From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia

Cyberpastoralism

This article examines cyberpastoralism—the subsumption of rural nature into digital infrastructure—across C. W. Smith's work. For related technological systems in Beach Surgery, see Technology in Beach Surgery.

Cyberpastoralism names the subsumption of rural nature into digital infrastructure across C. W. Smith's oeuvre—a recurrent meditation on the fate of landscape under late-capitalist datafication. In the novel, the narrator observes: "Pastures now hold warehouses filled with hard drives… To be a farmer is to be a data farmer."^[1] The Autonomous diesel data-harvesters that pursue Leif and Katita across the red desert are the material embodiment of this logic.

Smith explores the ethical vertigo this produces. In Antinomicity, the wife's critique cuts against technological pastoral fantasy: "you record the sound of a passing train"—a meditation that engaging with a virtual nature is "better than no nature at all," yet remains a substitution, a loss.^[2]

Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time presents the counter-image: a solar-punk hacker-gardening community where nature is hacked, redirected, but reclaimed from the apparatus. Yet Pastoral Scanlines names the ideology most clearly: "cryptopastoralism rewriting the history of sun smudged wheat fields"; drones instead of bees; "streaming data pouring down… in some sort of augmented reality sun shower… increasingly low polygon."^[3] The cycle itself—Leif and Katita's eternal return—mirrors the data-farm's perpetual harvest, an ecosystem that consumes and regenerates without conclusion.

See also

• Autonomous diesel data-harvesters
• Synthesised nature
• Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time
• Empty World Meditations
• The surplus of the seen

References

1. ↑ A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (novel)
2. ↑ Antinomicity (2022)
3. ↑ Pastoral Scanlines (2025)