planetary home on the web
Bhumics
Bhumics was a Substack series I wrote in 2025 and 2026. It began as a planetary framework that would come after politics and economics, written in what Gramsci called an interregnum, when the old order is dying and the new one is not yet born.
Over the weeks it went through the Pauper, a Machiavelli for the ruled, then the rules-based international order, then cocaine as a planetary substance, and then polyconflict, my word for what comes after polycrisis. The Weekly Planet turned the series toward metabolism, the energy and information that run a civilization, and toward who controls them. I call that metabolic sovereignty.
Think of Bhumics as a floor in the house of the webwelt. The rooms on this floor are the strands of the series, and Habitability, which has a room of its own, is one of them. Pick a room and a post opens at random.
Choose a room on this floor and walk.
Rooms on this floor
start anywhereThe RBIO is the rules-based international order. I started writing about it because it is collapsing and its most powerful patron has lost interest. Four weeks go through the juridical idea of order and its critics, and the first post of the series, written in the interregnum, belongs in this room too.
Start walkingWhat if Machiavelli wrote for the people?14The Pauper is my reading of Machiavelli's The Prince as if it were addressed to the ruled instead of the ruler. It runs for many weeks in 2025 and comes back in August. By the end I am asking how to think realistically about the planet, and not only about nations.
Start walkingWhere does coca fit on the planet?4A short run of posts on cocaine as a planetary substance. It starts with capitalism's habit of putting a price on everything, follows the coca leaf from planet to globe, and asks what a trace substance does in human history. Then I stopped, to write about carbon and silicon instead.
Start walkingAfter the polycrisis, what?15Polycrisis suggests problems we can manage. I think the world is closer to polyconflict, a set of struggles over power and survival that can't be solved. It began as a sidebar in 2025 and came back in 2026 with the Gulf war, tracing helium, metformin and firewood, and then five posts on the AI polyconflict.
Start walkingWhat runs a civilization?19The Weekly Planet gathered my daily posts on the world into one essay a week. Over eighteen weeks it moved to metabolism and then to metabolic sovereignty, the control of energy and information. It includes the AI bubble in four parts, and a later essay on the metabolic sovereignty of India.
Start walkingCan philosophy be engineering?6Planetarity as Philosophical Engineering, or PAPE, is four posts that introduce the glossary I ended up writing. They say we need a planetary politics and not only a climate politics, and they end on protocols and the technosphere. The System of the World, on perfectionist and productionist systems, is in this room too.
Start walkingWhat should one read to think the planet?16The Planetarity Syllabus is a reading list for Bhumics, built on an idea I call writing for reading. I write first, then read. The entries take governing the planet, time and space in turn, mostly as close readings of a few books.
Start walkingHabitability is where the syllabus ended up. A planet is habitable when its geological, atmospheric, chemical and biological systems sustain one another. This room holds the two syllabus entries and the essay that recasts them as epistry, and the Habitability room has its own pieces, if you want to walk into it.
Start walking