Archives of Discontinuity

Issue #5: The Digital Spectacle of Firecommons

Updated on March 8th to correct some errors made in the publishing process.

In this issue: A case study of a wild and prescribed fires in California, the wildland-urban interface (WUI), combustion as memory, and the implication of new tools. Also – join us next Thursday, March 13th, for a virtual salon on open distributed Southeast Asian tech futures. More info at the end of this issue.

"To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language?" - Gilles Deleuze.

​​Fire Affects and Epistemological Breaks

The history of fire management in the United States is shaped by a fundamental contradiction. While fire has long been understood as an essential ecological process—regulating plant succession, maintaining biodiversity, and reducing fuel loads— wildfire management systems have historically treated it as a threat to be neutralized. This approach was institutionalized in the early 20th century, when agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service implemented aggressive fire suppression policies, often justified under the logic of economic protection. The 1935 "10 a.m. Policy" mandated that all wildfires be contained by the following morning, reinforcing the notion that fire (and the cultural knowledge of it) could be systematically eliminated from the landscape. But what if the real danger lies not in fire itself but in our refusal to live with it? What if the logic of suppression as a stand-alone policy, designed to erase fire from the landscape, has instead created the conditions for the climax of its destructive capabilities?

The consequences are most evident in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where suburban development has expanded into fire-prone landscapes. This expansion—driven by land speculation, housing market pressures, and a regulatory framework that continues to permit construction in high-risk areas—has created new forms of exposure to fire hazards. In California, it has generated what fire historian Stephen Pyne refers to as a “new fire regime”¹ — meaning that the entanglement of petroleum-based suburbs with high-volatility brushland and chaparral ecosystems has created a more destructive form of fire than what present-day ecologies have ever known; one that moves not just as a ‘front’ racing over wildland, but as through ‘conflagration,’ jumping from house to house or block to block as embercast, with no need for continuous fuel beds.

In California alone, more than 14 million people live in the WUI, increasing both the human and economic stakes of wildfire events. The financial impact is significant: the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise, resulted in over $16 billion in damages, while the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires have caused record property damage, with insured losses projected at $75 billion, and with total property and capital losses ranging between $95 and $164 billion according to a recent report from the UCLA Anderson Forecast). Over the past decade especially, fires in the WUI continued to outmatch their predecessors, increasing in frequency and severity. The ‘new fire regime’ is situated within and reproduced by a cultural context that is skilled at directing blame and even better at forgetting. For example, wildfire expert Jack Cohen notes that various parts of Malibu, one of the sites for a recent disaster in LA, has, in fact, burned over 15 times in the last century (and yet still, the public was no less shocked and intergovernmental relationships were no less prompt in falling apart). As Mike Davis noted in his essay The Case For Letting Malibu Burn (1995): “Malibu is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods.”

Davis links America’s fire suppression policies—and its recurring shock at their failure—to uniformitarianism, a 19th-century geological principle. Shaped by Anglo-American nostalgia for Europe’s slow, humid geologies, this logic instills a deep belief in environmental stability—one fundamentally misaligned with the West of the United States’ fire cycles. The effort to impose stasis on this landscape alienates its climatic and geologic customs, forcing nonlinear natural systems into a fiction of ‘averages.’ As Davis notes, “nothing is less likely to occur [in California] than the ‘average rainfall’.”

Perhaps ‘catastrophism’ is a more apt approach to make sense of California’s autopoiesis, where “high-intensity, low-frequency events (‘disasters’) are the ordinary agents of landscape and ecological change.”² In this sort of environment, fire will always make a place for itself.

For the past 100 years, US Wildfire management has forced itself into a posture of reactivity centered on emergency response and infrastructure reinforcement—firefighting aircraft, home-hardening strategies, and vegetation clearance mandates that are difficult to enforce. These measures do not address the underlying drivers of fire vulnerability: the continued expansion of high-risk developments, the failure to integrate cultural burning practices, the aridification of the West, and the lack of structural reforms in land-use planning. Fire suppression as a stand-alone policy with no provisions for the inevitability of California’s fire cycles is, simply put, the pursuit of uniformity with the result of catastrophe.

Rather than seeing fire as a crisis to be managed, what would it mean to understand it as an epistemological break—one that calls for rethinking our relationship to prediction, adaptation, and climate governance? To relate to the Wildland-Urban Interface as a sort of ‘intertidal zone’ — built not as a human layer over wildland but as an exposed intermediary adaptation to the ebb and flow of fire cycles and their effect on home-making? What does ‘hardening’ mean in this context? What would it look like to follow Campbell et al’s understanding of climate collapse more generally ‘...not [as] a problem that can be framed, but something entirely different, a World that generates, but is not commensurate with, problems, and which no current organizational form can address.”³ That is, climate is not a problem facing the world, it is the world itself.

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Instruments of Perception

Fire follows patterns. It responds to contour and aspect, wind shifts, and cycles of fuel accumulation. To work with fire is to engage with its logic, to learn its grammar.

James Gibson’s theory of affordances suggests that meaning does not exist independently but emerges in relation to how a system is perceived and engaged with. In this sense, firefighters, cultural burners, prescribed fire practitioners, and residents all encounter fire differently. Their perceptual instruments—what they see, interpret, and respond to—are shaped by different histories and techniques.

Addressing the complexities of fire-prone landscapes requires not only coordinating among those various groups and their perceptions of fire but also across federal, state, local, and tribal governments. It requires rarely-in-place structures like bioregional funding and coordination, shared resource caches, training for local fire literacy, immutable data recording, legal reform for prescribed burning, and liability protections for fire managers. There are, fortunately, incredible people working hard to make these systems of knowledge and project implementation possible, though they face an era of Federal defunding, cultural erasure, bureaucratic roadblocks, and job loss.

Through our work at The School For Inclement Weather and Fire Protocols, we’ve come to experience fire as a form of memory and a structuring instrument that affects both material landscapes and social, political, and cultural dynamics. How could governance systems see fire and unpredictability not as objects to be extinguished but as instruments that inscribe and transform, shaping what remains?

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Fire Commons and Digital Spectacle

As wildfires increase in scale and severity, so does the public attention they generate. Fire has become a digitally mediated phenomenon, streamed and mapped in real-time through platforms like WatchDuty and UC San Diego’s ALERTCalifornia camera network. These tools, which provide live updates on fire movement, wind shifts, and suppression efforts, are transforming wildfire into an open-access event. In 2023, an AI-enhanced wildfire monitoring system—developed by CAL FIRE, ALERTCalifornia, and DigitalPath—was responsible for the initial alert of 30% of all wildfire starts in California. While these technologies improve situational awareness and public safety, they also introduce new complexities. Who controls the narratives that emerge from this real-time data? What happens when digital visibility outpaces the reality on the ground? The rapid dissemination of fire imagery means that wildfires are no longer contained to the physical landscapes where they burn—they now unfold in digital space, where perception often shapes response.

The challenges of this shift became apparent during a prescribed burn that we hosted last year at The School for Inclement Weather, which participated in a pilot program with WatchDuty. Designed to enhance public awareness of wildfire, evacuation zones, and more recently prescribed burns, WatchDuty displayed the event on its map with a simple "Bellweather Rx" label and a safety message. However, due to a miscommunication between agencies, for eight minutes, our prescribed burn was mistakenly classified as a wildfire. A crowd of digital viewers, watching through surveillance feeds, began calling emergency services. Emergency resources were immediately mobilized, and the situation escalated into an unintended public emergency.

The implications are significant at various scales. When fire becomes a publicly observed event in real-time, it can create new forms of participatory governance, often outside of formal institutions. In the School’s example, digital spectatorship pressured local fire managers to respond in ways shaped by public perceptions that were very different from the actual conditions on the ground. The fire itself remained calm and controlled, but its presence in the digital commons classified it as a crisis.

This raises broader questions about digital transparency, emergency data, and public agency. Wildfire surveillance networks introduce radical transparency, but transparency alone does not guarantee better governance. What happens when public access to real-time data creates more confusion than clarity? How do we design fire information systems that enable meaningful engagement rather than reactive interference?

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Mnemosyne Data: Sensing Elements

The contemporary landscape of fire management emphasizes data accumulation, including satellite mapping, predictive algorithms, and sensor networks. The premise is that with enough information, fire can be rendered predictable. However, as seen in recent wildfires, and as Kei Kreutler observes, “the impact of today’s technologies will not be explainable in pre-existing concepts.”⁴ The increasing precision of predictive technologies has not led to greater certainty but to a paradox: the more accurately fire behavior is modeled, the more unpredictable the broader system becomes.⁵⁶

The challenge is not only to produce more fire data but also to foster a dialogue of epistemologies. Guilherme Moura’s research in Brazil’s grasslands reconfigures the relationship between digital and material realities, showing fire as intelligence—something sensed and engaged with, not just recorded.⁷

In “Cloud Times” Mitch McEwen and Nadir Jeevanjee similarly intervene in the reduction of atmospheric complexity to the metric system.⁸ Just as Jeevanjee reframes clouds through temperature coordinates rather than linear distance, what would it mean to understand a fire scar not in acres lost but in more nuanced forms of measurement—resprout cycles, bacterial flushes, migration patterns, water and soil conditions?

Fire does not create a single rupture but a series of breaks—a mosaic of interruptions and recompositions, shaped as much by absence as by presence. The forest understory differentiates what would be a seamless wall of green into distinguishable generations of growth, parsed apart by cycles of combustion. Its force is not just one of destruction but of reordering, making visible the limits of prediction and measurement.

The disruption that fire brings is not only an ecological event but an ethical question. What if disasters are not the opposite of permanence but its very condition? Denise Ferreira da Silva pushes this further: [What is] “an ethics that, instead of striving for the betterment of the world as we know it, aims at its end?”⁹ Contemporary climate governance systems are often designed to preserve, extend, and institutionalize. But what if their ethics were otherwise?

The promise of disaster is to instruct our civic progress in how to fail. The struggle toward recovery, however, is an opening to recalibrate technology not toward the most certain algorithm but toward “the most delicate instrument at our disposal”¹⁰ or what Édouard Glissant would offer as “tools we can use to make our uncertainties productive.”¹¹ To engage with fire is a perpetual process of listening to the rhythmic discontinuities of combustion, to see breaks as the condition for endurance. This attunement composes a praxis of elemental literacy—resonating with Sylvia Wynter's “down to earth”¹² theoretic recalibration—where we do not merely observe or control the fire but conspire with it. What follows is not a governance of the unpredictable but a play of sensitive improvisations with the ungovernable nature of living systems.

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Upcoming Event: Silicon Archipelago

Next week, we will host an online salon on technology futures in Southeast Asia, and the region’s potential to become a powerhouse of open, distributed computing protocol technologies, in particular distributed AI and blockchains. While the rest of the world gets sucked into the vortex of Great Power competition, can Southeast Asia offer an alternative vision of technology inspired by its own decentralized geography?

The salon will be on Friday morning SEA time, (10 AM Singapore, 9 AM Bangkok) and Thursday evening in North America. Join us! The salon will also serve as a prequel to a week-long in-person workshop on the same themes to be held in April in Bangkok.

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Sci-Friday Fiction Prompts

Here are two protocol fiction prompts based on this week’s issue:

• In a future where humanity has accepted fire as inevitable, cities are constructed as modular units designed to “breathe” with seasonal fires. Write about life in such a community the day before, during, or after its annual fiery renewal.

• Imagine a digital platform that allows collective decision-making on fire management strategies. When the platform is hacked, sending false evacuation signals and misinformation about controlled burns, write about the community’s struggle between trusting digital protocols or relying on local knowledge.

Interesting in writing with us? Learn more here.

1. Davis, M. (1998). Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster. Metropolitan Books.​

2. Davis, M. (1998). Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster. Metropolitan Books.​ academicworks.cuny.edu

3. Norah Campbell et al. (2018). Climate Change Is Not a Problem: Speculative Realism at the End of Organization'.

4. Kreutler, Kei. (2025). The world has never been disenchanted. https://keikreutler.substack.com/p/the-world-has-never-been-disenchanted.

5. Mnemosyne is in reference to Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, which challenges linear historical narratives, proposing instead a networked, associative mode of understanding history through recurring images and gestures.

6. Paraphrasing “The Nemesis Guide to Being Early”.

7. Fagundes, Guilherme Moura. (2021). Fuel Maps: digitizing grass and sensing fire in Brazil. In: Imaging Nature. Thematic Series - Engagement: a blog published by the Anthropology and Environment Society.

8. Mitch McEwen with Nadir Jeevanjee. As Per Protocols. (2025). Co-published by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and Amherst College Press

9. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. (2014) Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World.

10. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. “This nose, for instance, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with admiration and gratitude, is in fact the most delicate instrument at our disposal.”

11. From “Manifesto for a Global Project” (published originally under the title “Manifesto for Reformulating French Overseas Territories”), co-signed by Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Bertène Juminer, and Gérard Delver.

12. Wynter, Sylvia. Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World.