MIT Future Fest ran for the first time this fall. Five days, September 30 to October 4, with MIT opening its doors to the public. It was led by the MIT Museum, with MIT Technology Review and the Morningside Academy for Design. More than 50 events and 100 speakers across AI, quantum, health, climate, energy, policy, art and design. Panels, open labs, immersive installations, a party in a foundry. I was there for three of the days.1
The term
Over those three days in Cambridge, a set of verbs emerged as calls for the future: build, deploy, imagine, augment! But there was one, more urgent, sitting underneath them all:
Tend.
To care for something or someone, in this case. To cultivate.
Tend has a second meaning. A tendency: the way something leans when nobody is steering. Both senses come from the Latin tendere, to stretch toward.2 One is a habit. The other is a practice. Left alone, a system follows its tendencies. Tending is the work of leaning it somewhere else.
From this sense, I will borrow cultivation as a working term for the cyborg lexicon. It's the continuous labor of maintaining agency inside technological, cultural, bodily and planetary systems that keep running whether or not we participate.
Future Fest clarified the need for a cultivator, a tender, and a steward.
The frame of cultivation comes directly from Andrea Lipps, senior director of Visual Arts, Media, and Technology at the MIT Museum, who moderated a session titled Laboratories of Imagination. During her introduction, she traced the word culture to the Latin cultura, participle of colere3 for tilling and tending. While mostly used to refer to the actual cultivation of land, Lipps noted that Cicero brought the metaphor against the untended mind. In the Tusculan Disputations he wrote "Cultura autem animi philosophia est", which C.D. Yonge's 1877 translation gives as "Whereas philosophy is the culture of the mind".4 Lipps warned:
"A field left untended does not stay empty; it goes to whatever seeds blow in."
An untended field is one problem. An untended field surrounded by monoculture and invasive species is another.