I start this afterword in whole-hearted agreement with the argument made by the editors of this fascinating collection, which is that the mediation of human and non-human life by technologies means that there is no direct access to a pristine real world, let alone to a nature unsullied by human intervention. Human life has always depended on and been shaped by tools and technologies; human relations to environments as well as to other humans are always mediated by devices and discourses – digital technologies are just some of the most recent of these. This implies that technologies, including digital technologies, are always productive.¹ They co-produce ecologies and geographies. They are generative rather than reductive or selective in relation to a ‘real’. They multiply natures, environments, and ecologies. This is also the case because digital processes of mediation are now extraordinarily diverse, dissimilar, and differentiated. As the chapters in this collection attest, and as Andrew Dwyer’s chapter in particular emphasises, there are very many such technologies of many different kinds, deployed by many human and non-human actors, converting the world into digital data in diverse ways with very different consequences. Entirely invented digital animals; animals translated into pictures and sounds and routes; animals charismatic and edible; trees wired up as urban infrastructure: these are hybrid and perhaps even undecidable figures.

I have to confess, though, that I remain particularly interested in one sort of animal that appears in all the chapters gathered here, which is what most contributors call the ‘human’. The notion of the ‘human’ has itself also been reconfigured somewhat by digital technologies of course. Digital data and computational processes are often cited as one of the more recent material innovations that mean that ‘the human’ cannot be understood as a uniquely self-reflexive actor inhabiting a (particular kind of) corporeal body. Human life is also mediated by digital devices of many kinds. And of course there are many arguments that that sovereign notion of the human was always a Western idea in any case, aligned far too closely with only particular forms of embodiment and reason. Hence a new label for such animals: the posthuman. A more capacious sense of multiple posthuman lives intimately entangled with all sorts of ecologies and technologies, including the digital, thus has some potential for displacing the Eurocentrism of much critical theory. Rather than the familiar roll call of social theorists, for example, a more relational and generative sense of digital geographies might emerge if, in different ways with diverse Indigenous knowledges, we proactively engaged in ‘making kin with machines’.²

This broad orientation towards multiple forms of the digital mediation of organic life aligns with the gist of many of the chapters here, all of which sidestep simplistic accounts of the digital. Many of the specific examples of digital mediation discussed here are approached ambivalently. In the context of the contemporary biodiversity crisis, much of this ambivalence circles around whether a particular digital process will contribute to the conservation of animal life or to its depredation. Some chapters suggest that the answer is – probably – both. This is particularly the case when not only the digital content which renders an animal visible or audible is considered, but also the materialities of that digitality. What kind of cost-benefit analysis could calculate the balance between a digital game that generates empathy with a charismatic non-human animal, the environmental impact of the mining of the materials needed to make the game’s hardware, and the carbon footprint of the energy used to produce that hardware and to play that game? I’m not sure, but that kind of calculation is certainly implicit in some chapters here. Other contributors grasp that sort of balance sheet as an impossibility and instead describe digital mediation as inherently paradoxical, as Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme does with some lobsters. As Mari Arold argues, there is a need to ‘simultaneously account for digital/analogue, discursive/material, and tangible/ethereal mediations of phenomena’.³ To which might be added, human and non-human, technological and natural. This complexity certainly aligns with emerging arguments in digital geography which are particularly attentive to digital technologies as a complex site of potentiality rather than a tool wielded by the powerful to capitalism’s gain.⁴

Emphasising the complexity of digital mediation – its ambivalence, or paradoxicality – means that questions about the power dynamics of any particular mediation must also be nuanced. Several of the chapters here flag the political economy of platforms as one of those dynamics, as does Bram Büscher’s influential account of Nature 2.0.⁵ However, the contributors to this collection do not give a lot of attention to the big social media platforms. Few contributors interrogate their harvesting of user data and their algorithmic mediation of environmental data, or their commodification of non-human life. In relation to the subdiscipline of digital geographies and its current focus on platforms, this is an interesting and provocative swerve. It suggests that platforms are not the only digital organisations making digitally mediated worlds, and that profit-making is not the only dynamic at play in that making.

Some chapters prefer to explore, for example, the ways in which digital data and datafication are being incorporated into pre-existing archives, tools, and models. Hannah Hunter, Sandra Jasper, and Jonathan Prior discuss a museum archive,⁶ for example, and Sophia Doyle and Katherine Dow examine an online seedbank database.⁷ Here the focus is more on how digital data harvested from ecological worlds replicate and reproduce, but also modify, existing power dynamics of power/knowledge. The truth claims made with data, whether in terms of science or empathy, are often complicit with governance institutions and processes. But digital technologies also have their own material affordances. Uniquely ‘digital objects’ such as hashtags and hyperlinks are the focus of Rogers’ definition of digital methods,⁸ and are used by Jonathan W.Y. Gray, Liliana Bounegru, and Gabriele Colombo here to explore the specific mediation of fires in the Amazon forest by Twitter and its users.⁹ While topics through which the fires were framed were fairly diverse, perhaps the most striking finding is the temporality of the concern expressed via the platform, which peaked very rapidly and dissipated equally swiftly. This attention to both digital affordance and posthuman practice and discourse is a valuable methodological orientation implicit in much of this collection.

One digital device that struck me because of its repeated appearance in this collection is the online camcorder-with-a-website.¹⁰ A webcam that just sits and watches and shares its watching with online viewers – I wonder if that is a somewhat novel form of digital visuality which might deserve more attention? It’s slightly distanced, a little fascinated, a little wary, boring after a while but never bored, its attentiveness performing in(post)human endurance. A lot has been written about operative images – which don’t represent the world but are part of a machine’s functioning – and webcams aren’t quite that, or at least not the ones discussed here. They don’t seem to be defined by a particular purpose, though as Catherine Oliver suggests, they do some things with some viewers.¹¹ So the always-on webcam seems to me to perhaps be another form of inhuman photography for which this collection offers some context.¹²

Indeed, we might supplement discussions about the generative gaze of the webcam with other extended, posthuman ways of seeing.¹³ Drone vision is another example,¹⁴ and Oscar Hartman Davies and Jamie Lorimer in this volume examine other forms of surveillance-at-a-distance.¹⁵ Satellite imagery is yet another. Remotely sensed data are received as radio frequency data which are impossible for human corporeal vision to perceive and converted into images. Yet the framing of these images by the notion of a ‘cosmic zoom’ from outer space to the innermost workings of cellular life is familiar and fascinating.¹⁶ It can be found everywhere from conservation documentaries to video adverts for smart cities to Hollywood movie special effects and art projects. It creates the ambiguous effect of being ‘close up at a distance’,¹⁷ a viewing position occupied by no one yet powerfully productive.¹⁸ It is also a view increasingly often created by algorithmic calculations to create what have been called ‘synthetic geographies’.¹⁹ There’s also another finding by Jonathan W.Y. Gray and colleagues, which is that many images shared on Twitter purporting to show the 2019 Amazon fires were of other fires entirely.²⁰ Rather than dismissing these as fake, they link them to the importance of stock images in the viewing of social media feeds,²¹ in which images signify fleetingly and gesturally. Instead, they offer the kind of generic imagery that floods the adverts, blogs, and websites of digital culture.²² Like the online webcam, none of these images stand in for what humans might witness directly. They are not photographic in that sense. These forms of technologically augmented vision are distinctively posthuman, neither embodied nor representational, and several chapters here find it particularly distressing that no animal can similarly augment or extend its vision.

That visual cosmic zoom is dependent on a specific spatial organisation of the visual field. It assumes three-dimensional space, as a volume through which bodies – corporeal or virtual – can travel. There are histories to the digital mediation of spatialities, of course. Early geographic information systems focused on urban areas, both because data were available there and some use could be seen for GIS there. However, one of the earliest GIS technologies was a land management tool, and efforts to create three-dimensional GIS models on two-dimensional printouts and, later, display screens were there from the very beginning of GIS too (as were animated GIS graphics). Increasingly extensive sensing technologies have extended this three-dimensional spatiality organised through x, y, and z coordinates through oceans and atmospheres and across land, enrolling animal life in various ways, as the chapter here by Oscar Hartman Davies and Jamie Lorimer points out.²³ More recently, satellites have generated the data for Global Positioning Systems. According to William Rankin, GPS technology organises the physical environment differently from the cartographic assumptions embedded in GIS design, less in terms of territories and sovereignties and more through points and connections.²⁴ These different spatialising technologies reconfigure animal (and posthuman) distribution and mobility somewhat differently, just as forests are configured differently through different spatialities in Mari Arold’s discussion here.²⁵ Different again is the ‘movescape’ through which some ocean spaces are mediated by many digital devices, which consists of mobile wet territories. One of the devices mentioned in several chapters are the tags attached to animal bodies that allow them to be tracked; it would be interesting to learn more about the specific spaces enacted by that animal-tracker hybrid as it is enrolled in these different spatial formations.

Emphasising the multiplicity of these spatialities is important. As Jennifer Gabrys argues, drawing on the work of Spivak and Wynter, the planetary is a geography that is made rather than discovered, and while it may constitute vast distances, planetary knowledge is neither comprehensive nor universal. ‘The planetary is the difference, distance, and duration with, within, and against which it might be possible to think differently about being human and becoming collective’, she suggests.²⁶ The chapter by Jess McLean and Lara Newman in this collection makes this point as it centres the Indigenous force of Country in its account of digital climate activism in Australia.²⁷ As many of the chapters here imply, it is vital that digitally mediated gaps, multiple knowledges, and uncertainties remain alert not only to differentiations within processes that are spatially extensive, but also to those gaps where such extension dissipates or fails, where understanding or data give out.

Alongside their various emphases on multiplicity, lurking in most of these chapters is a particular version of the posthuman. Most authors are concerned about posthuman capacities to enact relations of care and compassion – or, rather, how and whether the use of digital technologies might evoke such feelings for the animal by the human. The chapters are concerned about the exploitation of animals, their entrapment, and disappearance. The desired human response to such threats is often described as affective: feeling empathy with a snow leopard or a lobster, being hopeful for change, effecting repair. Humans should feel differently, feel more, when they consider animals, and digital technologies may enable that feeling. Action to protect and nurture will follow, it is hoped (though several authors seem less than convinced that nice feelings convert into nice actions). Catherine Oliver’s chapter here complexifies this framing, in its recognition that care can also be a form of violence.²⁸ These affective or emotional ambiguities perhaps deserve more attention. For example, Oliver’s chapter also offers a precise account of one posthuman-animal relationality in its discussion of ‘byproductive labour’. Byproductive labour maintains ‘positive affective atmospheres, but also metabolises ‘waste’ affects and affective byproducts’,²⁹ and in her account that labour is undertaken by the farm chickens watched by – yes, you guessed it – webcams. The outcome of byproductive labour in this instance is a somewhat ambiguous viewing human who is feeling less intensely, and it’s not entirely clear in Oliver’s chapter whether this is a good thing or not.

Of course, posthumans don’t just feel. They may also calculate, for example, and play, have spiritual experiences, and do many things without consciously thinking at all. Their feelings can be multiple and contradictory, and relations between feeling and doing are highly convoluted (to which the notion of cogniser as decision-maker may add something). Some feelings are not nice: shame, anger, and fear also motivate actions. Violence and apathy are also actions. So too are remembering and memorialising. I was particularly struck by the chapter by Hannah Hunter, Sandra Jasper, and Jonathan Prior on digital audio recordings, and their suggestion that archiving and listening to recordings of extinct animals is a means of grieving their loss.³⁰ These complex emotional dynamics are felt but they are also themselves mediated through things like archive recordings. Elsewhere I have argued that the multiplicity and diversity of such exteriorised mediations enable posthuman invention of many kinds.³¹ What emerges from memory, imagination, and speculation is one kind of posthuman agency.

So while digital entanglements with non-human life are crucial to explore, I don’t think that can mean not thinking about posthuman life. The human genome project has converted posthuman life into digital information too;³² human life is watched by millions of surveillance cameras and hundreds of satellites; GPS systems track human crowds; facial recognition software continues to attempt to sort human bodies into types; drones track and kill humans as well as animals; posthumans track their mobility, their menstrual cycles, their heart rate, their screen time. While many scholars have questioned the continued relevance of Foucauldian notions of biopower when embodiments of so many kinds are now so thoroughly datafied, there is an intriguing sense here that all and any carbon-based life-forms are increasingly enacted through similar technologies.

To push this provocation a little further, I was struck by Andrew Dwyer’s description of digital eco-logics as processes through which materials ‘read, interpret, or act upon signs’.³³ Interpreting signs is one of the key ways that the academic disciplines in the human and social sciences have approached the human, of course. As a form of sentience, however – or cognisance, to use Dwyer’s term – it is something shared by animals as well as humans and computers (and those environments in which computers are embedded).³⁴ There are big-data-based approaches to ‘human’ agency that constitute humans no more and no less as ‘cognisers’, for example agent-based modelling approaches to understanding human behaviour. Now that so much of posthuman and animal behaviour is turned into data, algorithms can be used to find patterns in both equally, and to simulate such behaviour in many scenarios. Driverless cars can learn about the behaviour of humans on roads from simulated bodies rather than risking live bodies, for example, and though I haven’t come across any examples of chickens being added to the models, that may only be a matter of time.

In short, there are many ways that the chapters in this collection extend the range of digital geographies. They pay careful attention to the specifically digital affordances of technologies and to their enactment in a range of different situations. These chapters suggest that various forms of power and agency are at work in these enactments, often in complex and contradictory ways. They suggest that there are new spatial formations emerging in these enactments, from huge extensions of three-dimensional space to the fluid mobilities of wetscapes. Given the importance of screen interfaces to so much digital technology, these chapters also provide a rich account of some of the spatial formations which structure specific kinds of digital images in particular ways: the surveillant zoom, for example, now accompanied by the ongoing flow of what Hito Steyerl calls ‘the wretched of the screen’:³⁵ the stock image, the meme, and the gif. Perhaps most intriguing to me, as a scholar who can’t quite shrug off her early training in human and cultural geography, they also offer rich and nuanced accounts of the posthuman life that is also part of these many paradoxical digital-ecological entanglements.