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compost Radical composting is perhaps one element we (as humans, other-than-humans alike) should consider; not an (often) artificial layering but a sympoeitic composting - a decomposing and recomposing of multiple constituent parts, actors, compost-mates, interconnected beings. The valuable and practical product needed in the epoch of a dying planet. There is no Earth 2. Composting in the pastoral sense is through the use of otherwise waste matter, though what you could call compost-able-bodies do not discriminate in this regard, and is why I liken to collage. Collage, however, clearly has failed to satisfy what I had previously ascribed my fascination with compost to; collage is stately, cut and dry. Compost is localised turmoil, subterranean churning of wet organic matter, constant flux and recomposing. What I see as an important distinguishing factor is in the implied methodologies behind each mode of cut-up: collage is the hand of the artist, the curatorship, the implicit, the meaning. Compost is decomposing; myriad composing parts chopped-and-screwed in precisely unpredictable, morphing, organic ways. Compost is also communal, in that it often does contain communities (microbial or otherwise), while also feeding community. The permaculture of communal gardening/the permaculture of communal webrings. The sympoeitic generations of early (and ongoing, though marginal) html webrings, I would ascribe as composting: Non-Euclidean social strata, meshing of contexts and content, intertextual relations. I think importantly to compost is often not a conscious act from participants, however beneficial it may be. Writing is composting; mind-ing is composting. Sympoeitic as the “making-with”, the messy interlocution of myriad actors. Html webrings work as a potent example - a webring describes a flattened or non-hierarchical social structure common within early-though-ongoing web-use. The webring is a making-with, a cyberspace composting - trans-stratum. Importantly, a net of non-innocent working parts, a site of potential and of potential for escaping the social strata of your collage-mates. What I have experienced as the dominant mode of self-projection in online spaces is collage-like, and singular, centralised, and euclidean. Space for potential compost-mates is whittled down: not meeting at states of intersection or even adjacency, but only wholistic alignment; rather than compost you are left with pure decay. Factoring in this I see anonymity as a clear and key actor, rather - as many have commented on - the diminishing anonymity and anonymity-ability of contemporary online citizenship. While large-scale centralisation of online community-at-large has been an issue for quite some time, a separate though inter and intra-related issue is the willingness to be onymous. The gift of anonymity is perhaps the greatest of all given to us by cyberspace (standing ovation, please), and true anonymity gives rise to composting-proper — encounters between protozoa and earthworm, [xX_kyuwu69_Xx] and [thanatos_demiurge]. The wanting to exist as an agender, location-less, race-less, sexuality-less online entity can be seen as coming from a place of having the privilege not to have those aspects of yourself (violently) imposed onto you; escapism for those who do not need it, invisibility for those that do. This has merit. Though as equally as you gain visibility you are exposed, and exposed we are. Anonymity grants the escape hatch from corporate managerial dominion over cultural online space; anonymity is the true vanguard of the contemporary discourse, not so-called freedom of speech. Anonymity lets us organise, compost outside earshot (in theory at least). We need to take advantage, fully, of the permeable membrane of online/irl interconnectivity. The messy composting. [...] Formally, webrings have a tradition of operating within the realm of compost. Take even the rudimentary visual aestheticism endemic to the format: it is not out of conscious decision to create a net-aesthetic formed of dead hyperlinks, obscure-specific images often with entrenched personal history (even by effect of when, where, and whom the image(s) were sourced from), but by-effect of the tools available. Having to write your own html, css, creates a fertile ground for radical composting — text and image the width of the screen, bizarre workarounds to technical issues, text overlaying image, image overlaying text. Compost, not collage. The inherent disconnect here between text-image is one thing that leads to this characteristic; there is no non-textual interface available — all non-textual elements are determined by text. Evidently leading to strange design that is not collage, despite happenstance formal similarities. This is in opposition to the feed of contemporary social media, what I would describe as collage. A difference is in the form of mediation, as in the processing, gathering, and reproduction of content. Social media such as twitter could by all means be seen as a net of interconnecting feeds, retweets, likes, but it is not compost - it is composite, each element neatly delegated its own screen space, memory location, quadrat. Mutant hybrid code leeched from webring-kin, hyperlinks across servers, geospace, all of this clearly existent still, but clearly not the mode of atm. [...]