated, were found alive by the shepherds. And being taken proper care of, some of them recovered and afterwards had lambs. From his, the dog's, delicacy in this respect, the destruction he made may, in some measure, be conceived. As it may be supposed that the fat of one sheep a day would hardly satisfy his hunger, the farmers were so much alarmed by his depredations that various means were used for his destruction. So you see what's going on here is the dog is just attacking sheep and eating the fat from around their kidneys and leaving the sheep alive. And I just realized that I put this anecdote into a lunch talk. So you'll have to excuse me there. But that's right. I have yet to eat myself. So I mean, this dog is like a long-tailed dog. And I don't mean like he's got a long tail. I mean, he's got a very kind of rarefied, well-specified taste. All he wants is the kidney fat. This is not a wolf. This is a domestic dog that is living in a habitat that's not its own. A domestic dog which, in fact, as a, and of course this is purely an anecdote and there's no kind of data or way to verify this. But in fact, Greenland dogs, Eskimo dogs were often fed the organ meat by Eskimos. And so he's got this very specific domestic diet that he's trying to recreate in the wild. But there's a little more about this dog that's interesting to me. They, the farmers, frequently pursued him with hounds, gray hounds, et cetera. But when the dogs came up with him, he laid down on his back as if supplicating for mercy. And in that position, they never hurt him. He therefore laid quietly, taking his rest until the hunters approached, when he made a way without being followed by the hounds, till they were again excited to the pursuit, which always terminated unsuccessfully. So this dog is not only like a long-tailed dog. He's like a hacker, too. This dog is like the first member of Anonymous. I mean, he's this kind of feral fluency and looseness and adaptability, this kind of wily coyote aspect to this totem of the feral condition, which I find very compelling somehow and inspiring. And with that, I'll go back to the story and let's see. So we left them in the park with the flock of birds having sort of stopped an attack on the dogs and the trees. By degrees, however, such scenes lost their distinctiveness. As the number of dogs and trees continued to grow, the sense of prodigy gave way to a siege of numbing tension. At first it had seemed that only the lost of the stray and the feral were taking to the canopy. With regularity now, people reported their own dogs had gone missing in the trees. A neighbor's blue-pointed cattle dog, whose face had always seemed to me to bespeak a placid certainty, had resisted the call for some weeks. But from day to day for some while now, it had watched through the windows with unappeased fervor as the trees swayed in the seasonal winds and gave up their leaves. The pooch, pearly was its name, had all but ceased eating or even drinking water and would no longer walk on its leash, but would only stand with its lips trembling at the base of the first tree it encountered. My neighbor greeted these behaviors with undisguised consternation, her anguish taking the form of impatience with pearly's newfound metastasizing madness. She would stand at the foot of a great wart-need beach, berating pearly, who crouched in tremulous rapture, tugging and tugging at the leash until it seemed the poor dog would lose consciousness, until at last pearly would back down the path towards home. At night, my neighbor told me, pearly no longer slept at the foot of the bed. Instead, she paced at the door, stopping only to paw and whine piteously. She would turn in unsettled circles, coming round each time with freshened purpose as she caught a glance of bow shadow twitching in the moonlight, or sniffed who knows what subtle illusion of bark and leaf litter. Her whimpering turned to barking, which by degrees lengthened into a mournful baying for which pearly seemed to have no lack of energy. Three nights, this full-throated cry went on. I could hear it on the cold air, joined now and again by dogs on high throughout the neighborhood. Looking through the window above my bed, I caught glimpses of baleful eyes staring in the sky, their livid green constellating the dark, high fretwork of the trees. On the third day, pearly's plane went quiet. I found out a few days later that my neighbor, having reached the end of her patience, had in the end simply opened the door, opened the door and watched as pearly flowed out into the night without another sound. Now, what does the internet look like to a dog? It might look like this. Actually, this is a screenshot from an interactive documentary called Bear 71, which many of us in metalab are big fans of. And it's kind of become de rigueur that we include Bear 71 in every presentation that we give right now. But there's a good reason for this. This is, as I call it, an interactive documentary. It's a natural history documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada. And what we're seeing right here is the kind of interface that you will see when you go in and enjoy this documentary, which I encourage you to do. It's really a remarkable work, very compelling in a number of ways. This is a kind of abstracted landscape of Banff National Park in Canada, which is contiguous with Glacier National Park. And you, the human, move around through this landscape and encounter different media that have been used to create this documentary, which tells the story of Bear 71, who's a grizzly bear who lives in Banff. And her story is told in the form of media captured by wildlife behavior scientists who've put remote cameras all throughout the park. And they capture a kind of slice of her life, several years of her life, in fact, through this network, a network with which Bear 71 is interacting. It is a tragedy, although she's just drugged here. She's OK here. But this is Bear 71 getting her radio collar on, which is another kind of networked entanglement that she's subjected to. There's a narrative arc to this story told by Bear 71 herself through the intercession of a human narrator. She's a very wise bear. She quotes Virgil. And she knows the pharmacology of the tranquilizer that subdued her. But she talks a lot, her narrator talks a lot, about what it is to be a bear in the context of what she calls the wired, wild world. Hard to say, wired, wild world. But it's the world that she's living in, a world not only with camera traps and rub traps and radio collars, but highways and railroads and airliners going overhead and transformers and high-tension lines with magnetic fields that some animals interact with. There's a jangle of sensory inputs that this bear and all of us are encountering. And of course, she's a wild creature. But in a way, she's kind of a mirror of this kind of feral habitat, this kind of feral quality that I've been specifying. Like the dogs, she finds herself in a habitat with which her kind of sensory constitution, there's a little bit of a gap between what she's expecting and what she's receiving in terms of inputs from the environment. And I think that's a condition, again, that we find ourselves in, not infrequently. I think not a bug of networked life, but a feature. And now he puts steamboats up. What are we doing now? I'm thinking of the pastoral in literature. And I'm thinking particularly of a book by Leo Marx, a kind of landmark book in American studies called The Machine in the Garden, where Leo Marx traces the life of the pastoral genre in American literature. Now, you may recall that in antiquity, the pastoral was a kind of mediating space between the city and the howling wilderness. It's a place of repose, a garden, a pasture, where you can play on your flute and watch the used gamble and have a kind of loose and easy relationship, both with nature and with art, both with the wilderness and with technology. And Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden argues that in the American context, this pastoral genre is invaded by the machine, that there's no increasingly no place of repose. American artists like Hawthorne, like Melville, like Mark Twain, like Sarah Ornjuet, increasingly through the 19th century, imagine for us these places, like the Mississippi River or Sleepy Hollow, where their pastoral piece is invaded by the whistle of the train, by the smoke of the steamboats, or by the textile mills, stacks on the horizon. And Marx argues that this kind of pastoral invaded by the technological is an important kind of battleground for American culture, where we specify this either or relationship with respect to technology, where we find ourselves caught, according to Marx. And I think he's pretty persuasive that we find ourselves caught either casting our lot with the Luddites or with the techno-futurists. And where this feral stuff starts to seem to me like slightly more than a metaphor is in respect to this cultural conflict. Because it seems to me that the context we live in is a hybrid one. And really, it always has been, of course. But the affordances of network culture are making that hybrid character more and more obvious. And maybe we need, from a literary perspective, which is primarily where I come from, to specify new models for inspiration, for coming to grips with this experience. And maybe a kind of feral pastoral or a feral ittle is a likely candidate for that new ground for inspiring art. The important thing I should tell you about these dogs is that the boy, the 11-year-old Kyle, put on YouTube as his comment when he posted this video. He said, practicing whistling up the dogs for when I go bow hunting with my dad. In New South Wales, feral dogs are a nuisance. And they're hunted in an open season. So one never really knows who's on the other side of the screen. And I think that that feral wariness is worth cultivating as a citizen of the network and public sphere. But it's an affordance. It's a feature, not a bug. And with that, as the dogs are running around, I'll just finish this story for you. By midwinter, the dogs were dying. Rarely did the bodies lie about for long. Municipal authorities dispatched crews to patrol the treeline streets, gathering up the remains, and carrying them off in covered trucks. For the most part, people had lost their fascination, however. Videos stopped making their way around the networks and news coverage all but ceased. By the time the first buds of spring had burst open with their bright and larval leaves, the dogs were gone. And in the years since, we talk about them hardly at all. The dogs have left us, the consensus seems to be. Their rebuke is quiet and complete, and may only be passed over in silence. Few now will admit to having ever owned a dog, fewer to having lost one. To the children, dogs are a rumor, an archetype, a figment fit for dreaming, like the other lost creatures who once filled the skies and darkened the plains. And that's my talk. Thank you. Any questions? This is based between the pastoral and the machine today, and how it unfolds. Well, as I alluded to, I think it continues to be a huge dilemma in the context of American culture and a kind of culture war that's now moved on to a technological domain. I mean, I think we see it in the cultural conversation around libraries and books versus the web and the e-book with respect to worries about the last child in the woods versus children spending all their time texting and getting onto Facebook. I think we still see this dichotomy, this kind of violent dichotomy, in American conversation about technological affordances and our natural endowments. And I think that the terms of that conversation, it would be healthy if we changed the terms of that conversation to one that, to terms that acknowledge that a networked experience is kind of irreducibly also a natural experience. That starts to sound more like an agenda than just like a kind of literary conceit, which is kind of where I'd like to leave. I feel safer on safer ground in the literary conceit domain, but I do feel like there's a kind of programmatic agenda to it as well. The way you told this story to us, I really liked, because it also blended some traditional with sort of modern storytelling techniques. Obviously, you chose to write the story as text, but I'm curious, in your mind, as you think about it, what other ways could you use technology to even present the story in a different way than you did today? Yeah, it's a great question, and it's certainly a set of affordances to which I'm really open. And part of the project of Sovereignty of Invention is, I think you quite charitably put it in terms of traditional storytelling techniques. I mean, there is a voice to these stories that is trying to evoke a kind of 19th century American storytelling voice. And so the project of these stories, in part, is to try and coax back into that idiom, some of these experiences and affordances of technological life. So that quality to the story has a particular kind of, for lack of a better word, artistic point to it. It's part of a project in that sense. That said, though, storytelling in multimedia form is terrifically important to me. I mean, the Bayer 71 that I mentioned towards the end is a remarkable example of a kind of story that I would be delighted to tell. And particularly in the context of networks and natures in a world in which our sort of sensory inputs from the natural world are being drawn from networked resources rather than the resources of a Jack London, or a Daniel Beard, or even Henry David Thoreau, where rather than an author telling us, or Marlon Perkins for that matter, and Wild Kingdom, or Sir Richard Attenborough, instead of those voices or conduits, increasingly we have access to data. And real time data. And I think that really opens up kind of rich and fascinating prospects for bringing new kind of aesthetics to bear on the storytelling about natural phenomena and our relationship ultimately with a world that is wired irreducibly. Thanks, Andrew. So you have me thinking about the transition from the domestic state to the feral state. And the new environment is certainly a big component. But am I wrong to think that one gets into the feral state by having survived for a certain period of time? So to be, and that has me then, if that's true, if there needs to be some component of survival, then that has been thinking about the metaphor of the networked world and what those terms of survival might be in that new networked environment. Is it measurably different from the non-networked world? I mean, it's an important question, and I think that it really depends on the context. I mean, obviously I'm coming from a particular perspective. I mean, I grew up in the rural Midwest, where images like Three Wolves Moon have a particular kind of evocative resonance. And in a kind of agrarian context with a relative socioeconomic privilege, so surviving an experience of network mediated culture means something different for me than it does for somebody picking tech trash in China or Haiti. I mean, there's a wide spectrum of specification of kind of feral habits. So I mean, is it feral to be a kind of reptiloid master flying around in a Gulfstream, dining on the kidney fat of blams, or is anonymous a kind of feral experience? I mean, I think there's a spectrum of what we might metaphorize as feral. I wonder if a common denominator of some level of activist may not know if you can be a lurker and be considered to be feral. Well, it's an interesting question. I think that we did see in the Occupy movement and the Indignados and in Tahrir Square a new kind of engagement with political voice, which folks in this room have done rich and rigorous scholarship on. And all I can really say about that is that it seems to specify certain aspects of the feral, simply in the way it refused to nail its theses on the door or to elaborate an agenda, but to manifest in a kind of wary kind of forcible context. I don't know. Again, I feel comfortable specifying that in a kind of literary framework, not so much as an agenda, but it does seem to fit in some way to my mind. Yeah. I'd like to ask you what you think about the story that you read was so lovely. And when it ended, the artifacts were all gone. And yet in the wild, networked worlds, the artifacts move on forever, which I think is part of the danger of the whole thing. And I just wonder what you thought to our own mind. Well, I think in the story, I'm leery of trying to interpret my story just because I think I'll get it wrong, but I think there's a contrast to be drawn there. And I think I wanted them to go away to evoke that very impossibility, in a sense. I mean, I think that the way in which the network makes it possible for things to persist in time, who knows how long and in what kind of forms in the long duree, but it's a very interesting and not only dangerous but also wonderful aspect of the kind of embodied, distributed, archival tendency of networks. And maybe what I want is for people to value that, actually, and think about the consequences it has. And by having a kind of so long and thanks for all the fish moments with respect to dogs, I might be trying to evoke that very contrast between a complete obliteration or a facement and its impossibility. Now I'm talking to her. That things do not persist in technology at all. Well, they persist in the way that archaeological traces persist in shreds and patches here and there. How about those broken links? Those broken links are very important to attend to, for sure. But what's left to us from antiquity is a vast, vast number of broken links. So it's an affordance which isn't unique to the network age. We've been contending with it all along. Yeah. So I mean, you said that the feral dogs are hunted and considered a pest. Do you think there's an analogous thing of that online where the feral is put similar pressure? Oh yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I think it manifests in different ways, in different cohorts, but I just went through this experience where my daughter, who's 13 years old, posted some photographs of herself sunbathing. And there were members of my extended family who took issue with it and expressed their concern to me. And I felt very much betwixt in between, because I was trying to argue to them, well, you know, she has a different experience of these things from the experience that we have of them. And I was trying to argue to her, don't put those pictures on the web. And I think we all felt a little bit feral in the context of that family contretemps. But certainly the experience of my extended family, her aunts and grandmother in particular, was one of their granddaughter. Having gone slightly feral, well, thank you all very much. Yeah, Dr. Just as a thought, a friend of mine, Craig Bergen, conceives the end-to-end architecture of the internet as a giant hollow sphere, in which we are all zero distance from everybody else. It's got a zero, it's stupid in the middle, it's David Eisenberg. An interesting thing about that, his point is that this is a second world that we made alongside the physical one we already have. And we're just starting to terraform it, as he puts it. It just strikes me as you're talking that, A, we're all feral on the very thing that we're making, and B, it can only be surreal in a kind of way. So just some reflection back to you as I'm running it through my own experience. Yeah, I hear you. And I think that the thing that appeals to me about following this feral trail is that I think there's always a gap. I think that surreal quality is somehow irreducible. And I think it's worth waking up to that and waking up to the quality of that surreal quality that manifests itself in the world we're already in. I mean, the objects around us already have lives without us, and it can get uncanny pretty fast when you start to think about what this room is doing when we're not in here. It's doing something, it's persisting in time and space in some way, showering this cat. But this is manifestly and continuously and richly true and figured with respect to network technology, I think. And it troubles the waters, I think, of the theoretical prospects of the idea of the digital native a little bit. This fact that we're always playing catch up. There's always a gap in terms of what we're expecting technology to do for us or what we're expecting it will do for us soon. And the complexity of the systems, just the sheer complexity of the systems. There's too much to know to coin a phrase. And encountering that is an experience, even as the net gives us affordances for contending with that systematic over-determination and temporal dislocation. Even as the net helps us with that, there's still an experience. And I think that experience has some of that surreal quality that your friend specifies. Yeah? So what online but not in the Bureau? Where are there boundaries to the Bureau? Is it a specific attitude, a specific sort of mode and perspective? Or is the web itself inherently plural? Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question. I mean, the thing I worry about with the notion of the feral is that everything is and so nothing is and so it's really kind of, which is why I try to keep it on the literary side. But I do think, for some of the reasons that we were just talking about, that our encounter with these technologies is feral in some kind of irreducible way. If you get down to an internet of 100 or an internet of one, then maybe you can get some control over it. But at the kind of vast scales that we're dealing with, I think we're always a little bit lost, a little bit trying to follow sensory inputs that are not completely continuous with our endowments. So yeah, it's all feral all the way down. Feral turtles all the way down. Do you see anything like that would be sort of wild in terms of like the not the sort of the feral dogs, but sort of the native wolves or native animals on the internet? The bots. Bots are wild. They're wild creatures of the network. They're right now just really kind of bio-slime at the bottom, but they're evolving. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you.