INTRODUCTION
The accepted norm that our environment is degrading and the perceived notion that Nature is in danger has problematized and undermined the value of emerging successive ecologies. It even oversimplified the complex processes of Nature itself. Ubiquitous substances such as pollution are immediately deemed bad, without consideration that its “impurity” is an indication of a productive system. This creates a dichotomy between the “idealized and the untouched” Edenic image of Nature and the so-called “negative effects” of production.
However, production has always been in dialectic with Nature. If we were to frame Nature through a Marxian perspective, we can deduce that production is a process by which the form of nature is altered. “The producer ‘can work only as nature does, that is by changing the form of the matter... he is constantly helped by natural forces... the producer changes the forms of the materials furnished by nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him...” As such, we as humans have altered objects from Nature through labor to produce useful things in order to facilitate and fulfill our needs to thrive as species, whether or not we are conscious of the ecological impact we are causing and altering. Production is inevitable; Nature is destined to evolve temporally.
Today, the virtual realm has become an extension of our being, where digital connectivity has become a part of our second-Nature. A disconnection from this phenomenological infrastructure brings upon a sense of anxiety, which can be disabling. Though created by man, it is much more unsettling when this terrain becomes uncontrolled, and informalities, synthetic Natures, begin to occur without man’s doings. The idea of man’s inability to tame such a creature reverts our perception towards such creations as “unnatural,” and exoticizes their existence as being the “other.”