Posted on by indiebio

Building an eco-feminist metaverse

This is chewing through the philosophy of the biosphere metaverse project. It’s still messy, and trigger warning, it involves mention of patriarchy and ecofeminism. In more developed framing it won’t mention these to avoid the hangups around the words. Probably won’t mention metaverse either for the same reason.

outline:

  1. Background: why does patriarchy persist
  2. Pathological defences against loss applied to our relationship with nature
  3. Repairing relationship through association, ways of listening
  4. A globally accessible ecosystem of integrated data
  5. Case study: UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR) 
  6. Funding

1. Background: why does patriarchy persist

From Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider’s book “Why does Patriarchy persist” (notes from the book), their three discoveries:

  1. It is trauma, not development, that separates reason from emotion
  2. Pathological defences against loss (basically being a psycho) is the patriarchal ideal
  3. Patriarchy subverts the capacity to repair relationship, by shaming the human capabilities that are vital to reach across the boundaries of conflict and difference.

The book, and Gilligan’s more recent book “In a human voice” (notes relating this to the ecofeminist metaverse) explains the two pathological defence patterns against loss (following Bowlby’s work) as compulsive care-giving and detachment from relationship, what the authors call pseudo-relationships and pseudo-independence. These defensive styles of relating, are ultimately concerned with defending against the same unbearable threat of irreparable loss.

In general, I think there is a gendered approach to this, that women tend to compulsively care-give and neglect themselves, break the relationship with themselves, “stop knowing”, and men tend to detach from relationship, silencing their emotional needs “stop caring”, breaking the relationship with themselves. But I thought, what if we translate this to our relationship with nature?

2. Pathological defences against loss applied to our relationship with nature

I think we can see that there is both forms of symbiosis-like attachment and detachment from relationship with nature too, and I think our approaches are about the unbearable threat of irreparable loss – either running out of resources, or climate change, or whatever. I think the hippie weirdness, the tree-hugging veganism are pseudo-relationships, in that it idolises and fantasises nature as good and nice and death doesn’t happen and if we can only sit in a circle and sing kumbaya it will all be okay. The engineering pseudo-independence of resource exploitation is the approach that we don’t need to care, that there will always be enough, if not oil, then wind, or sun, or nuclear. Or something, we will innovate our way out of it. Both of these approaches are problematic, and these are the sort of extremes that dominate discourse on conservation or resource management (or AI or the metaverse or anything else). And then we get these really bizarre compromises that don’t achieve anything, pretty much like we see in most feminist or BLM or political or whatever arguments too. Now I understand saying all this will pretty much piss everyone off equally, so it needs to be reframed, but this is me chewing through stuff, so bear with me please. I want to find a better way – through an ethic of care that is not compulsive, pathological care-giving, while maintaining accountability that is not reductively pseudo-independent. When I see it I can come back and frame it more gently.

The trauma (not development) that separated reason from emotion, is then, not the development from the industrial revolution, but the trauma of … war? Of needing more power, more money? Basically, what do we see if we frame the industrial revolution as trauma rather than technological development? Perhaps then saying, we don’t want to continually develop, continually grow economically, engineer our way out of the polycrises. We want to repair relationship with nature, by restoring the human capabilities that are vital to reach across the boundaries of conflict and difference. And then, when we use technology to engineer responses to the polycrises, we come at it from a different perspective, not running faster to keep up, but to repair relationship, regenerate trust in nature, sort of things.

3. Repairing relationship through association, ways of listening

Carol Gilligan says “silence is essential to maintaining a patriarchal order” And resisting patriarchy is about breaking that silence (In a Human Voice, page 33 – selected notes). I think this was developed in the context of psychotherapy, in other words, one on one conversations, and in her paper “Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the Conversation about Differences” (2014, Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol 45(1), 89-106): she lists six aspects to consider:

  • Association—the stream of consciousness and the touch of relationship—can unlock dissociation, bringing what is out of awareness back into consciousness. When it does, we have the sensation of discovering something at once familiar and surprising. Something we know, and yet didn’t know that we knew.
  • The ethic of care in its concern with voice and relationships is the ethic of love and of democratic citizenship. It is also the ethic of resistance to moral injury.
  • Listening in a way that creates trust.
  • Lifting, if even only temporarily, taboos: Replacing judgement with curiosity.
  • Gently embracing the intimate.
  • Rebuilding the trust that facilitates our ability to love.

I believe that the work of Kahan & Brookman (originally published in 2016 but later work is also relevant) adapted this technique through the deep canvassing approach. To scale this into a digital, globally accessible tool … is where Sci-Curious goes. Part of that digital tool is the integration of knowledge infrastructures, which I call the metaverse. (More notes on association and building that into a digital deep canvas tool at https://indiebio.co.za/project-5-2/)

4. A globally accessible ecosystem of integrated data

We mean the metaverse here as an ecosystem of integrated data, which may be suited to visualisation in 3D or virtual environments, but this visualisation is not a prerequisite.

Nature cannot speak in a human voice, it cannot stand up in meetings or send strongly worded letters. It relies on representatives, who are flawed in their pathological defence patterns. To represent nature well, we need to restore the human capabilities of the representatives, and we need to do that at scale (ultimately, like, for 8 billion people).

… I think what I am trying to do here is to apply a digital version of the deep canvassing approach as an … alternative … ? to social media platform approaches. So how you can react and share on social media, but guided by a spirit of curiosity, training ways of listening to achieve association.

We also need the evidence to back the representation up. We need a reinterpretation of data to undo the bias of patriarchal lenses, at a global scale. This is the response to the crisis of expertise (Eyal, Stampnitzky). This is big data, but flipped: little data to count in a big way, to build the big data up from … uh … an accountable ethic of care. The internet is (potentially) really good at this, it’s the whole point of convergence culture. Potentially really good because one is fighting algorithms and corporate capture of course – in other words, fighting patriarchy. So playing in a protected sandbox may be a safer approach, in other words, using a case study:

5. Case study: UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR) 

The World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR) consists of a dynamic and interactive network of sites of excellence. Today, the three official functions that characterize the network are conserving biological and cultural diversity; facilitating socially and culturally sustainable economic development; and providing logistic support for research, monitoring, education, and training (Barraclough and Reed 2026). The WNBR is hosted within the Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB), which aims to establish a scientific basis for enhancing the relationship between people and their environments.

Academic references:

Good things about the WNBR:

  • It’s an established collection of biosphere reserves across the globe
  • The stated three official functions align perfectly with my thoughts above, and the technological objectives of our collective
  • Stakeholder participation in BRs has become more important over time, with both an increase in the number and diversity of stakeholders involved at higher levels of participation (Curtet et al 2024), with the associated opportunities and challenges of online participation.

Challenges with MAB that makes it a suitable case study for applying this … ecofeminist metaverse? … thinking to:

  • It is near impossible for me to find coherent information. It may just be me, but if something is called a World Network of Biosphere Reserves I would expect at least a well networked website suited to global access by non-experts? There’s this website (which sometimes just fails for me altogether) https://www.unesco.org/en/mab/map?hub=66369 and that’s … about as good as it gets.
  • fragmentation
  • structural, institutional, and perceptional/ideational challenges (Sandström et al 2025)
  • incl governance constraints, narrative complexities

6. Funding

I am developing this into a proposal for the 2026 International Joint Initiative for Research Harnessing Disruptive Technologies to Address Global Challenges. Please get in touch if this appeals to you (especially social sciences and humanities, as you can see I’m winging it here – I have an engineering background).

One Reply to “Building an eco-feminist metaverse”

  1. Pingback: Patriarchy and Our Relationship to Nature … – indiebio

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