Mindy Seu

I grew up in the suburbs of Orange County in a very classic cul-de-sac, so I was likely looking across to see another track house. All the houses were one of three templates. We were walking distance from a park and my elementary school. It was a very quiet and conservative upbringing.

My parents emigrated here from South Korea when they were in high school. They met in the United States and have still never flown back to visit. They never travel by plane in general, so growing up, all of our family vacations were these very long road trips, camping along the California coast. I have this very distinct memory of the campsites: My mom was a painter, and she would make these wire grids where she would draw a tile, and then I would draw a tile, and then my sister would draw a tile, and it would end up becoming this mosaic of whatever landscape we were looking at. It was a very tactile way of understanding perspective, and also thinking about what it means to sit in nature and be outside of a city or suburban context.

I feel bad saying this, but since I moved here so many people ask me to go hiking, and it is really not for me. That is not my beat. I will quip, “Oh, I hate nature. I'm a cosmopolitan person, I love cities.” But I do think that in my favorite cities, it feels like you’re enmeshed with nature. When I’m in New York, I stay in Brooklyn Heights, which is so historic and lush with these huge trees. Los Angeles is obviously very lush too, even though we’re a desert landscape. That said, I think I have always felt a deep closeness with water. I’m not quite sure why, but lakes, oceans, beaches are where I feel most at peace.

We were a 20-minute drive from the beach in Orange County, so we would always go to Newport Beach. This was a city of strip malls, but we were always outside in the sun with palm trees and ocean views. Living in Los Angeles now, there’s Manhattan Beach, Santa Monica, Malibu. I also lived in upstate New York for a while during the pandemic, and that was my first real experience having very close access to freshwater watering holes. They felt like these peaceful hidden pockets that were much more immersed in nature than say, the Rockaways.

I’ll admit, my screen time is enormously high. I am living on the internet, whether on my desktop or on my phone. When I'm frustrated with my devices, I often think that I'm basically holding a smart rock, because of all of the rare earth minerals that make up our devices. I wish I could say an animal or something, but maybe it would have to be these minerals. Given the material quality, they are almost complex ecosystems unto themselves.

Technology exists within this living ecosystem, so the technologists who created these early tools were deeply influenced by nature. That's reflected, at the very least, in the language and syntax we still use today. The first “bug” was a literal moth found inside Grace Hopper's computer during her mid-century research. When we talk about computer “viruses” and “virality,” we're drawing directly from the spread of biological illness. We call programming structures "trees" and "rhizomes” and store our data in “the cloud.” It feels ephemeral, but of course it all has roots in the physical world.

All these data centers are connected by huge fiber-optic cables running along the ocean floor. In some regions where these cables have existed for decades, local fish populations have actually built habitats around them and can no longer survive without them, so this interspecies entanglement is incredibly pervasive. More broadly, we have to understand that everything that we do carries an environmental footprint; even sending an email with a large attachment has a carbon cost. People tend to intuitively grasp this when it comes to things like flying or recycling, but the same logic applies to our digital lives and correspondences as well.

Yeah, well RGB—red, green, and blue—is the main colorway for our machines. Back when screens were primarily cathode ray tubes, it was just the easiest way to transmit color, and green was the most high-contrast out of those three waves. It got adopted into terminal when you were coding on those kinds of screens, before we moved into graphical user interfaces. I think that really cemented it as an internet association, and then the media intensified that.

There's this beautiful poem by Richard Brautigan called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. It's this imagining of how machines and animals can live together—humans, of course, also being animals. He describes these cybernetic meadows where spinning flowers live in harmony alongside grazing deer.

Of course, I think that vision is very far from the way we talk about AI today. Engineers often joke about “P-Doom,” meaning probability of doom in relation to AI. Like, “What’s your P-Doom on a scale of zero to ten?” Zero meaning AI will not destroy humanity, and ten meaning it absolutely will. Sam Altman notably rated it very low, like five. Now, do I believe in a future where AI could help humanity? In many ways, yes. It's not the tool itself I'm worried about, but the motivations behind developing these tools, and who has access to them.

With the rise of modernism, there was this fracture between modernity and nature—the former being associated with the “intelligent man,” and nature being understood as a resource that could be extracted in its pursuit. The same went for Indigenous people and women. And this very thinking is built into the development of our metropoles. Walter Benjamin describes, “Every monument of civilization is also a monument of barbarism.” It's an extremely difficult form of entanglement that’s hard to separate, even though we talk about decolonizing language and rhetoric.

Absolutely. People talk all the time about how, as our generation ages, we’ll have short-term memory issues, sight problems, and hearing problems, because our ears were never meant to have sound projected directly into them.

Exactly. We’re no longer locally situated because we just follow the blue dot. I, personally, am very directionally challenged. But I don’t know if it necessarily worries me that much, because with the advent of every technology—radios, televisions, factory lines—there’s been some modification of our physiologies. I think people are maybe more nervous about it because it’s our generation specifically, and because the acceleration has been so intense. Historically, though, we see these pendulum swings. When we saw the rise of big grocery stores, we also saw the return of local farmers markets. We always vacillate somewhere in-between.

I think the tricky part is that even though I am seeing a shift toward more local tech, it can also feel like an indicator of wealth—who actually has the time to experiment with certain things, to invest time in open source, to avoid these massive platforms that are highly convenient and very fast. Buying from a farmers’ market is a luxury. So I wonder how to make these things feel more accessible, even as we toggle between huge mainstream systems and smaller independent networks.

Yeah, we see experiments like Brooklyn Grange, the rooftop farm in Red Hook. But again, think about the wealth transfer there. It’s an experiment that’s really impacting the local area. It’s also interesting because I see so many of my peers talking about moving upstate, starting a commune, imagining this idyllic communal life, and in many ways it’s a beautiful dream. But part of me wonders if our brains are too conditioned by the conveniences of big cities. People still want their wine bars. Still, it makes sense to fantasize about reconnecting with nature because it does feel so removed from our daily lives.

We are creatures in living ecosystems that are based on dynamic relationships—we have been incredibly shaped by modern political movements, social contexts, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Everything. It is impossible to think that we can return to the past. That feels like a romanticism of nostalgia that forgets how interpersonal our lives truly are.

I use this term “gathering,” which comes up a lot in the work of Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others. But I’m not formally trained as an archivist. Historically, archiving requires some method of generational preservation, which is why it often becomes institutional. That’s why grassroots archiving is so difficult; there usually aren’t enough resources to ensure things are preserved across generations. Of course, there are much more ad hoc ways of doing this: oral histories, social citation, collective memory. But when we think about capital-A Archives, they’re safeguarded by institutions that also determine what is worth saving and how it’s positioned.

So I think about gathering in two senses. We gather materially—people are natural collectors. You want your little treasures, you want to bring them into your home. But we also gather socially. We want to be with our peers and our friends. We want to belong to larger communities. To me, both impulses come from the same ethos, just in less institutionalized forms. So I see myself less as an archivist and more as a collector or gatherer, trying to figure out alternative methods of citation and trying to cite as many people as possible. The Cyberfeminism Index really feels like a compilation of thousands of voices. It feels closer to a polyvocal oral history project than a traditional archive because nothing is ever fully preserved. It’s always fragments and references.

That’s such a beautiful quote, I’ll have to remember that. But I know, what is man’s fascination with the singularity, with separating from the body? It makes me think about the origins of cyberfeminism itself as a term. Historically, it was intentionally undefined, meant to be as emergent as possible. But I personally think about cyberfeminism through its etymology. The prefix “cyber” first emerged through Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, with its focus on feedback loops. Later, “cyber” became attached to cyberspace through William Gibson’s Neuromancer. And Neuromancer was important because it predicted so many of the sensory networked landscapes we now live in.

But it was also deeply male-gaze-driven, full of fembots, cyber babes, women assistants—women as sex objects. So when cyberfeminism emerged in the early ’90s, it almost functioned as a provocation: how could women imagine what this techno-utopia could be? And part of that provocation was to say that technology is not this cold, sterile thing. It’s slimy, it needs oil and water and energy to run, it’s built into the ground. For me, that sliminess is very much connected to the body and this refusal of the idea that intelligence requires separation from nature. Instead, maybe intelligence comes from entanglement, from bringing those two halves even closer together.

I often refer to Le Guin's “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which she posits that the first tool was not the spear, a tool of domination, but rather the basket, a tool of gathering. It shifts the history of technology away from the he toward a we, from an individual toward a collective. It also emphasizes the importance of rooting technology with ancestral tools, rather than focusing on its modern digital connotation.

I wonder about this. There was a point when the internet was an incredible organizing platform. It enabled massive social movements that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, like the Arab Spring. Now, though, when I look at hashtag activism, I feel conflicted. On one hand, it allows people to rally very quickly. #MeToo and all of these other movements spread rapidly online. But I think what we’re struggling with now is the speed and proliferation of virality. Everything becomes very short-lived. What we actually need is a kind of maintenance: people willing to devote themselves to something over a prolonged period of time, because real change doesn’t happen instantly.

There’s an essay by Maxwell Neely-Cohen on “10,000-year storage,” which asks what durable knowledge systems look like. It suggests they are not necessarily machines, but books. Books naturally circulate. They move into homes but also into forever institutions like museum and library collections. They almost function like calling cards. Michael Warner has this great quote that says “a publication is the site where a public is formed.” I really think of books in that way: as gathering objects. In contrast, online interfaces degrade quickly. I still experiment with them, but I always want to pair them with print, something that can persist in institutional time, like a library or archive.

According to Forbes, the average lifespan of a website is about 2 years. This was a study around 2015, back when personal websites were more popular. Now we’ve shifted toward platforms and templates. But regardless, there are more long-term strategies for saving books than websites.

That’s such a beautiful question. My grandmother recently passed, and I wrote her eulogy. It was the first time I really learned certain stories about our family lineage in depth. She was very much the matriarch, so thinking across generations feels emotional in that way. For my ancestors, especially my family in South Korea who lived through war and real material precarity, I think it would be a “thank you.” A recognition of the sacrifice that allowed us to be here, and to have stability and community across generations. There’s something very grounding about that continuity.

For the future generations, that’s harder. I think there’s both hope and uncertainty there. I want to say: We’re trying our best to move things forward in a way that makes life more livable for you. But it’s also hard to fully imagine what that world will look like, or what kinds of pressures they’ll inherit.

A kind of tree-seed decomposition would be ideal. There are these burial methods where you decompose in a kind of bag and return to soil—sometimes even through mushrooms, or tree-planting systems. I like that idea of becoming something that continues to grow. Returning to the earth in that way just feels right.