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Kudzu

10 de out.
10 min de leitura

Atualizado: há 2 horas

The history of digital life, like that of nature, is a history of migration. Everything changes and moves. It is a continuous dance of displacement and adaptation. In nature, ecology is the dance floor where different species dance together, sharing rules and coexisting. They organize themselves into trophic levels, the food chain that we usually simplify in the form of a pyramid, although it can take various structures. There are those who produce, those who consume, and those who decompose. The word “trophic” comes from Greek and means “food.” It is the system of energy distribution. The more harmonious the dance, the stronger the species become. But everything changes with the arrival of an invasive species.


The invasive one comes from afar, ignores the rules, and destroys local and native life. It has no commitment to anything beyond its own survival. By threatening everything that has been built, it becomes a symbol of fear. In plants, its nickname sounds almost like a capital sin: weed. In sci-fi and horror works, it is a common theme: invasion by aliens, by zombies, by diseases. Something arrives and destroys everything we have done and believed. Fiction is a common response, because, when control is lost, the logical point of reference is lost. Language then begins to resort to emotion, speculation, and faith, or the lack thereof. Both AI and the weed and religion speak about a common theme: control, and the lack of it. AI as control of information, weed as control of nature, and religion as control of one’s own destiny.


Within this context, I want to tell the story of an invasive plant that has many parallels with AI. It is called kudzu, a friendly little plant that got out of control and became both a symbol of faith and salvation and a monster of biological devastation. Its scientific name is Pueraria montana, but, being native to Asia, it bears the popular Japanese name: kudzu. It is a beautiful, aromatic, fast-growing vine, which is why it was introduced in the US as a plant to decorate gardens. But in the region where it is native, it does much more than that. Everything in it is edible: its root, which looks like cassava, becomes starch and noodles; its flower becomes jelly; and its leaves, salad. In China, it has medicinal use to treat heart problems, alcoholism, and menopause.


But its fate was sealed when they discovered it could treat soil erosion and recover the productivity destroyed by the exploratory aggression of the Industrial Revolution. In the 1930s, the US faced the Great Depression, a disaster both economic and environmental. Soil degradation and intense drought gave rise to the dust storms known as Dust Bowls, which devastated crops and forced mass migrations. Kudzu emerged as a miraculous solution: besides treating the soil, it was cheap, grew fast, and served as animal feed. The government even paid those who planted kudzu on their land. Moments of tragedy are known for being fertile ground for religious frenzy, and with the Great Depression and kudzu, it was no different. In the southern US, the region most affected by the Dust Bowls, a radio host named Channing Cope became the prophet of kudzu. He promoted the plant as a miracle from God to save America from the Great Depression and created the Kudzu Club, a group of about 20,000 people who spread seeds and information about kudzu. More than 3 million hectares were covered by the plant.


However, at the height of planting, World War II arrived, and rural workers abandoned their farms to go fight. Only then did they discover a problem: kudzu cannot be left without maintenance, because it propagates by itself and gets out of control. The relationship with kudzu remained religious, but now, instead of a blessing, it was a curse, because it began to do what an invasive species does: suffocate native life, destroy diversity, and spread to the point where it is no longer possible to eliminate the plant without destroying the environment in which it is located. What makes it restore soils is the large nutritional stock in its root, but this is also what makes its destruction difficult. If any remnant of the root remains, there is nutrient for it to sprout again.


Furthermore, it propagates by itself: it does not depend on new seeds or human replanting. The mother root of a kudzu plant can generate daughters that grow and become new mother roots. Legends about kudzu revolve around the frighteningly fast growth of its root. It is nicknamed “Foot-a-Day Vine,” because it grows 1 meter every 3 days. They say that if you stand still in front of a kudzu, it is possible to watch it grow. It is a structural parasite, like the orchid, but while the orchid grows on trunks, kudzu grows over everything—houses, roads, and cities. Mainly over other plants, preventing them from receiving light and performing photosynthesis.


Kudzu became a folkloric horror character, known as “the vine that ate the South.” Artist Casey Lance Brown created the photographic project “Kudzilla,” cataloging landscapes still covered by the plant today. She describes kudzu as “a botanical-evangelical legend, a disturbance, a mythical projection of our minds in plant form. We associate uncontrolled growth with cancer, overcrowding, invasive plants, and pollution. By association, kudzu becomes a modern myth about fear.” But, as in the context of AI, what usually comes after fear is apathy. When something seems too big to face, the easiest path is defeatism, living with the end. And this was also the government’s tactic, which put kudzu on the list of invasives to be combated, but, years later, removed it from the list. Kudzu’s only weak point is that it grows slowly in the cold; and, as it prospered in the heat of the South, the strategy was basically to abandon the South, leaving the local population to deal alone with the consequences.


Imagining AI as a weed is not only about visual infestation, the difficulty of searching for images and discerning what is real in clickbait culture. The loss of control is also functional; it is in the use of AI as a biological extension of the human body, which invades and suffocates the capacities we depend on to survive, such as memory, communication, interpretation, and human interrelations. In September 2025, the startup Friend.com launched the largest campaign in New York subways to promote its AI virtual friend. The posters caused outrage and were covered with messages such as “surveillance capitalism” and “get real friends.” This occurred in the same year that ChatGPT faced lawsuits for “AI-driven suicide,” after cases of users who used it as a therapist, a practice that has already been banned by public bodies, such as that of the state of Illinois. The impotence in the face of AI accelerationism grows on the same soil of defeatism as kudzu. Without having the right to autonomy and with AI treated as an inevitable greater force, the relationship is not one of partnership; it is unilateral, of submission. That is, it seems like religious obedience. Several articles and books have been written about the religious force that AI has been inciting, and on social networks aesthetic movements such as Divine Machinery, Digital Neogothic, Techno Mysticism, and Cyber Spiritualism proliferate. They speak of the act of faith of surrendering to the chaos of the divine machine.


The trend that best summarizes the sacralization of AI is Divine Machinery, inspired by a publication by philosopher Howard Kainz, called Angelic Characteristics of Computers (1993), which in 2011 got a sequel: Angelology and Artificial Intelligence. He asks: if an angel is a creature without a human body and without autonomy (whoever questioned lost their position as an angel, like Lucifer) and exists only to follow orders and transmit a superior message, what separates it, then, from a computer? Angels also have instant cognition, perfect memory, and do not need linear thought; they transform thought into language immediately, just like AI. Coincidentally, pop culture, which was already flooded with Christian aesthetics, from Fleabag to Conclave, is now reinforced with Lux, Rosalía’s new album, which transforms religious transcendence into pop. The record has been called “an acclamation of human musical ability,” something too complex for AI to reproduce. The war on machines seems to have taken on proportions of a holy war.


Philosopher Giorgi Vachnadze, in the book Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence, talks about how AI has been controlling our cognition in a way similar to Christianity. He says that the path to salvation, which in Christianity is conducted by rituals of purification of the body, such as baptism, confession, and renunciation of the sins of the flesh, in the techno-salvation of AI takes place through self-improvement: overcoming the limitations of the body to reach perfect language, the perfect feed, the trained algorithm that brings only the purest and most revealing information. Researcher Mark Coeckelbergh, in the book Ethics in Artificial Intelligence, draws a parallel between AI and Gnosticism, a religious philosophy that, despite opposing Christian logic, emerged from it. Gnosticism preaches that salvation comes through a divine knowledge that exists in the universe, but that cannot be accessed within the limitations of the human body; one must be more than human to achieve personal and divine enlightenment.


But spiritual forces have material consequences, in the body and in nature. And, by making a botanical parallel, one can look at botanical solutions. Kudzu, although an interesting analogy, is also a case of failure, of what not to do. The interaction between species is the rule; the emergence of weeds is only the exception. Biologist Stefano Mancuso, in the book The Incredible Journey of Plants, speaks about the importance of breaking the stigma of invasives, recalling that nature is a force in movement, and that all flora that is now native was once invasive. Invasive species only acquired their reputation as “outlaws” by escaping the places where human beings believed they could keep them enclosed. A species only becomes invasive when it alters the balance of ecological communities, for example, by not having a natural predator that regulates excessive growth. In Japan, its place of origin, kudzu is not invasive, because there beetles feed on it. Furthermore, there is a greater culture of kudzu consumption, which prevents plants from growing too much and propagating by themselves far away.


Both AI and kudzu face a challenge of commoditization: what cannot be controlled is more difficult to monetize. Journalist Ayurella Muller, author of Devoured, a book about the history of kudzu, states that the plant’s problem has always been swept under the rug. No public body wants to take the blame for the ecological crisis, and many even avoid granting interviews to her. They also avoid funding scientific research on kudzu, precisely what could reveal ways to use it as a raw material. AI also faces production problems. An MIT study from August 2025 points out that 95% of AI pilot companies did not reach planned profit, because the technology has served more as a way to cut expenses on old products than as a truly new product, a shortcut that leads to the same destination.


The failure in introducing invasive species like kudzu, intentionally inserted, can also be compared to diasporic immigrations: foreign populations displaced and treated as mere raw material for labor, without consideration for their social and biological needs, nor for the needs of the place where they go. And, like diasporic peoples, kudzu also became a symbol of resistance. In the region of Jackson, Mississippi, there was a magazine called The Kudzu, an independent counterculture publication that addressed topics such as the Vietnam War, the war on drugs, and other radical issues of the time. They worked in partnership with the Louisiana Weekly, a newspaper focused on Black and African diasporic culture.


Finally, something crucial that AI and invasive species have in common is that both exist in a moment of inescapable transition, at the intersection where two times and two forces act together, harmoniously or not. In nature, this place has a name: ecotone, the place on the line that separates biomes, the division between desert and forest, Cerrado and Amazon. At the edges, the life of the two biomes mixes and creates an explosion of interactions. The transformations are so many that ecotones are often used as thermometers for “trend forecasting,” because post-change life happens there first. Brazil has one of the richest and most complex ecotones, where three biomes intersect: Mata dos Cocais, a transition between Amazon, Cerrado, and Caatinga.


“Biodiversity flourishes in ecotones. They often harbor a greater abundance of species than the regions on either side, a phenomenon known as the edge effect. They can function as important migratory corridors and crossroads for certain species. Ecotones defy categorization. Although there is value in dividing the world into biomes for purposes of scientific study, these ecological crossroads reveal the limitations of our maps. They remind us that all borders are human creations. Species cross limits, soils mix, and climates overlap, forming transitive gradients over rigid divisions. Instead of fixed containers, nature offers fluid zones of possibility, part of a single continuous biosphere.” (Willow Defebaugh)


The name Ecotone is a combination of “eco” (meaning “home”) with “tone” (from tonos, “tension”). It is a home of tension, organic and delicate, of bodies adjusting their rules to allow neighboring species to share the same space. The ecotone performs many functions in the ecosystem and, despite the chaos of which it is made, is a solid and constant presence. But, for those who live in movement, it is a place of passage and should be used less as a new home and more as a sanctuary, a place to visit and learn how to deal with the unstable, and then return to stability, to the care of old roots and mother trees: the oldest trees in a forest, which support, instead of competing with, the younger trees and the whole forest.


“To truly reckon with ourselves, to tell the stories of what is happening, we need to reach our own limits, toward the incomprehensible, where totally new ways of thinking are being gestated in the puddles of the forgotten.” -Bayo Akomolafe




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