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Primordial Desert

10 de out.
8 min de leitura

Atualizado: há 2 horas

In 2023, the UNCCD (United Nations sector for combating desertification) released the surreal fact that, every second, the world loses the equivalent of four football fields of healthy land. Among those responsible are agriculture and livestock farming. Together, their many forms of environmental destruction result in the final form: desertification. When it becomes desert, the soil becomes not only infertile and unfit for production, but also for habitation. There is no life. Here it is possible to draw a parallel between the mode of agricultural production and the current mode of production of the most popular AIs.


AI facilitates the creation of information on a large scale, to feed the demand of the media market, but also to train AI itself. A vicious cycle with great environmental impact. It is estimated that 1 paragraph of 100 words in ChatGPT consumes half a liter of water and energy to light 9 houses for 1 hour. In the US, 2/3 of the new data centers built since 2022 are in places where there is already water scarcity, leading local populations to protest and fight with the data centers for access to water. AI’s promise of infinite possibilities and growth (a well-known capitalist premise) has already begun by running into physical limitations, but it also runs into logical limitations.


Linguist Emily Bender says that a big problem with the language model currently used is what she called the “Stochastic Parrot.” Stochastic means random, and “random parrot” is the idea that AI only repeats what it hears, in a recombined and almost always random way. That is, despite creating a message that we understand, it itself does not understand the meaning it has just created. That is why the name “black box algorithm” is also used. It is a response based on a “half-calculated guess,” when the exact answer is not known, but something about the content is known, so it eliminates the obviously wrong and takes a chance on the remaining options. It is a logical but not conscious process, because it acts from a material whose structure is unknown, only fragments.


So, if AI “writes with its eyes closed,” it messes up meanings. To order them, it depends on user feedback, like a child asking a responsible adult for help. Thus, without knowing how it did what it did, it creates new meanings from “messy” versions, causing many meanings, over time, to become more confused instead of more elaborated. In other words, it does build meanings, but it also destroys. And destruction may even be necessary to grow, but it is not very “intelligent” to hand a knife to someone who is blindfolded. Archaeologist Maria Dragoi says that, despite our image of the internet as an infinite collection, it is actually becoming the opposite of a library.


Beyond the distortion of meanings, there is also the distortion of time. Maria Dragoi uses the term “algorithmic historicity,” which describes AI’s way of thinking about time. The archaeologist says that the blind algorithm elaborates visions of the present and future that are only creative distortions of the past, leading to an excessive consumption of nostalgias, that is, living while fleeing from the present. And without knowing the present, it is impossible to imagine the future, because the future is not a place; it is a project, built in the now. And with aggressive content moderation, such as Meta’s censorship of posts about Palestinian history and boosting of Israeli posts, the past also becomes difficult to access. If we take the image of time measured by an hourglass, with sand flowing from one side to the other, it is as if the hourglass had broken. Without the back-and-forth of the hourglass, there is no longer “going to the future” or “returning to the past,” there is only an eternal and chaotic present. When the hourglass broke, time became a sandstorm.


However, the surreal irony that the machine known for making absurd images tried to create a forest but came out a desert can actually be a starting point to understand the possibilities of the desert and see it not as an end, but as a crossing. And when we seek the roots of images about the future of technology, we find the ground taken over by science fiction stories. But, curiously, many stories that feed the terror of the “war against machines,” such as Blade Runner, Star Trek, Star Wars, and Mad Max, took inspiration from the literature of Dune, but it has a slightly different vision.


In Dune, long before the time in which the story of the films takes place, the Butlerian Jihad occurred, a war against intelligent machines. The population noticed that machines were influencing human behavior, making people think like machines and forget human needs, thus living confused and stagnant lives. “One day, men handed over their own reason to machines, hoping this would free them. But they only let themselves be enslaved by other men with machines.” “The target of the Jihad was a machine attitude, more than the machines themselves. Humans configured these machines to usurp our sense of beauty and our necessary self-control with which we make judgments.” Then there was the war to overthrow intelligent machines. But technology was not abolished, but restructured. Some time later, the profession of the mentats emerged, shown in the films, a class trained to mediate between machines and humans.


However, even with a better relationship with technological resources, environmental devastation continued. The center of the economy in Dune became spice, a property extracted from the desert and used as a drug and fuel, and which many literary critics consider an analogy for oil. And it is in the most devastated region of the desert of Dune that the Fremen live, an analogy to the Tuareg and Bedouin peoples, indigenous to the deserts of the Middle East and Africa. As in real life, they are stereotyped as savage, aggressive, and inferior, but they are scientifically very advanced; they merely allow themselves to be read as savages, because they live hidden carrying out their plan of ecological utopia: to rebuild the desert, making it fertile and habitable again. In Dune, there is a saying that goes “Polish comes from the cities, but wisdom comes from the desert,” because it is in scarcity, where the only option is movement and transformation, that innovation is born.


But although fiction is an excellent fuel for imagining futures, in real life there is a universe of ideas and references in the wisdom of desert peoples. And the greatest of them is so well known that it seems obvious: the oasis. Unfortunately, the oasis is usually seen through an orientalist stereotype from cinema and cartoons, which portray it as something magical that arises by itself in nature, usually in the form of a mirage. But the oasis is actually a human construction, a very complex garden capable of regenerating the soil and making the desert fertile and habitable. Lab Oasis, an international scientific institute based in Italy, is dedicated to protecting oases and their legacy as an ancestral technology of ecological innovation. According to the institute, the oasis is a chain effect of natural elements: it begins with a date palm seed, one of the trees most resistant to the desert, nicknamed the tree of life. Desert beetles carry water on their shells, which is collected from the humidity of the night. After the date palm comes the olive tree and other fruit trees, which form a green barrier that protects the region. Then come the more delicate plants, vegetables, cereals, and forage shrubs, which feed animals that can move from one oasis to another.


But the power of the oasis is not only the regenerative cycle of the soil, it is its principle of decentralized community. The oasis does not grow so much in size; it is a localized force. There are various types of oases, Chott, Sebkha, Wadi; some closer to aquifer channels, others in the shadow of stone mountains. Each with a regional potential and carrying out exchanges. That is why they are nomadic peoples; they walk through the desert, from oasis to oasis. The first great centralized civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia formed at the same time and in the same region as the oasis nomads, but only on the banks of great rivers, because centralized power does not withstand inside the desert. This is one of the most powerful analogies of the oasis: its power is not in expansion, but in connection; because it exists collectively and ecologically, it not only survives, but transforms nature.


Lab Oasis also points out that there is a difference between desert and desertification. The desert is not a “bad,” dead place. Not only is it an important part of geological history, but it is also a habitat rich in biodiversity, which we only ignore or disregard because it does not represent our Western way of life. The desert that arises naturally through geological events, such as the movement of tectonic plates, is different from the desert created by humans through environmental destruction. Desertification is destruction and, in that sense, even the desert can be desertified.


When we speak of “rebuilding the internet,” we have as a point of reference a moment in the digital era when the internet seemed a much more fertile place. When researching, it was possible to access an enormous community of niches and blogs, not just disconnected texts and a showcase of advertisements. There was a feeling of a digital forest of possibilities. And this is a warning point: the reconstruction of the desert begins with an oasis, not with a forest. Returning to the internet-forest may be a mirage. It may even be possible in the future, with a better technology-nature relationship, but at the moment the most viable is the path of the internet-oasis. Because we came from the forest, we dream of returning to the forest. But in the desert, the rules of nature are different.


A real and cruel example is a project conducted by Israel in the invasion of Palestinian lands called Make The Desert Bloom. In 1948, Zionists illegally occupied a rural region of 10% of Palestine, obtaining land rights with the justification that it was an empty and infertile territory, despite there being a desert ecosystem there and rural peoples who were expelled and had their homes destroyed. The JNF (Jewish National Fund) then began the Make the Desert Bloom campaign with the mission of transforming the desert into forest and showing that Palestine “could be fertile.” However, only pines native to European forests were planted, chosen to make the new residents “feel at home.” Because it is, in the desert, an exotic and invasive plant, the European pine spreads easily, conveniently covering the debris of the destroyed houses. However, it is not adapted to the arid climate and, in the high temperatures of the desert, it becomes highly flammable. The result: in May 2025, Israel records the largest forest fires in its history, occurring in more than 100 regions simultaneously. Another wave of fires also happened in 2010. Researchers and activists call this movement Palestinian ecocide (sources: BBC, CNN, and Mondo Weiss Journalism).


There is a long history of ignorance regarding desert biodiversity, which is not only much richer than colonial stereotypes show, but is also a source of valuable knowledge for us today. The inhabitants, human and plant, of the desert have a rich history of finding intelligent solutions in resource management, autonomy, community building, and survival where life is not impossible, only more challenging. Researchers at CLIMAVORE, an ecology institute, created a project called “Become Xerophile,” to become xerophilous (plants adapted to water scarcity), and they speak about the importance of knowing and being inspired by plants that thrive in the desert. Building oases and becoming xerophilous are some of the various paths found in the wisdom of the desert to see beyond the sandstorm and build possible futures beyond desertification.





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