What is it to think the planet? What forms of thought are adequate to the task?

One answer: Planetarity as philosophical engineering. Earlier this year, I spent many a month on a planetarity syllabus that culminated in habitability as the core concept of my inquiry into planetarity. Having taken a break, I want to revisit the term “philosophical engineering” with the intent of replacing it with a new term that not only encompasses philosophical engineering, but also methods from design and speculation, and the use of new cognitive technologies, i.e., AI as Augmented Intelligence.

That term is Epistry.

Aside: I have been playing with that term, with more or less the same meaning that I am using here, for over a decade now, with this essay in particular being quite close to my current usage. Epistry is philosophy for a synthetic age, where we don’t just study the world, but make it. Or to put it in computational terms:

Epistry is philosophy when it becomes executable.

In this new adventure of abstraction, we aren’t abstracting away from the world, but rather, abstracting into the world. That is how philosophy becomes executable. In my mind, Epistry is an Aristotelian + Nagarjunian mode of intellectual being. They are the second most important thinkers (after Plato for Aristotle, and the Buddha for Nagarjuna) in their respective intellectual tradition, but that’s a plus.

At the risk of being reductive, Aristotle inspires my head, while Nagarjuna touches my heart. Their fusion makes for a vibe, a mood, an atmosphere more than a theory or a doctrine that I hope the second-in-commands would approve and adopt if they were alive today. But A & N are distant gods, Mahadevatas, and it’s always good to have some local guides, the Ishtadevatas who bless our pilgrimage.

Here are a few nearby minds who continue to inspire me: (in no particular order): Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstader, Christopher Alexander, D’Arcy Thompson, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Francisco Varela, J.J. Gibson, Jakob von Uexkull....If I had to think of a concrete step I want to take that goes beyond these Ishtadevatas, it’s that the epistrator has to engage deeply with the process of technology creation, especially technology that serves as infrastructure for doing science.

TLDR; I am restarting my investigation of habitability; expect one long, deeply researched essay - likely split into two parts - every month. While this essay is being published in July, I am counting it as my essay for August, so you will see the next habitability essay in September.

Habitability

The planet is the ‘first object’ of epistry (that should remind you of Aristotelian first philosophy and the unmoved mover as its first object…). Planetarity is the planet ~~thought as philosophy~~ thought as epistry - i.e., planetary thinking that extends seamlessly into the making of the planet; not just by human beings, but by all living beings. And within that thinking of the planet as first object, habitability becomes the first concept, the central concern of ~~philosophical engineering~~ planetary epistry.

What does that reorientation look like? Too early to tell, but over the next few months, I am going to revisit the planetarity syllabus reframed around habitability.

When I started working on the planetarity syllabus, I was reading and writing my way through entanglements of governance, time, and space, trying to figure out the contours of our planetary condition. I didn’t know that habitability was the destination until I arrived there. But now looking back at the territory that has been surveyed: it’s time to draw a map. In this second iteration, we are not going to meander toward habitability; we are going to start with it.

Round two has two foundational commitments. The first is that planetarity is, fundamentally, ~~a species of philosophical engineering~~ a species of epistry. We are composing concepts, protocols, institutions, and artifacts because, in our planetary condition, the earth is known through instruments and governed through executable code. Understanding the world and intervening in it should fuse into a continuum. If the first two acts of the play of epistry were about the Hegelian idea of philosophy being its own time apprehended in thought and the Marxian idea of changing the world rather than studying it, then the third act is to engineer the concepts and the code that will allow all beings to flourish in the Anthropocene.

The second commitment is to the planet as the first object and habitability as the first concept of planetary epistry (note that concepts here aren’t abstractions - they have to be executable, like any other aspect of epistry). We usually think of habitability as an astrobiological concept - conditions that a planet needs to satisfy before it can teem with life. A rock in the Goldilocks zone, some liquid water, an atmosphere, and abracadabra, life happens. I am no expert on the origins of life, but as far as I can tell, habitability is not a given; it is a relational, metabolic, planetary achievement. In the autopoietic conception of life, it is an ongoing, dynamic process at many scales - living systems both produce and reproduce themselves.

Our technologies should be in service of this planetary autopoiesis. The maintenance of this planetary metabolic order is our primary collective task as a species.

As an intellectual commitment that’s grounded in material practice, habitability will not be achieved or squandered at the level of abstract moral belief, but at the level of protocol. In order to engineer this metabolic achievement, we have to address the design challenges posed by the three themes I covered in the planetarity syllabus: Governance, Time, and Space, but before I get to those themes, a few words on the method behind the madness.

A Pattern Language for Habitability

If our investigation of habitability is to be a manual of epistry rather than a sequence of arguments, it needs a pattern language: recurring forms through which philosophical ideas encounter the world, acquire structure, and be tested in practice. Four patterns will recur throughout these essays, each placing the reader in a different role: witness, constituent, rule-maker, and inhabitant.

Witness: Field Note.

Consider the room in which you are reading this essay. What electricity keeps the screen lit and the air at a tolerable temperature? Which watershed supplies the building? What materials, organisms, infrastructures, and forms of labor keep the room functioning? Where do its heat and waste go? For which beings is this environment habitable, and for which is it hostile? What protocols determine what happens when the electricity fails, or someone cannot pay the water bill?

When seen via the pattern, every room turns out to be a planetary fractal. Inside it are power stations, reservoirs, mines, forests, microbes, supply chains, maintenance workers, financial systems, atmospheric processes, and histories of construction and extraction.

The Field Note pattern trains us to notice these relations. It asks us to cultivate a form of planetary attention, the ability to perceive habitability as an ongoing accomplishment instead of a passive background.

The field note is a combination of actual field work - say, walking outside the door to see who is laying a pipe - and metaphorical journeys to rare earth mines in China to see who is purifying neodynium for the car plugged into your wall socket.

Constituent: Institutional Prototype.

This pattern begins with a philosophical claim and asks what kind of institution would have to exist for that claim to acquire heft. If future beings deserve consideration, for example, what institution could give them standing in present decisions? One possible prototype might be a Ministry for the Distant Future, permitted to deliberate only on consequences unfolding more than a thousand years from now.

Ministry for X is an institutional prototype pattern for many futures/alternatives.

Who would constitute the ministry and how would it acquire knowledge of distant futures? What authority would it possess? How can its decisions be contested by those alive today, and by our successors? How could it speak for people and species that do not yet exist without simply projecting present values onto them? Under what conditions should it be revised, or dissolved?

The Institutional Prototype convenes the actors, forms of knowledge, sensing capacities, rights, obligations, and limits that collective action requires. The term agency has two common meanings - our agency as individuals or collectives to change the world to suit our needs, and institutions that serves a collective purpose, like the now defunct ‘US Agency for International Development’, USAID. The institutional pattern combines the two agencies into one, while asking the question: what kind of agency would make this philosophical claim actionable?

Rule-Maker: Draft Protocol.

Institutions make agency possible; protocols make agency actual. which is to say, protocols operationalize the agency that institutions convene. A protocol specifies what a system can sense, which participants it recognizes, how it responds to particular signals, what actions follow, and how its decisions can be challenged or revised.

Imagine, for instance, an interspecies carbon currency (carbon being the element that makes life possible) through which humans exchange value with other forms of life, and even more speculatively, other forms of life start trading with one another. Designing such a currency immediately raises many questions such as:

1. What would count as participation by a forest, a pollinator, or a microbe?

2. How to translate their activity into a signal the carbon currency system can recognize?

3. How would we compile the traded activity into a biochemical signal that could be read by cellular processes and potentially encoded in DNA?

4. Would such a currency enable reciprocity, or merely extend the market’s power to commodify life?

5. Could another species refuse to participate?

6. What happens when the relevant signals are ambiguous, manipulated, or entirely unintelligible to us?

Let’s wear a designerly hat and look at this protocol more closely.

Protocols: Carbon Currency Case Study

Carbon is the element that makes earthly life possible. An interspecies carbon currency is a medium of exchange grounded in carbon. Its basic unit would not represent carbon in the abstract, but as a verified metabolic event: carbon fixed, transferred, transformed, stored, or released under specified ecological conditions.

Such a currency would have to pass through several worlds/umwelts. An ecological activity, say, photosynthesis by a plant, methane oxidation by a microbial community, or the transfer of sugars from a tree to a mycorrhizal fungus - would first need to generate a biochemical signal. A cellular sensor could detect that signal and activate a CRISPR-based molecular recorder. CRISPR would function as the protocol’s writing mechanism, making a defined alteration in a designated region of DNA.

The DNA sequence might encode several features of the exchange: the kind of carbon transformation, the identities or classes of the participants, its approximate magnitude or duration, the conditions under which it occurred, and its position within a sequence of earlier transactions.

CRISPR is the inscription instrument; DNA the durable ledger.

Trade between organisms will therefore leave complementary records. If a plant transfers carbon-rich sugars to a fungus and receives phosphorus in return, molecular signals associated with the exchange would trigger different inscriptions in engineered sentinel cells positioned at the interface. One record would attest to the carbon transfer; another to the reciprocal nutrient flow. Like with the blockchain, neither inscription alone would constitute the transaction. The trade would be recognized only when the protocol detected a corresponding pair of events.

Once a particular trade or threshold had been inscribed in DNA, the altered genetic state might change what a participating cell does next: release a nutrient, produce a signal legible to another organism, activate a protective function, or acquire access to a shared resource. The ledger becomes more than an archive; it would operate as a biological contract in which past exchanges alter the conditions of future ones.

I could then collect DNA samples across an ecosystem to translate these molecular records into human-legible institutions. A verified inscription might trigger the release of funds for habitat restoration, impose an obligation upon an extractive actor, or allocate resources to the maintenance of the ecological community that produced the value.

The DNA inscription is evidence that a cell registered a signal, but by itself, it’s not proof that an ecosystem flourished, that carbon remained stored, or that another species consented to the exchange. Ecological observations, carbon-flux measurements, durability assessments, and multiple biological witnesses would still be required.

In short: the carbon ledger makes a multispecies economy and democracy possible, but much work will be needed to make sure organisms are consenting to the trade (can a bacterium in my blood consent to being ingested by a white blood cell?). The currency could enable organisms to become participants in a shared economy, or it could turn them into involuntary accountants for a human one. The currency must therefore preserve the capacity of living systems to remain illegible, to interrupt the transaction, and to refuse it.

Giving a concept executable form does not end philosophical inquiry; ideally, it gives philosophy skin in the game.

Inhabitant: Speculative World.

A speculative world is an imaginary environment in which institutions, protocols, technologies, organisms, and everyday practices have been assembled into a possible form of life. It asks the reader to inhabit the world an idea might produce, not just evaluate that idea from the outside.

A multispecies home, for example, would not be a human house decorated with bird feeders and insect hotels. It would recognize several species as first-class inhabitants. Its light, temperature, acoustics, surfaces, circulation routes, appliances, and rhythms would be designed around their differing needs.

Inhabiting such a home would quickly reveal conflicts. What happens when the temperature one species prefers is intolerable to another? How are predators and prey accommodated? Who decides which forms of reproduction, contamination, noise, decomposition, or death belong inside the home?

The Speculative World is not a utopia; it is an integration environment, a place where philosophical commitments, institutional arrangements, and operational protocols meet one another’s consequences.

The Grammar of Habitability

Witnessing, Constituting, Rule-making and Inhabiting: together, the four artifacts describe a movement:

1. The Field Note discovers a world.

2. The Institutional Prototype convenes a world.

3. The Draft Protocol regulates a world.

4. The Speculative World lets us inhabit and contest the world they produce together.

This movement is a circle, not a line. After entering a speculative world, we return to the existing one with altered senses. We notice relations that had appeared as background. We find exclusions our institutions concealed, consequences our protocols erased, and forms of life our imagined futures failed to accommodate. Inhabiting returns us to discovery, and the cycle begins again.

These artifacts will recur throughout the three principal themes that I am going to cover - governance, time, and space - and together they form a design language for turning habitability from an idea about the world into a practice of making worlds habitable.

The First Design Problem: Governance (Who maintains habitability?)

If you are reading this on a screen, inside a temperature-controlled room (I am), you are insulated from the vagaries of the flesh by an interlocking series of technological systems. We have built a technosphere that extracts energy, processes information, and spits out waste at a planetary scale. Think of Benjamin Bratton’s concept of “The Stack” - the accidental, planetary-scale megamachine of computation that is currently terraforming the Earth.

The problem is that the Stack, and the globalized capitalist system it serves, is completely indifferent to habitability. It operates in the register of the Globe, a human-centric construct that views the Earth merely as a backdrop for trade and extraction. But we don’t live on a Globe. We live on a Planet, a deeply entangled biophysical system.

So, who should maintain the metabolic order of the Planet?

It certainly can’t be the traditional nation-state. The nation-state is a geographic and juridical fiction completely mismatched to the scale of atmospheric carbon or ocean acidification. Planetary governance requires us to move past the idea that humans are the only actors that matter. Perhaps the solution is Gilman and Blake’s idea of “Planetary Subsidiarity” - a system of governance that embeds reciprocity, decentralization, and multispecies justice. However we do it, we have to learn to govern not as masters of a passive rock, but as self-conscious organs of a living planet. We need new epistries for this: the Elephant who holds the memory of the whole, the Architect who designs the institutional rooms for new forms of life to gather, and the Connector who maintains the relational networks across species and timescales.

The Second Design Problem: Time (Across what durations do we maintain it?)

We have a massive temporal contradiction at the heart of our planetary condition. Human political and economic cycles operate on scales of days, quarters, and four-year election terms. But the hyperproblems we face - like climate change or ecological collapse - operate on geological scales.

If we are to engineer habitability, we have to grapple with the “Planetary Durée.” This requires a radical expansion of our temporal imagination. As the geologist Marcia Bjornerud points out, we suffer from ‘time-illiteracy.’ We have to cultivate ‘timefulness’ - an awareness of deep time. We need to look at the Earth not just as a snapshot of the present, but as a vast, unfolding text, the book of the world.

In this context, our cognition, our sensor networks, our climate models, and our artificial intelligence are not unnatural aberrations. They are the planet thinking itself in rapid time that’s embedded in geological time. We are the means by which the Earth has become aware of its own deep duration. But this also means we are responsible for designing and executing institutions, protocols, and legal frameworks that can respect a polytemporal reality.

How do you write a constitution that protects the habitability of the planet for a species that won’t exist for another million years?

How do you design for deep time? This is where the Ministry for the Distant Future might help concentrate our imagination.

The Third Design Problem: Space (In the face of what otherness?)

When we expand our view of governance and time, we inevitably crash into the problem of Space, or what I called “Planetary Alterity.” For the last few centuries, the Western, now Global, project has been one of reducing the world to a known, mapped, and exploitable grid. But as we transition from the Globe to the Planet, we discover that the Earth is profoundly alien to us. As Gayatri Spivak notes, the planet is in the species of alterity, it belongs to another system. It is unmasterable. We inhabit it ‘on loan.’

We see this alterity when we look up at exoplanets, realizing how bizarre and varied the universe’s planetary zoo really is. But we also see it when we look down into the soil, or into the abyssal oceans, or even into our own microbiomes. We are surrounded by non-human actors - fungi, bacteria, weather systems, forests - that all have their own Umwelt, their own bubble of perception and meaning. They are terraforming the Earth right alongside us.

Another project of mine (also on Substack), the Cellosophy project, is a focused exploration of the alien umwelts that cohabit the earth.

To take planetary space seriously is to abandon the disembodied cosmic eagle view that treats the Earth as a fragile blue marble to be managed from above. Instead, we need the perspective of the cosmic earthworm: embedded, intimate, crawling through the dirt, acutely aware of its entanglement with the immediate, messy, alien realities of the biosphere.

Terraforming for Habitability

Usually, when we hear of terraforming, we think of science fiction (Expanse is really good!), or Elon Musk blasting nukes over the poles of Mars to create an atmosphere. But the truth is much closer home, for we have been terraforming the Earth for centuries through agriculture, industrialization, and carbon emissions. It’s just that our current terraforming project, aka, the Globe, is accidental, blind, and suicidal.

The question is not whether we will terraform the Earth; we are already doing it. The question is whether we can terraform it intentionally, with an ethics of care and reciprocity for all beings (what I called Mahayanics).

However, the recognition of our responsibility has to go hand in hand with humility, because the Earth has always been terraformed by life. Cyanobacteria were the OG epistrators, terraforming the planet billions of years ago by pumping it full of toxic oxygen, forcing a massive extinction and paving the way for complex life. The biosphere is an autopoietic, self-making system. Our job is not to retreat into a fantasy of pristine, untouched nature, for that’s the cosmic eagle speaking, but to accept our species-dharma as the cosmic earthworm.

We must use our technological power, our planetary sapience, and our deep time historical consciousness not to conquer nature, but to embed ourselves gracefully within it. We have to design the bio-futures of our terrestrial habitats so that they support the flourishing of the multitude.

This is the task of planetary epistry.

Over the next few months, I am going to build out this framework, a reworking of the planetarity syllabus as a manual of habitability. We will reread the deep history of the Earth as Bjornerud and Chakrabarty put it, reparse the cybernetics of the Stack, and take another look at the stars to understand the ground beneath our feet.

We must embrace our role as conscious, active, and deeply entangled participants, recognizing that our future as a species depends on our ability to terraform a world where life can flourish.

Starting in September 😛

I am going to take a break from writing. Will be back in a few (weeks, maybe months) when the Monkey Goes East.

The universe is astonishing in so many ways. It’s really big. It’s really old. It started with the biggest bang ever. And to add to that litany of astonishment, there’s the fact that at least one corner of the universe has been inhabited for almost four billion years, and at least one of those creatures looks up at the sky and wonders why there’s anything at all. Out of the swirling chaos of hydrogen and helium forged in the furnace of the Big Bang, matter somehow arranged itself into complex, self-replicating patterns. It arranged itself into cells, then tissues, then nervous systems. Eventually, the universe produced creatures capable of looking back up at the night sky and wondering at the sheer improbability of their own existence. As the physicist Paul Davies has observed, we are the moment the universe wakes up to itself.

This capacity for wonder at the possibility of existence is the starting point for any serious inquiry into habitability. We cannot afford to take the existence of the world - or our presence within it - for granted. The condition of planetarity demands that we expand our philosophical imagination; it can no longer remain the humanistic discipline that it has been for a couple of millennia. We must start with the cosmos, ask questions about planetary habitability, delve into the deep geological history of the Earth, and finally arrive at the burning questions of the Anthropocene.

1. The Cosmic Prerequisite: Fine-Tuning and the Anthropic Principle

The most general setting for habitability is the universe itself. Before a planet can support life, the fundamental laws of physics must allow for the possibility of life. When physicists and cosmologists look at the basic parameters of our universe, they encounter an eerie reality: the universe appears suspiciously fine-tuned for the emergence of complexity.

If the laws of physics had been even slightly different, the universe would be a sterile void. If the strong nuclear force that binds atomic nuclei together were just a few percent weaker, the universe would contain nothing but hydrogen - no carbon, no oxygen, no nitrogen, and therefore no biology. If gravity were slightly stronger, stars would burn out in a matter of millions of years, leaving no time for evolution; if it were slightly weaker, matter would never coalesce into stars and galaxies at all. If the expansion rate of the universe immediately following the Big Bang had been altered by a fraction of a percent, the cosmos would have either rapidly collapsed back in on itself or expanded so fast that galaxies could never form.

In The Goldilocks Enigma, Paul Davies calls this the ultimate mystery of existence: why is the universe just right for life? This observation is formalized in cosmology as the Anthropic Principle. Explored exhaustively in John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler’s definitive 1986 tome, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, the concept takes this idea of fine-tuning and pushes it to its logical conclusion.

In its Weak form, the Anthropic Principle is not much more than selection bias: we should not be surprised to observe that the universe’s physical constants are perfectly tuned for life, because if they were any different, we simply would not be here to observe them. We are bound to find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe because a non-habitable universe produces no astrophysicists or historians to document its sterility. The universe is the way it is because we exist.

However, the Strong Anthropic Principle proposes something far more radical: that the universe must possess those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history. This flips the narrative of life’s insignificance on its head. It suggests that while (as far as we know) living beings are a sideshow to the parade of galactic and stellar activity, observers such as living creatures are not byproducts but ontological prerequisites. If the cosmos is a Book of the World - to use the medieval metaphor we revived in our discussion of time - then the most striking feature of that book is that it’s produced specifically to allow for the existence of readers.

When we bring this cosmoanthropic perspective down to Earth, it fundamentally alters our understanding of planetarity. It suggests that habitability is not merely a lucky chemical accident; it is a profound cosmic property. Perhaps the physical universe is not an indifferent machine, its habitability is built into its architecture.

Note that while the Strong Anthropic Principle was first formulated to require observers like us, it doesn’t need to. Octopii will serve as well. Perhaps even bacteria.

2. The Planetary Sweet Spot: Exoplanets and the Goldilocks Zone

If the universe provides the foundational laws for habitability, it is in planets that we must seek environments that fulfil their promise. Having acknowledged that the universe permits life, and entertained the possibility that it necessarily does so, we must ask: what makes a specific planet habitable?

Astrobiologists looking for exoplanets will likely refer you to a standard checklist. To support life as we know it, a planet requires a rocky surface, a breathable atmosphere, the right cocktail of biogenic elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), and, most importantly, liquid water. This dictates the search for the circumstellar habitable zone - the orbital distance from a star where temperatures are not too hot (which would vaporize water) and not too cold (which would freeze it), but just right. This is the Goldilocks Zone.

For centuries, our understanding of this zone was limited to our own Solar System. But as we have learned from Chris Impey (Worlds Without End) and Joshua N. Winn (The Little Book of Exoplanets) emphasize, the universe is teeming with planets. We have gone from knowing of zero planets outside our solar system to cataloging over 5,000, with current statistics indicating there are more planets than stars in the Milky Way. Impey estimates there are roughly a thousand billion billion (10^21) potential biological experiments happening across the observable universe.

Winn points out that not only planets aplenty, they are bizarre and diverse from the point of view of our solar system. The exoplanet zoo includes hot Jupiters skimming the surfaces of their stars, rogue planets wandering the dark void without a sun, and planets orbiting two stars at once. The two most common types of planets found in the galaxy - super-Earths and mini-Neptunes - do not even exist in our own Solar System. Looking at this diversity, one must assume that every possible chemical reaction has been repeated many times in many places.

This exoplanetary perspective reinforces what I have called Planetary Alterity. The planet is alien. The universe is alien. But the great lesson we are yet to learn is: embrace that difference. We are not the measure of all things. Perhaps there are more forms of wisdom than we can imagine!

Locating a planet in the Goldilocks Zone is only the beginning of the story. Venus and Mars both sit near or within the habitable edges of our Sun, yet Venus is a runaway greenhouse hellscape capable of melting lead, and Mars is a frigid, irradiated desert. Habitability, is a relational concept, not a widget you can extrude out of a checklist of ingredients.

As Charles Langmuir and Wally Broecker detail in How to Build a Habitable Planet, a planet is not habitable simply because it possesses certain fixed properties; it is habitable because the complex relationships between its geological, atmospheric, chemical, and biological systems are mutually sustaining over geological timescales. Habitability is a dynamic condition that living systems actively produce just as much as they require.

Habitability is a metabolic achievement.

3. Deep History: The Great Oxygenation Event and the Paradox of Life

To understand this metabolic achievement, we must grasp the rhythms of the Earth, the Planetary Durée, the realization that the deep past is woven into modern landscapes, atmospheric chemistry, and our own DNA. The Earth has been inhabited for billions of years, but the circumstances of that habitability have shifted violently. The planet we inhabit today is not the planet that first birthed life. The Earth of the Hadean eon was a churning magma ocean; the Earth of the Cryogenian period was a solid ball of ice. If we were to step out of a time machine onto the Earth of three billion years ago, we would immediately suffocate.

Life did not simply adapt to a static, habitable rock; it engineered the rock to suit itself. For the first two billion years of Earth’s history, the biosphere consisted entirely of anaerobic microbes that lived without oxygen. Cyanobacteria were the first organisms capable of photosynthesis. These microscopic entities began harvesting energy from the sun, and in doing so, they released a highly reactive, toxic waste product into the oceans and the atmosphere.

That toxic waste product was oxygen.

What followed was the Great Oxygenation Event, arguably the most significant climate catastrophe in planetary history. As oxygen accumulated, it poisoned the vast majority of the anaerobic life forms that had dominated the Earth until then, driving the planet’s first mass extinction. Furthermore, the oxygen reacted with atmospheric methane (a potent greenhouse gas, the main ingredient in LNG, which is in short supply as a result of the Gulf War), scrubbing it from the air and plunging the planet into a deep, prolonged ice age.

The oxygen that sustains our bodies today - the air we take for granted with every breath - was originally a deadly pollutant that eradicated the Earth’s first inhabitants. Their death is our life. Nature is not a harmonious whole in static equilibrium. The Earth is a polytemporal tapestry, as Marcia Bjornerud calls it, marked by periods of immense biological disruption. Life is the ultimate terraformer. Over billions of years, the interplay of life and geology - through the carbon cycle, plate tectonics, and nitrogen fixation - has continuously regulated the Earth’s temperature and chemistry.

The habitability we enjoy today is the inherited legacy of billions of years of metabolic labor by non-human actors.

4. The Anthropocene: Securing the Metabolic Order

Making the connection between this deep geological history, including acknowledging our existence to planetary poisoners, and the contemporary moment is a key task of Planetarity. Today, human history and planetary history have violently collided as Dipesh Chakrabarty says. We have entered the Anthropocene (or the Capitalocene, if we focus on the economic drivers of this shift), an epoch in which human activity operates as a planetary-scale geophysical force.

Just as the cyanobacteria once altered the atmospheric chemistry of the planet through their collective metabolism, industrial civilization is currently altering the global climate by extracting and burning millions of years of fossilized sunshine. The Great Acceleration of the mid-twentieth century has pushed multiple planetary boundaries - climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle disruption - into the danger zone.

I am guessing cyanobacteria did not poison the world out of malice. They were the winners in the game of natural selection (but what about that early world made their skills so powerful? Need to find out...). We, on the other hand, possess what Benjamin Bratton calls Planetary Sapience. Through our sprawling technosphere - our satellites, sensors, deep-ocean cables, and computational models - we have developed the capacity to read the Book of the World. We can measure the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere; we can track the melting of the cryosphere in real-time.

We are aware of the metabolic disruption we are causing.

This brings us back to the contradiction that animates the condition of planetarity: the tension between the human-scaled Globe and the alien, deep-time Planet. Globalization treats the Earth as a frictionless grid for capital and trade, a standing reserve for human extraction. We assumed that the background habitability of the planet was a permanent given.

We now know this is a dangerous delusion.

As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, the climate crisis has collapsed the distinction between human history and natural history. We can no longer pretend that the social order sits independently above the physical order. Biogeochemical stocks and flows are the conditions that make any society possible in the first place. Without stable climate patterns, functioning water cycles, and fertile soils, there’s no human drama, no Netflix and Chill.

Therefore, our primary collective task as a species is the deliberate maintenance of planetary metabolic order. Habitability is no longer a background assumption; it is something that must be secured through explicit acts of governance. We must move beyond abstract environmentalism and engage in what I call Philosophical Engineering, designing the protocols, legal frameworks, and cybernetic feedback loops that keep the planet in tune. As Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman propose in Children of a Modest Star, we need institutions based on planetary subsidiarity, capable of governing biogeochemical cycles that laugh at national borders. We need a politics of deep time that acts as a trustee for the unborn and the non-human. We must transition from being planetary consumers to planetary stewards.

5. Conclusion: Habitability as the Central Concept of Planetarity

When we look at the condition of planetarity from the outside in - starting from the cosmic fine-tuning of the universe and arriving at the urgent climate politics of the present - we see that all our inquiries converge on habitability being the central concept of planetarity, one through which we can view the three previous concepts we engaged with: governance, time and space.

Through the Planetary Durée, we learned to subsume the frantic, spatialized clock-time of human history into the deep, slow rhythms of geological time. We realized that to govern effectively, we must become timeful ancestors. Through Planetary Alterity, we recognized that space is not a passive backdrop but an active, alien participant. We learned that to live on Earth is to inhabit a world that we share with a multitude of non-human kin. We rejected the fantasy of escaping to Mars, committing instead to the Bodhisattva’s vow for the Earth: to stay with the trouble of our damaged home.

And in our inquiry into Governance, we sought the architecture of institutions - the Stack, the planetary assemblies, the multi-level regulations - required to manage this complex reality. We realized that the philosopher-king of the polis must be replaced by the planetary steward of the biosphere.

Habitability is the umbrella concept under which all of these ideas come together.

It is the bridge between the cosmic and the intimate. It encompasses the astrobiologist calculating the orbital mechanics of a distant super-Earth, the geologist tracing the isotopic signatures of the Great Oxygenation Event, and the urban planner designing a biophilic city block that sustains multi-species flourishing. It merges the universal laws of physics with the subjective, lived Umwelt of every creature on Earth.

To grasp habitability through philosophical engineering (as Hegel might urge us if we were around) is to accept our species-dharma: that we can use our technological power and our historical consciousness not to conquer nature, but to embed ourselves gracefully within it. We are living in a universe that has graciously allowed us to exist. Our task now is to ensure that the unique, finely-tuned alignment of time, space, and life that makes this planet a home does not collapse under the weight of our arrogance.

We must become the architects of our own continued existence. And not only our own.

Endnote

Having written this essay, I am not sure what I will do next. I had promised a year’s worth of writing on the Planetarity Syllabus, but in my head, I have stumbled into a cavern that I need to explore more thoroughly before coming back to monthly topic-by-topic coverage.

I am thinking of coming back in a few months with a deeper exploration of habitability - it needs a sustained investigation, unlike this time, when I feel into it as I scratched beneath the surface of Time and Space.

BTW, to show how well habitability has been covered as a humanistic subject, I performed a simple n-gram search for “Philosophy of Society” versus “Philosophy of Habitability,” and here’s what I found:

There’s no record of anything like “Philosophy of Habitability” (just see the screenshot above) while new books on the philosophy of society are published every day. What a shame isn’t it? No society without habitability, right?

Anyway, round two in a few months time, but I am taking a break from the Planetarity Syllabus for now.

The Principle of Habitability

Behind every contemporary anxiety about the future of the Earth (and of human civilization, whatever that might mean), is an existential question: what makes a planet livable? Not just for humans, not just for the present century, but for the full community of beings that constitute Earth’s living systems, across the vast scales of time that geological and biological history demands. That question is the question of habitability, and exploring its diverse manifestations requires a radical shift in how we perceive our place in the cosmos.

What makes a planet habitable?

If you ask an astrobiologist scanning the heavens for exoplanets with the potential for life, they will likely refer you to a checklist: liquid water, a breathable atmosphere, moderate temperatures, a rocky surface, and the right cocktail of biogenic elements. This is the search for the Goldilocks Zone - a planet not too hot, not too cold, but just right. But the astrobiologist isn’t our only consultant, for habitability as a planetary concept is far richer, more dynamic, and more philosophically demanding than any checklist can capture. It is not an accidental sweet spot in a solar system. At its core, habitability is a relational concept: a planet is habitable not because it possesses certain fixed, sterile properties, but because the complex relationships between its geological, atmospheric, chemical, and biological systems are mutually sustaining over time. Habitability is a condition that living systems produce just as much as they require.

It is, in other words, a metabolic achievement.

More speculatively, you might have heard of the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle takes this idea of metabolic achievement and pushes it to its ultimate logical conclusion, suggesting that the very laws of physics and the fundamental constants of the universe appear suspiciously fine-tuned to allow for the emergence of life and, eventually, observers like ourselves. It posits that we should not be surprised to find ourselves on a planet that is habitable, because if the universe were any other way - if the nuclear force were slightly weaker or the expansion rate of the Big Bang slightly faster - we simply would not be here to ask the question.

In its weak form, the principle is almost a tautology of selection bias: of course we inhabit a Goldilocks world, because a non-habitable world produces no historians to document its sterility. However, the Strong Anthropic Principle suggests something far more radical: that the universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history. This shifts the planet from being an accidental chemical reaction to a necessary ontological frame.

I am betting on the Strong version, but in the context of the planetary zoo - that the necessity of life goes hand in hand with a diversity of living contexts. If so, habitability is built into the universe. It’s a pretty wild bet, and how would we test it? A slightly weaker version is to take the necessity of habitability as a hypothesis and see what conclusions we might be able to draw and then refine the hypothesis further until we don’t need the original hypothesis anymore - we have downstream consequences that can themselves be viable starting points for empirical research.

I. Habitability as Metabology

Back to Earth: to understand habitability, we must situate it within the framework of metabology, the flows of matter and energy that constitute life at planetary scales. Metabology posits that life and its environment are not separate entities interacting across a void, but rather a unified, continuous flux. To understand habitability is to understand the governance of these flows across both space and time.

Spatially, planetary metabolism requires the establishment of boundaries and interfaces, what we might term Bhumic architecture. The soil beneath your feet, the ocean currents cycling nutrients across hemispheres, the atmosphere regulating heat and filtering radiation are all active, semi-permeable membranes regulating the exchange of carbon, nitrogen, water, and photons, the skin of the world, so to speak. They are the spatial manifestations of planetary metabolism.

Space is only half the equation. Drawing upon Bergson’s concept of durée - a continuous, indivisible flow of lived time - we recognize that a planet’s habitability cannot be measured in the discrete clock time of human observation, but in the deep time of planetary durée. A habitable planet is one that has mastered the temporal governance of its metabolic cycles, maintaining a precarious, wobbling homeostasis over millions and billions of years, despite shifting solar luminosities, asteroid impacts, and massive geological upheavals.

Therefore, habitability is fundamentally a question of governance, not in the narrow political sense of parliaments and treaties, but governance as the distributed, decentralized regulatory system by which a biosphere negotiates its own survival. It is the complex web of feedback loops managing the spatial distribution of resources and the temporal pacing of evolutionary adaptation. To ask if a planet is habitable is to ask a systemic question: does it possess the metabolic infrastructure to govern its own duration?

Where do we come into this picture as planetary stewards? Answer: through the conscious act of terraforming.

II. Terraforming as Philosophical Engineering

How, then, do we actually study something as vast, complex, and temporally extended as planetary habitability? Science has traditionally relied on observation and analysis - breaking systems down to understand their component parts. But in recent decades, a powerful new epistemological paradigm has emerged: the paradigm of synthesis. This approach is best captured by a principle often attributed to the physicist Richard Feynman, found written on his chalkboard at the time of his death: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Note - ironically, Feynman was an arch reductionist, claiming in his famous lectures on physics that the most important discovery of all time is “matter is made out of atoms,” but I digress....

This is the essence of philosophical engineering: the practice of constructing conceptual and material frameworks that reveal the deep structure of the phenomena they attempt to replicate. The synthetic method does not merely interpret the world; it builds versions of the world, and in building, discovers what observation alone could never see.

Artificial intelligence researchers took this seriously from the start. If you want to understand the mind, they reasoned, build one. Your theory of cognition can be tested in the most direct possible way: does a system built according to those principles actually think? By engineering a cognitive architecture from silicon - by testing the hypothesis of substrate independence - researchers isolate the functional logic of intelligence from its biological wetware. The early failures of classical AI - its inability to handle context, embodiment, or tacit knowledge - revealed that mind is not a disembodied symbol-manipulating system. The attempt to build a mind led to claims that the mind cannot be separated from its environment. Then again, maybe it can - the successes of Deep Learning is convincing many that all we need is massive amounts of data fed into a brain in a vat.

Synthetic biologists applied the exact same constructivist logic to life. If you understand how living systems work, you should be able to synthesize one. When researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute created the first artificial bacterial cell in 2010, and later stripped it down to a minimal functional genome, they found that roughly a third of the essential genes required for life had entirely unknown functions. By stripping away evolutionary noise and building life from standardized parts, synthetic biology moved from describing biological phenomena to demonstrating the absolute algorithmic requirements for vitality. Don’t get me wrong - we are far from synthesizing life from scratch, but the attempt to do so opens up questions about possible life that are quite different from the study of life as it has evolved.

Now, extend this logic one step further. If artificial intelligence is the synthesis of the mind, and synthetic biology is the synthesis of the cell, then terraforming is the synthesis of the planet. Terraforming - the deliberate transformation of a planet’s surface, atmosphere, and climate to make it habitable - is the constructivist method applied to planetary habitability. It is the ultimate epistemological tool, a privileged way of understanding what makes a world livable.

Consider the (realizable?) thought experiment of terraforming Mars. Our best understanding as of today is that Mars is a dead rock - to terraform Mars would be a profound synthetic inquiry into the mechanics of genesis, and potentially a violently evil act - terraforming forces us to take ethics where it’s never gone before. By attempting to induce a planetary metabolism from a cold start, we are forced to define exactly what a Minimal Biosphere requires.

Imagine the proposed pathways: placing orbital mirrors to vaporize the Martian polar caps, releasing engineered greenhouse gases to thicken and warm the atmosphere, redirecting comets to deliver water ice, and introducing genetically modified cyanobacteria to the regolith to begin producing oxygen. What is philosophically revelatory about this exercise is not whether it is technically feasible with today’s rockets, but what it forces the intellect to confront. You immediately discover that you cannot do any one thing in isolation. Warming the atmosphere changes the barometric pressure, which alters the water cycle. Introducing water alters the chemical weathering of rocks, which changes atmospheric chemistry. Seeding with life changes the atmosphere, which in turn changes the selective evolutionary pressures on the life you just introduced.

Every intervention is entangled. The system responds to your engineering as a complex agent in its own right, not as a passive recipient of your blueprints. Every failure in this theoretical process - every toxic soil interaction, every atmospheric leak - teaches us a crucial lesson about the hidden regulatory mechanisms that make Earth work. Terraforming forces us to transition from descriptive Earth sciences to prescriptive planetary engineering.

Hypothesis: we will not truly understand the ‘mind of a planet’ (its self-regulating systems) until we attempt to engineer its body.

Through the rigorous crucible of attempting to make a dead world live, we learn that life is not just something that happens on a planet; life is something that happens to a planet.

III. The Autopoietic Earth: Billions of Years of Terraforming

Now let’s turn that thought experiment back toward Earth, because Earth itself has been through exactly this process of terraforming. Once we adopt this synthetic lens, once we recognize terraforming not as science fiction but as the active engineering of habitability, we see the history of our own world in an entirely new light. Earth was not born habitable for the life that exists today; Earth was terraformed by the life that exists today.

Is terraforming the missing link between human history and planetary history? Between the Globe and the Earth?

The early Earth, ~ 4.5 billion years ago was not the verdant blue marble we know. Its atmosphere was thick with carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen, with virtually no free oxygen. Its oceans were rich in dissolved iron, and its surface was bombarded by ultraviolet radiation that would destroy most modern organisms within minutes. By any contemporary standard, it was an alien, highly lethal world. And yet, in that hostile environment, life emerged- and then proceeded, over billions of years, to transform the planet into something hospitable for an entirely different class of organisms, including, eventually, ourselves.

The history of our planet is a history of relentless, autopoietic (self-creating) biological engineering. The most profound terraforming event in our solar system did not occur through human technology, but through the metabolic innovations of cyanobacteria during the Great Oxidation Event, approximately 2.4 billion years ago. These microscopic planetary engineers invented oxygenic photosynthesis, harnessing solar energy to crack water molecules and excrete oxygen as a toxic metabolic byproduct.

Over hundreds of millions of years, this oxygen accumulated. It first reacted with dissolved iron in the oceans, producing the banded iron formations that geologists now read as the signature of this biological revolution, and then built up in the atmosphere. In doing so, these microbes triggered a mass extinction of anaerobic life, plunged the planet into a deep freeze by stripping the atmosphere of heat-trapping methane, and fundamentally altered the chemical composition of the sky and the sea.

They completely rebuilt the planetary interface. Life has been continuously modifying Earth’s habitability since it first appeared. Plants and their fungal predecessors transformed rocky, barren landscapes into living soils, creating entirely new Bhumic substrates for terrestrial life. Forests evolved to alter precipitation patterns, generating their own rain and regulating regional climates. Marine organisms, living, dying, and sinking, drove carbon into deep-sea sediments, drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide over geological time scales and creating the limestone cliffs of today.

James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, in developing the Gaia hypothesis, were pointing at exactly this reality: the biosphere is not a passive inhabitant of Earth’s surface, merely adapted to whatever conditions happen to prevail. It is an active modifier of those conditions. The planet and its biosphere have been in a relationship of mutual terraforming from the beginning.

Understanding Earth’s history as a massive, ongoing terraforming project demystifies the concept. It reveals that planetary engineering is not an unnatural violation of a pristine natural order; rather, it is the defining characteristic of a living world. Habitability is a hard-won, metabolically expensive state of equilibrium that must be constantly maintained against the relentless forces of cosmic entropy. The cyanobacteria were planetary engineers. The forests are planetary engineers. The question, therefore, is not whether planetary engineering is permissible, but what kind of planetary engineering serves life.

Readings for this Month

We have an eclectic stew this month, ranging from astrobiology to architecture.

1. How to Build a Habitable Planet - Charles Langmuir and Wally Broecker. A supplementary reading for Month Two on Time, a core reading this month.

2. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning - Jakob von Uexküll. One of my all time favorites. Ed Yong’s An Immense World is a contemporary, popular rendition of Uexkullian ideas.

3. A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander. Another all time favorite. We will not be able to do ‘wise’ terraforming without incorporating Alexander’s ideas.

4. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? - Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Popular account of the promises and perils of terraforming.

5. The Goldilocks Enigma - Paul Davies. Popular exposition of fine tuning and habitability. There’s also the OG book on the Anthropic Principle by Barrow and Tipler.

It goes without saying that we won’t be reading these books from cover to cover in one month.

The underlying ambition, even if it’s a bit much for any single person to comprehend: to understand habitability, we must simultaneously hold the macro-scale of planetary formation - how a dead rock becomes a vibrant, life-sustaining system, as Langmuir and Broecker detail - and the micro-scale of lived experience, except that it’s not just human lived experience! Von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt is crucial here; he argues that every organism inhabits a subjective, meaningful world. A habitable planet sustains myriads of intersecting, subjective worlds.

If life itself is the original, relentless planetary engineer, then our conscious efforts to shape our environment must align with its deep logic. Christopher Alexander’s pattern language offers a methodology for this alignment, demonstrating how the spaces we build can either nourish or deaden the metabolic order of the communities that inhabit them. Whether we are designing a sustainable neighborhood on Earth or settling Mars, as the Weinersmiths explore, we cannot simply export our current extractive paradigms to new environments. In doing so, we will fulfil the promise of planetary sapience: the conscious, deliberate maintenance of the metabolic processes that allow the Earth to remain our home.

Over the course of this series, I have traced the AI Polyconflict through four interlocking threads. Part I examined the compression of the kill chain and the cheap drone paradox. Part II built the theoretical foundation: Augmented Intelligence as the merger of distributed cognition and political technology, militaries as artificial intelligences, and the new cyborg as fearsome and structurally stupid. Part III mapped the Stack War between the American Prediction Stack and the Chinese Production Stack, with the Gulf states hedging between them. Part IV revealed the metabolic dimension of both AI Stacks - the energy, water, and capital that the compute infrastructure demands.

In this last and most speculative essay of this series, I want to weave these four threads into one cloth.

The Highest Stage of the Algorithm

In 1902, the British economist J.A. Hobson published a study of imperialism that identified its root cause as domestic inequality. The working classes could not afford to consume what they produced. Capital accumulated at the top with no profitable domestic outlet. This excess capital had to go somewhere, so it went abroad - seeking new markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities in territories that could be politically controlled. Territorial imperialism was the military and political expression of an economic problem that could have been solved at home through redistribution, but wasn’t.

Lenin sharpened Hobson’s analysis in 1916 with Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. For Lenin, the key transition was from the export of manufactured goods to the export of finance capital. Banks, cartels, and monopolies no longer needed to sell things to foreign markets. They needed to invest in them - to export capital itself, which would then generate returns through the control of foreign productive capacity. This was imperialism’s mature form: not armies conquering territory for its own sake, but finance capital dividing and redividing the world among monopolies, with armies following to enforce the arrangement.

I want to suggest that the global economy is now entering the highest stage of the algorithm: the transition from the export of finance capital to the export of inference capital (which is tied to a longer analysis of how inference might replace money one day, but that would take us too far afield). The pattern is similar to what Hobson and Lenin described, but the commodity being exported is different. It is not cotton, or steel, or even money. It is cognition, or if you prefer, intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence functions as the ultimate absorber of excess capital. At a time of staggering global inequality, hyperscalers and tech monopolies are pouring hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure such as chips, energy, real estate, cooling systems while material human needs go unmet across most of the globe. Unlike physical railroads or oil wells, the raw material of AI - data and compute - is infinitely scalable in principle, which also means AI is a bottomless sink for stagnant wealth, which makes it the most attractive investment frontier since colonial real estate.

But capital expenditure of this magnitude must yield a return. The technology must find new markets to monetize, and in the process uncover more data that feeds into the next stage of expansion. The two competing stacks are establishing a system in which every nation on earth, from Nigeria to India to the Gulf states, is encouraged (required?) to rent its intelligence through cloud platforms owned by a handful of corporations in California and, on the other side, to embed its physical infrastructure with AI systems manufactured in Shenzhen.

Macaulay’s Mirror

This is where the framework I built in Part II becomes essential. Foucault’s political technology was originally a theory of how institutions produce docile bodies - individuals whose physical capacities are maximized while their political autonomy is minimized. The drill sergeant formats soldiers. The prison formats inmates. The school formats students. In each case, the disciplinary apparatus works by structuring the environment so that compliance becomes the path of least resistance.

The Prediction Stack - the American AI architecture I described in Part III - is a political technology of this kind, but operating at civilizational scale. It produces docile bodies within docile polities. BTW, we have already seen that with social media - disciplining at population scale is political reality across the world. When a nation’s hospital logistics run on a proprietary model owned by a Silicon Valley corporation, when its port management relies on cloud infrastructure controlled from Virginia, when its military targeting depends on algorithms licensed from American defense contractors, and when its civic administration operates through platforms whose optimization logics were designed for a different culture in a different language - that nation’s institutional cognition has been formatted by an external disciplinary apparatus. Its cognitive capacities have been extended and it can do things it could not do before, so the leash is long. But it’s there.

Classical imperialism extracted raw materials like rubber, cotton, minerals. Cognitive imperialism extracts data: the accumulated behavioral, cultural, and institutional output of entire societies, compressed into training sets that feed the next generation of foundation models. One fear is that the patterns congealed in those models encode the priorities of the extractor - English-language epistemic hierarchies, Western legal frameworks, Silicon Valley optimization logics, American cultural assumptions about what counts as intelligent, efficient, or normal. When a nation in the Global South operates its government through these models, it runs its institutional cognition through a foreign cognitive artifact. There’s legitimate fear that its own knowledge - its local institutional wisdom, its cultural context, its situated ways of understanding - is systematically underweighted in the statistical distribution.

But the greater fear is that the prediction provider is even more firmly in charge when the localize their prediction engine for your geography; you will see yourself in a mirror made in California, and be happy that you are seeing yourself in a sari, not a suit, but so what? The mirror is not yours, and the more you get used to seeing yourself in it, the less you can walk away from it. You do not need to occupy a nation’s territory and extract its minerals. You occupy its cognitive infrastructure - the tools, the platforms, the models, the optimization logics through which its institutions think - and the territory follows.

In 1835, when British power in India was ascendant and they were confident about the superiority of their race and their civilization, Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote his Minute on Indian Education, where he says:

I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education....We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the west....We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

Macaulay was more successful than he thought, but his successes will be nothing compared to what AI will usher. He who controls the Stack controls the (mental) State.

Compute Stations and the Comprador Class

The British Empire required physical coaling stations across the globe to project naval power. Ships needed to refuel, so Britain secured harbors, built infrastructure, and stationed garrisons at strategic points along its sea lanes. The host territories provided the coal, the labor, and the land. They did not own the ships.

The AI empires of the 2020s require compute stations. Data centers need energy, water, and land. The host nations provide these metabolic inputs - and, in the Gulf’s case, the capital to build the facilities — to sustain an intelligence they do not fully own, control, or understand. The snapback clauses and governance safeguards are the twenty-first-century version of the coaling station agreement: access to advanced technology in exchange for structural dependency.

The comprador class follows from this arrangement. In the history of European imperialism, the comprador class consisted of local agents who facilitated resource extraction on behalf of foreign empires. They were intermediaries - materially rewarded, culturally shaped by the imperial center, structurally necessary for the system to function. What Macaulay called ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ The British Raj in India ran not on British administrators alone but on an English-educated Indian middle class that staffed the civil service, practiced British law, and managed the extraction of revenue from the countryside. They were not coerced at gunpoint. They were incentivized by the architecture of the system.

Cognitive imperialism will produce its own comprador class: the local elites, technologists, and policymakers who facilitate the integration of foreign cognitive infrastructure into their societies. They are not villains; they are rational actors responding to incentives.

India makes this visible at scale. India’s entire technology services economy - the Infosys-TCS-Wipro model - was built on cognitive labor extraction: the body shop. Indian engineers processed information for Western corporations at low cost, providing execution capacity without intellectual ownership. This was already cognitive semi-colonialism. The next stage is worse. AI now replaces the Indian IT worker while the AI itself remains owned by the same Western corporations. The software engineer in California who is replaced by AI has some political recourse, but when Oracle fires 12000 engineers in Hyderabad in one day, to whom can they appeal?

The Indian comprador is doing very well for themselves, thank you. Indian-origin CEOs of American AI companies - Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft - are smart individuals making rational decisions for themselves. I might do the same too. Indian startup founders are building thin application layers on top of AWS and Azure. The NASSCOM policy establishment has consistently advocated for India’s integration into the American tech stack. Like the pharmaceutical company CEO choosing to outsource APIs to China, we could be heading into a future where we are mere assemblers of AI systems, unprepared for a foundation model supply shock.

I don’t want to oversell the doom. India has mounted a more serious resistance than most. Aadhaar, UPI, ONDC - India has built genuinely impressive public digital infrastructure that is interoperable, open, and domestically owned. The IndiaAI Mission, Sarvam AI, etc - there are real attempts to build Indian-language models grounded in local linguistic and cultural reality. However, India does not have the semiconductor fabrication capacity, the training infrastructure, or the energy leverage to compete at the top of the stack. It is attempting managed interdependence, the same strategy as the Gulf states, but without the Gulf’s metabolic bargaining power.

The Great Enclosure

The AI Polyconflict potentially represents a Great Enclosure of the human mind. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the enclosure of the English commons forced subsistence farmers off shared land and into wage labor, creating the proletariat that powered the Industrial Revolution. Land was privatized - transferred from a commons that sustained a community into a productive asset that generated returns for its owners.

Something similar is happening now. The collective intelligence of humanity - our aggregated data, our art, our social interactions, our institutional knowledge, our agricultural wisdom, our legal traditions, our languages - has been enclosed, extracted, and refined into a rent-seeking asset (if they can make any money!) controlled by a small number of corporations. Large language models are, as Ted Chiang observed, lossy JPEGs of the internet.

The enclosure is not incidental to the technology. It is the business model. Foundation model providers spend billions training on the cognitive commons - the open internet, digitized libraries, public datasets, the accumulated record of human thought and expression - and then charge access fees to the very societies whose collective output made the models possible.

Public Intelligence

If the AI Polyconflict is a Great Enclosure, then the defense against it must be a form of Public Intelligence, and it needs to have teeth, not just good intentions. Public Intelligence means cognitive architecture that is genuinely situated rather than abstracted into cloud services owned elsewhere. It means intelligence that is embodied in local physical and cultural reality, embedded in local institutional context, enacted through local practice and knowledge production, and extended through tools and artifacts that communities actually own and control.

A realistic public intelligence for now - no nation can build frontier foundation models without access to the global semiconductor supply chain, and pretending otherwise is fantasy. But the application layer - the layer where AI actually touches governance, agriculture, healthcare, education, legal reasoning, cultural production - is defensible. India’s UPI is proof of concept: a public digital infrastructure that is interoperable, open, and domestically governed, even though it runs on hardware manufactured elsewhere. The question is whether this model can be extended to the AI layer - whether nations can own the cognitive interface between their societies and the frontier models, rather than ceding that interface to the model providers.

Across this entire series, from the twenty-second kill-chain confirmation in Part I to the algorithmic velocity of the Stack War in Part III to the metabolic acceleration of the compute buildout in Part IV, the consistent pattern has been the compression of human deliberative time. Cognitive imperialism colonizes space and time at once. The human durée - the lived time of ethical deliberation, cultural reflection, democratic consensus - is treated as inefficiency by the algorithm. Your local knowledge is too slow. Optimize it away. Compression of time goes hand in hand with its fragmentation; we have seen that already with the attention and gig economies, where the feed distracts us toward one shiny object after another, and the Uber or Swiggy driver whose workday is revealed only one trip at a time.

The colonization of time is central to cognitive imperialism.

The defense of durée is not nostalgia for a slower world. It is the precondition for cognitive sovereignty. A society that cannot think at its own pace cannot think for itself.

Closing

IMHO, the AI Polyconflict is a contest over the cognitive architecture through which humanity will understand itself in the twenty-first century.

The five threads of this series - the industrialization of lethality, the planetary cyborg, the Stack War, the metabolic loop, and the Great Enclosure - are facets of a single transformation. Human societies are being reorganized around augmented cognitive systems of unprecedented capability combined with stupidity, systems that carry the congealed patterns of their creators and impose those patterns on everyone they touch. The empires that control these systems - the prediction and production empires - with their different architectures but identical ambitions - are engaged in the most consequential division of the world since the Cold War. That division will pass though - sometimes fractally so - the Gulf, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, whose capacity for self-governance is at stake, and that is what Public Intelligence must defend.

One final essay to close out my coverage of Space as well as Time - next month, I will bring governance, time, and space together under the banner of “Habitability.”

Planetary Stewardship is the wager (updated Pascal’s Wager?) that humanity can consciously govern its relationship with the Earth, acting not as autonomous masters of a passive globe, but as deeply entangled inhabitants of a living, complex system. If you recall, I argued that we are entering the Third Age of Systems Theory. The first age - Cybernetics - was defined by the Cold War, game theory, and the specter of nuclear annihilation. The second age of Complex Systems grappled with the interconnected networks of economic globalization and chaos theory. Today, we have entered the age of Planetarity. Here, the animating force is understanding both the robustness and the fragility of life on Earth, and designing machines, institutions, and behaviors that promote the flourishing of all beings.

To truly grasp what this stewardship entails, one must learn to see the world through a dual lens where we fuse the historian’s sensitivity to human meaning with the astrophysicist’s and geologist’s staggering scales of cosmic and earthly reality. Yet, the moment we attempt to adopt this dual perspective, we run headfirst into a contradiction, for the very tools and frameworks we use to measure our incredible power over the biosphere simultaneously expose our profound insignificance. This friction spawns polycrises and polyconflicts, setting the stage for the central paradox we must now confront.

That contradiction fuels our approach to planetary stewardship.

1. The Contradictions of Planetarity: History vs. Deep Time, the Globe vs. Alien Space

At the heart of the condition of planetarity lies a profound contradiction, one that animates both the temporal and spatial realms of our existence. It is the contradiction between the human-scaled world, what we call History (in time) and the Globe (in space), and the vast, indifferent reality of the Earth itself, defined by Deep Time and Deep Space.

In the temporal realm, let’s note that humanity has evolved into a dominant geophysical force: our daily impact on the biosphere is increasing, industrial emissions threaten to elevate Earth’s temperature to levels not seen in millions of years, and humans and their livestock now constitute the vast majority of land mammals. However, the very technology that enabled this planetary dominance has simultaneously revealed that the Earth is immensely ancient and vast, far beyond human control. Humans will only occupy the Earth for a small fraction of its 4.5-billion-year history.

How do we reconcile these two opposing realities: our overwhelming geological power and our fundamental cosmic insignificance?

This temporal contradiction is mirrored by a spatial one. We have conceptualized and occupied the Earth as the Globe. Globalization views the planet as a smooth, frictionless surface for trade and human borders. However, the physical reality of the Earth is a dynamic, living system characterized by intricate biogeochemical processes operating far beyond our full comprehension. Our lives are increasingly highly mediated by interlocking technological systems - which insulates us from the vagaries of the flesh, and don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want it any other way - but while mediation is acceptable, alienation from the Earth is not.

The spatial contradiction, therefore, is the tension between attempting to capture and enclose the planet via the technosphere, and being constantly confronted by the alien unfamiliarity of the Earth’s physical reality. Before we can even begin to build institutions to govern this space, we must first bear witness to what we have done to it. Just as the Mauryan emperor Ashoka looked upon the carnage of Kalinga and immortalized his profound sorrow in stone, we must acknowledge the immense violence of our colonial terraforming - the clear-cut forests, the factory farms, the choked oceans. We cannot erect planetary institutions without first acknowledging profound regret for our assault on the biosphere.

What would a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the planet look like? Who will confess? Who will bear witness? Who will pronounce judgment?

2. The Planetary Durée: Overcoming the Spatial Fallacy of History

To navigate the temporal contradiction, we must fundamentally revise our conception of time, moving away from clock-time to what we might call the Planetary Durée. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that anthropogenic global warming has forced the collision of three distinct timelines: the history of the Earth system, the history of life, and the history of industrial civilization. For centuries, human history was treated as a separate domain from natural history. But the philosopher Henri Bergson provides a vital clue for how to weave them back together. Bergson argued that we typically commit a spatial fallacy by treating time like a ruler, i.e., a line of discrete points. This spatialized time is a useful tool for physics and capitalism (measured in fiscal quarters and election cycles), but it murders the actual, fluid experience of reality. Bergson proposed durée (duration) - time experienced as a melody, where the past swells into the present.

Applying this to the Earth, a Planetary Durée suggests the planet is not a dead rock ticking through an abstract void, but a living entity made of compounded time. Marcia Bjornerud captures this beautifully with her concept of timefulness. To the geologist, the Earth is polytemporal. The deep past is not lost; it is palpably present in modern landscapes, in the isotopic signatures of ancient rocks, and in the DNA of every living cell.

Manuel DeLanda complements this scientific view with a materialist history, arguing that reality consists of coexisting material flows operating at different speeds. The slow flow of minerals and biomass coexists with the highly turbulent, rapid flow of human economics and culture.

The concept of the Planetary Durée resolves the temporal contradiction by subsuming human history into geological history. We are not separate from the Earth’s deep time; we are a fast-moving, highly conscious coagulation of the planet’s own duration. By embracing this, we acknowledge our cosmic unimportance while taking ultimate responsibility for our immediate power to destabilize the Earth’s life-support systems.

3. Planetary Alterity: The Alien at Home

Just as we must rehabilitate time, we must also rehabilitate space from a passive backdrop into an active, living participant. The fulcrum of this spatial turn is the concept of Planetary Alterity: the recognition that the Earth is fundamentally alien, inexhaustible, and impossible to fully capture within human frameworks.

The literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak articulated this when she insisted that the “planet” must overwrite the “globe.” Where the globe is an abstract, capitalist projection, the planet is in the “species of alterity.” It belongs to another system, yet we inhabit it, on loan. Timothy Morton extends this humanistic perspective with his concept of “hyperobjects”—entities like global warming or oceanic plastics that are so massively distributed in time and space that they defy human perception and induce a sense of paralyzing dread.

The scientific perspective from astrophysics and astrobiology adds another dimension to this alterity. Astrophysicists Chris Impey and Joshua Winn point out that the exoplanet zoo includes worlds completely alien to our own Solar System. When the astrophysicist looks outward, they confirm the philosopher’s intuition: the universe is strange. But this external alterity reflects back on us, forcing us to realize that Earth, too, is an alien world.

Engaging with this alien Earth, over which we have a measure of dominion, requires a “planetary philosophy” that involves thinking with multiple cultures, but also thinking with other beings and things. A whale or a bacterium must become a legitimate interlocutor. Artificial Intelligence and ancient rock formations must be factored into our models of existence. How else can we sit together in a planetary assembly? While Bruno Latour agrees that the Earth is not a passive backdrop, he rejects the conclusion that the planet is an untranslatable mystery. For Latour, the planet is a highly reactive Gaia - a system whose decrees are brought into reality through our scientific instruments.

4. Planetary Stewardship, Metabology, and Sapience

How, then, do we live? How, then, do we act? If we accept the Planetary Durée and Planetary Alterity, what is our political and ethical mandate?

The answer is Planetary Stewardship. Stewardship requires us to embrace the central contradiction of planetarity. We must reject both the techno-utopian fantasy of fleeing the Earth to colonize Mars (abandoning our home) and the romantic fantasy of returning to an imagined pre-industrial purity (abandoning our responsibility). Instead, we need to embrace the empty planet - empty not as in empty space, but empty as in sunyata, the interdependence of all beings. In Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhisattva vows not to achieve enlightenment until all beings do so together. Mahayanics is the translation of that vow into governance: a commitment to design for the flourishing of all beings, human and otherwise. It is a compassion protocol, a moral logic written into computing systems, recognizing that one’s own thriving depends entirely on the thriving of oceans, microbes, and future generations. The planetary steward acts simultaneously as the Architect engineering the abstractions that structure possibilities, the Connector bringing disparate human and non-human entities into a moral commons, and the Elephant holding the entire system together.

This stewardship relies on what Benjamin Bratton calls Planetary Sapience. In his framework of The Stack, Bratton describes a planetary-scale computation system - an interlocking network of energy, minerals, sub-oceanic cables, satellites, and algorithms. This is a vast, accidental megastructure that serves as the sensory apparatus of the planet itself. Part of the Stack represents a counter-Galilean movement: where Galileo pointed the telescope outward to the heavens, Planetary Sapience directs our sensors inward, toward the Earth, to read the Book of the World.

However, computation is critical here for a very specific governance reason: unlike the law, computation is executable. A traditional constitution cannot regulate a smokestack directly, but a computational protocol can. Bratton notes that the Stack currently terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices. To survive, computational institutions must also be metabolic institutions, designed to maintain the metabolic order of the Earth: keeping the lights on, the water clean, and the air breathable.

This requires what Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman call Planetary Subsidiarity. We must move away from the traditional nation-state’s monopoly on violence over territories. Instead, we must build narrow, functional planetary institutions with teeth - cyborg bureaucracies capable of tackling specific planetary challenges like managing a carbon currency or regulating biogeochemical cycles at the global scale, while devolving all other power to bioregional and local units.

5. Habitability: An Umbrella Concept

By synthesizing time and space, history and geology, human meaning and cosmic indifference, we arrive at the ultimate metric of Planetary Stewardship. Sovereignty - the defining political concept of the Globe - must be replaced by a concept that is one level deeper and infinitely more important: Habitability. Habitability is the umbrella concept under which all of these ideas - governance, metabolic order, time, and space - come together. It is the condition of possibility for all life and all society.

In short: habitability is at the core of metabology

Habitability bridges the cosmic and the intimate. It spans the vastness of astrobiology and exoplanetary science, studying the precise thermodynamic and chemical balances required to build and sustain a habitable world in the dark void of space. But it also scales all the way down to the disciplines of architecture, urban planning, and biophilic design. It asks how we design an HVAC system, a city block, or a cybernetic feedback loop that sustains multi-species flourishing.

Next month, we will explore Habitability in detail. We will move from the cosmic parameters of Fermi’s Paradox and the Drake Equation to the material realities of extreme environment design and patterns of living architecture.

Planetary Stewardship is the wager that through philosophical engineering, executable protocols, and a profound Mahayanic respect for the alien duration of the Earth, we can secure the architecture of existence. We can ensure that the fast-moving layers of human activity do not irreversibly shatter the slow-moving foundations of the Earth's life-support systems, securing a flourishing, habitable world for the deep time yet to come.

Part III ended with a promise that the AI Polyconflict has a metabolic dimension most analyses of the AI race completely ignore. I want to make good on that promise. So far, I have been talking about Augmented Intelligence, i.e., the merger of distributed cognition and political technology, as though it exists in the realm of strategy, software, and institutional design. It does. But it also exists in the material realm. Information has energetic and entropic implications. Every inference token, every trained neural weight, every algorithmic decision I described in Part III has a material cost measured in watts, in liters, and in dollars (the last one isn’t physics, but it’s still hooked into materiality). The cloud is made of silicon and copper, cooled by water, powered by hydrocarbons, and financed by sovereign wealth. At least in the Gulf.

The Metabolic Dimension

In the 4E Cognition tradition, one of the things that distinguishes extended cognition from ordinary tool use is that the cognitive system becomes dependent on the artifact for its basic functioning. The navigator who uses a chart is cognitively different from the navigator who has memorized the stars; take the chart away and the first navigator is lost. The system’s intelligence depends on maintaining its material extensions.

Scale that to the stack. The Prediction and Production Stacks I described in Part III are cognitive systems that span continents. The American Prediction Stack extends institutional cognition through centralized cloud platforms, proprietary models, and precision hardware. The Chinese Production Stack distributes cognition through AI-enabled industrial infrastructure such as ports, factories, power grids. Both stacks, like the Navy bridge crew in Hutchins’ original study, can accomplish things no individual component could do alone. But both stacks also have metabolic requirements that most commentary on the AI race fails to register.

A typical hyperscale data center requires around 100 megawatts of continuous power - the output of a small gas turbine running without pause. Gigawatt (1000 megawatt) scale data centers are under construction. As an aside, it’s instructive that the most widely used measure of datacenter size is its energy footprint. A single such facility consumes approximately two million liters of water every day just to keep its processors from overheating. In the United States, data centers already account for roughly 4.4% of annual energy consumption, and that figure is expected to triple in the coming years. The resulting friction with local communities over water rights and grid stability has produced severe domestic permitting bottlenecks.

This metabolic demand is the third thread of the AI Polyconflict. Not who has the best algorithms. Not who controls the cognitive heights. But who controls the physical substrate - the energy, the water, the capital - that makes the compute possible in the first place. If your cognitive extensions depend on material infrastructure, then whoever controls that infrastructure has leverage over your intelligence. This is true whether the extensions are centralized in a cloud or distributed across a continent of factories. The brain needs a body, and the body has to eat. Energy, water, and capital are to the AI stacks what grain and iron were to premodern empires.

“Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics” - saying attributed to Omar Bradley.

Two Architectures, Two Metabolisms

In Part III, I described the American and Chinese AI stacks as two competing visions of augmented institutional cognition - one centralizing intelligence in the cloud, the other embedding it in physical infrastructure. Now I want to look at the same rivalry from below: through its metabolism.

The American strategy amounts to Intelligence as a Service. The United States controls the foundational hardware (Nvidia chips), the hyperscale data centers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), and the proprietary foundation models (OpenAI, Anthropic). It offers the world the ability to rent American cognition. Foreign nations and global enterprises do not own their cognitive capabilities; they subscribe to them. This is the European Navigator’s approach to global intelligence - abstract, centralized, portable, and powerful. But it concentrates massive metabolic demands in a small number of nodes. Centralized cloud infrastructure means centralized metabolic dependencies: specific power grids, specific water supplies, specific cooling systems. A blockade on critical cooling gases like helium, a kinetic strike on a server farm, a cyberattack on a utility grid - any of these can degrade or extinguish the cognitive system.

China’s approach is Infrastructure as a Service. Rather than renting cognition from the cloud, China integrates AI into the physical body of production: robotics, port logistics, manufacturing, energy management. China constructs the roads, the power grids, the factories, and the logistics networks with the cognitive algorithms baked in. This is the Trukese Navigator at national scale. Its metabolic demands are spread across thousands of smaller installations embedded in industrial infrastructure. Harder to knock out with one strike, but also harder to upgrade, harder to audit, and far harder to decouple once installed.

Both create deep dependencies. Not least upon one another.

The United States requires Chinese manufacturing capacity and supply chain resilience to physically build the hardware for its exquisite cognitive architecture - the rare earth processing, the precision machining, the sheer volume of fabrication that American industry cannot currently replicate at scale. China requires Western chip architectures, particularly advanced GPU designs from Nvidia and AMD. Each stack’s metabolism depends on inputs that the other controls.

From Gas Station to Compute Hub

This is where the Gulf enters: as the metabolic center of the AI Polyconflict.

The Gulf states sit on two of the inputs that both competing stacks need in vast quantities: energy and capital. They have a third advantage that receives less attention: geopolitical flexibility, which means they can engage both, as I described in Part III - purchasing American targeting systems and cloud platforms while running their ports and smart cities on Chinese infrastructure. OK, maybe that’s a bit too much - they have been American vassals for much of the post war era, but this war against Iran might precipitate more hedging than in the previous 75 years.

But hedging is not sovereignty. To rent your intelligence from two competing empires is to be cognitively dependent on both of them. So the wealthy Gulf states are attempting something more ambitious: a phase transition from planetary gas station to planetary compute hub. Data centers in the United States face severe domestic permitting constraints, localized noise resistance, and acute power grid bottlenecks. The Gulf has abundant, low-cost energy - hydrocarbons today, solar tomorrow - vast tracts of buildable land, and governments that can approve infrastructure at speed. Western hyperscalers need somewhere to build. The Gulf is offering itself as the site. The GCC can congeal their abundant sunlight and fossil fuels into neural networks.

In parallel, the Gulf states are building their own cognitive substrate. The UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute developed the Falcon family of large language models under permissive open-source licenses. The UAE’s Jais model and Saudi Arabia’s ALLaM are Arabic-first models that natively grasp the linguistic and cultural nuances of the region rather than filtering everything through English-language training data. These sovereign models are deployed alongside commercial Western tooling - Saudi Arabia hosts ALLaM on the DEEM Cloud alongside IBM watsonx - maintaining local control over critical inference and data while retaining access to frontier capabilities where useful.

This strategy of managed interdependence is itself a political technology, that uses financial entanglement and energy leverage to discipline the larger powers rather than being disciplined by them. The 1973 oil embargo is a more extreme example. The Gulf states will not passively accept whatever congealed patterns come bundled with American or Chinese infrastructure.

The Market Makers

The capital required to build this infrastructure is unprecedented. Hyperscale data center construction, frontier model training, talent acquisition, and the supporting energy systems demand investment at a scale that exceeds traditional venture capital by orders of magnitude.

The Gulf Sovereign Wealth Funds are among the few entities on the planet that can write checks at this scale. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, managing over $900 billion in assets, has established a dedicated $40 billion AI investment fund operating under the newly launched national champion HumAIn - designed to advance domestic AI infrastructure, support local startups, and establish joint ventures with global firms like Andreessen Horowitz. The UAE has established MGX, a sovereign investment group exploring plans to raise up to $50 billion in third-party capital to expand its AI portfolio, building on existing stakes in OpenAI and xAI. OpenAI itself, pushing toward a reported target of $125 billion in revenue by 2029 and seeking to fund its massive Stargate data center project, has actively courted both PIF and MGX.

This financial leverage comes with disciplining power. When a Gulf sovereign wealth fund provides the capital to build a hyperscale AI facility, it shapes the conditions under which that facility operates: where the data is stored, which models are deployed, whose assumptions are embedded in the system. The oil-for-security relationship that defined the US-Saudi alliance for decades is giving way to an AI-for-partnership arrangement in which the Gulf’s capital buys not just a financial return but a seat at the cognitive table. Maybe.... Capital flow is becoming a disciplinary apparatus of its own - not through snapback clauses, but in the softer mode of financial entanglement.

Why threaten the hand that funds you?

The Data Center in the War Zone

All of this compute, whether American, Chinese, or sovereign, has to physically exist somewhere. And wherever it exists, it needs to be cooled. Over the next five years, data center capacity in the Gulf is expected to triple, rising from roughly one gigawatt today to 3.3 gigawatts by 2030. These facilities will operate in a climate where summer temperatures regularly exceed 45°C. They cannot be cooled by the ambient air. They require massive quantities of water. And in the hyper-arid Middle East, that water must come from the sea.

Desalinating the ocean in order to feed data centers feels like a dystopian movie come to life doesn’t it? Data centers in Saudi Arabia alone are projected to consume 15 billion liters of water per year. If the current growth trajectory holds, that figure could scale to 87.52 billion liters, roughly 4% of the country’s total water output. Desalination is itself an energy-intensive and environmentally costly process. Consider the three dominant technologies. Seawater reverse osmosis, the most efficient option currently available, consumes 3.7 to 4.5 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter of freshwater produced and emits over 3 kilograms of CO₂ per cubic meter. Multi-stage flash distillation, still widely used across the Gulf, requires roughly 4 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter of electrical energy plus vast thermal energy inputs, and emits over 23 kilograms of CO₂ per cubic meter. Multi-effect distillation sits between the two in efficiency but produces comparable emissions and pollutant loads. All three technologies discharge concentrated brine back into the Gulf’s shallow, enclosed waters - an ecological cost borne by the non-human inhabitants of the Gulf.

This creates a dependency loop that tightens with every new gigawatt of installed capacity. The Gulf states burn hydrocarbons to generate electricity. That electricity powers desalination plants that produce freshwater. That freshwater cools the data centers that run the AI. The AI, in turn, manages the smart grids and logistics systems that distribute the power and water.

The Gulf’s AI infrastructure is not being built on blank ground. It is being built on top of the existing political economy of the petrostate - an economy historically organized around hydrocarbon extraction, desalination, and sovereign wealth accumulation. The new cognitive architecture inherits these dependencies and cements them deeper. What was a contingent historical arrangement - we have oil, but we don’t have water, so we built desalination - is becoming a central dependency for the global AI system.

BTW, Iran holds all these developments hostage, because data centers are targets for their missiles as they have demonstrated.

Every cable cut in the Red Sea, every drone strike on energy infrastructure, every cyberattack on utility controls is an attack on the extended cognitive system that powers global AI. This fragility is unavoidable, the product of building the planet’s cognitive infrastructure on top of the same geography that supplies its energy, in a region where the kinetic and digital battlefields overlap. A thousand individually rational decisions by hyperscalers seeking cheap energy, by Gulf states seeking economic diversification, by sovereign wealth funds seeking returns, by militaries seeking cognitive advantage, have collectively produced a system of great vulnerability.

Next Up

The metabolism of intelligence creates new forms of economic dependency, new asymmetries between those who control the metabolic inputs and those who must rent them. In Part V, the last essay in this series, I want to turn to this macroeconomic dimension: how the cognitive imperialism emerging from both the American and Chinese stacks is reshaping the global economy, what it means for the nations caught between them, and why the Gulf’s phase transition from gas station to compute hub is an example of this imperialism at work.

To repeat what I have said earlier:

The current global situation - whether viewed through the lens of political conflict, economic instability, or the accelerating breakdown of our ecological life-support systems - is boiling over; it’s a crisis of metabolic order, not just social order. International efforts to combat climate change routinely falter, hampered by the short-term incentives of the nation-state and the demands of quarterly capitalism. Meanwhile, our unquestioned dominance over the biosphere continues to drive the sixth mass extinction, erasing ancient lineages of life at a terrifying pace. While each of these cascading crises possesses specific material, political, and historical causes, an underlying flaw connects them all: a profound and deeply ingrained misunderstanding of how human beings relate to the Earth.

TLDR; We must fundamentally shift our perspective from the Global to the Planetary.

In the modern era, humanity has weathered two massive conceptual decentrings. First, the Copernican revolution proved that the Earth is not the center of the universe, displacing our cosmic address from the heart of creation to the suburbs of an unremarkable galaxy (ok, Copernicus isn’t really modern....). Second, the Darwinian revolution proved that humans are not a unique, divine creation, but merely one evolving species among many, displacing our biological origins. The condition of planetarity represents a third major paradigm shift. This third shift takes aim at our world-making powers. Planetarity dethrones human beings as the sole or even the primary agents reshaping the face of the Earth. It rejects our autonomous mastery over nature, exposing us to uncomfortable truths such as: bacteria have a greater claim to ruling the Earth than we do. We are latecomers to a biogeochemical project that has already been in progress for billions of years.

Last month, we explored the condition of planetarity through the dimension of time; synthesizing the rapid, chaotic flow of human history with the deep, slow rhythms of the Earth to grasp what Henri Bergson might inspire us to call a Planetary Durée, we have spent this month paying attention to Space. I have been trying to rehabilitate space from a passive backdrop into an active, living participant in our shared planetary drama. Bergson thought that turning Time into Space reduces the living duree to clock time. But imperialist space colonizes itself too, not just time! My attempt to rescue space has revolved around the concept of Planetary Alterity: the recognition that the Earth is not merely our familiar home, but a radically alien, complex system that utterly exceeds our totalization and control.

The Myth of the Passive Container

Clock time and scale space treat them as passive containers; measurement devices that don’t have agency of their own. In particular, space is viewed as a neutral stage, an empty theater upon which human beings acted, traded, fought, built empires, and told themselves flattering stories about historical progress. Terra Nova. Even when we spoke grandly of “the world,” what we almost always meant was the human world: a mapped, abstract surface of sovereign territory, national borders, logistical supply chains, maritime travel routes, financial markets, and military power. Space, in this picture, was smooth, available, and ultimately manageable, a standing reserve waiting to be organized by human ingenuity.

That picture is no longer tenable. Climate change, mass extinction, the advent of planetary sensing, and the astronomical discovery of thousands of exoplanets have all conspired to shatter it. The Earth is not simply the mute background where human history happens. It is an active, dynamic, historically layered, and often deeply unfamiliar reality in which human life is inextricably embedded.

This spatial domination is precisely what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak critiques when she insists that we must allow the planet to overwrite the globe. The globe is a human construct, an abstraction produced by the convergence of multinational finance, media networks, and the rigid, mathematical gridwork of Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The globe is a smooth sphere optimized for the frictionless flow of capital. It effectively enacts a blindness to alterity, reducing the vibrant, jagged reality of the Earth to a manageable spreadsheet of latitudes and longitudes.

The planet, by contrast, exists in the species of alterity. It belongs to a system that remains profoundly underived from human subjectivity. To think in terms of the planetary is to experience the uncanny: that we inhabit this immense, dynamic rock merely on loan. Planetary alterity asks us to recognize that the Earth is not just where we are, but who and what we are with.

The Octopus, the Earthworm, and the Mahayana

We actually encounter the alien in space far more readily than we do in time. Until we invent time travel, deep history is an abstraction; the fossil record can be mined for insights, but you can never truly know what it was like to be a dinosaur. But there are creatures more alien than dinosaurs who are within walking distance - press your face against the glass, and gaze into the highly intelligent, rectangular pupils of an octopus - a creature with whom you last shared a common ancestor roughly half a billion years ago - and you are in contact with a profoundly ‘other’ being who is nevertheless a fellow creature. Even closer, scrape a sample from the plate you left in the sink overnight and peer at it through a microscope - you’ll see creatures who are even more alien to the macroscopic, multicellular world we inhabit. But the very fact that the octopus is trapped in an aquarium or served on a dinner plate demonstrates our historical ability to colonize, contain, and consume its world. Our relationship with spatial alterity has historically been one of conquest rather than coexistence.

To correct this, we must change our posture. Rather than viewing the world from above, like an eagle or a satellite surveying a conquered map, planetarity asks us to burrow into the soil like an earthworm. We must chew our way to wisdom, intimately encountering the strange, nonhuman actors, microbial networks, and geochemical flows that make our lives possible. The earthworm does not survey space; it ingests it, lives within it, and transforms it from the inside out. In the Mahayana, the Bodhisattva takes a sacred vow not to enter the final peace of Nirvana until all other sentient beings have achieved enlightenment together. To think planetarily about space is to adapt this vow for the Anthropocene; it is the recognition that any flourishing we engineer must be a multispecies flourishing. It must include the octopus and the bacterium, the ancient riverbed and the subterranean rock formation. It asks us to accept that the planet contains worlds - deep oceans, atmospheric currents, microscopic ecosystems - that are not simply unknown, but genuinely alien, and it’s not clear if we will ever develop the empathy we need to transcend that alterity.

Viscosity and the Swarm: The Reality of Hyperobjects

The Earth is not a passive canvas, but a swirling swarm of living and non-living actors interacting without any centralized control. Timothy Morton reveals it as a physical reality from which we cannot escape; even billionaires will mostly want to die on Earth. This brings us to the terrifying and liberating concept of hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are entities like global warming, the planet’s carbon cycle, tectonic plates, or the diffuse soup of oceanic microplastics, that are so massively distributed in time and space that they completely shatter our traditional, evolutionary modes of perception. You cannot point to global warming in a single place; you can only observe its localized effects, like a flooded street, a blazing forest, or an unseasonably warm winter day.

Because of their immense scale, hyperobjects are viscous - they stick to us so that we cannot achieve a detached, objective, scientific distance from them because we are always already caught inside them. Global warming is not an event happening out there on a map; it is an omnipresent spatial reality altering the very weather outside our windows and the cells in our bodies. This physical entanglement renders traditional, isolated environmental management completely obsolete. We cannot build a wall to keep the hyperobject out. It forces us to confront the alien, uncontrollable scale of our own planetary exhaust.

The Exoplanetary Mirror and the Flight to the Stars

Paradoxically, looking out into the cold, alien void of the universe might be the best possible way to deepen our grasp of the Earth’s own alterity. In the last thirty years, astronomy has undergone a quiet but spectacular revolution. We have gone from knowing virtually nothing about planets around other stars to cataloging over 5,000 of them, with the realization that there are likely more planets than stars in the Milky Way.

As Joshua N. Winn highlights in The Little Book of Exoplanets, the true shock of this discovery is not just the sheer abundance of planets, but their diversity. The exoplanet zoo features worlds with highly elongated, chaotic orbits, hot Jupiters skimming the surfaces of their stars on the brink of fiery destruction, circumbinary planets orbiting two suns at once, and puffball planets as large as Jupiter but as light as Styrofoam. The two most common types of planets found in our galaxy are super-Earths and mini-Neptunes, neither of which exist in our own Solar System.

Winn reminds us that the universe has run every possible chemical and geological reaction countless times. We are a highly contingent, incredibly strange outcome among billions. Is life generic? Is it likely to exist around most stars? How many harbor intelligences like us? Are most intelligences like ours? We don’t know how to resolve Fermi’s Paradox as of now.

For Chris Impey, this realization serves as a powerful mandate for human expansion. In Worlds Without End, Impey argues that to survive the resource bottlenecks, climatic tipping points, and existential threats on our home planet, humanity must inevitably become an interplanetary species. He advocates for mining passing asteroids, settling the hostile deserts of Mars, and eventually sending nanobots to nearby star systems. Is that the Globe up to its usual tricks, colonization in the name of science and survival?

This tension reveals the fundamental contradiction of spatial planetarity. On the one hand, we only apprehend the planetary through our vast, world-spanning technosphere. The Stack of computation, undersea cables, airborne sensors, orbiting satellites, and deep-space telescopes - as Benjamin Bratton argues - is what allows us to see the Earth as a unified system in the first place. That same system pointed outward, at distant stars and the planets around them, makes us confront the alien unfamiliarity of other planetary systems.

Conclusion: Philosophical Engineering and the Earthworm’s Labor

The condition of planetarity, ultimately, demands that our response become a kind of philosophical engineering. It is no longer enough for philosophy to merely interpret the planet as an abstract idea, nor is it enough to simply reflect on our entanglement. As we face the escalating, interwoven crises of the Anthropocene, we have to actively compose and engineer the concepts, institutions, governance protocols, and tools that are adequate to a planetary scale.

Yeah, but isn’t that a Trojan horse for introducing more global control over the planet? I worry about that...

We require an expansive political imagination that dissolves the rigid boundaries of the nation-state, explicitly including the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, and our nonhuman kin in our definition of territory. Sovereignty has to be replaced by a concept that’s one level deeper and way more important: habitability. We need a vocabulary for habitability that can hold together alterity and relation, humility and action, planetary-scale computation and local mud.

The real lesson of space in the condition of planetarity is not that we should flee the Earth in rockets to colonize the stars, nor that we should surrender in terror before the viscous quicksand of hyperobjects. It is that we must learn the difficult, unglamorous labor of staying with a planet that is at once intimately ours and wildly alien; a planet that is knowable through science yet fundamentally inexhaustible; a planet that is ours to care for, but never ours to own.

To think planetarily is to accept the Bodhisattva’s vow for the Earth. It is to dig into the soil, honoring the bacteria, the oceans, and the deep rock. It is the hard, necessary work of encountering Planetary Alterity right here at home, acknowledging our fragile place within an impossibly vast, living system.

To have and hold, but not possess.

We encounter the alien in space more readily than in time. Planetary history is far removed from us, and you can never really know what it was like to be a dinosaur, but you can walk down to an aquarium and gaze at an Octopus, a creature with whom you last shared a common ancestor about 500 million years ago. Alterity is right there in front of you, but then again, the fact that the Octopus is in your aquarium (or worse, on your plate) demonstrates your ability to colonize their world. Much harder to feel the same regret for the dinosaurs who got fried by an asteroid.

Spivak and Morton

The term “Planetarity” originates in a lecture by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, where she establishes a break from anthropocentric geography by insisting that the planet must overwrite the globe.

I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere. In the gridwork of electronic capital, we achieve that abstract ball covered in latitudes and longitudes, cut by virtual lines, once the equator and the tropics and so on, now drawn by the requirements of Geographical Information Systems. To talk planet-talk by way of an unexamined environmentalism, refer-ring to an undivided “natural” space rather than a differentiated political space, can work in the interest of this globaliza-tion in the mode of the abstract as such....The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. It is not really amenable to a neat contrast with the globe. I cannot say “the planet, on the other hand.” When I invoke the planet, I think of the effort required to figure the (im)possibility of this underived intuition.

She critiques the globe as an abstract, mathematical construct designed for totalizing human control and the expansion of electronic capital.

Not surprising from a postcolonial theorist, but it’s clear that the planet is the non-colonized earth. While Spivak and Chakrabarty stick to recent European colonialism, we might want to posit the planet as a refuge from settler humanity as such, which is a much longer history.

In its place, Spivak posits the planet as an entity that exists “in the species of alterity,” belonging to another system entirely, which humanity merely inhabits “on loan,” one that we cannot colonize.

Here’s where I point you towards an earlier essay of mine on the Planet as a Colony and also towards Schmitt’s idea that the Nomos of the Earth is first constituted through an act of appropriation.

By framing the planet through this profound otherness, Spivak decenters the human, insisting that planetary alterity is “underived from us” and that it “contains us as much as it flings us away”. Embracing this alterity functions as a gesture of protest against the flattening logics of global capitalism and rejects the imperial hubris of human custodianship over the Earth. Instead, it demands a dual ethics: a stewardship of a dwelling we occupy only temporarily, and a humble acceptance of the planet’s radical, untranslatable mystery as an “experience of the impossible”.

The planetarity of which I have been speaking in these pages is perhaps best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of the planet. In this era of global capital triumphant, to keep responsibility alive in the reading and teaching of the textual is at first sight impractical.

This intuition, that the planet’s vast otherness defies human mastery and totalizing knowledge, flows into Timothy Morton’s conception of the hyperobject. Morton defines hyperobjects as real entities, such as global warming or nuclear radiation, that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans. These massive entities are - arguably - the material and ontological incarnations of Spivak’s planetary alterity.

The hyperobject is not a function of our knowledge: it’s hyper relative to worms, lemons, and ultraviolet rays, as well as humans. Hyperobjects have already had a significant impact on human social and psychic space. Hyperobjects are directly responsible for what I call the end of the world, rendering both denialism and apocalyptic environmentalism obsolete. Hyperobjects have already ushered in a new human phase of hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness: these terms have a very specific resonance in this study, and I shall explore them in depth. Hypocrisy results from the conditions of the impossibility of a metalanguage (and as I shall explain, we are now freshly aware of these conditions because of the ecological emergency); weakness from the gap between phenomenon and thing, which the hyperobject makes disturbingly visible; and lameness from the fact that all entities are fragile (as a condition of pos-sibility for their existence), and hyperobjects make this fragility conspicuous.

Just as Spivak rejects the globe because it falsely implies human mastery and a manageable, undivided space, Morton argues that the terrifying encroachment of hyperobjects brings about the end of the world. For Morton, the traditional concepts of “world,” “environment,” and “Nature” are static, objectified aesthetic backgrounds much like Spivak’s “globe”; hyperobjects destroy this illusion entirely, forcing us to realize we are not the masters of our domain.

Furthermore, Spivak’s notion that we inhabit the planet’s alterity on loan prefigures Morton’s concept of “viscosity”. Hyperobjects are viscous; they stick to us, meaning we cannot achieve a detached, objective distance from them because we are always already enmeshed inside them. We are hollowed out and coated by these entities, trapped in an intimate yet alienating enclosure that forces us to realize our painful entanglement.

Post-Humean causality is by no means a matter of “objective” versus “subjective” impressions, let alone a matter of human reality versus nonhuman reality. Rather it’s a matter of different levels of causality. It’s a matter of how entities manifest for other entities, whether they are human, or sentient, or not. Nuclear radiation-for the flower turns its leaves a strange shade of red. Global warming-for the tomato farmer rots the tomatoes. Plastic-for the bird strangles it as it becomes entangled in a set of six-pack rings. What we are dealing with here are aesthetic effects that are directly causal. The octopus of the hyperobject emits a cloud of ink as it withdraws from access. Yet this cloud of ink is a cloud of effects and affects. These phenomena are not themselves global warming or radiation: action at a distance is involved. A gamma particle is a wonder-ful example of a profound confusion of aisthēsis and praxis, perceiving and doing. A gamma particle is an ultra-high-frequency photon. In illu-minating things, it alters things: flesh, paper, brains.

Finally, Spivak describes the planet’s alterity as discontinuous and an experience of the impossible. This impossibility directly parallels Morton’s descriptions of hyperobjects as nonlocal and phased. Because hyperobjects occupy a high-dimensional phase space, human beings can only ever perceive fragmented, local manifestations of them - we might feel a raindrop or a sunburn, but we cannot directly perceive the totality of global warming or ultraviolet radiation. The hyperobject is impossible to see as a whole, rendering our encounters with it inherently uncanny and disorienting.

Spivak’s insistence on the untranslatable, inexhaustible nature of the planet paves the way for Morton’s diagnosis of the “Age of Asymmetry,” an era defined by a humiliating gap between our limited cognitive powers and the much larger, looming reality of planetarity. The two force us to abandon the illusion that we are the center of the Earth, demanding instead that we reckon with our fragile entanglement within a vast, indifferent, and profoundly alien planetary system.

Impey and Winn

Our friendly neighborhood astrophysicists are more optimistic, while endorsing Spivak’s rejection of the human-centric globe and Morton’s assertion that we must abandon the illusion of being masters of our domain. From the perspective of astrophysics, the sheer numbers and diversity of the universe definitively prove that human life is not the pinnacle of creation. Impey actively dismantles the idea that Earth is the gold standard for life, suggesting there may be superhabitable exoplanets far better suited for biodiversity than our own world.

Now that we know there are at least as many exoplanets as stars, we can put our planet in a larger context. The conclusion: Earth is not the best of all possible worlds. Life did not start in naturalist Charles Darwin’s “warm little pond.” It probably began in the darkness and crushing pressure of a hydrothermal vent

Similarly, Winn points out the bizarre diversity of the exoplanet zoo, noting that the most common types of planets in the galaxy, i.e., the super-Earths and the mini-Neptunes, do not even exist in our Solar System.

The newly discovered planets include potentially Earth- like worlds along with many exotic planets that bear little resemblance to any of the members of the Solar System. We’ve found planets on highly elongated orbits, planets on the brink of destruction by the gravitational force of a nearby star, planets as light and puffy as cotton candy, planets orbiting two stars at the same time, and planets that probably have oceans of lava.

However, while both sides acknowledge the staggering, non-human scales of planetary reality, they would radically diverge on how we should respond to it, beginning with how we understand it. Where the philosophers see an impenetrable mystery, the astronomers see a data-rich frontier. Spivak argues that the planet’s alterity is an experience of the impossible that we must accept as fundamentally untranslatable. Morton similarly argues that hyperobjects are essentially withdrawn, occupying a high-dimensional phase space that humans can never fully perceive - let’s note, however, that “high-dimensional” and “phase space” are mathematical terms that Impey and Winn would use in very different ways from Morton.

Winn and Impey would likely push back against this epistemological despair. While they acknowledge the immense difficulty of their work, they rely on a rapidly advancing technosphere of telescopes to actively translate the cosmos. I am guessing Bratton, given his fascination with Planetary Sapience, will also argue along these lines. For the astronomers, a planetary atmosphere is not an impossible alterity demanding our intellectual surrender; its chemical reality can be parsed through spectroscopy, and we are quite capable of sniffing out biosignature gases like oxygen or methane to find empirical evidence of life elsewhere in the cosmos.

We can see the outlines of a shining vision, with new opportunities for tourists and entrepreneurs— and perhaps humanity. Science fiction has long presented just about every aspect of this vision to us. But in the coming decades, with reusable spacecraft, economies of scale, and perhaps even a space elevator, it could become reality. The Moon and Mars beckon.

This epistemological split naturally leads to a divergence in action. Spivak asserts that we inhabit the planet on loan, demanding an ethics of stewardship and a rejection of the hubris of imperial control. Morton emphasizes the viscosity of hyperobjects, that we cannot achieve a detached distance from it. Impey, by contrast, would forcefully reject the idea that we should humbly accept our terrestrial limitations. Instead of remaining passively entangled in Earth’s fragile web, Impey views space exploration as a mandate for human survival. He advocates for mining asteroids, settling the Moon and Mars, and eventually sending nanobots to nearby stars to transcend the resource bottlenecks and existential threats we face on Earth. Where Spivak and Morton see the attempt to master space as an extension of the destructive, imperial globe, Impey sees the expansion of human technology into the cosmos as a necessary hedge against our own extinction.

This is the fundamental contradiction of spatial planetarity - on the one hand, trying to grasp planetarity via the technosphere and on the other hand, being confronted by what that grasp reveals in its alien unfamiliarity. I don’t want to resolve that contradiction, and might prefer to embrace it instead. If you see a planet around the sun, kill him?

Latour

Latour helps me hold the contradiction without resolving it in favor of one camp. Addressing the technoscientific optimism of astronomers like Impey and Winn, Latour would forcefully reject their dreams of space expansion and the infinite universe. He mocks the fantasy of escaping our living biosphere to colonize space, quoting the protagonist of the film ‘Gravity’, who, upon finally returning to the muddy ground, declares, “I hate space!”.

Suddenly we have to pull back on our imaginary voyages; Galileo’s expanding universe is as if suspended, its forward motion interrupted. Koyré’s title has to be read in the opposite direction from now on: “Returning from the infinite universe to the closed and limited cosmos.” All those fictional characters you’ve sent out? Bring them back! Tell Captain Kirk that the USS Enterprise has to return to port. “Out there, you’ll find nothing like us; we’re alone with our terrible terrestrial history.” As for the planet Pandora, it’s not in this direc-tion that the next front line against the Na’vi barbarians is going to continue to stretch. Moreover, in the film Gravity, Dr Ryan Stone summed up the situation nicely for us: when she finally made it back down onto the muddy earth, she confessed: “I hate space!”

Conversely, while Latour completely agrees with Spivak and Morton that the Earth is not a passive backdrop and is now actively reacting to our presence, he would firmly reject their conclusion that the planet is an untranslatable mystery or a withdrawn hyperobject that induces only paralyzing dread. Where Spivak and Morton see an experience of the impossible, Latour sees a highly reactive system whose decrees are brought into reality “inside conduits where numerous human hands helped by numerous instruments are bent on making it an external reality”.

If we aren’t specialists in this unknown object, we struggle, of course, but the procedure is exactly the same as the one we engage in every day when we consult the Internet for information about a person, place, event, or product that someone has mentioned in passing. We begin with a name that at the outset “means nothing to us”; then we unfold, on screen, a list of situations; later, after we have become familiar with them, we invert the order of things, and we get in the habit of starting from the name to deduce or summarize what it does.

The End

I don’t know if the souls of Captain Kirk and James Lovelock can be reincarnated in one body, but that’s where I would like to go if I can.

In Part II, I argued that Augmented Intelligence in Society - the thing we should actually be paying attention to when we talk about AI, unless you’re a machine learning researcher or engineer - should be understood as a merger of two ideas: distributed cognition (from the 4E Cognition tradition) and political technology (from Michel Foucault and his successors). Militaries have always been artificial intelligences, vast distributed cognitive systems that format human bodies into standardized components and extend their capacities through material artifacts. The cybernetic military-industrial complex of the Cold War was the most consequential iteration of this political technology before our own. Contemporary AI systems are its children, carrying the congealed patterns of that complex in their statistical weights.

Part II ended with a question: what new forms of discipline and institutional design does AI require? The answer, I’m afraid, is already taking shape - and it looks less like international humanitarian law and more like a global protection racket. I want to retreat from the battlefield and look at the geopolitical architecture of the AI Polyconflict. Because the kinetic conflicts in the Gulf, in Ukraine, and along the India-Pakistan border are not strictly local disputes. They function as surrogate battlegrounds for the defining superpower rivalry of our century: the contest between the United States and China over who will control the cognitive infrastructure of the planet (read that in a deep ominous voice introducing a PBS documentary on the Second Cold War).

The Surrogate Sandbox

At the end of Part I, I wrote that militaries are stress-testing AI warfare architecture in the Gulf, and that nothing beats a war for finding out if your weapons work. That was the narrow version of the claim. The broader version is this: the Gulf has become a surrogate sandbox not just for weapons systems, but for entire civilizational models of Augmented Intelligence.

The physical geography of the Middle East and elsewhere is being inscribed by the digital geography of competing AI stacks. The United States and China are each projecting a different architecture for how human institutions should be cognitively augmented - a different vision of what the human-machine ensemble should look like at the scale of nations and economies. The Gulf, with its vast capital reserves, its cheap energy, and its active war zone, is one of those places where these competing visions collide.

To understand what’s happening here, I want to use the same framework from Part II. If Augmented Intelligence is the merger of distributed cognition and political technology, then the Stack War between the US and China is a contest between two different political technologies, each producing its own kind of augmented institutional cognition, each disciplining its client states in different ways, and each carrying the congealed patterns of the civilization that produced it.

The Prediction Stack

The United States projects power through I have called the Prediction Stack: a technological ecosystem built on cutting-edge semiconductor fabrication (Nvidia GPUs above all), massive centralized cloud computing platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), proprietary foundation models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), and precision military hardware. This is a stack designed to dominate the cognitive heights (should remind you of commanding heights) to control the most advanced forms of computation and rent them out to the world. Washington treats data centers, cloud access, and compute licensing as instruments of power projection in the same way it once treated military bases and aircraft carrier groups. The goal is to bind allied and client states into the American technology ecosystem while systematically excluding Chinese influence.

India is very much in their sights.

The Microsoft-G42 deal is a clear example. Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in the UAE’s sovereign AI holding company, G42, as the cornerstone of a broader $15.2 billion commitment to UAE digital infrastructure. This was not an ordinary business transaction. It was orchestrated with explicit U.S. government oversight, and in exchange for access to advanced American chips and deep integration onto the Azure platform, G42 was required to execute a hard decoupling from Beijing: divesting from Chinese technology firms, selling its stake in ByteDance, and stripping Huawei equipment from its data centers.

The deal includes restrictive chip licensing, American board representation, governance safeguards, and snapback clauses - provisions that automatically revoke compute access and degrade system capabilities if restricted vendors or personnel touch the technology stack. USG has veto power over the UAE’s digital future. Rows of servers and racks of GPUs now carry the strategic weight that forward-operating military bases once did; not that it’s one or the other - the UAE has both.

Looking at this through the lens of political technology, these deals are about disciplining nations. The snapback clause is a mechanism of control that works structurally the same way Foucault’s disciplinary apparatus works on individual bodies. You don’t need to invade the UAE or threaten it with military force. You build dependency into the cognitive infrastructure, and then you establish automatic penalties for deviation.

The idea is to turn the UAE, in a specific and non-trivial sense, into a docile body within the American technological order - its digital capabilities maximized, its geopolitical autonomy constrained. If the UAE violates the terms of the deal, its AI systems degrade. Its military targeting platforms lose access to frontier models. Its smart city infrastructure loses cloud support. The punishment is cognitive diminishment, not boots on the ground. And like all effective discipline, it works best when it never has to be applied - when the threat alone is sufficient to ensure compliance.

This is the nature of the fast developing cognitive imperialism that I will write about in the fifth essay in this series.

The Prediction Stack is an augmented intelligence at civilizational scale. It extends American institutional cognition - the logic of Silicon Valley, the priorities of the Pentagon, the cultural assumptions embedded in English-language foundation models - across the globe. The nations that plug into this stack get American patterns of thought, American optimization logics, American definitions of what counts as intelligent behavior for free, like it or not. California is a State of Mind right - well, now you’re going to get it as a service.

The Production Stack

China’s approach looks very different. Rather than competing for dominance at the cognitive heights - the most advanced LLMs, the most powerful chips - China projects power through the Production Stack, an Industrial Nervous System. The Chinese strategy focuses on ubiquitous, society-wide integration: embedding AI into the physical infrastructure of logistics, manufacturing, energy, and urban management. Through the Digital Silk Road, the technological arm of the Belt and Road Initiative, China provides developing nations and Gulf states with affordable 5G networks, cloud computing platforms, surveillance technology, and smart city infrastructure.

In the Gulf, this manifests as deep integration into the region’s material base. Chinese technology firms are building the actual nervous system of Gulf economies. COSCO Shipping Ports and Chinese AI firms jointly developed the automation systems for Khalifa Port in Abu Dhabi, integrating AI-driven logistics and digital twin technologies. Huawei built the Smart City 3.0 platform for Yanbu Industrial City in Saudi Arabia, connecting broadband, security, public services, and industrial clusters across a critical petrochemical hub. SenseTime established a $776 million joint venture with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth apparatus to localize computer vision and deep learning for smart city applications. Aramco signed cooperation agreements with Chinese tech firms for predictive maintenance and operational optimization across the energy sector.

Notice the difference in where the cognition sits. The American stack concentrates intelligence in the cloud - in centralized data centers and proprietary models that client states must access remotely. The Chinese stack distributes intelligence into physical infrastructure - into ports, factories, power grids, and urban management systems. The American model is, in Suchman’s terms, the European Navigator’s approach to geopolitics: a centralized plan, computed in advance, projected onto the world. The Chinese model is closer to the Trukese Navigator: embedded, situated, responsive to local material conditions.

The American stack is powerful but brittle in some ways, because so much of the intelligence is concentrated in centralized cloud platforms, a disruption to connectivity from kinetic strikes on data centers, sabotage of undersea cables, or cyberattacks on cloud infrastructure can cognitively decapitate client states. The Chinese stack, by distributing intelligence into physical infrastructure at the edge, is harder to knock offline in one blow, but its components are also harder to update, harder to audit, and harder to extract once installed.

I am partial to the distributed cognition approach in general, but I don’t want to romanticize China’s approach. The Industrial Nervous System comes with the surveillance priorities of the Chinese security state, the optimization logics of state-directed capitalism, the disciplinary mechanisms of social credit and algorithmic governance. When a Gulf state integrates Huawei’s smart city platform into its urban infrastructure, it is importing a particular vision of how human behavior should be monitored, predicted, and managed. It is still political technology.

And the disciplining works differently in the two cases. Where the American model disciplines through a gun to the head - threatening to revoke compute if you deviate - the Chinese model disciplines through dependency. Once your ports, your power grid, and your industrial logistics run on Chinese AI, switching costs become prohibitive. The dependency is physical and material, embedded in concrete and fiber optic cable.

GCC Intelligence

This section is even more speculative than the others since I have very little understanding of the situation on the ground - caveat emptor!

The Gulf states are not passive recipients of these competing stacks. They are sophisticated actors playing a two sided market. A Gulf state might purchase an American AI targeting system for its border security, run its enterprise software on Microsoft Azure, and rely on Palantir for intelligence analysis - while simultaneously operating its massive industrial ports on Chinese-built automation, managing its smart cities through Huawei platforms, and training its petroleum engineers on SenseTime’s computer vision tools. This is metabolic hedging as statecraft, and it works because the two stacks, despite being strategically opposed, are functionally complementary. The prediction stack handles the cognitive heights; the production stack handles the material base. As long as the Gulf states can keep both plugged in without triggering the snapback clauses, they get the benefits of both augmented intelligences.

This is, if you like, distributed cognition at the geopolitical level, a patchwork of cognitive artifacts drawn from competing prediction and production models, stitched together by local administrative practice and sovereign capital. The question is whether a distributed cognitive system assembled from structurally antagonistic components can function coherently under stress (that’s polyconflict as technology!)- or whether it fractures precisely when coherence matters most.

Both superpowers tolerate this arrangement because the Gulf functions as a live lab for their respective stacks. The US tests how far it can push decision compression, cloud-based surveillance, and hardware export controls in a hot conflict environment. China observes, refines, and demonstrates how its industrial AI can maintain infrastructural resilience and supply chain efficiency under extreme operational pressure. The Gulf War is also a product demonstration, and here, one must include the Israelis and their tacit marketing of war crimes as military progress.

But the Gulf states also recognize the danger of this position. To rent your intelligence from two competing empires is to be cognitively dependent on both of them. When your hospital logistics run on an American cloud platform and your port logistics run on Chinese automation, you don’t fully control either system. Your institutional cognition is partly owned by Washington and partly owned by Beijing. He who controls the spice controls the world.

Sovereign AI: Building Your Own Mind

This is why the wealthiest Gulf states have begun pursuing what they call Sovereign AI - the attempt to develop indigenous cognitive capabilities that reduce dependency on either superpower stack.

The UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute developed the Falcon family of large language models and released them under permissive open-source licenses, explicitly asserting technological independence from traditional power centers. Saudi Arabia developed ALLaM, and the UAE developed Jais - both designed as Arabic-first models that natively understand the linguistic nuances, cultural values, and historical contexts of the Middle East, rather than importing the epistemic biases and safety guardrails engineered in Silicon Valley.

Viewed through the lens of 4E Cognition, the Sovereign AI movement is an attempt to build augmented institutional cognition that is genuinely situated - grounded in local cultural and linguistic reality rather than running on borrowed American or Chinese patterns. A foundation model trained primarily on English-language internet data carries the congealed patterns of English-speaking institutions. When you use that model to run Arabic-language civic administration, you’re filtering your institutional cognition through a foreign cognitive artifact. The output will be shaped by assumptions, priorities, and blind spots that originated in a different cultural and institutional context.

Sovereign AI is, in this sense, an attempt to produce locally grounded congealed patterns - to train models on data that reflects the actual situated reality of Gulf societies, rather than importing a lossy compression of someone else’s reality. IMHO, sovereign AI won’t work for foundation models or cutting edge GPU’s - the talent and the infrastructure for those are only available in the US and China; the Gulf states don’t have the semiconductor fabrication capacity or the training infrastructure to compete with the US or China at the frontier. Neither does India or France, for that matter. What they’re pursuing is something more like managed interdependence using sovereign models for culturally sensitive and strategically critical applications such as civic administration, Arabic-language services and military command while continuing to access American and Chinese frontier capabilities for less sensitive tasks.

Sovereign AI in the application layer seems doable for many middle-powers.

Whether sovereign or dependent, the problem of Augmented Intelligence is not just a problem of who owns the models, but also a problem of how the models interact with the political technologies of the institutions that deploy them. A sovereign foundation model integrated into a military bureaucracy that has twenty-second human oversight is just as capable (perhaps more so?) of catastrophic stupidity as an American or Chinese one. The Minab school bombing wasn’t caused by the foreign ownership of the AI system. We have never paid attention to either of them, but the Saudi funded war in Yemen and the UAE funded war in Sudan are as horrendous as they get, and will only get worse with AI.

The Stack War as Polyconflict

What I’ve been describing is more than a technology race; it is a polyconflict in the sense I defined at the start of this series: a structural knot where material reality, in the form of semiconductor supply chains, energy grids, submarine cables, and water resources, tangles with institutional systems, military strategy, and the cognitive architectures that organize human societies.

The prediction and production stacks are two competing models of planetary augmented intelligence, each seeking to extend its institutional cognition across the globe, each disciplining client states through different mechanisms, each carrying the congealed patterns of its parent nation (civilization?). Everyone else is caught at the intersection, trying to build sovereign cognitive capabilities while hedging between two empires that each want to be the sole operating system of the twenty-first century.

And all of this is happening inside an active war zone where the physical infrastructure - data centers, submarine cables, desalination plants, power grids - has been attacked and will continue to do so in the future, with all the impact that will have on local cognitive architectures.

That material vulnerability is where the next essay in this series will go. The AI Polyconflict has a metabolic dimension that most analyses of the AI race completely ignore: the energy, water, and capital requirements of the compute infrastructure that all of these augmented intelligences depend on. To understand why the Gulf is the geographic center of the AI Polyconflict, you need to understand energy-compute arbitrage. The Gulf states are attempting a phase transition from planetary gas station to planetary compute hub.

Will they succeed? That’s Part IV.

The current global situation, whether politically, economically or ecologically, is in a state of crisis that’s boiling over into conflict. We thought we were behind wars forever; turns out not to be the case. International efforts to combat climate change have failed to gain sufficient traction. And our dominance over other forms of multicellular life continues to drive the sixth extinction. While each one of these challenges has its specific causes and conditions, I believe there’s one underlying them all: a fundamental flaw in how humans understand their relationship with the Earth.

To move forward, we must shift our perspective from the Global to the Planetary.

Globalization views Earth as a smooth surface for trade, capital, and human borders—it is entirely focused on human needs. Planetarity, however, displaces the human agent from the center to acknowledge the Earth as a dynamic, complex, and living system where human existence is deeply fused with natural, biogeochemical processes.

If Copernicus showed us that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe, and Darwin showed us that humans weren’t a unique creation but an evolving species, Planetarity represents a third major shift. It dethrones humans as the sole important agents or world-makers. It dismantles the old myth of humans as autonomous masters of nature, placing humanity instead as a highly aware but vulnerable product of the planet’s own ancient, powerful biological and chemical cycles. As the biologist Uexkull noted a hundred years ago, even a tiny tick lives in a world as meaningful to it as ours is to us. We must extend this view, recognizing that not only are we connected to all life, but that nonhuman entities - like bacteria and ecosystems - are crucial agents in creating and maintaining the world we inhabit.

The Epistemological Rupture: Apprehending the Anthropocene

The transition to planetary thinking requires a fundamental reorientation of philosophical practice. In his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, G.W.F. Hegel defined philosophy as “its own time apprehended in thought,” positioning the discipline as an act of historical self-consciousness directed toward the institutions of the modern state. Karl Marx radicalized this mandate, arguing that the point of philosophy is not merely to interpret the world but to change it, shifting the object of apprehension from the state to the material reality of capital. Hegel, Marx and their followers brought historical consciousness into the practice of philosophy and the social sciences, but that historical consciousness is limited to human history. Today, the “time” that philosophy must apprehend has undergone a transformation so profound that it displaces the anthropocentric objects of both Hegel and Marx. Why stop with time though - it’s not just history that needs reconfiguration; we also need to bring spatial consciousness into thought (the topic of this month’s essays). And more - concepts such as “habitability” (the topic of next month’s essays) and “metabolism” (also starring in next month’s essays) that have never entered the philosophical lexicon must do so, and do so urgently.

Ultimately, the planet itself must be brought into thought in a manner it’s never done before.

That’s the task of reason in the Anthropocene - a geological epoch defined by human activity operating as a planetary-scale geophysical force. Apprehending the Anthropocene requires moving beyond abstract interpretation to what I might call “Philosophical Engineering,” a practice of composing and constituting the concepts, protocols, and tools required to make the planet livable for all beings.

In my discussion of Time, I used ‘Planetary Duree’ as the key concept tying human and planetary history. In my discussion of Space, I will use ‘Planetary Alterity’ in the same way.

The Alien Planet

Readings for this month:

1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Death of a Discipline.

2. Bruno Latour: Facing Gaia.

3. Timothy Morton: Hyperobjects.

4. Chris Impey: Worlds Without End.

5. Joshua Winn: The Little Book of Exoplanets.

On Planetary Alterity

For our purposes, space is the primary domain of difference, of encountering the other. Philosophers have a fancy term for this - alterity. At its core, alterity is the philosophical study of otherness - while we often use the word “difference” to compare two things within the same category (like two different colors), alterity describes a boundary that cannot be crossed. It is the recognition that another entity possesses an internal life, a history, and a perspective that is entirely exterior to your own and can never be fully mapped or consumed by your understanding.

Eating is the fundamental contradiction of alterity - in swallowing a vegetable, a fruit or a chicken, I assimilate the other into myself, but in doing so I reduce their interiority to nothing. In consuming the other, I have absorbed part of their being, but the rest is lost to me for eternity.

In the phenomenological tradition, particularly in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, alterity is not just a concept but an ethical event. Levinas argued that when we encounter the ‘Face of the Other,’ we are confronted with a radical alterity that we cannot control or categorize. This gap between the Self and the Other is the very foundation of ethics; because the Other is fundamentally not me, I am called into a state of infinite responsibility toward them. Ultimately, alterity is the acknowledgment of a not-me that is just as real as me. It is the realization that no matter how much we empathize or communicate, there remains an irreducible core in every other person that remains mysterious and sovereign. Alterity is what prevents us from turning people into mere objects or extensions of our own egos.

Why stop with people? Why not chickens and ticks and rocks and mountains? Why not the planet?

Radical alterity is the premise behind Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s conception of Planetarity (she coined the term) as a counter to the homogenizing forces of globalization. In Death of a Discipline, Spivak posits that the planet exists in the ‘species of alterity’ - belonging to another system that humans inhabit merely on loan. Planetarity, for Spivak, is not susceptible to the totalizing grasp of the human subject; it resists the museumization of the Earth inherent in neoliberal concepts like ‘sustainable tourism’.

We are entangled in a world that’s radically unlike us; solidarity with its Planetary Alterity is the key spatial challenge.

Gaia and Hyperobjects

To grasp this entangled reality, contemporary theory relies on concepts that transcend the outdated Nature/Culture dualism. Bruno Latour’s figure of Gaia strips away romanticized notions of Mother Earth, presenting instead a secular, political, and agentic assemblage of living and non-living actors whose interactions constitute the Earth system without centralized control. Similarly, Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘hyperobjects’ - entities like global warming, the carbon cycle, or oceanic plastics that are massively distributed in time and space - illustrates the difficulty of planetary apprehension. In his framing, Hyperobjects are viscous (they stick to us), nonlocal, phased, and interobjective, rendering traditional modes of perception and isolated environmental management obsolete.

Exoplanets

Hyperobjects are not the only way to alienate ourselves - we can also peer into alien worlds, that the Earth is just one planet among many. Paradoxically, looking for life elsewhere in the universe might be the best way to deepen our grasp of the condition of planetarity. In the last thirty years, we have gone from knowing nothing about planets around other stars to cataloging over 5000 (and increasing by the day). This planetary diversity is as much a species of alterity as the ones Spivak writes about. We will round off our exploration of space with two readings on Exoplanets: Chris Impey’s Worlds Without End and Joshua N. Winn’s The Little Book of Exoplanets. While Impey takes a sweeping, astrobiological approach that links distant worlds to the future of humanity, Winn grounds the discussion in the rigorous data of planetary detection and the practical limits of observation.

Both Impey and Winn emphasize that the most profound discovery of the last thirty years is simply the sheer number of planets. Current statistics indicate that there are more planets than stars in the Milky Way. Impey projects this out to the entire observable universe, estimating there are roughly a thousand billion billion (10^21) potential biological experiments out there.Winn highlights that the true surprise is not just the abundance, but the bizarre diversity of these worlds. The exoplanet zoo includes planets with highly elongated orbits, hot Jupiters on the brink of destruction, planets orbiting two stars at once (circumbinary planets like Tatooine in Star Wars), and puffball planets as light as Styrofoam. Most notably, Winn points out that the two most common types of planets found in the galaxy - ‘super-Earths’ and ‘mini-Neptunes’ - do not even exist in our own Solar System. Looking at the unfathomable number of galaxies, stars, and planets, Winn concludes that “every possible chemical reaction has been repeated many times in many places, including those that spawn life. The only question is how far we need to look”.

The condition of Planetarity is characterized by qualitative and quantitative alterity

In Part I of this series, I traced how the Gulf War is exposing the AI Polyconflict through two concrete developments: the compression of the kill chain (where AI systems like Lavender and Project Maven are replacing human ethical deliberation with algorithmic speed) and the Cheap Drone Paradox (where $500 quadcopters are credibly threatening billion-dollar weapons platforms). I ended with a question that I want to pick up here:

how is it that cheap drones with embedded spatial intelligence are defeating legacy military systems that cost thousands of times more?

To answer that question, and to understand the AI Polyconflict at a deeper level, I need to step back from the Gulf and take a theoretical detour. Bear with me: this detour will pay off, because it changed how I see this conflict, and therefore, it changes how you see everything that follows in this series.

My claim is this: to understand what AI is doing in the world right now, you need two ideas that most people working on AI or people who are solving the world’s problems don’t care about. The first comes from cognitive science: distributed cognition. The second comes from a certain strand of philosophy: political technology. When you put them together, you get a framework for understanding Augmented Intelligence - the actual thing we should be concerned about, as opposed to the science-fiction version of AI that dominates most public debate on AI doomerism.

Militaries Have Always Been Artificial Intelligences

Let me start with distributed cognition. In the early 1990s, the cognitive scientist Edwin Hutchins published a book called Cognition in the Wild. Hutchins had spent years studying how the crew of a U.S. Navy ship navigates into port, and what he found upended a basic assumption of cognitive science: that thinking happens inside individual heads.

It doesn’t, or at least, not only there. When a Navy crew brings a warship into San Diego harbor, the thinking required to do so is spread across the entire bridge team and their instruments. One sailor takes a bearing through an alidade, another plots it on a chart, a third relays headings to the helm. The navigational tools themselves such as the charts, the compasses, the plotting instruments, carry centuries of accumulated mathematical knowledge built directly into their physical design. A sailor using a scale doesn’t need to know trigonometry; the tool does the trigonometry for him. The intelligence of the operation doesn’t live in any one person’s brain. It lives in the system: the people, their training, their tools, and the social organization that connects them all.

Hutchins’ work was part of a broader movement in cognitive science now called 4E Cognition - the idea that human thinking is Embodied (grounded in the body), Embedded (situated in an environment), Enacted (emerging through action), and Extended (relying on tools and artifacts outside the skull). For Hutchins, the right unit of analysis for understanding cognition isn’t the individual mind. It’s the whole sociotechnical system.

Now the second idea. In Discipline and Punish, the philosopher Michel Foucault traced how modern institutions - prisons, hospitals, schools, and above all, militaries - developed specific techniques for reshaping human bodies and minds into standardized, controllable components. He called this a political technology of the body. The key innovation of modern military discipline, starting in the seventeenth century with tacticians like Maurice of Nassau, was to take the chaotic mass of infantry and reorganize it through relentless drill, precise time-keeping, and rigid spatial ordering. Every movement was standardized. Every soldier became interchangeable. The military camp became a machine for producing what Foucault called docile bodies - people whose physical capacities were simultaneously maximized and whose political autonomy was minimized.

Foucault’s point was that the military didn’t just use technology. The military was a technology - an artificial apparatus for organizing human beings into a productive, lethal machine. Long before anyone built a computer, the army was already a kind of computational system, processing information about terrain, logistics, and enemy positions through hierarchies of disciplined human processors.

As I keep saying: we have always been artificial.

Augmented Intelligence

Here’s where these two ideas converge in a way that I think changes how we understand AI.

If Foucault argues that militaries are artificial systems - political technologies that format human beings into standardized components - and Hutchins shows us that cognition in complex institutions is distributed across people, tools, and organizational structures, then juxtaposing their insights leads to the inevitable conclusion: militaries have always been artificial intelligences (also see “AI is a cultural technology”). They are vast, distributed cognitive systems composed of disciplined human elements, material artifacts, and institutional procedures, all organized to process information and produce lethal outputs.

The Roman legion was an artificial intelligence. The Napoleonic staff system was an artificial intelligence. The thing we now call AI - machine learning using neural networks - is only the latest cognitive artifact to be plugged into this ancient apparatus. Like I said last week, what we’re witnessing today is better described as Augmented Intelligence: the merger of distributed human-institutional cognition with new machine capabilities that extend, accelerate, and sometimes replace elements of that distributed system.

Engineers building deep learning systems think of AI as a property of the machine - its parameters, its training data, its benchmark scores. But when that machine gets deployed inside a military bureaucracy or a corporate supply chain, it becomes something else entirely. The intelligence that matters is no longer the machine’s. It’s the intelligence of the ensemble: the humans, the algorithms, the organizational incentives, and the material infrastructure, all entangled. And that ensemble can only be understood through the lens of distributed cognition and political technology.

Fearsome and Stupid

A paradox runs through the entire history of institutional cognition: these systems can be simultaneously fearsome and stupid.

Hutchins saw this clearly on the Navy bridge. The distributed cognitive system of ship navigation could perform calculations far beyond any individual crew member. But it was also fragile in unexpected ways. A misheard bearing, a misplotted line, a moment of miscommunication between stations - and the whole system could produce catastrophically wrong outputs. The intelligence of the system was real, but it was brittle, dependent on every component performing its role correctly within tight tolerances.

Foucault saw the same thing from the other direction. The political technology of discipline could produce armies of extraordinary effectiveness, but the very process of doing so created docile bodies stripped of individual judgment, and as a result, also created institutions capable of extraordinary stupidity. When the situation didn’t match the drill, when reality deviated from the plan, the disciplined apparatus could grind forward into disaster with mechanical persistence.

This dual character - of fearsome capability married to structural stupidity - is the permanent condition of complex institutional cognition. And it runs straight through the history of the military-industrial complex that gave birth to our current AI systems.

The Bumbling Cyborg

The most consequential iteration of Augmented Intelligence before our own was the cybernetic military-industrial complex that arose after World War II. The Cold War and the nuclear arms race demanded a new scale of institutional cognition. Operations research, game theory, systems analysis, cybernetic feedback loops - these became the intellectual infrastructure of a vast human-machine apparatus spanning the Pentagon, RAND Corporation, defense contractors, and research universities.

This apparatus was, in every meaningful sense, a new kind of cyborg - a term coined in the 1960s for a fusion of biological and technological systems functioning as a single organism. The post-war military-industrial complex fused human judgment with computational machinery on an unprecedented scale. It could model nuclear exchange scenarios, coordinate global logistics networks, and project force across continents. It possessed the apocalyptic capacity to end life on earth in an afternoon.

And it was also, frequently, bumbling, inefficient, and stupid.

The same apparatus that developed precision-guided munitions also produced the catastrophic miscalculations of Vietnam, where Pentagon planners mistook body counts for strategic progress and tonnage dropped for political influence - and I am not even talking about the moral cretinism involved in doing so; the bombings and body counts were failures according to the standards set by the military planners themselves. The systems were brilliant at processing quantifiable data and terrible at grasping the situated, cultural, political realities that actually determined outcomes on the ground.

Moral hazards are particularly important when it comes to military systems.

This is the European Navigator problem, to use a distinction the anthropologist Lucy Suchman writes about in Plans and Situated Actions. The European Navigator creates a rigid, detailed plan in advance and then tries to force reality to conform to it. The Pentagon’s systems analysts were the ultimate European Navigators: they built elaborate models, ran simulations, and then expected the world to behave accordingly. When it didn’t - which was often - the apparatus doubled down, which was both stupid and evil.

The horrendous mistakes this apparatus produced were not always the result of overt malice. Many of them arose from apathy and structural stupidity - the inability of a vast, distributed cognitive system to account for what it couldn’t measure. The cybernetic complex was a political technology of extraordinary power and extraordinary blindness, a cyborg that could destroy a continent but couldn’t understand a village.

The cybernetic military-industrial complex wasn’t just a military phenomenon, either. Its logic seeped into civilian life. The interstate highway system, corporate management science, standardized testing, urban planning - all carry the DNA of the first era of systems theory and cybernetic control: centralized modeling, quantified metrics, top-down optimization. The same political technology that organized Cold War lethality organized the American economy and, eventually, the consumer internet.

Congealed Patterns

Contemporary artificial intelligence is the child of this complex. The foundational research on neural networks, pattern recognition, and machine learning was incubated inside Cold War defense institutions and funded by military research agencies. The internet itself - the source of much of the data used to train modern AI - was originally a DARPA project designed to ensure military communications could survive nuclear war.

When today’s large language models and deep learning systems are trained, they consume the digital output of the entire internet. They absorb the accumulated, compressed record of decades of human activity - much of it shaped by the institutional logics, biases, and priorities of the cybernetic complex and its commercial descendants. The writer Ted Chiang called large language models ‘lossy JPEGs of the internet’. Just as a compressed image loses detail while preserving dominant patterns, AI models capture the dominant patterns of their training data while losing the situated context, the ambiguity, and the ethical nuance that characterized the original human activity.

When an AI system makes a prediction, it is drawing on the accumulated logic of the bureaucracies, markets, and military apparatuses that shaped the digital world. The system doesn’t think in any meaningful sense. It reproduces, at tremendous speed, the patterns laid down by the human-machine complexes that preceded it. These are congealed patterns, institutional behavior compressed into statistical weights.

The New Cyborg Goes to War

Which brings us back to the Gulf and to the wars currently reshaping how organized violence works.

The Augmented Intelligence systems now being deployed by the United States, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, and others represent the latest political technology - the newest iteration of the cyborg. They fuse the distributed cognition of military bureaucracies with the pattern-matching speed of deep learning. And they display the same dual character we’ve seen throughout the history of institutional cognition: fearsome capability and structural stupidity, now operating at unprecedented velocity.

In Gaza, the Israeli Defense Forces industrialized the kill chain using a triad of AI systems. Lavender analyzed surveillance data to flag tens of thousands of individuals as potential targets. Habsora generated over a hundred structural targets per day - compared to the roughly fifty per year that human analysts had previously produced. Where’s Daddy tracked the phones of flagged individuals and alerted operators when they entered their family homes. The human role in this system was reduced to roughly twenty seconds of confirmation per target. The intelligence of the system was distributed across the algorithms, the surveillance infrastructure, and the military hierarchy. The individual human operator was reduced to being a switch in a circuit.

When this architecture expanded into the direct conflict between the US-Israeli coalition and Iran in 2026, Project Maven, augmented by large language models, nominated over three thousand targets in a single week during Operation Epic Fury. The system could sift through satellite imagery, classify targets, recommend weapons systems, and draft legal justifications for strikes in seconds. It was, by any measure, a formidable cognitive apparatus.

And it was also capable of catastrophic stupidity. The bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, Iran - which killed over 170 civilians, mostly children - occurred because the AI system relied on a Defense Intelligence Agency database that hadn’t been updated to reflect the building’s conversion from an IRGC compound into a school. The system processed congealed historical data rather than situated current reality, and no human in the chain caught the error (they don’t have any incentives for doing so, just FYI).

In Ukraine, the same dynamics play out at the edge of the network. The grinding war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine has compressed the evolutionary cycle for autonomous weapons from years to weeks. Ukrainian FPV drones and Russian Lancet munitions increasingly operate with autonomous terminal homing and machine vision. When electronic warfare jams their radio links, these drones don’t fail - they switch to onboard AI, recognizing targets by thermal signature and executing strikes based on immediate environmental feedback.

These are Trukese Navigators in the sky. They don’t follow rigid, centralized plans beamed from a command center. They sense, adapt, and act based on local conditions. The intelligence is embedded in the device, enacted through its interaction with the environment, distributed across the swarm. Shoot one down and the network barely registers the loss.

But this situated, embodied capability comes with its own form of stupidity. Edge AI operates on narrow pattern recognition. It can identify a thermal signature that matches its training data, but it cannot assess whether the heat source is a tank, a tractor, or a school bus. The speed and autonomy that make these systems tactically effective also make them ethically uncontrollable. The drone is situated in the physical environment but is alienated from the moral context of its actions.

The Monster We Are Building

Here’s what I want you to take from this essay:

The thing we’re watching emerge in the Gulf, in Ukraine, and along every contested border on the planet is not just “how is AI being used in war?” It is a new kind of cyborg, a new political technology that fuses centuries of institutional discipline with the latest cognitive artifacts, producing an Augmented Intelligence of frightening capability and familiar stupidity.

This cyborg can coordinate force with mathematical precision. It can process information at scales beyond individual human comprehension. And like its predecessors, it can produce catastrophic errors - not despite its sophistication, but because of it. The very mechanisms that allow these systems to operate at superhuman speed also strip away the human capacities that might catch their mistakes: deliberation, contextual judgment, moral friction etc.

The frameworks of distributed cognition and political technology help us see that the emergence of this new cyborg was, in retrospect, predictable. Every major military innovation has been an exercise in extending the distributed intelligence of the military apparatus through new material technologies while simultaneously demanding new forms of human discipline to interface with those technologies. The musket required the drill sergeant. The telegraph required the signal corps. The nuclear weapon required the systems analyst.

And AI requires... what?

That’s the question the AI Polyconflict forces us to confront. We are building new forms of Augmented Intelligence at a pace that far outstrips our ability to develop the institutional wisdom needed to govern them. The political technologies of discipline that once constrained military cognition - chains of command, rules of engagement, international humanitarian law - were designed for a world where human beings had time to think, not for a world where the kill-chain can go from detection to assassination in thirty seconds.

The future of war, and of organized violence more broadly, depends on whether we can develop new political technologies capable of governing the augmented intelligences we are building. That is a problem of institutional design, not of engineering. And it requires us to pay attention to the people who study how cognition actually works in the wild.

That’s, of course, assuming that we want to arrive at some constraints on planet-scale violence. Maybe we won’t, and our rulers are fine with waging a war of all against all.

In Part III of this series, I’ll turn from kinetic warfare to the geopolitical architecture of the AI Polyconflict: how the Gulf has become a surrogate sandbox for superpower rivalry. This is what I promised at the end of Part I, but I hope this detour has been instructive, if not enjoyable.

1. The breakdown of the liberal international order and its descent into polycrisis followed by polyconflict.

2. The importance of energy and information flows in maintaining metabolic order, and how metabolic order underlies social and political order. Within this, the roles of Silicon and Carbon as master elements, the drivers of polyconflict among other things.

3. The interregnum between the Globe and the Earth and the reign of new ‘monsters’ in this period of turbulence, and the emergence of Planetary Governance as a practical need, rather than a utopian demand.

4. The need to couple human history with deep evolutionary and earth history, and human geography with a cosmological perspective on space.

Behind all of which is an attempt at a “Bhumics,” a thorough reckoning of the condition of Planetarity. As I have been doing so, the world hasn’t been staying still; the very opposite in fact, and I wrote some essays (here, here, here and here) on how the war in the Persian Gulf is impacting India’s access to some key commodities. These aren’t separate explorations: helium is both the product of stellar furnaces and the coolant that makes MRIs and chips possible. And energy, information, metabolism and habitability are themes that run throughout this enterprise at every scale.

Today’s essay is an attempt to bring many of these themes together in an analysis of the metabolic sovereignty of India. It’s a very long essay - about 7000 words - and I have gotten rid of images and hyperlinks (in the main body of this essay, not in this section) in favor of an uninterrupted narrative. Some years ago, I said that “nothing in society makes sense except in the light of the planet.” This essay is an attempt to make that connection explicit in the context of an issue that’s still raging on our screens, and in some cases, on our streets.

Much of the content of this essay is recycled from previous essays, but the take is new IMHO.

Introduction

For most of the last century, the primary instrument for making sense of politics was ideology. Know where a party or a regime sat on the spectrum from liberal capitalism to state socialism and you could predict its alliances, its campaign promises etc.

But ideology is a description of intentions. It tells you what kind of world a government claims it is building, not how that world actually runs. For that you need to look at the pipelines and shipping lanes, the semiconductor fabs and data centers, the pharmaceutical supply chains and fertilizer networks - the flows of energy, matter, and information that constitute the material substrate of social life - and every society and its reigning institutions (governments, corporations etc) have tacit theories of how these flows are to be regulated. It’s time to make that tacit governance into an explicit framework, or what I call metabology: the analysis of the protocols, formal and informal, that govern how energy, matter, and information actually move through and between societies.

When global supply chains are functioning, the metabolic substrate of civilization is invisible. When the system breaks, the metabolic reality announces itself. The diabetic who cannot get her medication and the farmer who cannot afford his fertilizer are experiencing a metabolic rupture. That rupture raises a political question: who controls these flows, and who is left at the mercy of those who do? This question is close to the traditional question of sovereignty: “who is the supreme authority within a territory”, except that we are not restricting ourselves to territorial control, but rather, the capacity of a political community to organize and secure the flows of energy and information that keep it alive.

Metabolic Sovereignty dictates whether you can provision your population with energy, pharmaceuticals, food, and compute without being held hostage by a chokepoint you do not control.

The geopolitical struggles defining our era are, at bottom, metabolic. When commentators describe a new cold war between the United States and China, the contest is often framed in ideological terms, but the material reality is a competition between metabolic stacks: the US champions a compute-centric stack - doubling down on AI, data centres, semiconductor design - while China centres an electric stack, commanding over 80 percent of solar PV manufacturing and three-quarters of global battery output. Both are bids for metabolic leverage.

India is caught between them, unable to fully participate in either stack while dependent on both, and the war in the Persian Gulf is bringing our metabolic needs to the forefront. Over the last few weeks, I have been investigating the commodity shocks arising out of the ongoing war between the US/Israel and Iran, with India firmly inside the fallout zone.

This essay is an attempt to incorporate what I have learned into a metabolic framework, with the metabolic sovereignty of India being its chief concern.

Three Metabolisms, One Conflict

When the global system works, natural gas arrives on schedule, pharmaceuticals stock the shelves, and cooking fuel fills the cylinder. We can treat geopolitics as something that happens elsewhere, to other people, and kick the systemic externalities down the road for our children to deal with. But when the system breaks down, as it is breaking down now in the Persian Gulf, geopolitical volatility ceases to be an abstraction.

The current war between the United States, Israel, and Iran is such a breakdown. It is not merely a military conflict confined to the belligerents. It has an epicenter, a blast radius, and a fallout zone. At the core are the combatants, trapped in a zone of drone strikes, ballistic missiles, and perhaps soon, land battles. In the immediate line of fire are the Gulf Cooperation Council countries - Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE - whose airspace is restricted, whose shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz are choked, and whose petrochemical infrastructure is under direct threat. Further out, in the fallout zone, sits India: not launching missiles or under bombardment, but caught in the wake of those who are. We lack the agency to stop the core conflict but face urgent consequences from its cascading disruptions.

To understand what those consequences actually look like, we need a way of seeing that our existing analytical tools do not provide. The standard media apparatus gives us abstractions such as “Brent Crude hitting $120 a barrel will lead to an extra 5% inflation in India.” But that inflation isn’t going to be uniform. I was told by a friend that the prices of vegetables are going down because people don’t have the LPG for cooking them. The paddy farmer in Punjab or the diabetic gig worker in Bengaluru needs a finer instrument.

I want to propose one. Every functioning society, I argue, runs on three coupled metabolisms. The first is the external metabolism: the flows of energy, matter, and information that power civilization. This metabolism has two registers. Its energy register encompasses the pipelines, shipping lanes, refineries, and chemical plants that convert raw hydrocarbons into the thousands of derivative molecules modern life depends on - from fertilisers to pharmaceutical precursors to cooking fuel. Renewables have a similar mesh of products. The information register of external metabolism encompasses the semiconductor fabs, data centres, fibre-optic cables, and cloud infrastructure that convert raw compute into the digital nervous system through which modern economies are coordinated.

The second is the bodily metabolism: the biological processes that keep individual human beings alive - cellular energy regulation, respiration, nutrition, and the pharmaceutical and diagnostic systems that maintain metabolic balance when the body fails. Perhaps education is also in this bucket - the cultivation of human capacity to respond to the world. While there’s plenty of thinking about the politics of energy flows and semiconductor chips, there’s very little political - let alone geopolitical - thinking about bodily metabolism even though shocks to the system are ultimately absorbed by our bodies.

The third metabolism is the political metabolism: the institutional capacity that governs the relationship between the first two, sovereignty over critical supply chains, strategic reserves, industrial policy, the ability to decide who gets what when scarcity arrives, and the willingness to treat essential goods as sovereign infrastructure rather than as commodities best left to the cheapest bidder.

It’s this third metabolism that metabolic sovereignty concerns itself the most, but of course the three are coupled. The external metabolism feeds the bodily metabolism, for you need fuel to cook food, gas to make drugs, industrial gases to power medical equipment. Political metabolism mediates the relationship - it decides whether to build strategic reserves, whether to manufacture critical inputs domestically, whether to subsidize essential services. It’s much more invisible than territorial sovereignty - no soldiers at the borders, no immigration agents, and when it works, the tankers arrive at their terminals and the lights stay on.

Then there’s the stage of crisis, or what is more likely given the interconnected world we are in, polycrisis. Polycrisis acknowledges multiple, intersecting emergencies. But it carries a hidden assumption: that a crisis is temporary, that the metabolism will eventually recalibrate into a new equilibrium, that one day, gas cylinders will be replaced with solar cookers. But solar cookers don’t appear out of nowhere: India cannot manufacture them at scale today without embedding ourselves into the Chinese supply chains. That’s tipping the crisis over into conflict.

Conflict is ongoing, structural, open-ended, and resistant to being fixed by the right policy, the right summit, or the right experts in the right room. That shift in framing, from polycrisis to polyconflict, is what the current moment demands, for we are in the interregnum between the reign of the Rules-Based International Order that governed the coupling between our three metabolisms (the RBIO was never perfect, never equal, and rarely rules-based, but it was the operating system we had) and whatever comes next, if we can even name it.

The old order was a metabolic order as much as a geopolitical arrangement. The global trading system, the petrochemical supply chains, the shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz - these were the arteries of a planetary metabolism that fed energy into bodies, drugs into patients, and fuel into kitchens. The Rules-Based International Order was, among other things, a set of metabolic guarantees: that the flows would continue, that the couplings between the external and the bodily would hold, that the political metabolism would manage the exceptions when they arose. Those guarantees are dissolving.

India is living inside that dissolution, caught in a triple bind across all three metabolisms. Our external metabolism depends on Gulf hydrocarbons for energy and on Chinese manufacturing for the hardware of the energy and compute transitions. Our bodily metabolism is under chronic stress from diabetes, respiratory disease, and a fragile diagnostic infrastructure. And our political metabolism - its sovereignty over pharmaceuticals, energy, healthcare, and increasingly over compute - has been systematically hollowed out by three decades of decisions that seemed rational in the short term and have turned out to be structurally catastrophic.

The most reliable way to see how the three metabolisms are failing simultaneously is to trace the disruption through specific commodities, following each from the blast radius in the Gulf to the body in Bihar. Each of the three cases that follow illuminates a different failure mode across all three registers. A noble gas that cools superconducting magnets and semiconductor wafers. A synthetic molecule that regulates the bodily metabolism of 101 million diabetics. A fossil-fuel byproduct that determines whether women breathe clean air or toxic smoke. Each traces the same structural pattern: when the external metabolism is shocked and the political metabolism has no buffer, it is the bodily metabolism that absorbs the cost, and that cost falls heaviest on those whose bodies were already most precarious.

The Helium Shock: Where Energy Meets Compute Meets the Body

When missiles strike the energy infrastructure of the Persian Gulf, it is obvious that the price of crude oil will spike and that shipping delays will hit Liquefied Natural Gas. Oil and gas are first-order casualties of Middle Eastern wars - the disruptions everyone expects and the dependencies every state actively manages. But polyconflicts generate second-order dependencies that are less visible and often more damaging. Helium is a case in point.

Most people associate helium with balloons and blimps. In reality, it sits at the intersection of three critical systems: Gulf energy infrastructure, advanced semiconductor manufacturing, and medical diagnostics. To understand why, we need to grasp the chemistry of the second lightest element in the universe.

Helium is not manufactured. It is generated over hundreds of millions of years by the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium deep within the Earth’s crust - the alpha particles produced by decay are helium nuclei, which pick up electrons from surrounding rock and become helium gas. Being the second-lightest element, helium would normally escape Earth’s gravity and dissipate into space. But sometimes it gets trapped in the same geological formations as natural gas. This means helium is extracted almost exclusively as a byproduct of natural gas processing, separated through cryogenic fractional distillation towers that cool raw gas to extreme temperatures. Since helium has the lowest liquefaction point of any element, everything else in the gas condenses first, leaving only helium in gaseous form.

This geological reality chains helium directly to the world’s hydrocarbon nodes. Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City complex is not just the world’s largest gas terminal; it also accounts for roughly 30 to 38 percent of the world’s entire helium supply. When Ras Laffan was struck by Iranian missiles, a third of this critical industrial gas vanished from the global market in a matter of days. And with the Strait of Hormuz contested, even helium that could be extracted has no shipping route out. The external metabolism suffered a sudden, severe constriction at one of its most critical nodes - and because helium cannot be stockpiled (the atom is so small it eventually leaks through the microscopic pores of almost any container), there is no warehouse of reserves to draw down. Helium must be a continuous, cryogenic flow.

We wouldn’t care about this so much if it weren’t so important: what makes helium irreplaceable are two properties:

• Helium is chemically inert, and

• Helium remains liquid at colder temperatures than any other substance in existence.

These properties make it the invisible substrate of modern medicine and advanced computing. Consider the MRI machine. An MRI works by exciting the hydrogen atoms in the body’s water molecules with a powerful magnetic field and mapping how those atoms relax - effectively imaging the fluid metabolism of tissue, revealing tumours, strokes, and neurological damage that cannot be detected any other way. To generate that magnetic field, the machine’s internal coils, typically a niobium-titanium alloy, must achieve superconductivity. That happens only at roughly 4 Kelvin, -269 degrees Celsius, a few degrees above absolute zero (-273 celsius, 0 Kelvin). Liquid helium is the only substance capable of reaching and maintaining those temperatures. Liquid nitrogen is too warm. There is no synthetic substitute. Without liquid helium, there is no MRI (though new technological alternatives are emerging).

India has roughly 2,500 to 4,800 MRI machines for a population of 1.4 billion - compared to over 12,000 in the United States, which has a quarter of India’s population. But the helium shock lies not in the numbers but in the composition of the fleet. The newest generation of MRI scanners uses only 7 litres of helium, permanently sealed at the factory. Zero-boil-off models use a refrigeration unit called a cold head to recapture evaporating helium. Both are too expensive for most Indian hospitals. Instead, the bulk of India’s MRI infrastructure, particularly in smaller diagnostic centres and Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, consists of refurbished legacy machines imported from the West. These 10-to-15-year-old scanners require 1,500 to 2,000 litres of liquid helium and constantly vent it into the atmosphere, demanding frequent, expensive refills.

Even when a well-funded Indian hospital acquired a zero-boil-off machine, the technology was engineered for the predictable infrastructure of the Global North. The cold head requires a highly stable power supply and massive, uninterrupted industrial air conditioning. In the Indian context, frequent power grid fluctuations and extreme ambient heat cause these cold heads to trip or fail. When the cold head stops working, helium immediately begins boiling off, transforming a state-of-the-art machine back into a legacy bleeder and forcing the hospital into emergency refills at whatever the market will bear. If a hospital cannot secure a helium delivery or pay for it at the new wartime prices, the MRI machine’s magnet warms up, loses superconductivity, and potentially destroys itself in a catastrophic event known as a quench - a failure that results in crores of damage and takes the machine permanently offline. The external metabolism, disrupted at Ras Laffan, reaches directly into the bodily metabolism through the diagnostic machines on which India’s healthcare system depends. The three metabolisms create a mesh linking a gas field in the Gulf with a neurological scan in Muzaffarpur.

Helium does not only cool magnets. The semiconductor industry relies on gaseous helium for thermal management during chip fabrication. As chip architectures shrink to five nanometres and below, silicon wafers are bombarded with highly energetic lasers and plasma inside vacuum chambers during processes like extreme ultraviolet lithography and plasma etching. The vacuum contains no air to carry heat away. To prevent the atomic-level structures from melting or warping, gaseous helium is pumped into the microscopic gap between the cooling chuck and the wafer’s back surface. Its thermal conductivity is unmatched, and because it is a noble gas it does not react with the volatile chemicals used in fabrication. No other gas - not argon, not nitrogen - can substitute.

This is where the external metabolism’s two registers - that’s energy and information - collide in the same supply shock. India is currently investing billions in establishing domestic semiconductor manufacturing as part of a bid for compute sovereignty, i.e., the capacity to produce and govern the digital infrastructure on which a modern economy depends. Those nascent fabs require ultra-high-purity helium, which is the same helium the hospitals need, and they will be competing for it against TSMC and Samsung, tech giants that together consume over 20 percent of the world’s helium supply. The same supply shock that degrades India’s capacity to diagnose a brain tumour in Darbhanga also delays its bid to manufacture the chips that would underpin a domestically governed information metabolism.

And here the political metabolism reveals its failure most starkly. When the helium flow is interrupted, rationing begins. Industrial gas distribution is a highly consolidated oligopoly dominated by companies like Linde and Air Liquide, which can invoke force majeure and place all customers on allocation, a system where buyers receive only a percentage of their usual order. In that rationing hierarchy, a diagnostic centre in Bihar has no leverage against a politically connected mega-hospital in Boston, a semiconductor fab in Hsinchu, or a SpaceX launch facility in Texas.

There used to be a buffer. For decades, the U.S. Federal Helium Reserve held billions of cubic feet of helium as a sovereign shock absorber, capable of stabilising the market during exactly this kind of crisis. But in 2021, in a familiar triumph of short-term financial logic over long-term metabolic resilience, the U.S. government privatised the reserve, auctioning off its final assets to private industry. No one, it seemed, thought helium deserved a reserve in the public interest, which is the exact same delusion that runs through our modern polyconflicts: the belief that private markets always allocate resources more efficiently than the state, and that optimising for short-term returns is more important than maintaining buffers for long-term survival.

That decision - a failure of the political metabolism - now means that when the external metabolism breaks, there is no sovereign buffer between the shock and the body. Private distributors are forced to make opaque choices: fulfill an allocation for a politically connected mega-hospital in Boston, or a refurbished diagnostic centre in Bihar? The cost of a neurological scan in Muzaffarpur is set by a rationing algorithm in a corporate office in Munich. For a tenant farmer in Darbhanga, an undiagnosed tumour because of higher MRI costs means potential depth or crippling lack of mental function. Paying for the higher priced scans means pooling the family’s savings to travel to a city where a functioning MRI exists, paying vastly more for the scan, and slipping into generational medical debt. In the agrarian economy, healthcare debt is among the primary engines of rural dispossession. That’s the helium shock.

The Metformin Shock: Natural Gas and the Cellular Metabolism

If the helium case demonstrates how the external metabolism reaches the body through its diagnostic infrastructure, the metformin case takes us to the cellular level, where the external metabolism becomes the body’s metabolic regulator. The pharmaceutical industry, it turns out, is deeply dependent on the fossil fuel industry, and not merely as an energy source. Petrochemicals like benzene and ethylene are the building blocks of modern drugs.

If you are Indian, you almost certainly have a close family member with diabetes. Probably several. According to the 2023 ICMR-INDIAB study, over 101 million Indians are living with diabetes, with an additional 136 million in a state of pre-diabetes. India currently accounts for roughly one-quarter of the global diabetic burden.

We have been condemned by nature and nurture to occupy an evolutionary and metabolic profile known in the medical literature as the Thin-Fat Indian phenotype. For epigenetic reasons traceable to nutritional stress and colonial-era famines, Indians possess a lower metabolic capacity: smaller internal organs, particularly the pancreas and liver, and significantly less skeletal muscle mass. We are built to survive starvation, not abundance. But we now live in an environment of unprecedented metabolic load. An Indian with a seemingly normal Body Mass Index of 22 often carries the same hidden metabolic risk as a Caucasian with a BMI of 30. We are genetically predisposed to store fat viscerally, packed tightly around our internal organs, rather than subcutaneously. This visceral fat is highly inflammatory, triggering systemic insulin resistance and premature beta-cell failure in the pancreas. Indians are often diagnosed with diabetes in their late 20s or 30s, decades earlier than the typical Western patient.

The biological vulnerability is compounded by the carb-heavy nature of the Indian diet. Rice and wheat are the anchors of the Indian plate and palate. In the 1960s, the threat of mass starvation led to the Green Revolution and the massive expansion of grain cultivation. The mountains of cheap rice and wheat that sustain India today are only possible because of massive applications of urea, a highly concentrated nitrogen fertilizer. India is overwhelmingly dependent on the Persian Gulf for this urea - over 45 percent of imports come from Oman alone, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia providing much of the rest. With the Strait of Hormuz mostly closed, the urea supply is threatened. A shortage could mean immediate drops in crop yields for the upcoming Kharif season, which translates into punishing inflation in basic staples. And when food prices spike, people do not pivot to lean proteins and organic vegetables. They default to the cheapest, most heavily processed, high-glycemic carbohydrates available: more refined flour, more sugar, more cheap starch. The Gulf war is producing a more diabetogenic diet for millions of Indians at the exact moment their access to diabetes medication is about to decrease.

That medication is Metformin, and it is keeping a significant proportion of those 101 million people alive. While its origins trace back to the French Lilac plant (Galega officinalis) used in medieval European folk medicine, modern Metformin is effectively solidified natural gas. Its industrial synthesis depends on two chemical building blocks: Dimethylamine and Dicyandiamide. Manufacturing Dimethylamine requires enormous quantities of methanol and ammonia, which require massive, continuous flows of methane. Synthesizing Dicyandiamide requires nitrogen-rich feedstocks processed in energy-intensive, high-heat environments. The petrochemical complexes at Ras Laffan and Saudi Arabia’s Jubail industrial city are the primary global sources for the methane and ammonia that flow into metformin. The first was hit by Iranian missiles. The second has been threatened repeatedly.

What Metformin does inside the body is metabolic in the most literal sense. It activates AMPK - adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase - the enzyme that functions as the master regulator of cellular energy metabolism. AMPK is the body’s fuel gauge. When Metformin activates it, AMPK instructs the liver to stop overproducing glucose and signals muscle tissue to become more sensitive to whatever insulin remains. Metformin is cheap to produce, effective at controlling blood sugar, and carries low risk of inducing fatal hypoglycaemia. For most Indian diabetics, it is the foundational treatment. The ICMR guidelines position it as first-line therapy for nearly all newly diagnosed patients. In the Indian pharmaceutical market, it is combined with other drugs in Fixed-Dose Combinations - single tablets that reduce the pill burden and improve compliance. Metformin is the bedrock of India’s public health response to a disease affecting a quarter of a billion people including pre-diabetics. There is no viable, affordable substitute. Patients cannot switch to thousand-dollar-a-month GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic or manage complex, refrigerated insulin regimens. For most of them, it is Metformin or nothing. And in a grim irony, the patent for Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, the much-hyped next-generation diabetes drugs, expired recently. Indian firms are eager to manufacture generic versions. But to do so, they need the same petrochemical precursors from Qatar and Saudi Arabia that are currently under threat.

The chain from Gulf gas to the Indian liver runs through China, and here the political metabolism enters the story as a history of deliberate surrender. China currently dominates the global production of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients - the synthesized medicinal chemicals that do the actual work in the body. As of 2024, China accounted for roughly 45 percent of all new global API filings. Massive, heavily subsidized chemical mega-factories in provinces like Shandong synthesize the Gulf-sourced precursors into pure, bulk Metformin API. India then imports this powder by the megaton - 70 to 80 percent of its total API and bulk drug imports come from China. In formulation plants in Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Mumbai, Indian companies press Chinese API into tablets, package them, and ship them worldwide. India calls itself the Pharmacy of the World. The phrase is accurate about the final step - the tabletting, the packaging, the export - and misleading about every step before it. We are assemblers, not makers. We press imported Chinese powder into blister packs and call it sovereignty.

It was not always this way. Following the Patents Act of 1970, which recognised process patents but not product patents, India built a vertically integrated pharmaceutical sector. Indian scientists reverse-engineered global blockbuster drugs and manufactured the APIs domestically. In 1991, Chinese ingredients made up less than 1 percent of India’s bulk drug imports. But after liberalisation, Indian pharma executives recognised that high margins lay in marketing finished formulations to Western markets, not in the dirty, highly regulated, energy-intensive, low-margin business of chemical synthesis. Simultaneously, China made a strategic state decision to capture the base of the global pharmaceutical supply chain, building massive chemical parks powered by cheap coal. From the perspective of any individual Indian pharmaceutical company, outsourcing API production to China was the rational short-term choice. Collectively, these individual rational choices amounted to the voluntary dismantling of India’s own chemical foundation. We dismantled our fermentation plants and allowed our synthesis capacity to wither because it was cheaper to buy the molecules from Shandong. Today that figure of less than 1 percent has become 70 to 80 percent. India surrendered its pharmaceutical sovereignty - a failure of the political metabolism - because the logic of liberalised markets treated sovereignty as an inefficiency to be optimised away.

The consequences are now recursive. As the government scrambles to launch Production Linked Incentive schemes to bring API manufacturing back to Indian soil, it faces a brutal paradox. To rebuild these energy-intensive factories, India needs cheap, reliable power, stable grids, and raw petrochemical feedstocks. Where does that energy come from? The Persian Gulf. What about renewables? The solar panels and batteries needed for green energy manufacturing come from China. Rebuilding pharmaceutical sovereignty likely means that India will sink deeper into energy dependency on the two nodes it is trying to escape. Meanwhile, China’s dominance in the API supply chain is not only about cheap energy and labour. It has been built partly on state-subsidized, computationally optimised chemical synthesis, where AI accelerates molecular design and process efficiency. The information metabolism and the pharmaceutical supply chain are already entangled at the source.

The global dimension of this shock deserves attention, because it demonstrates that the these metabolic disruptions do not stop at India’s borders. India supplies roughly 40 to 50 percent of all the generic drugs consumed in the United States and the United Kingdom. If Chinese export curbs and Gulf energy shocks squeeze the Indian manufacturer in Hyderabad, the downstream effect reaches pharmacy shelves in London, Detroit, and Boston within weeks. The rationing hierarchy we observed with helium - where hospitals compete for scarce supply - replicates itself in pharmaceuticals. The American and European working classes, already burdened by decaying, hyper-financialised healthcare systems, could face shortages in basic metabolic maintenance drugs. The pauper in Darbhanga and the pauper in Detroit are tethered to the same fragile supply chain.

Then comes the perfect storm: when the external metabolism attacks the bodily metabolism from two directions at once. On one front, the cost of Metformin rises as API supply chains fracture, energy costs spike, and shipping insurance premiums surge. On the other front, food inflation driven by urea shortages makes healthy, protein-rich diets economically impossible for the majority of the population. Consider the daily reality of the tenant farmer in Bihar or the gig worker in Bengaluru: their diet is becoming more carb-heavy, more ultra-processed, and more diabetogenic as the medication required to manage the physiological fallout of that diet becomes scarce and expensive.

The war in the Gulf is simultaneously worsening the disease and removing the treatment, and the costs of this metabolic fracture fall along India’s socioeconomic fault lines, concentrating stress on the most vulnerable and shifting the burden onto the household.

LPG, Firewood, and the Gendered Metabolism

Cooking is the oldest and most intimate interface between the external metabolism and the bodily one. It is the act through which humans have always extended their metabolism into the world, converting raw matter into something the body can use. Fire is the original metabolic technology. For millions of Indian women, that technology takes the form of a biomass-burning chulha - a mud or clay stove fuelled by firewood, crop residue, and dried cattle dung. Burning solid biomass in an enclosed space produces devastating levels of indoor air pollution.

Cooking three meals a day over a chulha is the physiological equivalent of smoking hundreds of cigarettes. It is a primary driver of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, acute respiratory infections, and cataracts among rural Indian women. The combustion products do not merely enter the lungs; they attack the respiratory metabolism directly, scarring tissue over years of daily exposure, producing irreversible damage. The environmental cost is equally severe as the relentless need for cooking fuel drives the slow, steady stripping of local scrublands and forests, destroying the ecological commons that rural communities depend on for resilience. The chulha attacks both the bodily metabolism and the environmental substrate on which it depends.

And firewood does not pipe itself into a kitchen. It must be foraged, cut, and carried, labour that falls squarely on the shoulders of women and girls who often spend hours every day walking miles to gather fuel. Every hour spent foraging is an hour stolen from education, from income-generating work, from rest. The chulha is a mechanism of gender inequality. It chains women to the hearth, destroys their lungs, and consumes their time. Whatever its historical usefulness, it is an ongoing catastrophe.

From the bird’s eye view, energy is a neutral resource - policymakers see barrels of oil, cubic metres of gas, gigawatts of solar, BTUs of heat. But on the ground, energy is never neutral. It is distributed along axes of power, and gender is one of the most durable of those axes. Recognising this injustice, the Indian state launched one of the most ambitious public health and gender-equity interventions in modern history: the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana. By heavily subsidising Liquefied Petroleum Gas connections for below-poverty-line households, the programme aimed to move hundreds of millions of women from toxic chulhas to clean, efficient cooking fuel. The blue flame of the LPG stove became a symbol of metabolic liberation, freeing millions of hours and clearing the air in rural kitchens.

The Ujjwala Yojana intervened across all three metabolic registers simultaneously. It changed the external metabolism by introducing a cleaner fuel supply. It protected the bodily metabolism by reducing respiratory damage and reclaiming women’s time. And it altered the political metabolism by formally recognising that women’s bodily sovereignty - their right to breathe, their right to time - was a legitimate object of state policy. In just over a decade, India’s LPG consumption has doubled, from 16 MMT (Million Metric Tonnes) in FY 14 to over 31 MMT in FY 25. India is the world’s second-largest consumer of LPG.

LPG is a byproduct of natural gas processing and crude oil refining. India does not produce enough of it. Roughly 55 percent of India’s LPG is imported from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and those tankers are now stranded at the Strait of Hormuz. Supply has constricted. The global price of gas has surged. The fiscal arithmetic of maintaining the Ujjwala subsidy at wartime prices is already breaking down.

What happens when LPG becomes unaffordable? A decade of hard-won progress on gender equality begins to unravel as daughters are pulled from school to forage - because of a war in the Gulf that they had no voice in, no knowledge of, and no agency over. We too easily forget how much fossil fuels are woven into our idea of modernity. The three registers trace the shock as LPG supply and price both move against India and the external metabolism falters, which destabilizes the political metabolism as the subsidy becomes unsustainable, and finally the bodily metabolism absorbs the final cost in lungs, time, education, health.

The information metabolism is implicated here too, for the Ujjwala subsidy reaches its beneficiaries through Aadhaar-linked digital systems and the electrostate transition that could genuinely free India from Gulf LPG dependency with solar-powered induction stoves, decentralised microgrids and village-level renewable energy. That also requires a compute stack: smart inverters, grid management software, digital metering, demand forecasting. Unfortunately, that compute stack, today, runs largely on Chinese hardware and American cloud infrastructure. The attempt to liberate women’s bodily metabolism from one set of external dependencies introduces another.

This is where the concept of bad intersectionality earns its spurs. In academic and progressive circles, intersectionality describes how various forms of oppression compound one another. Polyconflicts are intersectional in the most destructive sense of the word. They act like water under pressure, seeking out the deepest, most historically entrenched fault lines in a society and cracking them wide open.

We have known this about shooting wars for a long time: men die on the front lines while women face sexual violence. But modern geoeconomic warfare - supply chain fractures, commodity shocks, subsidy collapses - also has a gendered fallout, and it is less visible precisely because no one is firing a weapon. When global energy prices spike due to a war in the Gulf, it is rural Indian women who pay the physical price of the LPG squeeze. Their lungs fill with toxic smoke. Their time is stolen by the daily march for firewood. Their daughters are kept home from school to help with housework. When the external metabolism is disrupted and the political metabolism fails to buffer the shock, the cost does not distribute equally. It concentrates on those whose bodies were already doing the most uncompensated work, whose claims on the political metabolism were already weakest.

The Metabolic Condition

The three cases we have traced, i.e., helium, metformin, and LPG/Firewood, involve different commodities, different populations, and different technical specifics. A noble gas used for superconducting magnets and semiconductor cooling. A synthetic molecule that regulates cellular energy metabolism in 101 million diabetics. A fossil-fuel byproduct that determines whether women breathe clean air or toxic smoke. But beneath their differences, the cases reveal the same pattern operating at different nodes of the same system.

In each case:

1. First the external metabolism is disrupted - energy flows are cut, supply chains fracture, prices spike.

2. Second, the political metabolism fails to buffer the shock - because strategic reserves have been privatised, or because sovereign manufacturing capacity has been outsourced, or because public health programmes have been built on top of geopolitical dependencies.

3. And in each case, the bodily metabolism absorbs the cost in the form of undiagnosed tumours, unregulated blood sugar, scarred lung tissue, or daughters pulled from school.

To name this pattern is to arrive at the concept of metabolic sovereignty - as a diagnostic instrument for now, but with normative policy goals in the background. Metabolic sovereignty describes the degree to which a political community can govern the coupling between its three metabolisms: maintaining sufficient control over external energy and information flows, sufficient investment in its population’s bodily health, and sufficient institutional capacity to defend both under stress. It is what the systems theorists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela called autopoiesis, the capacity of a living system to continuously regenerate the conditions of its own existence. A cell does this. An organism does this. A metabolically sovereign polity would be one that can keep making itself under changing conditions, without being at the mercy of chokepoints it does not control.

Autopoiesis is not autarky. A sovereign system is not a closed system. It can trade, import, and exchange. What it cannot afford is to lose the capacity to refuse a dependency when that dependency becomes coercive. There is a difference between interdependence and indebtedness. Metabolic sovereignty, as a diagnostic concept, asks a simple question of any given commodity chain: if the external supply were cut off tomorrow, does the political metabolism have the institutional capacity to protect the bodily metabolism from the shock? For helium, for Metformin, for LPG, the answer in India’s case is no.

By that measure, India’s metabolic sovereignty is low. And the three cases establish that this is not bad luck, not the unfortunate coincidence of a distant war landing on an unlucky country. It is the accumulated result of specific choices made within the political metabolism over three decades - choices shaped by the same neoliberal logic that assumed private markets always allocate resources more efficiently than the state, and that optimising for short-term financial returns is more important than maintaining buffers for long-term survival. The privatisation of strategic buffers - as with the U.S. Helium Reserve, which once served as a global shock absorber. The outsourcing of critical manufacturing capacity - as with the pharmaceutical industry’s surrender of API production to China in pursuit of higher margins on finished formulations. The embedding of essential public programmes inside geopolitical dependencies that were treated as permanent - as with the Ujjwala Yojana’s reliance on Gulf LPG imports.

Each of these was a rational decision within its own frame. Each optimised for short-term efficiency at the expense of long-term metabolic resilience. The pattern is consistent enough to constitute a diagnosis: what the neoliberal era called efficiency, such as outsourcing API production, privatising helium reserves, tethering public health programmes to imported fuel, was, in metabolic terms, the systematic destruction of buffers. A buffer is metabolically expensive; it looks like waste on a balance sheet. But a buffer is also what stands between a supply shock and the bodies of citizens.

Remove the buffers, and the body absorbs the shock directly.

The double bind completes the analysis: India’s escape from Gulf hydrocarbon dependency runs into Chinese manufacturing dependency. The solar panels, lithium batteries, EV components, and rare earths needed for the energy transition flow almost entirely through China, which controls over 80 percent of solar PV manufacturing capacity and dominates battery and rare-earth processing. China is a strategic rival with whom India shares a heavily militarised, contested border, and one with a demonstrated willingness to weaponise economic leverage. Every rooftop solar panel installed in Pune, every electric two-wheeler sold in Coimbatore, deepens a dependency on this rival. The faster India electrifies to escape the first set of dependencies, the deeper it embeds itself in the second.

India’s bid for compute sovereignty faces a parallel dependency structure. Advanced chips come from TSMC in Taiwan. The extreme ultraviolet lithography machines that make those chips possible come from ASML in the Netherlands. China dominates midstream manufacturing and packaging. AI-grade data centres are currently located in only 33 countries worldwide, with capacity heavily concentrated in the United States and China. India’s nascent semiconductor fabs need helium from Qatar, energy from the Gulf or China, and equipment from supply chains it does not control.

Information and energy metabolisms are entangled at every level, since data centres require enormous amounts of electricity, while modern energy grids require computation for forecasting, dispatch, and cyber defence. You cannot be sovereign in one without being sovereign in the other. The faster India tries to escape the petrostate nexus, the deeper it wades into the electrostate and computestate nexuses, each of which carries its own sovereignty risks. There is no clean exit from metabolic precarity. There is only a shifting of which dependencies expose which bodies to which risks, mediated by a political metabolism that has consistently underestimated how tightly the three registers are coupled.

Consider, finally, the full shape of what these three cases reveal when seen together. A paddy farmer in Punjab sees his input costs jump because urea prices spiked. That traces back to a gas field attack. If the Government of India covers the mounting fertiliser subsidy by cutting rural health allocations, the farmer might decide to migrate to Delhi. Where will he live? What will he do? Meanwhile, an EV buyer in Bengaluru thinks she is making a responsible ecological choice. It is a better choice for sure, but one embedded in a macroeconomic rivalry with China that could cut off her spare parts tomorrow. The diabetic gig worker who drives her electric scooter cannot get Metformin because the API factory in Shandong is prioritising domestic supply. The woman in Bihar who was promised clean cooking fuel is back in a smoke-filled kitchen because the LPG tankers cannot transit the strait. The hospital in Patna cannot run its MRI machine because the helium that was supposed to arrive from Qatar is sitting in a cryogenic container on a ship stuck in the Strait of Hormuz.

Moral of the Story: India’s three metabolisms, the external, the bodily, and the political, are coupled in ways that the political metabolism is struggling to govern.

Over the last few weeks, I have been exploring how the ongoing war in the Gulf is exposing a series of polyconflicts, starting with Helium, Metformin and then Firewood.

But there’s a polyconflict that underlies them all, the mother of all polyconflicts, so to speak: Artificial Intelligence. Today’s newsletter is the first of five or six essays on the AI polyconflict, which looks at the changing face of kinetic warfare (i.e., shooting wars) through the lens of the current Gulf War and AI.

1. Except that I am redefining AI as Augmented Intelligence for reasons I will explain below.

2. Caveat Emptor: I am no expert and this is just my attempt to satisfy my curiosity...

From what I can tell, the usual suspects - US, Israel and China - are key players in this race to the bottom, but so are Russia, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, Turkey.

On the targeting front, or what’s called the kill-chain, systems like Lavender and Project Maven fuse satellite data and digital exhaust to generate thousands of targets in seconds, replacing human ethical deliberation with algorithmic speed.

On the “Cheap Drone Paradox” front, we have the use of drones by Iran, AI-assisted loitering munitions in Ukraine and India’s transformed Line of Control.

Brave New World for sure.

Framing the “AI Polyconflict” Series

AI is implicated in this Gulf War in interlocking ways. It shows up in targeting decisions and the systems that help identify military objectives. It shows up in attacks on data centers and digital infrastructure, because compute and data are strategic assets. And it shows up in the expanding Cold War between the US and China over who will control the future, because whoever leads in AI will shape economics, security, and influence for decades.

The Gulf War is a lens. It’s a way to see the world we’re building, or more likely, the world we’re drifting into without knowing why. AI - and I use that term very broadly, so don’t confuse it for Generative AI alone - changes incentives, changes what counts as a target, and it changes how nations gauge power. In fact, for me, AI is Augmented Intelligence, not artificial intelligence. A military bureaucracy combining satellite data and ground intelligence to inform targeting decisions is already ‘AI as augmented intelligence;’ and in that sense, AI was already alive and kicking in the 1990s - Ed Hutchins wrote a book about it then, as part of the first wave of writing on what’s now called 4E Cognition.

My Hypothesis: ideas from 4E Cognition aren’t seen as particularly useful to the engineers building Deep Learning systems, but a reworked version of those ideas is exactly what we need to understand Augmented Intelligence, and in particular, how AI as in artificial intelligence is used by human institutions to augment their capacities, sometimes with tragic consequences.

In short: if you want to understand where the tech came from, read Geoff Hinton, but if you want to understand where the world is going, read Ed Hutchins first.

In this series, I’m going to use the Gulf War to grasp the Augmented Intelligence polyconflict: how AI becomes a weapon, how it becomes infrastructure, and how it becomes a bargaining chip in global politics. Today’s essay introduces the AI Polyconflict, and then moves on to its use in military decision making, where the Gulf War is building upon patterns we have already seen in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and in Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

As always, I am no expert on AI’s military uses (in either its augmented or artificial form), and I have absolutely no insight into the “kill-chain” except for what’s available publicly. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; let me be your fool for the day.

Introduction

To treat our interconnected world as polyconflicts is to take a sober, perhaps pessimistic systems perspective on the world. A polyconflict is not merely a complicated problem or geopolitical friction; it is a nexus where material reality - the extraction of finite minerals, the generation of megawatts, the synthesis of industrial chemicals, and the flow of global capital - tangles with human systems, military strategy, and below all that, biology and geology. A polyconflict presents concurrent, mutually reinforcing challenges that overwhelm traditional modes of governance and strategic foresight.

IMHO, polyconflicts are an essential aspect of the interregnum between the Globe and the Planet.

We have covered three polyconflicts so far. The Metformin Shock demonstrated how deep petrochemical dependencies and fragile Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) supply chains collided with the global public health crisis of type 2 diabetes. Because China had emerged as the dominant supplier of global APIs, geopolitical tensions and subsequent U.S. tariff measures exposed the acute vulnerability of Indian and Western medical systems, forcing efforts to optimize continuous manufacturing processes like wet granulation and relocate production.

Similarly, the Helium Shock revealed how the Gulf War has cascaded through advanced high-tech sectors. Helium is a non-renewable control point for global production capacity. Driven by the demands of advanced semiconductor fabrication and the cooling of superconducting magnets in MRI machines, global helium demand is projected to grow more than fivefold by 2035. When disruptions tied to halted gas processing in Qatar removed 5.2 million cubic meters of helium per month from the market, it triggered force majeure declarations and doubled spot prices, exposing the fragility of the materials base required to sustain healthcare as well as the digital economy.

The LPG/Firewood Squeeze provided another example, highlighting how global energy scarcity forces regressive shifts back to traditional biomass fuels, placing a disproportionate burden on women’s labor and respiratory health in the Global South. As Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) becomes scarce and expensive, vulnerable households will be forced to abandon clean cooking fuels, leading to increased exposure to black carbon and household air pollution, which significantly elevate the risk of poor fetal growth and maternal health complications.

Yet, these crises - pharmaceutical, chemical, and energetic - are sectoral in comparison to the polyconflict about which I am starting to write today: Artificial Intelligence. AI isn’t simply a novel tool utilized by belligerents. It is the ultimate prize, strategic vulnerability, and the primary accelerant of violence, for the compute stack is at the heart of our age of cognitive capitalism and its imperial tendencies. To untangle the AI Polyconflict, it is necessary to examine five distinct threads that are currently rewriting the metabolism of the planet:

1. The changing face of kinetic warfare,

2. The use of the Gulf as a surrogate sandbox for superpower rivalry,

3. The structural divergence of global AI architectures,

4. The immense material demands of the energy-compute arbitrage,

5. The macroeconomic emergence of cognitive imperialism.

Every one of these five deserves standalone analysis, so I am going to devote an essay to each of the five.

The Changing Face of Kinetic Warfare

Kinetic warfare refers to the use of lethal force and physical weaponry to achieve military objectives. The term is primarily used to distinguish traditional shooting wars from non-kinetic forms of conflict, such as cyber warfare, economic sanctions, or psychological operations.

The kill chain is a military concept that describes the end-to-end stages of a kinetic attack, from the initial identification of a target to its eventual destruction and the assessment of the results.

The first thread of the AI Polyconflict reveals a fundamental shift in the ontology of war. Throughout the history of conflict, technology - from the horse to the longbow to the telegraph to precision-guided munitions - provided a tactical edge in executing human decisions. Today, however, technology is actively replacing the human durée - the lived time of ethical deliberation, moral friction, and strategic pause with automated decision making and automated coordination of lethality.

Decision Compression

The claim - perhaps not yet realized - is that modern military AI systems, integrating large language models (LLMs), vast arrays of sensor data, and continuous signals intelligence, are capable of fusing satellite imagery and digital exhaust to generate thousands of targets in a fraction of the time it would take human analysts. This speed outpaces the capacity of human cognition, handing the metabolism of conflict over to algorithms.

Imagine high frequency trading (HFT) with bullets and drones - not a pleasant thought is it?

Here’s what I have learned: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have effectively industrialized the kill chain in Gaza and the broader conflict against Iranian-aligned assets. Rather than relying on human intelligence gathering, the IDF utilizes a suite of AI systems to automate lethality. A system known as Lavender analyzes massive surveillance datasets to flag suspected militants based on behavioral patterns, identifying tens of thousands of potential targets with an estimated 10% error rate. Another system, Habsora, generates up to 100 structural targets a day by analyzing surveillance data, a massive acceleration compared to human analysts who previously identified roughly 50 targets a year. Finally, Where’s Daddy tracks the mobile phones of flagged individuals, alerting military operators when targets enter private family residences. From this interview of Yuval Abraham on 972 Mag (which has done some amazing work):

One of the sources that I spoke with, he said something that really stuck with me, he said that “the logic was quantity over quality.” They wanted to create as many targets as possible. This was called the “Dahiya Doctrine,” which is a doctrine that was developed in Lebanon to create a shock effect. They got it from the Americans, from “Operation Shock and Awe” in Iraq in 2003. This is a doctrine, a military doctrine, that emphasizes quantity. It emphasizes creating terror or fear among civilians by creating this massive shocking bombing campaign. What that source told me was that when you place the emphasis on quantity, this leads you to the private houses — say you want to get the rocket launchers, the ammunition warehouses, the military bases, if they exist, the tunnel infrastructure where Hamas is controlling the war — okay, there are a few hundred targets that you can create like that. But if you want to go to tens of thousands of targets, to place this emphasis on quantity, to bomb Gaza a lot, then you move on to civilian houses because you have so much of that. Because what that source said, he said, “if we suspect that there are 40,000 militants in Hamas, each one of those militants has a private house.” That immediately creates an aspiration to get 40,000 houses. If there are 40,000 militants, there are going to be 40,000 civilian houses.

“That emphasis quantity” is the key phrase above, showing Augmented Intelligence at work. International Humanitarian Law (IHL) requires human judgment to weigh the principles of proportionality, distinction, and military necessity before lethal force is applied. When a human operator spends roughly 20 seconds rubber-stamping an AI-generated kill order, how likely is it that they will be adequately weighing the principles of proportionality, distinction and military necessity? How likely is it that they are outsourcing the moral and analytical labor of killing to a machine?

This industrialization of targeting is rapidly becoming the global standard.

The United States military relies heavily on Project Maven, an AI platform built with private tech partners like Palantir and Anthropic. Maven claims to sift through drone and satellite footage to classify targets, recommend specific weapons systems based on stockpile data, and even draft automated legal justifications for each strike, compressing thousands of hours of human labor into seconds. I am not sure how much is in the ‘fake it till you make it’ territory right now, but its definitely in the future. In Ukraine, the integration of Palantir’s intelligence software with domestic battle-management networks like Delta and GIS Arta has reduced the time between detecting a target and striking it from hours to mere moments. Not to be left behind, Beijing is developing the Atlas system - a fully autonomous operational chain that integrates reconnaissance, target selection, and the simultaneous launch of drone swarms into one networked action.

When one military actor takes thirty minutes to deliberate the legal and ethical implications of a strike, and their adversary takes thirty seconds to execute an algorithmic recommendation, the deliberative side loses any kinetic advantage it might possess otherwise. Consequently, AI guarantees an augmented/automated race to the bottom.

The Cheap Drone Paradox

Simultaneously, the physical manifestation of this conflict has shifted away from exquisite, high-cost platforms toward attritable, autonomous quantity. The Gulf and the Red Sea have become global showcases for what military theorists term the Cheap Drone Paradox. Inexpensive, sub-$500 autonomous drones equipped with edge AI can now navigate, identify targets, and swarm without requiring a continuous cloud connection, credibly threatening multi-billion-dollar naval assets and national infrastructure.

Iranian-aligned forces, particularly the Houthis in Yemen, have leveraged this paradigm to disrupt maritime trade corridors in the Strait of Hormuz. Because these drones feature growing edge autonomy, they can execute missions even when advanced electronic warfare jamming degrades their communication signals. The cumulative effect is a saturation environment where defensive success is no longer guaranteed, but probabilistic - a certain percentage of attacking drones will inevitably penetrate the defense. This capability was starkly demonstrated when a Houthi drone navigated over 2,600 kilometers to strike Tel Aviv in July 2024, altering the regional balance of power. In response to this asymmetric threat, advanced militaries are mirroring the tactic. Israel, for example, has deployed an AI-driven mother launcher system over Iranian skies - swarms of micro-drones equipped with facial recognition to execute network-centric, data-driven strikes based on behavioral patterns.

The gulf war is not the only theater in which the cheap drone paradox is visible - it is equally pronounced in the grinding war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine. Russia has leveraged a pipeline of Chinese dual-use components and Iranian designs to manufacture massive fleets of AI-assisted loitering munitions, such as the Lancet, to hunt Ukrainian artillery and armor. As the skies over Eastern Europe become choked with drones, both sides are locked in a relentless cycle of electronic warfare (kinetic warfare and cyberwarfare are merging in the sky...). Because traditional radio links are constantly jammed, developers are pushing greater autonomy to the edge (i.e., the standalone drone in the sky), enabling drones to use machine vision and AI to find and strike targets without a human pilot ever giving the final command.

The cheap drone paradox had its day during Operation Sindhoor when India and Pakistan came closest to a full-fledged war since 1971. From what is known publicly, the Line of Control (LOC) has been completely transformed. India has deployed a vast network of AI-based surveillance systems and integrated advanced swarm drones and stealthy unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) into its command networks. Pakistan, in response, has accelerated its own drone ecosystem with Chinese assistance, prioritizing low-cost countermeasures and dispersed basing.

It’s prohibitively expensive to man the LOC with human beings all along the border, but swarms of drones feels doable. Drones offer cheap precision and deniable force without the political risks of a manned incursion, but they also severely compress decision-making timelines in a nuclearized theater. I hope we are not going in the direction of automated nuclear war.

That specter of automated nuclear escalation is not science fiction; it is the logical endpoint of the polyconflicts we have been tracking.

Augmenting the Drone

Of all the questions about the future of warfare, here’s the one I find most interesting:

How is it that $500 off-the-shelf quadcopters, retrofitted with explosives, are successfully paralyzing multi-million-dollar air defense systems and neutralizing exquisite, legacy military platforms?

These are the new guerilla tactics embraced by weaker state actors from Iran to Ukraine (and not just state actors - the Houthis are masters of this art). How might one explain their success?

Traditional military doctrine is built on the logic of what the anthropologist Lucy Suchman famously called the “European Navigator.” The European Navigator creates a highly detailed, centralized plan in advance, calculating the exact trajectory, and then tries to force reality to conform to that rigid plan. This is the logic of the aircraft carrier and the billion-dollar stealth jet: heavy, centralized, top-down, and enormously expensive (or that’s what I think - someone who knows how these billion dollar pieces of equipment are used might rebut my claims).

The cheap drone swarm, powered by edge computing, operates on a completely different paradigm. Suchman contrasted the European Navigator with the Trukese Navigator of Micronesia, who doesn’t follow a rigid plan but instead continuously adjusts to the waves, the stars, and the wind. The Trukese navigator relies on situated action - intelligence that emerges dynamically in response to the immediate environment.

A swarm of cheap drones with embedded spatial intelligence operates exactly like this. Because compute is now pushed to the edge (directly onto the device rather than relying on a vulnerable connection to a central server), the drone doesn’t need to phone home to a centralized command structure for a plan. It senses the terrain, spots a thermal signature, coordinates locally with its peers, and enacts a strike.

The cheap drone paradox is ultimately a triumph of 4E Augmented Intelligence. By distributing cognition across a swarm of cheap, expendable, embedded nodes, the system becomes resilient. If you shoot down one drone, the network’s cognitive process barely registers the loss.

You cannot destroy a distributed mind with a single bullet.

Conclusion

The Metformin shock revealed our deep dependency on monopolized, just-in-time chemical supply chains that can snap under tariff pressures. The Helium squeeze proved that the pinnacle of the digital economy and advanced healthcare remain tethered to easily disrupted subterranean gas reserves. And the LPG-to-firewood squeeze showed us that when modern energy markets fracture, the fallout forces the poorest populations back into respiratory nightmare.

These earlier crises were sectoral warnings about the fragility of the Globe. Now, we are superimposing automated lethality directly onto this precarious edifice. The cheap drone paradox and the compression of the kill chain do not exist in a vacuum. Edge computing is very much in evidence in your pockets - every time you ask for turn by turn directions, for example. The algorithms executing drone strikes run on the same semiconductors and require the same rare earth materials as your smartphone.

This is what makes AI the mother of all polyconflicts.

As militaries deploy cognition in the wild by handing over their decision-making to human-silicon meshes (with pure silicon decision-making down the road), they are stress-testing AI warfare architecture - nothing like a war to find out if your weapons work or not, and to show them off when they do - and that is where we will turn in Part II: how the Gulf has become the indispensable sandbox for AI rivalry - military and otherwise.

Galileo was my first scientific hero. I read about him in the How and Why book on Famous Scientists and fell in love. Thumbing your nose at the Church - muttering “and yet it moves“ while being shown instruments of torture - is based isn’t it? It took me many more years to learn that Galileo’s troubles were multiplied by his being an arrogant asshole; he was the Pope’s confidant until his attitude caused him to lose favor. But even that is really a lack of obsequiousness towards power - even more based!

It took even longer for me to realize Galileo was much more of a humanistic scholar than a scientist in the way we understand the profession today. He wasn’t the best mathematician or technologist of his time - not even the best mathematical technician in Pisa or Padua, though clearly the best mathematical innovator - but he was an excellent storyteller. His drawings of the phases of the Moon are narrative masterpieces, for they show a heavenly object that isn’t perfect just through the act of close observation. Alongside the Copernican overturning of geocentrism, Galileo and Kepler’s overturning of the perfection of the heavens (elliptical orbits for planets, imperfections on the moon) is a major shift away from the earlier orthodoxy.

Of course, that perfection returned with a vengeance in physics, where physicists spend a lot of their time seeking perfect symmetry.

Galileo’s books - Dialogues Concerning the Two World Systems, Two New Sciences etc - are masterpieces of non-fiction writing, a lot more like Darwin’s Origin of Species than the mathematized physics of today. And in the Assayer, he gave us one of the great metaphors of modernity:

Philosophy is written in this grand book -- I mean the universe -- which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.

Remember, he’s writing this paragraph for a printed book about 150 years after Gutenberg invented the printing press. The Book is the book of the universe! It’s the technology - as much as the telescope - that reveals the physical universe for what it is.

But what about the world? Galileo was a central figure in stripping the world of its qualitative richness (the secondary qualities) and replacing those with primary qualities. Can we recover what he made us forget?

These thoughts came to me as I read Bjornerud:

geology demanded a type of whole- brain thinking I hadn’t encountered before. It creatively appropriated ideas from physics and chemistry for the investigation of unruly volcanoes and oceans and ice sheets. It applied scholarly habits one associates with the study of literature and the arts— the practice of close reading, sensitivity to allusion and analogy, capacity for spatial visualization— to the examination of rocks.

Geology is not the domain of perfect symmetry, but a mixture of laws and accidents. How do we read that mixture? A major problem for planetary sapience is that we don’t have a technological artifact comparable to a book that condenses our understanding of the earth into a thing we can hold in our hands while also opening up access to the Planetary Duree. We can multiply sensors, satellites and large planet models but we still won’t have the field of meaning we are looking for. IMHO. To say the computer is that artifact - or even the smartphone - is only partly right.

Inventing a humanistic - no, a more-than-humanistic - artifact that helps us capture the qualitative richness of planetary history is going to be key to a new culture of planetarity, a literature appropriate to the condition of planetarity.

Keep these thoughts in mind as we conclude our discussion of time in the form of the Planetary Durée.

Introduction: Overcoming the Spatial Fallacy of History

In the first essay on Time, I introduced the main temporal contradiction underlying the condition of planetarity - the contradiction between the time of human history and the time of planetary history. On the one hand, we are a dominant geophysical force, fixing more nitrogen and moving more ammonia than anything else; on the other hand, the part of our technosphere (itself a small part of the human world) specialized in the study of the Earth’s processes reveals an Earth much older and much vaster than anything humans can control. Our presence is a footnote in a very long history of several billion years. There will be a day when humans no longer exist - and we might be bringing that day closer through everything we do.

The more we try to “Make Humans Great Again” (MHGA), the more we find out we were never great to begin with. There are lessons to be learned though: our current dominant position should give us a sense of responsibility and care, and our unimportance in the larger scheme should give us humility, but those are not the lessons we are learning right now. According to Marcia Bjornerud, our time-ignorance is one of the causes of our predicament - neither do we know how to be good inheritors, nor do we know how to be good ancestors. Which prompted me to ask the following question:

Is there a qualitatively rich conception of time that transcends the human?

To answer this, we have to look closely at how we naturally conceptualize time, and how that conceptualization is failing us. For Henri Bergson, to understand time is to stop turning it into space and start experiencing it more like a musical composition. We typically commit a “spatial fallacy” by imagining time as a line of discrete points - seconds, minutes, or hours - strung together like beads. This version of time, which Bergson calls “spatialized time,” is a useful tool for physics, scheduling, and quarterly earnings reports, but it is a corpse of the actual experience. It treats the past as a place we have left and the future as a place we are going, reducing the fluid, qualitative movement of life to a series of static snapshots.

While reading this, it struck me that the planet captured in spatialized time is nothing but the Globe, whose proceedings are measured in election cycles and fiscal years, a scheme that’s fundamentally incompatible with the deep, living history of the Earth. Instead, clock time continues to treat the Earth as a passive standing reserve subordinated to our technological mastery.

Not so for the Planetary Durée. The Earth is not a dead rock ticking away on an astronomical timeline; it is a living duration. And human consciousness is not an alien observer of this duration, but rather a fast-moving, highly conscious coagulation of the planet’s own ongoing duration.

The Polytemporal Tapestry

If we accept the Planetary Durée, we must stop looking at the planetary past as a graveyard of dead epochs and recognize it as a lived presence. The past courses through our veins - literally - and is visible in our geology, our atmosphere, and our DNA. To map this out, we can look to Manuel DeLanda, who argues that history across temporal scales is about the coexistence of material flows operating at different speeds. In his view, reality consists of coexisting structures defined by their speed of flow: the agonizingly slow, viscous flow of rocks and minerals; the faster, pulsing flow of biomass; and the highly turbulent, rapid flow of human economics and culture. In this planetary picture, time is not a single, forward-marching arrow of progress. The world is quite literally made of time, existing as a polytemporal tapestry with the ultimate Book of the World being written moment by moment across these varying speeds..

A fundamental aspect of the shift from clock to duree is about thinking about the world as measured in (spatialized) time to a world constituted by time. Is computing the way to embed numerical structure into time without freezing it as space?

That said, as I noted in the previous essay, I am not entirely convinced by this neat layer-cake model. If the fast-flowing layers can be neatly isolated from the slow-moving ones in our model of history, then we can neglect planetary history for all practical purposes. At this point in the Anthropocene - or whatever we choose to call the temporal condition of planetarity - isolation is precisely what we do not have.

This is where Dipesh Chakrabarty’s vital critique comes into play. Chakrabarty argues that anthropogenic global warming has brought about the violent collision of three histories that normally operate at vastly different scales and speeds: the history of the Earth system, the history of life (including human evolution), and the relatively short, recent history of industrial civilization and capitalism. These are no longer parallel streams flowing at different velocities; they are crashing into one another. The rapid flow of human economics has structurally altered the agonizingly slow flow of planetary biogeochemistry. We are experiencing the violent interpenetration of deep geological time and shallow human time.

Bhumics and the Cultivation of Timefulness

To resolve this collision of histories, we cannot simply retreat into a romantic environmentalism or “go off the grid.” We must actively cultivate what geologist Marcia Bjornerud calls timefulness—an acute, lived awareness of our embeddedness in the planet’s deep duration. Timefulness requires us to see ourselves as inheritors of a very long history, but also as active participants in the Earth’s metabolic order, and as long as we are the dominant species, one of our responsibilities is to maintain the metabolic order for all beings. It should be a daily ritual of sensing, coordination, and care.

This is the core of what I have been calling Bhumics, a way of embracing planetarity in a new imagination of our collective future. Almost every non-modern tradition and culture conceives of the Earth and its creatures as having meaning and purpose. Saying “we are entangled in the planet’s biogeochemical systems” isn’t enough if it is merely an entanglement of things. The starting point has to be our entanglement as beings in a community of other beings.

When we cultivate timefulness, we recognize a profound truth about the human condition: we are that part of the planet responsible for planetary sapience with help from our robotic masters; we are the Earth’s latest, most self-aware attempt to read its own grand book. Our cognition, our sensors, our simulations, and our planetary-scale computation (the Stack) are not unnatural aberrations. They are the planet thinking itself in rapid time. Instead of viewing humans as an external force acting upon the Earth, a true Planetary Durée positions us as a critical organ within the Earth’s metabolic body. We are the means by which the Earth has become aware of its own deep duration. By embracing this impersonal, planetary durée, we accept our profound responsibility. We will no longer be alienated dominators; we will be the self-conscious edge of the planet’s unfolding history, tasked with interpreting the Book of the World and acting upon its wisdom.

Philosophical Engineering: Designing for Deep Time

It is one thing to articulate an ontology of time; it is another to govern by it. Philosophy can no longer be content with reflection alone. It must become a practice of composition and constitution, philosophical engineering that builds concepts, institutions, and tools that make the planet livable for all. If the world is made of time, how do we build institutions that respect a polytemporal reality?

Currently, planetary governance is paralyzed because it is based on the spatialized, short-term time of the Globe. A constitution or a nation-state is ill-equipped to regulate the deep-time consequences of carbon emissions or nuclear waste because their temporal horizons extend only as far as the next election or the next generation. The Book of the World must have as many chapters as there are ages of the Earth.

Frederic Hanusch argues that this requires the invention of a politics of deep time and multitemporal governance to deliberately manage the bidirectional interactions between human society and cosmic/geological processes. To align human actions with planetary tempos, we must redesign democratic institutions to last across civilizations and geological epochs. These new institutions have to be computational - creating protocols and executable systems - because while a constitution cannot regulate a factory directly, a software protocol can.

Hanusch and Bjornerud both suggest that we need to adopt a trustee conception of sovereignty (also see Kumarappa’s idea of the Economy of Permanence) to protect the rights of the unborn and the non-human. This might look like creating new infrastructures for intergenerational governance, such as appointing a “Secretary of the Future” to guide policy, or designing planetary assemblies where the interests of the biosphere are structurally represented.

This brings me back to the archetype of the philosopher-king, which I wrote about in the context of governance. Let us reimagine this figure for the third age of systems theory. Plato envisioned a ruler who had stepped outside the cave to perceive the absolute truth, descending back into the darkness out of a duty to govern the polis. Yet, the polis was a purely human construct, existing entirely within the spatialized time of human history.

Today, the object of philosophical apprehension is the Planet. The philosopher-king, obsessed with the harmony of the human state, is fundamentally ill-equipped for this. We must replace the philosopher-king with the Planetary Steward. The planetary steward is responsible for maintaining the metabolic order across the longue durée. They are responsible for both spatial and temporal flourishing, for being a good neighbor to the community of beings, as well as being a good ancestor to the deep future.

The Planetary Steward governs not by decree, but through the rigorous philosophical engineering of protocols, institutions, and cybernetic feedback loops that keep the planet in tune. The Book of the World must be designed to be held in our hands, but it should also be a distributed artifact, spread across sensors and continents.

Conclusion: From Time to Space

Embracing the Planetary Durée is the necessary first step in revising our self-conception as world-makers. By rejecting the spatial fallacy of time, and by synthesizing the rapid flow of human history with the deep, slow rhythms of the Earth, we find a way to hold both our incredible power and our cosmic unimportance at once. We are but a fleeting moment in the Earth’s history, yet we are the moment the Earth made its presence felt in our consciousness.

The Book of the World is the foundational text for this new consciousness. We must build technologies as well as institutions that ensure that the fast-moving layers of human activity do not irreversibly shatter the slow-moving foundations of the Earth’s life-support systems.

That’s it for Time as Planetary Durée.

Having re-oriented our understanding of when we are, and how the past is intimately present in our planetary body, we must turn to the next dimension of our earthly condition. Next month, we will explore where we are, turning our attention to Space, planetary boundaries, and the material limits of our shared world.

Space was cast by Bergson as the villain; I will start by rehabilitating its reputation.

I wasn’t planning on writing another essay in the Polyconflict series this quickly, but a twitter thread sparked a reverie on the relationship between the Gulf War, gendered harms and the need for metabolic sovereignty.

When we hear the term “World War,” we think of nations the world over fighting pitched battles across their landscape, that they strike everyone, everywhere all at once. But that’s not the reality at all is it? Polyconflicts (of which WWs are one example), have a core - periphery grading to them. The ongoing gulf war has an epicenter, a blast radius, and a fallout zone (to use a nuclear metaphor).

At the core of this conflict are the belligerents - the US, Israel, and Iran - trapped in a zone of air and drone strikes, ballistic missiles, and perhaps soon: land battles. Then, there is the immediate line of fire: the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Nations like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE aren’t the primary combatants, but their airspace is restricted, their shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz are choked, and their petrochemical hubs are threatened by collateral damage.

Further out, in the fallout zone, you have countries like India. We are not launching missiles, nor are our refineries under physical bombardment. Yet, we are caught entirely in the polyconflict trap. We are the outer ring, lacking the geopolitical agency to stop the core conflict, but requiring urgent responses to its cascading consequences.

I have argued that we cannot navigate this time of monsters using the bird’s-eye managerial view from the sidelines. Polyconflicts require an embedded perspective, grounded in the situation as it is being affected by the conflict, tracing the shocks commodity by commodity. I have done this for two commodities already. We traced how a drone strike on a Qatari gas field instantly chokes the global supply of Helium, endangering MRI machines across India. We mapped how that same strike squeezes the petrochemical precursors for Metformin, creating a metabolic trap for the Indian diabetic.

Today, let’s examine a third commodity implicated in the Gulf War Polyconflict. It is not a high-tech supercoolant, nor is it a complex synthetic molecule. It is one the most primal commodities in human history: Firewood.

The Illusion of Neutral Energy

From the bird’s-eye view, energy is a neutral resource. When policymakers look at energy models, they tend to see numbers on a spreadsheet: barrels of oil, cubic meters of gas, gigawatts of solar, BTUs of heat. But on the ground, energy is never neutral and gender is often an axis of uneven distribution. For millennia, the primary source of household energy for cooking and heating across the Indian subcontinent has been biomass - firewood, crop residue, and dried cattle dung, burned in unventilated mud stoves known as chulhas.

Whatever its historical value, the chulha is an ongoing catastrophe now. Environmentally, the relentless need for cooking fuel drives the slow, steady stripping of local scrublands and forests, destroying the ecological commons that rural communities rely on for resilience. The human cost is equally, if not more, severe, and it is borne almost exclusively by women.

Burning solid biomass in an enclosed space produces horrifying levels of Indoor Air Pollution (IAP). Cooking three meals a day over a chulha is the physiological equivalent of smoking hundreds of cigarettes. It is a primary driver of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), acute respiratory infections, and debilitating cataracts among rural Indian women. And that’s not its only harm - firewood extracts a brutal ‘time tax’ for it does not pipe itself into a kitchen. It must be foraged, cut, and carried. This labor falls squarely on the shoulders of women and girls, who often spend hours every single day walking miles to gather fuel. Every hour spent foraging for firewood is an hour stolen from education, from income-generating labor, and from rest.

Once again, whatever its past usefulness, the chulha is a mechanism of gender inequality. It chains women to the hearth, destroys their lungs, and consumes their time.

The LPG Bridge and Its Collapse

Recognizing this profound injustice, the Indian state launched one of the most ambitious public health and gender-equity interventions in modern history: the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY). By heavily subsidizing Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) connections for below-poverty-line households, the state aimed to move hundreds of millions of women away from toxic chulhas and toward clean, efficient cooking fuel. The blue flame of the LPG stove became a symbol of modernization, freeing up millions of hours for women and drastically clearing the air in rural kitchens.

Note: we too easily forget how much fossil fuels are woven into our idea of modernity.

But the Ujjwala Yojana contained a hidden, structural vulnerability. LPG is a byproduct of natural gas processing and crude oil refining. India simply does not produce enough of it. To fuel the Ujjwala revolution, India became the world’s second-largest consumer of LPG, importing roughly 55% of its supply - the vast majority of it shipped directly from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Over the last two decades, India’s LPG imports have surged dramatically, increasing nearly 12-fold from 1,722 TMT in 1998–99 to over 20,667 TMT by 2024–25.

Those LPG tankers are all stranded in the strait of Hormuz. Supply has constricted, and the global price of gas has surged. For the Indian state, the subsidy burden to maintain the Ujjwala scheme at these new war-time prices will become fiscally impossible. That’s catastrophe enough, but I worry that a geoeconomic shock will wipe out a decade of hard-won progress on gender equality.

Will girls be pulled out of school to help forage?

Escaping the Trap

TLDR; Metabolic Sovereignty is more important than ever.

We cannot simply accept this regression. We cannot allow the promise of the Ujjwala Yojana to die on the altar of Middle Eastern geopolitics; we cannot afford to tether the dignity of Indian women to the Persian Gulf. We should maintain the spirit of our household energy policies, but we must shift their physical architecture towards DRE (decentralized renewable energy). We need to aggressively institutionalize the distribution and adoption of solar-thermal cooking stoves, build village-level renewable micro-grids to power electric induction cooktops, and (not so renewable) invest in community-level biogas consortiums that turn agricultural waste into piped cooking gas.

If a household’s cooking energy is generated locally - derived from the sun beating down on the roof, or derived from the agricultural waste of the adjacent fields - it won’t be at the mercy of a naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

But to understand what this transition truly entails, we have to look deeper into the nature of the new cold war. It is increasingly clear that the geopolitical struggles defining our era are not strictly ideological; they are metabolic. When we transition a rural Indian kitchen from Qatari LPG to an electric induction stove powered by solar panels, we are shifting from the Petrostate nexus to the Electrostate nexus. Which is, on the whole, a good thing, but it does bring some strategic worries along with it: in our attempt to escape the volatility of the Persian Gulf, we will deepen our dependency on China.

To break this cycle of merely swapping one set of masters for another, India must strive for true Metabolic Sovereignty. A metabolic sovereign is a political unit that possesses monopoly control - or what systems theorists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela would call autopoiesis (self-creation and self-maintenance) - over the vital energy and information that flows across its borders. Achieving this does not mean walling off the country, but it absolutely means executing the renewable transition with clarity. It requires the Indian state to fiercely protect, subsidize, and incubate the indigenous manufacturing of solar panels, battery storage systems, and high-efficiency induction stoves.

We must stop viewing the manufacturing of a solar stove as a mere consumer goods market best left to the cheapest foreign bidder. We must treat it as the foundational infrastructure of a new metabolic regime, necessary not just for the physical liberation of Indian women, but for the self-governance of the nation.

Bad Intersectionality and the Necessity of Solidarity

In academic and progressive circles, we often talk about intersectionality - the idea that various forms of oppression exacerbate each other. Polyconflicts are intersectional in the most destructive sense of the word. They act like water under pressure, seeking out the deepest, most historically vulnerable fault lines in a society and cracking them wide open.

We have known that about war zones for a long time: the gendered realities are brutal - men die on the front lines, while women are haunted by sexual violence. But modern geoeconomic warfare - supply chain decoupling and commodity shocks also have a gendered fallout.

When global energy prices spike due to a war in the Gulf, it is rural Indian women who will pay the physical price of the LPG squeeze. Their lungs will fill with toxic smoke from chulhas. Their time will be stolen by the daily march for firewood and their daughters will be kept home from school to aid in housework.

If we are to achieve metabolic sovereignty, we must track metabolic risk as seriously as we track macroeconomics. We must measure localized heat-mortality exposure, village-level grid fragility, and the respiratory toll of indoor air pollution with the same urgency we reserve for the stock market.

In this interregnum as new monsters roam the streets, citizens owe their allegiance to the tangible institutions that keep life possible and do so within planetary boundaries. The transition to clean, localized energy must not be rolled out as a technocratic imposition from above. It must be championed as an expansion of entitlements - a right to breathe, a right to time, and a right to health.

One more essay on the Polyconflict before I shift back to the Planetarity Syllabus. I have several essays queued up, but am holding them back while I get these depressing thoughts out of my head.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the impending Helium Shock due to the Gulf war. But Helium isn’t the only commodity under threat. It’s not even the only medically relevant commodity under threat. Surprise, surprise: the pharmaceutical industry is deeply dependent on the fossil fuel industry, and not just as an energy source: petrochemicals such as benzene and ethylene are the building blocks of modern drugs. Pharmaceuticals are petrochemicals!

In the two previous essays, I argued that polyconflicts cannot be managed from a control room. They are structural, open-ended scrambles for survival that must be traced node by node, commodity by commodity. We looked at how a drone strike in the Persian Gulf dictates the cost of a neurological MRI in Bihar by choking the global supply of helium. We saw how escaping one geopolitical trap frequently means wading into another.

The pharma industry is no different - the path to understanding the polyconflict is non-linear. I am going to illustrate that nonlinearity with a disease and a drug of great importance to Indians: diabetes and metformin respectively, where the metabology of the conflict is literally about human metabolism.

1. Diabetes

If you’re Indian, you almost certainly have a close family member who has diabetes, probably many such. According to the 2023 ICMR-INDIAB study, over 101 million Indians are currently living with diabetes, with an additional 136 million lingering in a state of pre-diabetes. We currently account for roughly one-quarter of the global diabetic burden.

Why are we so uniquely prone to diabetes?

It comes down to a metabolic profile known in the medical literature as the ‘Thin-Fat’ Indian phenotype. For epigenetic reasons due to nutritional stress and agrarian scarcity due to colonial era famines, Indians possess a lower metabolic capacity; we have smaller internal organs, particularly the pancreas and liver, and significantly less skeletal muscle mass. We are built to survive starvation, not abundance.

But we now live in an environment of unprecedented metabolic load. An Indian with a seemingly normal Body Mass Index (BMI) of 22 often carries the same hidden metabolic risk as a Caucasian with a BMI of 30. We are genetically predisposed to store our fat viscerally, packed around our internal organs and deep within our abdomens, rather than safely under the skin. This visceral fat is highly inflammatory. It triggers systemic insulin resistance and leads to premature beta-cell failure in the pancreas.

Unfortunately, nature and nurture have conspired to make the situation worse. Our biological vulnerability is exacerbated by the carb-heavy nature of our diet. Rice and wheat are the anchors of the Indian plate and palate. In the 1960’s, the threat of starvation - though there are serious doubts as to its accuracy - led to the Green Revolution and the massive expansion of monocultured grains in our diet.

The cheap rice and wheat that sustains Indians are only made possible by the application of urea, a highly concentrated nitrogen fertilizer. India is dependent on the Persian Gulf for its urea. Over 45% of our urea imports come from Oman alone, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia providing much of the rest. With the Strait of Hormuz acting as a highly militarized choke point in the current Gulf War, the supply of urea is threatened. A urea shortage means drops in crop yields for the upcoming Kharif season.

Lower crop yields ➡️ inflation in agricultural staples.

When food inflation hits, you would be surprised to know that the pauper does not pivot to eating expensive lean proteins, imported quinoa, and fresh, organic vegetables. Instead, they default to the cheapest, most heavily processed, high-glycemic carbohydrates available on the market. Strange isn’t it? They eat more refined flour, more sugar, and more cheap starch because those are more affordable. IMHO, the war in the Gulf will lead to a more diabetogenic diet for a lot of people.

Just when our access to insulin regulating drugs like Metformin is about to decrease.

2. Metformin

If you are one of the hundred million Indians with diabetes, Metformin is likely keeping you alive. But what actually is Metformin? While its ancient origins trace back to the medicinal use of the French Lilac plant (Galega officinalis) in medieval Europe, modern Metformin is effectively solidified natural gas.

The industrial synthesis of Metformin relies on two chemical building blocks: Dimethylamine and Dicyandiamide. To manufacture Dimethylamine, a chemical plant requires enormous quantities of methanol and ammonia. To get methanol and ammonia, you need massive, continuous flows of methane (natural gas). To synthesize Dicyandiamide, you need nitrogen-rich feedstocks processed in energy-intensive, high-heat environments.

Therefore, the Metformin manufacturing cycle starts with the Persian Gulf. The industrial cathedrals of Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex and Saudi Arabia’s Jubail industrial city are the world’s sources for the methane and ammonia that go into Metformin. The former was lit on fire by Iranian missiles last week and the second has been threatened many times.

The threat to the Metformin supply chain is terrifying because of the drug’s indispensability. Globally, it is the undisputed first-line oral therapy for Type 2 diabetes. It works by activating the AMPK enzyme, essentially tricking the liver into halting its overproduction of glucose while making the body’s muscle tissues more sensitive to whatever insulin remains. It is cheap to produce, highly effective at lowering blood sugar, and unlike older drugs, carries a very low risk of inducing fatal hypoglycemia.

In India, Metformin is even more important. The ICMR guidelines position Metformin as the foundational treatment for almost all newly diagnosed patients. Because Indians experience beta-cell failure and crippling insulin resistance so much earlier in life - often diagnosed in their late 20s or 30s rather than their 60s - Metformin is prescribed aggressively and preemptively, even to lean, young patients who do not fit the Western profile of a diabetic.

Furthermore, the Indian pharmaceutical market is driven by Fixed-Dose Combinations (FDCs). In this model, Metformin is chemically combined with other drugs, like Glimepiride or Teneligliptin, into a single, high-density tablet to reduce the pill burden (the more pills you are asked to swallow, the less likely you’re going to take them all) for patients and ensure compliance.

In short: Metformin is the bedrock of India’s public health response to a crisis affecting 101 million citizens with another 136 million waiting in the wings. If the supply of Metformin is compromised, the edifice of Indian diabetes management is on shaky grounds, for there is no viable, scalable, equally affordable substitute. We cannot simply switch to $1000-a-month GLP-1 receptor agonists (like Ozempic) or afford complex, refrigerated insulin regimens. It is Metformin or nothing.

PS: Even more irony - the patent for Semaglutide (Ozempic and Wegovy) expired recently, and tons of Indian firms want to manufacture generic versions of these drugs, but for that to happen, Indian pharma needs petrochemicals from Qatar and KSA.

4. Upstream of Metformin - the China factor

If the Gulf provides the raw energy and base molecules, how does the pill actually get made? The answer isn’t flattering to India during a polyconflict.

TLDR; we saw in the first essay on this polyconflict that India has to walk the tightrope between the Gulf and China for its energy needs. Turns out, we have to play the same game for Metformin too.

The production of Metformin is split between China and India, with China acting as the upstream brick-maker, while India acts as the downstream house-builder. China currently dominates the global production of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) - the actual, synthesized medicinal chemicals that do the work in the body. As of 2024, China accounted for roughly 45% of all new global API filings. Massive, heavily subsidized Chinese chemical mega-factories in provinces like Shandong synthesize the Dimethylamine and Dicyandiamide into pure, bulk Metformin API.

India then imports these Chinese APIs by the megaton. In vast formulation plants in Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Mumbai, Indian companies press this Chinese powder into tablets, package them into aluminum blister packs, and ship them around the world. As of recent data, India relies on China for 70% to 80% of its total API and bulk drug imports.

Not to belabor the analogy too much, but this is the same model through which fentanyl enters the US: the Chinese make the precursor chemicals, ship them to Mexico where the cartels assemble fent and ship it to their markets in the US and and Europe.

If the Gulf War creates a severe energy shock, it hits China’s chemical factories first. China, prioritizing its own domestic stability and the health of its own massive population, can easily and instantly weaponize export controls. In a time of molecular scarcity, Beijing can restrict the export of Metformin API or the critical, energy-intensive solvents required to synthesize it. Indian generic manufacturers will be starved of their core ingredients, and will find their assembly lines paralyzed.

Why aren’t we making our own APIs? It turns out we used to, but....

5. How India Lost Its Pharmaceutical Sovereignty

It was not always this way. To understand how India fell into this disastrous double-bind, we must look at the history of our pharmaceutical industry, which tracks perfectly with the rise of neoliberal managerialism.

Following the Patents Act of 1970, which recognized process patents but not product patents, India built an independent, vertically integrated pharmaceutical sector. In the 1970s and 80s, Indian scientists reverse-engineered global blockbuster drugs and successfully manufactured the APIs domestically. We owned the chemistry. In 1991, Chinese ingredients made up less than 1% of India’s bulk drug imports.

But in the 1990s and 2000s, after liberalization, globalized capitalism took hold. Indian pharma CEOs realized that high profit margins lay in marketing the finished formulations to Western markets, not in the dirty, highly regulated, energy-intensive, low-margin business of chemical synthesis and fermentation. Simultaneously, China made a strategic state decision to capture the base of the global supply chain, building massive chemical mega-parks powered by cheap coal and heavily subsidized grids.

Makes sense from an individual pharma company’s POV: outsourcing API production to China was the rational choice. And so, India voluntarily hollowed out its own chemical foundation. We dismantled our fermentation plants and allowed our chemical synthesis capacity to wither because it was cheaper to buy the molecules from Shandong.

Today, as the Indian government scrambles to launch Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes to bring API manufacturing back to Indian soil, we face a brutal situation. To rebuild these energy-intensive API factories, India needs cheap, reliable power, stable grids, and raw petrochemical feedstocks. Where does that energy come from? The Persian Gulf or Chinese Solar manufacturers. The very attempt to escape our pharmaceutical dependence on China drives us deeper into our energy dependence on the Middle East and China.

A true polyconflict if there was one. There is no escape hatch, only a shifting of vulnerabilities from one sector to another.

6. Not Just India: The Generic Squeeze

India supplies roughly 40% to 50% of all the generic drugs consumed in the United States and the United Kingdom. If Chinese export curbs and Gulf energy shocks squeeze the Indian manufacturer in Hyderabad, the downstream effect hits the pharmacy shelf in London, Detroit, and Boston within weeks. The rationing hierarchy we saw with Helium - where hospitals compete for scarce resources - will replicate itself in pharmaceuticals.

The American and European working classes - already burdened by decaying, hyper-financialized healthcare systems - could be plunged into further medical debt just to afford basic metabolic maintenance. The pauper in Darbhanga and the pauper in Detroit are tethered to the same fragile supply chain.

7. The Perfect Storm: Inflation, Diet, and Disease

Let us return to India, where various macro-level shocks caused by the Gulf War converge into a perfect storm.

On one front, the cost of Metformin and other essential diabetes treatments could rise as API supply chains fracture, energy costs spike, and transportation insurance premiums surge. On another front, food inflation driven by fertilizer (urea) shortages will make healthy, protein-rich diets economically impossible for the majority of the population.

Imagine the daily reality of the tenant farmer in Bihar or the gig worker in Bengaluru: their diet is forced to become more carb-heavy, more ultra-processed, and more diabetogenic precisely at the historical moment when the medication required to manage the physiological fallout of that diet becomes scarce and expensive. We are looking at a negative spiral of human health and economic agency.

There are no quick answers to this polyconflict, but we can take steps to address the situation in the short as well as long term.

8. Interconnected Pathways

Because the threats to our biology and our economy are deeply interconnected, our solutions must be equally holistic. We simply address the pharmaceutical crisis without simultaneously addressing the agricultural crisis. I am well aware that I am out of my depth in most of these topics and my suggestions could well be laughable - but it’s better to put my views out there and invite rebuttal than to stay silent.

• Food: We must aggressively pivot our agricultural systems away from fossil-fuel dependency. This is no longer just an environmental goal; it is a metabolic imperative. This means a structural shift toward agroecology and the large-scale cultivation of indigenous, climate-resilient grains like millets and sorghum, which require a mere fraction of the imported urea that paddy demands. A shift in agriculture forces a shift in diet - moving from refined, cheap carbs to local, protein-rich, complex carbohydrates that respect and nourish the Indian phenotype rather than poisoning it.

• Pharma: The pharmaceutical industry must be insulated from foreign API supply shocks. This cannot simply mean building dirty, coal-fired plants in Maharashtra to mimic Shangdong. It requires pioneering localized API synthesis powered by decentralized green energy grids. We must treat the production of essential, life-saving medicines as critical, non-negotiable sovereign infrastructure, not just a high-margin export business.

• Healthcare: We must fundamentally redefine healthcare from a reactive system of disease management via global drug regimes to a proactive, holistic framework of wellness, which has roots in local consumption patterns, community health literacy, preventive nutrition, and equitable access to localized medical facilities.

9. Commodity by Commodity: The Necessity of Solidarity

There is no master switch to turn off a polyconflict. Machiavelli’s grim insight remains entirely true for our era: systemic conflict is structural, and the prince who waits for stability before acting will wait forever.

These challenges must be resolved commodity by commodity, molecule by molecule.

We desperately need state intervention to heavily subsidize local food systems, fund indigenous pharmaceutical technology, and protect local manufacturing from global dumping. But the state alone is too slow, too cumbersome, and too easily captured by capital.

Therefore, we also need a massive, unprecedented mobilization of civic networks too. Solidarity is the only rational and moral response to a world where the conflicts are simply too large, too complex, and too planetary for any individual to survive alone. We must urgently weave localized, cooperative safety nets such as farmer-producer cooperatives sharing agroecological knowledge. We also need pharmaceutical consortiums pooling API resources and intellectual property, and community health workers prioritizing wellness over corporate margins.

What else?

PS: I hope you are getting a sense of my approach to system analysis: the earthworm’s way, so to speak.

Instead of talking about economic or political crises from a purely macro lens, it’s better to narrow down to one issue or commodity and trace its interconnections - they are far more likely to throw surprises than the view from up above, as I learned by tracing those connections for Helium as well as Metformin.

I am confident you can do this type of trace-analysis in every sector.

A quick follow up to my previous essay on Polyconflicts - I wanted to dig deeper into one commodity and trace its web of connections. Helium it is.

A couple of days ago, I wrote an essay arguing that polycrisis-talk is a coping mechanism for the establishment technocrat, while the world’s emergencies - war, supply chain collapse, inflation - are not just tangled together, they lead us towards intertwined conflicts, or what I call “polyconflicts.” Polyconflicts can’t be solved - it’s not a matter of data, better models, and putting the right managers in control.

We might be looking for a new equilibrium, but we are not going to find it.

As I discussed in the Gulf-India-China context, escaping one geoeconomic shock means stepping into another. And because these conflicts are overlapping scrambles for leverage (sometimes survival), they defy the bird’s-eye view of macroeconomic forecasting - not that I want to throw away those models - this is not about a new imperial vibe. You cannot understand the shape of this new world by looking at GDP charts or summit communiqués.

I don’t think there’s an overarching frame that explains all polyconflicts. At least not yet. Every unhappy dispute is unhappy in its own way. Instead, the conflict must be traced node by node, commodity by commodity. Each essential material that makes modern life possible carries its own distinct geography of risk, dragging entirely different populations into its specific battles. To see how this non-linear, inescapable web actually functions, we need only look at the second lightest element in the universe: helium.

Why helium? Because it came up during a conversation with a colleague and intrigued me enough that I decided to trace its connections to the ongoing war in the Gulf.

Tracing Helium

When missiles strike the energy infrastructure of the Persian Gulf, it’s obvious that the conflagration will impact the price of Brent Crude and will cause shipping delays for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). Oil and gas are first-order casualties of Middle Eastern wars - the disruptions everyone expects and the dependencies every state actively manages. Then again, maybe not - India had plenty of opportunity to build a natural gas reserve but it didn’t.

But it should have!

Polyconflicts have second-order dependencies that are less visible. Helium is a good example. It’s not a hydrocarbon, it’s not a rare earth material and it’s mostly known for its use in balloons and blimps.But as I found out, helium is embedded in a fragile, critical supply chain that sits at the intersection of Gulf volatility, advanced tech rivalry, and health systems.

First, some chemistry.

Helium is not manufactured on Earth; there’s a lot of it in the Sun, but over here it is a scarce resource. It is generated over hundreds of millions of years by the radioactive decay of elements like uranium and thorium deep within the Earth’s crust (uranium decay produces alpha particles which are nothing but helium minus its electrons - the alpha particles pick up two electrons from the surrounding rock and become helium). Helium is very light (the second lightest element) so left to itself, it will escape out of the Earth’s atmosphere and dissipate into space, but as it so turns out, sometimes it gets trapped in the exact same geological formations as natural gas. Consequently, it is extracted almost exclusively as a by-product of natural gas processing. It requires massive infrastructure - cryogenic fractional distillation towers that cool the raw gas to extreme temperatures to separate the helium molecules from the methane and nitrogen. Since helium has the lowest liquefaction temperature, if you cool natural gas to a low enough temperature, the other gases in it will liquify, leaving only helium in gas form.

This geological reality chains helium directly to the world’s major hydrocarbon nodes. Not only is Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City complex the world’s biggest gas terminal, it also accounts for roughly 30% to 38% of the world’s entire helium supply. So the attack on Ras Laffan immediately created a helium shock in the world’s supply chains. In a matter of days, a third of this critical industrial gas vanished from the market. And in any case, with the Strait of Hormuz closed, there’s no shipping that helium anywhere else even if you could extract it.

Who cares? What is helium good for?

Turns out, it’s good for some important things, and in particular, it’s crucial for MRI machines and chip manufacturing.

Why Helium is Non-Substitutable

As I mentioned earlier, helium is the second-lightest element in the universe, and because it is so light, any helium released into the atmosphere escapes Earth’s gravity and bleeds off into space. That doesn’t make it valuable though. What makes it essential is that it is chemically inert, and it stays liquid at colder temperatures than any other substance in existence. These two properties make it the invisible architect of modern medicine and advanced computing.

Liquid Helium and the MRI

The first critical use of liquid helium - used to be its biggest use, still second biggest - is in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). MRIs are large superconducting magnets. To generate the incredibly powerful magnetic fields required to see inside the human body, the internal coils of the machine, typically made of a Niobium-Titanium alloy, must achieve superconductivity. This metallurgical magic only happens at roughly 4 Kelvin, or -269°C - just a few degrees above absolute zero. Liquid helium is literally the only element capable of reaching and maintaining these temperatures. Liquid nitrogen is too warm. There is no synthetic chemical substitute. If you do not have liquid helium, you do not have an MRI. Older MRI machines needed about 1500 liters of helium, and since the gas keeps escaping, it has to be topped-up all the time. Not so for the newer models, some of whom have factory sealed helium (and need only 7 liters) but those models are too expensive to be bought by hospitals in India or other parts of the Global South.

Helium in Chip Fabs

The semiconductor industry relies on gaseous helium for an entirely different set of extreme conditions. As chip architectures shrink to 5-nanometers and below, the margin for error is vanishingly small. During processes like extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography and plasma etching, silicon wafers are bombarded with highly energetic lasers and plasma inside a vacuum chamber. They get incredibly hot. The vacuum doesn’t have any air that can transport the heat away from the chip (it’s vacuum!), so to prevent the delicate, atomic-level structures from melting or warping, gaseous helium is pumped directly into the microscopic gap between the cooling chuck and the back of the silicon wafer.

Because helium’s thermal conductivity is unmatched, it pulls heat away from the silicon wafer. Furthermore, because it is a noble gas, it is chemically inert and so does not react with any of the highly volatile chemicals used in chip fabrication, leaving the delicate wafers uncontaminated. Even other noble gases won’t work. If a semiconductor fab runs out of helium, they cannot substitute another noble gas such as argon which is both bigger and heavier, and has far less thermal conductivity.

OK, once again, so what? Where’s the squeeze when there’s a supply shock?

India’s MRI Infrastructure

To understand the depth of India’s vulnerability, you first have to understand the three generations of MRI technology. First, there are the traditional scanners, the legacy machines of the late 20th century. These require a massive bath of 1,500 to 2,000 liters of liquid helium that constantly boils off into the atmosphere, demanding frequent, expensive refills just to survive.

Second, there are zero boil-off (ZBO) scanners. Introduced in the mid-2000s, these still rely on a massive helium bath but are equipped with a complex refrigeration unit called a cold head that captures the boiling gas and re-condenses it back into liquid (how does it work exactly? I need to learn more about the mechanisms involved). Under perfect conditions, they rarely need a refill for the lifetime of the machine. Finally, there is the newest frontier of sealed micro-cooling scanners. Pioneered around 2018, these marvels use only 7 liters of helium permanently sealed at the factory. No hospital-level refills needed.

India has a low density of MRI scanners: roughly 2,500 to 4,800 machines for a population of 1.4 billion people. By comparison, the US has over 12000 for a population a fourth the size of India. But the true structural trap lies in which machines make up that number.

India possesses very few zero-boil-off machines, and a negligible number of the newer sealed micro-cooling systems. Both the ZBO and the sealed machines are too expensive for most Indian hospitals, remaining financially out of reach for all but the most elite, well-capitalized corporate hospitals in metropolitan hubs like Mumbai or Delhi.

Instead, a massive portion of India’s MRI fleet - particularly in smaller private diagnostic centers and Tier-2 or Tier-3 cities - consists of refurbished systems imported from the West to save on steep capital costs. These 10-to-15-year-old models are the traditional, high-bleed legacy machines. They are constantly venting helium, tethering Indian hospitals to the volatility of Gulf supply chains.

Even when a well-funded Indian hospital manages to purchase a modern zero boil-off machine, they run into localized, structural friction. ZBO technology was engineered for the predictable infrastructure of the Global North. The cold head requires a highly stable power supply and massive, uninterrupted industrial air conditioning to function. In the Indian context, frequent power grid fluctuations and extreme ambient heat often cause these cold heads to trip or fail. When the cold head stops working, the helium immediately begins boiling off, instantly transforming a state-of-the-art ZBO machine back into a legacy bleeder, forcing the hospital into purchasing emergency refills.

So, when the Ras Laffan complex goes offline and global prices triple, it’s terrible news for hospitals across India. If the hospital cannot secure a helium delivery or pay for it, the MRI machine’s magnet will warm up, lose superconductivity, and potentially destroy itself - a catastrophic event known as a “quench” that results in crores in damages.

As an aside - the semiconductor side of this helium story also has implications for India. Delhi is pouring billions into establishing domestic semiconductor manufacturing. But those nascent fabs require the exact same Ultra-High Purity helium that the hospitals need, and they will be competing with TSMC for the gas.

Not looking good IMHO.

The Allocation War

Helium cannot be stored or hoarded easily - since the helium atom is the second smallest in the universe, it eventually leaks through the microscopic pores of almost any container. It cannot be stockpiled for years; it must be a continuous, cryogenic flow. And when that flow is interrupted, India does not find itself competing against the usual nation-state rivals; it finds itself in a bizarre, asymmetrical war against a cross-section of the 21st-century elite.

An Indian hospital network or a newly minted semiconductor fab isn’t bidding against the Chinese state. They are competing against TSMC and Samsung - tech titans that alone consume over 20% of the world’s helium to keep their silicon wafers cool. They are competing against Kaiser Permanente and other massive, well funded Western healthcare networks. They are competing against SpaceX and the ESA, which require helium to purge rocket fuel lines and manage satellite systems.

Industrial gas distribution is a highly consolidated oligopoly dominated by giants like Linde and Air Liquide. Like QatarEnergy these corporations can invoke force majeure (force majeure is a contractual clause that frees both parties from liability when an uncontrollable event prevents one or both from fulfilling their obligations), and place all their customers on “allocation,” a rationing system where buyers receive only a percentage of their usual order. The claims on their stocks of cryogenic ISO containers will be fiercely contested. In this rationing hierarchy, Tier-1 priority technically goes to life-saving medical use and national defense. Tier-2 belongs to critical economic infrastructure, like the semiconductor fabs.

How will life-saving in Darbhanga compete with life-saving in Dublin?

The saddest part of this story is that there used to be a safety net. For decades, the U.S. Federal Helium Reserve acted as a massive, sovereign shock absorber, holding billions of cubic feet of helium to stabilize the market during crises. But in a familiar neoliberal move, the U.S. government deregulated and fully privatized the reserve, auctioning off its final assets to private industry in 2021.

I guess no one thought helium deserves a reserve in the public interest, which, if I may say so, is the exact same structural delusion that birthed our modern polyconflicts: the belief that private markets always allocate resources more efficiently than the state, and that optimizing for short-term financial returns is more important than maintaining buffers for long-term survival.

By dismantling this strategic stockpile, the U.S. removed the only buffer capable of mitigating a sudden global shortage. Private distributors are forced to make impossible, opaque choices. They must decide between fulfilling an allocation for a politically connected mega-hospital in Boston or a refurbished diagnostic center in Bihar. For a tenant farmer in Darbhanga, a decommissioned or significantly more expensive MRI machine could mean an undiagnosed tumor and far greater healthcare costs in the near future. It means pooling the family’s savings - such as they are - to pay for much more expensive care, and slipping into generational medical debt just to secure a scan. In the agrarian economy, healthcare debt is among the primary engines of rural dispossession.

More debt, more migration, more dispossession could be the outcome of the helium shock.

BTW, notice how the helium shock intersects with the larger story of the third Gulf war (similar to LPG scarcity and oil prices) but also has its own specificities - the helium reserve, direct impact on healthcare availability etc.

Surviving the Shock: Best and Worst Case Scenarios

The Worst-Case Scenario

The conflict in the Middle East stops Qatar’s LNG output for an extended period. The Strait of Hormuz remains contested, adding massive risk premiums to shipping. Global distributors slash India’s allocation by 50%. Prices quadruple. Smaller hospitals in India cannot absorb the operational cost of top-offs. They are forced to power down their MRI machines permanently. Simultaneously, the lack of UHP helium delays India’s semiconductor fabrication plants by years.

The Best-Case Scenario: The immediate supply chokehold eases within a few months, but the trauma of the near-miss serves as a wake-up call for Indian self-reliance. Startups in Bengaluru, like VoxelGrids are pioneering the first fully indigenous MRI scanners designed specifically for Indian reality. These machines do not require liquid helium. They operate on conductive cooling, require significantly less power, and survive the heat.

The best-case scenario is that the Indian state recognizes this as a matter of localized sovereignty. Delhi must radically subsidize the deployment of indigenous, helium-free machines, alongside other tech (diagnostics etc) that can be deployed in health centers at scale: local MRI machines won’t work unless they come with a localized healthcare system committed to the public interest. Concurrently, the state must secure diversified helium partnerships with emerging producers in structurally safer regions like Canada or Australia for the nascent semiconductor sector.

Concluding thoughts

The helium shock is a perfect microcosm of the polyconflict. It demonstrates how today’s conflicts are non-linear, with second-order effects that shatter our traditional economic models. A drone strike on a gas field in the Gulf dictates the cost of a neurological scan in Muzaffarpur, which in turn dictates whether a family falls into medical debt, which drives rural-to-urban migration, which stresses urban infrastructure in Delhi.

We can bring some general heuristics to understand the polyconflict - tracing the networks of energy and information (i.e., metabology) will always be helpful, but those traces will not be enough. Every commodity has to be understood on its own terms.

All the more reason to build robust mechanisms of civic solidarity.

I can only speculate as to what this might look like - could be regional medical consortiums that pool diagnostic resources instead of hoarding them, open-source hardware collectives that share the intellectual property for conductive-cooling technologies, and community-funded health trusts that prevent medical debt before it forces a farmer into dispossession. I don’t know how we are going to make it happen, but we need to willy-nilly. As the Benjamin Franklin quote goes:

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

I am no doomer but when Trump retook power in 2020, the old world died. New monsters were waiting in the wings.

That was a premonition, but I am now seeing the monster take shape, and it’s driving me a little insane.

I posted some scattered thoughts earlier today on social media. Having worked on the underlying themes some more, I am sharing the fleshed out version below.

As the current escalating conflict between the US/Israel and Iran demonstrates, geopolitics no longer stops at the border. We are inextricably connected to developments elsewhere, and rarely in ways we can control.

When the global system works, it operates invisibly. We can sleep assured that natural gas will be delivered on time, and the systemic externalities of that comfort will be kicked down the road for our children to deal with (hello, climate change!). But when the system breaks down, geopolitical and geoeconomic volatility suddenly becomes your immediate, localized problem (hello, climate change!).

Yet, our existing media apparatus is woefully unequipped to explain how this planetary turbulence lands on our doorsteps. We get headlines like, “Brent Crude hitting $120 a barrel will lead to an extra 5% inflation in India.” Legacy newspapers and television channels, built for mass-audience broadcasting, are forced to communicate in these abstract, macroeconomic generalizations.

We must do a lot better.

The Local Impact of Global Shocks

Consider the micro-impacts of macro-shocks. Benchmark prices for urea jumped 30–40% in just the first two weeks of March. To an urban dweller, this is invisible data, at least until food prices spike a few months later. But to a farmer planning for the Zaid or Kharif crop seasons, it is an immediate existential threat. To financial planners in Delhi, it means a sudden need to offset mounting fertilizer subsidies with budgetary cuts elsewhere.

What gets cut, and who bleeds for it?

Every day brings new variables that shatter our existing models. Yesterday, the world’s largest gas fields were attacked, first by Israel and then by Iran. Gas supplies could be constrained for months, if not longer. The Kharif season is in trouble.

Sensemaking…

Suppose I am a paddy farmer in Punjab, or a sugarcane farmer in Mandya. What is going to happen to the cost of my inputs? What are my realistic alternatives? Is agroecology a viable shift for me right now, or a luxury I can’t afford? How do I balance these surging agricultural costs with my household realities: after all, I rely on LPG, and I need medical supplies whose supply chains are also fracturing. My needs aren’t the same as the farmer in the next district, let alone the software engineer in Bengaluru.

Yet, there is no personalized sensemaking infrastructure that scours the globe from the village next door to Beijing, translating planetary events into localized, actionable intelligence. This is exactly where I see the true promise of AI: delivering fact-based, hyper-personalized summaries of how events at all scales impact a specific human life today.

From Polycrisis to Polyconflict

While my engineers are hard at work building that newspaper of the future, we have a new reality to navigate today. We have a Polyconflict on our hands. Notice I didn’t say Polycrisis, which is the buzzword of the Davos class. Polycrisis acknowledges multiple, intersecting emergencies, but it carries the hidden assumption that the crisis is temporary, that it will resolve. Things will eventually settle into a new equilibrium, perhaps with new winners and losers, but a familiar, manageable landscape nonetheless.

What if they don’t?

What if the correct word isn’t crisis, but conflict - ongoing, structural, open-ended, and immune to being fixed by the right policy, the right summit, or the right experts in the right room? That shift in framing from polycrisis to polyconflict is staring us in the face with the US-Israel-India-Gulf-China situation.

Escaping One Conflict, Wading Into Another

Look again at the paddy farmer in Punjab. His input costs just jumped because urea prices spiked because of an attack on the South Pars gas field during a war with no end date, in a region that has been volatile for decades and is actively unraveling. No global institution is coming to fix this mess. The Rules-Based International Order is dead. What has replaced it is a world where the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. That is a conflict, not a crisis.

And the farmer in Mandya or Jalandhar is living inside the conflict, whether they know it or not.

India’s rational, strategic response to Gulf energy volatility is electrification. Except the green transition depends on physical supply chains, and those supply chains run almost entirely through China: solar panels, lithium batteries, EV components, rare earths.

No alternative currently exists at India scale.

So, every rooftop solar panel installed in Pune, every electric two-wheeler sold in Coimbatore, deepens a dependency on a rival with whom we share a heavily militarized, contested border, and one with demonstrated willingness to weaponize economic leverage. We should mend the relationship, but the potential for conflict will never disappear.

The faster India tries to escape the first conflict, the deeper it wades into the second.

The sugarcane farmer in Mandya is hammered by a Gulf conflict he has no voice in. If Delhi covers the fertilizer subsidy by cutting rural health allocations, the farmer’s children might decide to migrate to Bengaluru. Where will they live? What will they do?

Meanwhile, the EV buyer in Bengaluru thinks she is making a responsible, localized ecological choice. It is a better choice, but it is one deeply embedded in a macroeconomic strategic rivalry. Tomorrow, she may not get spare parts because rare earth minerals needed for magnets are no longer available. There is no escaping the polyconflict for her either. These are struggles landing on ordinary people who don’t have a framework to understand what is hitting them, or why.

The Interregnum Revisited

Antonio Gramsci wrote from a fascist prison cell that “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” We are living in that interregnum. The Rules-Based International Order wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t equal, and it was rarely rules-based. But it was our monster. As it dies, new, planetary-scale monsters are arriving.

This 👇🏾 is where I was at the beginning of last year - note the date

Machiavelli wrote The Prince for Lorenzo de Medici as a manual for holding power in exactly this kind of moment - when the old order had collapsed and the new one hadn’t settled. For the last year, I have been trying to write the opposite book. Not a manual for the Prince, but a survival guide for the Pauper. For the paddy farmer, the sugarcane grower, and the EV buyer who are all navigating a world nobody prepared them for.

The polyconflict frame is what lends the Pauper urgency. The old frame of polycrisis was deeply embedded in neoliberal managerialism. It relied on the bird’s eye view of complexity scientists who believed that if you just modeled the system well enough, you could steer it back to stability from a control room. But we are now in the Third Systems Age. We don’t need the bird’s eye view - we need the earthworm’s view; embedded, grounded, sensing the vibrations of the soil, and navigating from inside the conflict rather than trying to administer it from above.

This 👇🏾 is when I started writing about the Pauper in earnest

Machiavelli’s insight was that systemic conflict is structural, not exceptional, and the prince who waits for stability before acting will wait forever. The pauper’s equivalent insight must be this: when the conflicts are too large for any individual to survive alone, solidarity is the only rational response. The olive garden owner in Palermo and the software engineer in Bengaluru are not living in different worlds.

In the age of polyconflict, they can’t separate their fates even if they wanted to.

Introduction

In the first essay on Time, I introduced the main temporal contradiction underlying the condition of planetarity - the contradiction between the time of human history and the time of planetary history. Last week I gave an overview of how we might think through that contradiction using the readings for this month - Bjornerud, Chakrabarty, and DeLanda - as our guides. Now it’s time to add a layer of Bergson to our planetary cake. Over the next two essays, I will attempt to address the following question in the affirmative:

Is a ‘Planetary Duree’ a coherent concept? Does it help resolve the contradiction between human and planetary history?

First up, a brief overview of Bergson’s conception of “duree” as it informs our inquiry.

On Duree

Duree as such

For Henri Bergson, to understand durée is to stop treating time like a ruler 📏 and start experiencing it like a melody 🎵. We typically commit a “spatial fallacy” by imagining time as a line of discrete points - seconds, minutes, or hours - strung together like beads. This version of time, which Bergson calls “spatialized time,” is a useful tool for physics and scheduling, but it is a corpse of the actual experience. It treats the past as a place we have left and the future as a place we are going, reducing the fluid movement of life to a series of static snapshots.

This brings me to one of my all-time pet peeves: that we have mangled the foundations of mathematics and computing by imagining ‘form’ as a sum of discrete entities, a reduction I blame on the otherwise blameless Cantor and Turing. Resurrecting the continuum qua continuum will help turn the wheel in the other direction, with some help from AI, since the new machine learning is a way to smuggle the continuum back into computation IMHO. This is way way off course from our planetary journey, so I am gonna tease you with these thoughts and shut up.

True durée, or pure duration, is the heterogeneous, continuous flow of inner consciousness. It is a qualitative multiplicity rather than a quantitative one; you cannot “divide” a moment of duration any more than you can cut a symphony into individual notes without destroying the music. In duration, the past is never truly gone. Bergson famously compares the soul to a snowball rolling down a hill: it doesn’t just move through the snow; it gathers it. Every new moment is saturated with the entirety of the past that preceded it, meaning that the “now” is always growing, changing, and essentially creative.

That past can be a planetary past too!

Because the past is constantly gnawing into the future, no two moments in duration can ever be identical. This creates a fundamental unpredictability that serves as the bedrock of human freedom. While the material world of space is governed by deterministic cause-and-effect, the “inner self” exists in a state of perpetual becoming. To live in durée is to recognize that we are not objects being pushed through a void, but a continuous process of self-creation where memory and anticipation are inextricably woven into a single, unbreakable fabric of being.

Do entities in the non-human world possess an inner self? If so, which ones? What other entities exist in the state of perpetual becoming? Rocks? Mountains? The Planet itself?

Planetary Duree

In the two previous essays on Time (here and here), we identified a central crisis of the Anthropocene: the fast-paced, human-centric time of our history (the Globe) has violently collided with the vast, indifferent deep time of the Earth system (the Planet). When we look at Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history, our human presence can feel like a meaningless, cosmic blip. We usually rely on the physicist’s conception of time to understand this scale, but this pure scientific time is reductive and essentially atemporal - and as Bjornerud points out - it treats time as a series of measurable, mathematical units, stripping it of its rich, historical reality.

But that rich reality isn’t human - it’s not experienced by us, there’s no phenomenology of Planetary Time, which leads to a crucial question for us: Is there a qualitatively rich conception of time that transcends the human? Can we break free from the tyranny of the discrete measurable?

While Bergson originally focused on our inner psychological lives, he also suggested that we naturally extend this duration to the physical world, arriving at the idea of an impersonal time that links the universe together. This is the key to grasping our condition of planetarity. If we adapt Bergson’s durée for the extreme longue durée of geological time, we realize the Earth itself endures. As Bjornerud points out, the Earth is not an empty, static stage; it is palpably made of time. The planet’s deep past isn’t gone, it’s preserved in rock strata, groundwater, and our own evolutionary biology. Manuel DeLanda helps us ground this materially, showing that human history, biological life, and geological formations are all just expressions of the same continuous matter-energy flowing and enduring at radically different speeds.

By viewing the Earth through the lens of a planetary durée, we can cure our societal time denial. The physicist’s spatialized clock-time alienates us by reducing humanity to a fraction of a second before midnight. Planetary durée, however, reconnects us. It shows that human civilization is a fast-moving, highly conscious current thoroughly entangled within the vastly slower, deeper currents of the Earth’s own unfolding memory.

Embracing this richer conception of time is a vital step in the project of planetarity as philosophical engineering.

Duree and Philosophical Engineering

In the context of Planetarity as Philosophical Engineering, Bergson’s durée offers a profound shift from seeing the Earth as a static resource to viewing it as a living, accumulating process. Most engineering operates in spatialized time - and current models of planetary processes treat the Earth as a set of discrete variables, coordinates, and predictable cause-and-effect loops - we need to set aside those mechanical reflexes. Planetary “becoming” implies that the Earth is not merely a stage for human history, but a qualitative multiplicity where every geological and biological past is actively gnawing into our present climate and social infrastructure.

How might engineering embrace the durée?

Applying durée to philosophical engineering suggests that we cannot fix the planet through spatial interventions alone. Instead, we must account for the irreversibility of time. Just as a melody is ruined if you try to isolate a single note, planetary metabolism is a continuous flow where the past (carbon deposits, evolutionary leaps, colonial histories) is inextricably woven into the future. By treating the planet as a being in planetary durée, our framework moves away from the dead time of the clock and toward a living time of the biosphere. It suggests that human agency is most free when it stops trying to dominate the planet as a spatial object and starts participating in its duration as a creative process.

These are, by their very nature, speculative thoughts; I am groping at how these speculations can be turned into engineering practice. Still stuck in Plato’s Planetary Cave for sure.

Some more scattered thoughts below:

Embracing the Contradiction

Mismatched Temporalities and the Poverty of Physics’ Time

Chakrabarty points out that we are now trapped in “mismatched temporalities”. We possess the geophysical force to alter million-year carbon cycles, yet our political and phenomenological horizons barely extend beyond a human lifespan. To govern the planet for habitability, we need to grasp deep time, which is not the time of physics, based on models that seek eternal laws.

The Bergsonian Resolution: Planetary Durée

Bergson opposes spatialized time with durée (duration) - a continuous, indivisible flow of becoming where the past is preserved and prolonged into the present through memory. Bergson argues that we naturally extend this duration to the whole physical world (How though? Can we identify the cognitive processes by which we do so?). Because our environment participates in our duration, we arrive at the idea of a duration of the universe, where, by eliminating the individual human observer, we discover an impersonal time in which all things will pass.

Is there an intermediate time, one that doesn’t eliminate the human observer, but rather, expands the list of observers to include all the beings that inhabit the Earth? Can we identify ‘living time’ that extends from the earliest prokaryotes, i.e., archaea and bacteria, who came to life almost four billion years ago, all the way to us?

Planetary durée is not an empty, spatialized container stretching back 4.5 billion years; it is a massive, qualitatively rich interval. Bergson writes that duration is “a memory within change itself”. Geology perfectly mirrors this: as Bjornerud observes, the Earth is “steeped through and through with time”; the deep past is not gone, but literally preserved in the strata, landscapes, and our own DNA. The Earth is a memory, an unfolding duration.

Materializing Duration: DeLanda and the Flow of the Earth

To prevent Bergsonian Planetary durée has a ‘solidarity with all beings across time’ vibe to it, but to keep it from sounding too mystical, we can use Manuel DeLanda to ground it in material reality. DeLanda erases the boundaries between the human, the biological, and the geological by viewing reality as a “single matter-energy” undergoing phase transitions.

For DeLanda, history across temporal scales is about the coexistence of material flows operating at different speeds: the agonizingly slow flow of rocks, the faster flow of biomass, and the highly turbulent, rapid flow of human economics and culture. That said, I am not that convinced by this layer-cake model - if the fast flowing layers can be isolated from the slow moving ones in our model of history, we don’t have much interpenetration, at a time when that’s precisely not the case.

To be continued...

Concluding Thoughts on Planetary Duree

Here’s where I am at: to resolve the contradiction between making humans great again and acknowledging our cosmic unimportance, let’s agree to subsume history - human, biological, geological - inside the provenance of ‘planetary duree,’ that the Earth is not a passive standing reserve waiting for our technological mastery (MHGA), nor is it an indifferent void (the deep clock time of the physicists). We are a fast-moving, highly conscious coagulation of the planet’s own duration.

Therefore, planetary governance and the maintenance of metabolic order cannot be based on the spatialized, short-term time of the Globe, the time of election cycles and quarterly earnings. Instead, we must cultivate Bjornerud’s timefulness, an acute, lived awareness of our embeddedness in the planet’s deep duration. By embracing an impersonal, planetary durée, we accept our profound responsibility as the planetary constituent responsible for planetary sapience.

Making Sense of it All

'Umwelt,' is the German name for the 'life-world,' the world as experienced by a living organism. Then there's the bare term 'welt' which is a delicious double entendre, standing for world in German and a painful injury in English, which is as good of expressing the Buddhist (and more generally Indian) intuition that all of Samsara is suffering. We take worlds for granted. Science reduces them; literature shrinks them and philosophy ignores them*. And yet, without the world we would be nothing. Literally.

Of course there are exceptions.

Planetarity expands the human world to include the Earth, and at the same time shrinks the universe to the planet. The worldly explorer isn’t an eagle, seeing the Earth from up above - or from the Moon like the astronaut in Earthrise - but an earthworm, digging into the soil, chewing their way to wisdom. But the world isn’t free of contradiction. On the one hand, we have the (tacitly) anthropocentric view expressed by Alva Noe in his book on presence:

The world shows up for us, in thought, and in experience; the world is present to mind. This phenomenon—presence—is the basic phenomenon in the whole domain of the mental. It is what is at stake in disputes over the nature of “intentionality,” and it is the heart of the problem of consciousness.

The world is present to us in consciousness, and we can try to own it and control it just as we try to do so materially. But it’s still possible to experience the world as if it wasn’t owned by us (from Bjornerud’s memories of visiting Svalbaard as a graduate student):

On Svalbard, my perception of time becomes unmoored from the normal measures. It is partly the 24- hour summer daylight (not to say actual sunshine— the weather can be quite awful), which provides no cue for sleep. But it is also the singleminded focus on the natural history of an austere world that has so little memory of humans. Just as the size of objects is difficult to judge on the tundra, the temporal space between past events becomes hard to discern. The few human- made artifacts one finds— a tangled fishing net, a decaying weather balloon— seem older and shabbier than the ancient mountains, which are robust and vital.

Which gives us a hint of planetarity in the way Spivak meant it when she introduced the term:

The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan.

Svalbard certainly struck Bjornerud as been loaned out to her and her fellow hut-mates. The familiar world gives way to a terrain bleached of meaning; the more you try to own the world, the more you run into its alterity. Burrowing our worm-like bodies further into the soil, we come to aspects of the planet that aren’t even on loan, an alien expanse (from Chris Impey’s “Worlds Without End”):

A tomb of rock. Not a chamber or underground structure, but a solid and almost seamless mass of granite. It’s laced with fissures and crevasses, the result of cycles of heating and cooling over the eons. Water oozes down the rock surfaces, sticky with dissolved chemicals. No light can penetrate this far underground, hundreds of meters below the surface. The only energy source is a feeble flux of radiation from radioactive decay within the rocks. It feels claustrophobic, desolate, and uninhabitable.

This planet is not even an ‘other,’ it’s not even an alien presence, it’s not there for us in any usual sense of thereness. These worlds aren’t present to us, and because they deny themselves to us, we are sorely tempted to collapse the planet into a field of ‘stuff,’ relics of a dead universe that have washed up on our shore. I want to resist that temptation; I want to hold on to the world without reducing it to the world of human presence or the universe of dead matter.

Is that even possible?

I think it is, and that along with science and philosophy and some aspects of the humanities and social sciences, we should learn also from human practices that routinely engage with alien presences and absences - mystical practices and their theology, for example.

Excerpts

Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that anthropogenic global warming has brought about the collision of three histories that normally operate at vastly different scales and speeds: the history of the Earth system, the history of life (including human evolution), and the relatively short, recent history of industrial civilization and capitalism:

As I argued in the last chapter, Anthropogenic global warming brings into view the collision—or the running up against one another—of three histories that from the point of view of human history are nor-mally assumed to be working at such different and distinct paces that they are treated as processes separate from one another for all practical purposes: the history of the Earth system, the history of life including that of human evolution on the planet, and the more recent history of industrial civilization (for many, capitalism). Humans now unintentionally straddle these three histories, which operate on different scales and at different speeds.

Which leads to the collapse of the nature-society distinction:

The figure of the human had doubled, in effect, over the course of my lifetime. There was (and still is) the human of humanist histories—the human capable of struggling for equality and fairness among other humans while caring for the environment and certain forms of nonhuman life. And then there was this other human, the human as a geological agent, whose history could not be recounted from within purely humanocentric views (as most narratives of capitalism and glob-alization are). The use of the word agency in the expression “geologi-cal agency” was very different from the concept of “agency” that my historian- heroes of the 1960s—E. P. Thompson, for instance, or our teacher Ranajit Guha—had authored and celebrated. This agency was not autonomous and conscious, as it was in Thompson’s or Guha’s social histories, but that of an impersonal and unconscious geophysical force, the consequence of collective human activity.

And that leads to a shift from the Globe to the Planet as the central object of history:

For all their differences, thinking globally and thinking in a planetary mode are not either/or questions for humans. The planetary now bears down on our everyday consciousness precisely because the accentuation of the global in the last seventy or so years—all that is summed up in the expression “the great acceleration”—has opened up for humanist intellectuals the domain of the planetary. As discussed before, even the everyday distinction we make between renewable and nonrenewable sources of energy makes a constant reference, by implication, to human and geological scales of time, to the hundreds of millions of years that the planet would take to renew fossil fuels. Similarly, all talk about there being “excess” carbon dioxide in the atmosphere refers implicitly to the normal rate at which the carbon sinks of the planet take up this gas. Langmuir and Broecker emphasize the critical importance to humans of counting soils and biodiversity among the “nonrenewable re-sources,” not simply fossil fuels.

Note how one of our readings - Langmuir and Broecker - makes its way into Dipesh’s work. I will comment on them later, but this talk about the Planetary gives us an opportunity to channel Bjornerud, who would likely welcome Chakrabarty’s distinction between the human-constructed “Globe” and the deep-time “Planet,” seeing it as a necessary awakening from what she diagnoses as society’s pervasive “time denial” or “chronophobia”. Her core concept of “timefulness”- an acute consciousness of how the world is made of time and our embedded place within it is an essential aspect of Planetary consciousness:

This brave new epoch is not the time when we took charge of things; it is just the point at which our insouciant and raven-ous ways starting changing Earth’s Holocene habits. It is also not the “end of nature” but, instead, the end of the illusion that we are outside nature. Dazzled by our own creations, we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted. As a species, we are much less flexible than we would like to believe, vulnerable to economic loss and prone to social unrest when nature— in the guise of Katrina, Sandy, or Harvey, among others— diverges just a little from what we expect. Averse to the even smallest changes, we have now set the stage for environmental deviations that will be larger and less predictable than any we have faced before. The great irony of the Anthropocene is that our outsized effects on the planet have in fact put Nature firmly back in charge, with a still- unpublished set of rules we will simply have to guess at. The fossil record of previous planetary upheavals makes it clear that there may be a long period of biogeochemical capriciousness before a new, stable regime emerges.

We are time-poor even when we think we are being sensitive to time. The time of the planetary is different from the time of the universe so prized by physics:

Academe, too, must take some responsibility for promulgating a subtle strain of time denial in the way that it privileges certain types of inquiry. Physics and chemistry occupy the top echelons in the hierarchy of intellectual pursuits owing to their quantitative exactitude. But such precision in characterizing how nature works is possible only under highly controlled, wholly unnatural conditions, divorced from any particular his-tory or moment. Their designation as the “pure” sciences is revealing; they are pure in being essentially atemporal— unsullied by time, concerned only with universal truths and eternal laws. Like Plato’s “forms,” these immortal laws are often considered more real than any specific manifestation of them (e.g., the Earth). In contrast, the fields of biology and geology occupy lower rungs of the scholarly ladder because they are very “impure,” lacking the heady overtones of certainty because they are steeped through and through with time. The laws of physics and chemistry obviously apply to life-forms and rocks, and it is also possible to abstract some general principles about how biological and geologic systems function, but the heart of these fields lies in the idiosyncratic profusion of organisms, minerals, and landscapes that have emerged over the long history of this particular corner of the cosmos.

I read this as saying that a ‘longue-duree’ version of Bergson’s ‘duree’ is much needed to analyze the condition of planetarity. I will see if I can get to that next week, but I will round off this week’s excerpt’s with some thoughts on how DeLanda might contribute to our understanding of planetary time. His philosophical project is dedicated to entirely erasing the boundaries between the geological, the biological, and the human, so he’s a fellow traveler of Chakrabarty and Bjornerud:

In a very real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated “stuff” simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear com­binatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes. Rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic material reality, or, in other words, they all represent the dif­ferent ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself. Thus, what follows will not be a chronicle of “man” and “his” historical achievements, but a philosophical meditation on the history of matter-energy in its dif­ferent forms and of the multiple coexistences and interactions of these forms. Geological, organic, and linguistic materials will all be allowed to “have their say” in the form that this book takes, and the resulting cho­rus of material voices will, I hope, give us a fresh perspective on the events and processes that have shaped the history of this millennium.

To reconcile Chakrabarty’s problem of “mismatched temporalities” with Bjornerud’s view of Earth as a tapestry holding traces of all past epochs, DeLanda would point to his concept of non-linear history. He rejects the traditional historical view of a linear “ladder of progress” where new stages replace old ones,. Instead, he argues that historical structures accumulate and coexist at vastly different speeds. The physical world is defined by how fast matter flows: very slow for rocks, faster for lava. Similarly, human history is a mixture of incredibly slow flows (like rigid peasant agricultural traditions) and highly turbulent, fast flows (like volatile urban markets and financial capital). The “feeling of falling” into deep time that Chakrabarty describes is simply the humanist historian waking up to the fact that fast human temporalities are completely nested within and dependent upon the slow, vast, and indifferent flows of planetary matter.

Not very comforting, but perhaps our idea of comfort itself is an artifact of being committed to human history instead of planetary history?

Concluding Thoughts

Synthesizing the perspectives of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Marcia Bjornerud, and Manuel DeLanda - alongside the Deep Time Politics of Frederic Hanusch - reveals a radical, emerging picture of Planetary Time. In this framework, time is no longer a passive, empty backdrop to human events, but a dynamic, material, and multi-layered force - and this is why it’s different from the physicist’s conception of time as well.Here are some key insights from reading these thinkers together:

1. Human history can no longer be viewed in isolation; it has violently collided with the deep time of the Earth system. Chakrabarty notes that we now exist simultaneously in two “now-times”: the short span of human civilization is suddenly entangled with the massive geological and biological timescales of the planet. This creates a severe crisis of “mismatched temporalities,” as our political, economic, and social institutions, which operate on the scale of election cycles or short-term markets, are entirely unequipped to manage human impacts on planetary carbon and geochemical cycles that unfold over millions of years.

2. Radical Decentering of the Human. Planetary Time demands that we abandon human exceptionalism. Chakrabarty distinguishes the “Globe”- a human-centric construct built by the logics of capital, empire, and technology - from the “Planet,” an Earth system that represents a radical “otherness” and operates with profound indifference to human existence. DeLanda takes this decentering even further by entirely erasing the boundary between the human and the non-human. He views human bodies, language, and cities not as the pinnacle of a linear history, but merely as temporary “coagulations” of the exact same matter-energy flows that form rocks, magma, and weather systems. Maybe we need a non-anthropomorphic karmic perspective, where our lives naturally flow into the lives of other creatures and the Earth’s material substrate as such.

3. Earth as a “Polytemporal” Tapestry. In the planetary picture, time is not a single, forward-marching arrow of progress. Instead, reality consists of coexisting structures defined by their speed of flow. DeLanda argues that physical matter flows incredibly slowly for minerals, faster for biomass, and very fast for cultural and economic systems. Bjornerud similarly observes that the Earth is “polytemporal”; the deep past is not lost, but palpably present in modern landscapes, rocks, and our own DNA. In this view, time is not just a measure; the world is literally made of time, and it possesses a wide repertoire of tempos ranging from slow tectonic shifts to sudden catastrophic snaps.

What does this mean for governance? Politically, Hanusch argues this requires the invention of a “politics of deep time” and “multitemporal governance” to deliberately manage the bidirectional interactions between human society and cosmic/geological processes. To align human actions with planetary tempos, we must redesign democratic institutions to last across generations, adopting a “trustee conception of sovereignty” to protect the rights of the unborn and the non-human. As Bjornerud suggests, this might even look like creating new infrastructures for intergenerational governance, such as appointing a “Secretary of the Future” to guide policy.

Channeling Blake and Gilman, we absolutely need a focused planetary institution that governs deep time. What shape should that take?

The Contradiction

The contradiction at the heart of planetarity is the following. On the one hand, the human impact on the biosphere increases by the day, so that our exhaust threatens to warm the Earth to the hottest it’s been in millions of years, and most land mammals are either human beings or animals that we rear for food or other purposes.

There’s no teleology to this ongoing assault on the Earth, but a small part of our technosphere has specialized in the study of the Earth’s processes; the instruments we have invented to capture and kill have been repurposed to study our planetary condition. That study reveals an Earth much older and much vaster than anything humans can control; our presence is a blip in a very long history of several billion years.

One day, we too shall pass.

The more we make humans great again, the more we find out we were never great to begin with. Our arrogant present opens up a vista of deep time and space which we can only gape at in awe. We shouldn’t deny our importance, for without that we will never take responsibility for what we have done; but we should also acknowledge our unimportance in the planetary scheme.

How can we hold both values at once?

Both this month and the next month, through our exploration of time first and space second, is about exploring how exactly the condition of planetarity demands a revision of our self-conception as world-makers in a zoo of other world-makers.

The Third Decentering

But first, let me clear a potential misconception: human self-importance isn’t new and the decentering of the human isn’t new either. Ever since Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and others dethroned geocentrism, we have increasingly come to know that we are just one creature on a planet which is an ordinary planet revolving around an ordinary star in a galaxy which is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. We are a minuscule fraction of the universe and our embedding in the deep time and space of the planet is, on the face of it, smaller than our embedding in the universe.

That’s one way to think about planetarity, but it’s not the right way IMHO. Darwin’s decentering of humanity was different from Copernicus’; both in their metaphysical significance and in the specific scientific inquiry that achieved the decentering. Evolutionary biology is historical and its fundamental question is: what is the process that explains biological diversity as well as the disappearance of some species and the appearance of others? In contrast, celestial mechanics is ahistorical and inquires into the unchanging laws that dictate celestial motion.

What we are at the cusp of today is yet another decentering, that takes aim at the world-making powers of humanity: if we think we can bend the Earth to our will, well we are not the first to do so, and we are not the last. The Earth was formed out of processes much bigger than anything humans can control, and the terraforming of the Earth by microorganisms - literally the air we breathe - is much more important than the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere. Bacteria have always ruled the Earth.

We may be world-makers, but we aren’t the only ones or even the most important. That’s the essence of the planetarity revolution. Isn’t this well known? We know how stars are formed. We know how planets are formed. We don’t know how life first arose, but we do know how early life created the conditions for bags of meat like us to survive and thrive. Is that it? Has the revolution already happened and we are just getting the news? I don’t have a good answer to these questions, though I am inclined to assert that the revolution has started but it’s far from complete.

But as a physicist friend of mine once asked me: it works in practice, but does it work in theory? Or put another way, what does the condition of planetarity mean and how do we think philosophically from within that condition?

My 2c: The contradiction at the beginning of this essay is central to planetary philosophy

PS: “Contradiction” here isn’t a logical paradox, but in the way Marx uses the word, i.e., a system whose activity paves the way to its demise, i.e., an instability built into the workings of the system.

This Month’s Readings

I will be exploring that contradiction in both its temporal and its spatial avatars, with time being the focus of this month’s essays and space the next. My strategy in both months is to juxtapose readings that represent the two sides of the contradiction, i.e., one reading representing the Globe (the human dominated Planet) and the other reading representing the Earth (the Planet beyond the human), but to use a third, philosophical text (or texts) as a connector. The three main readings for this month are:

1. The Climate of History - Dipesh Chakrabarty

2. Timefulness - Marcia Bjornerud.

3. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History - Manuel DeLanda

The first two are books of history and geology respectively, but DeLanda’s book is a work of philosophy; he attempts to digest the nonequilibrium physics and complexity theory that I called the second systems theory paradigm and turn those into philosophy. Did he succeed? I am not sure, but it comes closest to a cybernetic philosophy of time, an account whose shoulders we should stand upon. There are several other books that I would like to cover, but will have to be content to merely sample from:

1. How to Build a Habitable Planet - Charles Langmuir and Wally Broecker

2. Duration and Simultaneity - Henri Bergson.

3. The Politics of Deep Time - Frederic Hanusch.

I am resigned to barely scratching the surface of the “thinking of deep time” and the instruments and institutions we need to do as a society, but that also frees me to pick and choose the passages from these readings that sharpen my thinking (and hopefully yours!) on Time or Space or any other topic.The Planetarity syllabus isn’t objective in that sense, i.e., the most reputable or highly cited readings on these topics, but the books and papers that evoke and augment our collective wisdom on the condition of Planetarity.

Quick note to say that “habitability” intensifies the contradiction between the Globe and the Earth - it brings climate change, deep time governance, multispecies justice and astrobiology into sharp conversation with one another. Human societies have always worried about political order and what happens when it collapses, whether that’s the ‘state of nature’ or ‘great chaos under heaven,’ but habitability is one level deeper - it’s the maintenance of metabolic order, and the governance of earth systems for that purpose. The deepest worry is not death or collapse but extinction. I will cover habitability once I am done with Time and Space, i.e., in two months.

That explains the inclusion of Langmuir & Broecker and Hanusch in this crowd, but why Bergson? His book is over a hundred years old, while the others are contemporary volumes, but Bergson’s idea of time, the “Duree,” is important for our project. Why?

Because the condition of planetarity is qualitative, not quantitative, and yet that condition is a more-than-human condition; it envelops every creature that inhabits the planet with us, and not just that, it has enveloped every creature that has ever existed. There’s no phenomenology to these primordial worlds; their ‘what is it like’ is inaccessible to us, but maybe AI can help translate their worlds into ours one day. Today is not that day. We cannot reduce bacterial worlds to human modes of existence, and yet they are worlds, not markings on a clock or a scale. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities has to be set aside. What are the qualia of planetarity?

Is there a qualitatively rich conception of time that transcends the human?

Not yet, as far as I can tell, but Bergson is a good place to start if we want to learn how to integrate the Globe and the Earth in time. Our conception of the Globe is anthropocentric but qualitatively rich, whether humans are seen as the chosen species of God or the being (Dasein) for whom Being is an issue. The analysis of time as it relates to Being reveals a rich anthropocentric conception of time.

The physicist’s conception of time is reductive in contrast, but has the advantage of turning the clock all the way back to the origin of the universe. Speculative realists and new materialists such as DeLanda have tried to release us from Dasein’s prison while retaining the richness of Daseinic analysis. I was of half a mind to choose Quentin Meillasoux’s “After Finitude“ as the philosophical interlocutor, and I might still include some of his ideas, but DeLanda’s evocation of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and Bergson’s positive conception of time as “duree” strike me as more obviously about time than Meillasoux and a richer engagement with the natural sciences of their times.

Almost every non-modern tradition and culture conceives of the Earth and its creatures as having meaning and purpose; it’s not a standing reserve for our needs. Saying “we are entangled in the planet’s biogeochemical systems” isn’t enough, if it’s merely an entanglement of things - the starting point has to be our entanglement as beings in a community of other beings. At the same time, we can’t be fanciful or descend into superstition - astrology and crystals are not the path forward. So let me repeat my question:

Is there a qualitatively rich conception of time that transcends the human?

The challenge of grasping more-than-human time and space will be not solved in two months; I will be happy if I can surface questions that I can carry over to the rest of this syllabus. We are at the beginning of a long journey and we will lose some guides along the way and pick up others. Theory has a visual bias, of seeing the truth from a distance. In projects such as these, I prefer a circulatory metaphor - of theory as the lifeblood of inquiry, picking up nutrients and waste throughout the body and delivering them to places that can do something with it. Leaning on that metaphor some more: DeLanda and Bergson are pumps that push us along the pipe, while Chakrabarty, Bjornerud, Langmuir & Broecker and Hanusch are organs that supply essential nutrients.

1. Governing the Planet

2. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack”

3. Blake and Gilman’s “Children of a Modest Star”

4. The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman.

The Three Ages of Systems Theory

I am not a historian, but to my untrained eye, there are three ages of systems theory.

The first age, which you might call the age of cybernetics, came around soon after the Second World War, of course, hit its stride during the Cold War and was often tied to geopolitical concerns. This first age led to developments such as game theory and control theory, which were about dropping nuclear bombs on other people, or preventing bombs from being dropped by those other people on you. Whichever way you look at it, the nuclear bomb and nuclear technology were very closely tied to the cybernetic age. That’s age number one. And if I had to think of an institution that’s associated with the cybernetic age, it is the RAND Corporation.

Number two is the age of complex systems. It came into prominence around the time the Soviet Union was collapsing, which is not totally surprising since one of the key challenges for complex systems was grappling with economic globalization, which only became possible when the whole world came under the sway of capitalism. Throughout the sixties and the seventies, we had become more aware of the complexity, not just of economic systems, but of social systems more generally, and outside the human realm, the complexity of the weather, of ecological systems etc. The second age of systems is tied to chaos theory, complexity theory and towards the tail end, about networks - it brought ideas such as complex adaptive systems into the lexicon of many scholars. Physics of the “more is different” kind was the central discipline of the second age, and if there is an institution associated with this age, it is the Santa Fe Institute.

Now we are at the third age of systems, and in my mind the most important one yet. Like the first Cold War, this one also has a magical new technology at its center: AI. But we haven’t forgotten the insights from complexity and network science; the US and China are still intertwined with each other, not separate camps in the manner of the first Cold War. So many of the insights of the second age are also valid. But if I had to think of a ‘key factor,’ the animating force behind the third systems age (the key factor for first one being nuclear war and the second one being globalization) then the key factor for the third is planetarity, of understanding both the robustness and the fragility of life on Earth and how humans are intertwined with the Earth’s biogeochemical systems, and to design machines, institutions and behaviors that promote the habitability of the Earth and the flourishing of all beings who inhabit it. There’s no institution that comes to my mind as the central institution of this third age (perhaps because the age hasn’t dawned yet), but I know the discipline that is at its core: philosophy, properly configured, so that it’s no longer an abstract discipline that lives only in the ivory tower, but also a material practice that reaches out into the world.

Planetary philosophy is the yet to awaken third eye of cybernetics.

Some thoughts on Planetary Philosophy

In one of the most influential dicta of modern philosophy, Hegel declared that “philosophy is its own time apprehended in thoughts”. This assertion, found in the preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, reframed the philosophical enterprise not as a timeless speculation on eternal verities, but as an act of profound historical self-consciousness. For Hegel, to philosophize was to render in concept the essential character of one’s own epoch, to grasp the “inherent rationality” of the institutions - the family, civil society, and above all, the state - that constituted the lived reality of the age. This act of apprehension (German: begreifen) is not a passive reflection but an active, systematic comprehension, a step-by-step intellectual seizure of the logic immanent within the historical world. Hegel’s project was to take the given reality of the modern state and portray it as something “inherently rational,” a task he believed was the definitive philosophical mandate for his era, the “epoch of the state”.

What might a Hegelian seizure of the planet look like?

This Hegelian vision was sharpened and radicalized by Karl Marx. In his “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx famously countered: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”. When read against the backdrop of Hegel’s work, Marx’s eleventh thesis does not represent a simple rejection of apprehension but rather its radical intensification. The German verb begreifen carries a potent ambiguity, meaning both to understand and to seize or arrest. Marx leaned into this second meaning, transforming the philosopher from a mere commentator into an agent of historical transformation. His critique was a demand that philosophy move beyond abstract interpretation and engage in “revolutionary practice”. To apprehend the world, for Marx, was to uncover its underlying economic structures, indict the systems of exploitation they engendered, and catalyze the material, political action necessary to remake it.

This romantic vision of the philosopher as a metaphysical detective - part commentator, part conspirator in history’s unfolding - animated the intellectual and political currents of the nineteenth century. The figure of the ivory-tower thinker was recast as a worldly investigator, tasked with diagnosing the maladies of the age and prescribing the means of its transformation. Planetary Philosophy inherits that romance, viewing philosophy not as a sterile scholastic exercise but as a practice of apprehension dedicated to midwifing collective wisdom in turbulent times.

The Earth itself has entered the frame of philosophy, not as a passive backdrop for human history, but as an active, entangled participant. To fulfill Hegel’s mandate today, i.e., to apprehend our age in thought, is to apprehend the Anthropocene. This task compels a fundamental re-evaluation of philosophy’s core questions, extending its inquiries beyond their traditional humanist boundaries and into planetary horizons, for two centuries after Hegel and Marx, the “time” that philosophy is called upon to apprehend has undergone a profound and startling transformation.

To apprehend our age is no longer to grasp a society, a spirit, or a mode of production alone. It is to confront a new geological epoch (rejected by geologists) defined by the fact of human beings becoming a planetary-scale force, altering the Earth’s climate, atmosphere, biosphere, and geological strata. And the opening into geological time afforded by the anthropocene is a challenge to think philosophically about deep time that’s unfolded for much much longer than humans have existed as a species. We must ask anew: What is being apprehended? Who is doing the apprehending? And by what means is this apprehension to be achieved?

The Planetary Shift: What is Being Apprehended?

The object of philosophical apprehension has undergone a decisive expansion. For Hegel, the object was Geist (Spirit), the unfolding of freedom through the rational institutions of the modern state. His philosophical system was an attempt to comprehend the logic of human history as it culminated in the political structures of his time. For Marx, the object was capital, the system of social relations of production that structured exploitation and alienation under industrial modernity. In both monumental projects, the focus of apprehension remained firmly fixed on the domain of human history - society, politics, and the economy. The non-human world, or “Nature,” was treated as an external stage upon which the human drama unfolded, a collection of resources to be mastered and transformed. A “standing reserve” as Heidegger called it.

Today, this anthropocentric confinement is no longer tenable. The object that must be apprehended is the Anthropocene, along with the Earth as a being (Being?) deeply and irrevocably entangled with human activity. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that the climate crisis forces us to think across two incommensurable but now inseparable registers: the short arc of human history and the deep time of geology. The Industrial Revolution, once understood as an event in the history of human freedom and economic development, must now also be understood as a geophysical event, a turning point in the planet’s climate history. This forces an expansion of apprehension from the human condition to the condition of planetarity (hence this syllabus!).

This shift requires philosophy to develop a new conceptual apparatus, one capable of thinking with the same rigor about the flows of carbon, nitrogen, and silicon as it once did about Platonic forms or Kantian categories. The object of inquiry now includes not just human institutions but forests, oceans, and glaciers; not just human subjects but the vast multitude of beings with whom we share this planet.

Does philosophy - or something like it - have anything to contribute at all?

This is not merely a matter of adding scientific data to philosophical reflection. It represents a fundamental reworking of philosophy’s ontological commitments, demanding that process, relation, and entanglement be treated as primary categories of being. This move is strongly supported by the “new materialist” turn in contemporary thought, which challenges the traditional separation of nature and culture and emphasizes the agency and dynamism of matter itself. The world is no longer a collection of inert objects awaiting human inscription, but a vibrant field of “intra-actions” where human and non-human forces are co-constitutive.

This ontological expansion leads to ethical expansion as well. If philosophy once centered its ethical inquiries on the question, “What is the good life for humans?”, it must now confront a more encompassing question: “What constitutes the flourishing of beings?”. The scope of justice necessarily enlarges from the confines of human communities to the complex domain of multispecies entanglements. Apprehending the Anthropocene means reckoning with the conditioned and interdependent nature of all life within fragile and reactive Earth systems. It demands a metaphysics of material flows, an ethics of multispecies kinship, and a politics adequate to a planet in which the old dualism between society and nature has collapsed. The anatomy of this new apprehension will eventually be articulated through what I have called the five fingers of planetarity - Metabolics, Expanse, Multitude, Technosphere, and Mahayanics - but first, it is necessary to clarify who is qualified to participate in this expanded act of apprehension.

The Widening Circle: Who is Doing the Apprehending?

Just as the object of apprehension has expanded, so too must the circle of apprehenders. Justin E. H. Smith, in his The Philosopher: A History in Six Types, provides a useful taxonomy of philosophical types: the curious natural philosopher, the sage, the ascetic, the gadfly, the mandarin, and the courtier. Each archetype, from the truth-teller to the life-guide to the power-consultant, represents a specific function performed by a particular kind of human within a human society. In the Anthropocene, however, this exclusive and anthropocentric conception of the philosophical subject becomes untenable. Apprehension can no longer be the prerogative of a select few, nor can it be limited to the human species alone.

As I said towards the end of the previous essay, planetary philosophy has to expand itself to include:

1. Many cultures

2. Many beings

3. Many things

The first expansion is to decolonize the practice of philosophy. The wisdom needed to navigate the planetary crisis cannot be sourced solely from the Western canon, which is so often complicit in the very logics of domination and extraction that have produced the crisis. The ecological knowledges of Indigenous peoples, the experiential insights of marginalized communities on the frontlines of climate change, and the diverse philosophical traditions from across the globe must be recognized not as supplementary data points but as essential sources of apprehension. Indigenous philosophies, for example, often operate from a kincentric worldview, which understands humans and nature as part of an extended ecological family, bound by relations of reciprocity and mutual responsibility. The Lakota phrase Mitakuye Oyasin - “all my relations” - is not a quaint metaphor but a sophisticated philosophical and political statement, a practice of apprehension that recognizes the deep entanglement of all beings.

The circle of apprehenders must widen further still, to include non-human beings. This is not a metaphorical flourish but a philosophical necessity. Elephants with their complex social memory, whales with their trans-oceanic songs, octopuses with their distributed intelligence, and trees with their mycorrhizal communication networks are all beings that apprehend the world in their own ways. We must be able to think with them! They are, in a sense, “philosophers of survival, of dwelling, of interdependence.” To include them in the philosophical chorus is to recognize that our own apprehension of the planet is radically incomplete without attending to their modes of sensing, being, and knowing. This move is central to the project of multispecies justice, which seeks to extend political and ethical consideration beyond humans to include the claims and interests of “Earth others.” Donna Haraway’s injunction to “make kin” becomes a methodological imperative for a philosophy that seeks to be adequate to a multispecies planet.

This expansion of the subject of apprehension presents a profound challenge. A purely epistemological approach, which asks how we can truly know what an elephant or a forest apprehends, risks becoming trapped in an unproductive oscillation between anthropomorphic projection and radical skepticism. We must be generous to our fellow creatures. A more fruitful path is offered by the work of philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers and her concept of “cosmopolitics”. Stengers proposes a shift away from the epistemological and metaphysical question “What is true?” to the political question “How do we compose a common world in the presence of those who will bear the consequences?”. From this perspective, the inclusion of non-human apprehenders is not primarily a problem of accessing their subjective experience, but a political and institutional design problem. The task becomes one of creating forums, procedures, and modes of representation - however partial and mediated - that can allow the interests and perspectives of non-human beings to be heard and to matter in collective decision-making. This reframes the question of “who apprehends” from a problem of knowledge to a problem of political engineering. A philosopher who embarks on this project of political engineering at planetary scale should not only read Kant or Nagarjuna or Stengers, but also Uexkull and even that’s not enough: they have to work alongside systems engineers and designers who are building interfaces that connect humans and non-humans. That philosopher is no solitary genius but a connector of perspectives, a choreographer of relations between human and non-human, cultural and biological, ancestral and contemporary voices.

> What are some of the skills this new philosophical planetary engineer must master?

The Limits of the Classical Types and the Need for New Figures

Given the planetary scale of what must be apprehended and the radical widening of the circle of apprehenders, the traditional roles (which I am reframing as skills, for it’s possible to be a gadfly and an ascetic or a sage and a mandarin) of the philosopher prove insufficient for the tasks of our time. While the archetypes identified by Justin E. H. Smith remain vital, their scope is fundamentally limited by the anthropocentric framework within which they were conceived.

Smith’s six types can be grouped into three essential functions: the truth-tellers (the natural philosopher and the gadfly), who investigate the natural and social worlds; the life-guides (the sage and the ascetic), who offer wisdom on how to live; and the power-consultants (the mandarin and the courtier), who advise and navigate the structures of human power. Each of these roles has its place, but none is equipped to grasp the complexities of planetarity. The curious scientist, for instance, may provide crucial data about Earth systems, but often treats nature as a detached object of study, failing to apprehend its agency or our entanglement within it. The gadfly critic may expose social injustices but rarely extends that critique to the ecological foundations of society itself. The sage and the ascetic offer paths to human flourishing that are often disconnected from the realities of ecological interdependence. The mandarin and the courtier, advising the institutions of the state and the market, risk becoming captured by the very logics that drive the planetary crisis.

What is missing are philosophical figures adequate to the scale and complexity of planetary apprehension - roles capable of seeing wholes, designing spaces for collective action, and weaving connections across disparate domains. To supplement the classical repertoire, three new figures for the anthropocene are proposed below:

1. First is The Elephant. This figure represents the philosopher who apprehends wholes rather than parts. Drawing on the parable of the blind men and the elephant, this philosopher understands that it is better to mistake a rope for a snake - to make an error that nonetheless recognizes the presence of a living system - than to miss the animal entirely. In many traditions, including Indian philosophy, elephants symbolize memory, wisdom, and the capacity to bear the weight of time. As a philosophical figure, the Elephant is the midwife of a planetary constitution, capable of sensing the shape of the whole system even when its details are blurred or uncertain. This figure embodies the practice of holding together disparate scales and complex feedback loops, prioritizing systemic understanding over fragmented analysis.

2. Second is The Architect/Designer. This philosopher moves beyond interpretation to the active creation of conceptual and institutional spaces that enable collective action as well as artifacts that give us agency. Like the architect of a city or the designer of a digital protocol, this figure engineers the abstractions that structure possibilities. The challenges of the Anthropocene, say, redesigning cities for multispecies cohabitation or reimagining international law for a changing climate, require a philosophical capacity to think through both the technical engineering challenges and the normative horizons of justice and flourishing and then working with engineers and lawyers to turn those ideas into products and institutions. This archetype bridges the speculative world-making that’s common in science-fiction with actual world-making that The Stack is enabling.

3. Third is The Connector. This philosopher is a practitioner of the most general ecology of thought, dedicated to mapping relations and tracing links across domains, species, and scales. The Connector weaves an ontology of entanglement, while not ignoring fractures and differences where necessary to build coalitions and highlighting divergences where necessary to preserve alterity. This figure brings disparate entities - apples and oranges, scientists and sages, humans and non-humans, algorithms and ecosystems - into conversation, fostering the kind of relational understanding that is essential for navigating a complex, interconnected world.

These new figures are not replacements for the classical archetypes but necessary supplements that expand philosophy’s operational repertoire. Together, they signal a crucial shift in the philosophical mandate: from interpretation to engineering, from contemplation to composition, and from comprehension to constitution. They prepare the ground for the transition to philosophy as planetary engineering, the active and responsible shaping of frameworks for multispecies flourishing on a habitable Earth.

The Planetary Steward: A Philosopher who is not a King

It’s taken me over 3000 words to get to governance, which, after all, has been the topic of this month’s Planetarity Syllabus. Let us return, then, to Plato’s philosopher-king, but reimagine this figure for the third age of systems theory.

Plato envisioned a ruler who had stepped outside the cave to perceive the absolute truth, descending back into the darkness out of a reluctance to rule, but driven by a duty to govern the polis. Yet, the polis was a purely human construct, and Plato’s apprehension remained firmly fixed on the domain of human history. Today, the object of philosophical apprehension is the Planet. The philosopher-king, obsessed with the harmony of the human state, is fundamentally ill-equipped for this.

We do not need a king of the world; we need planetary-stewards. There are about 50,000 elected politicians in the world, and bureaucrats number in the tens of millions. There should be at least as many planetary stewards - my rough rule of thumb is 1% of humanity, i.e., about 70 million, and that’s only the human count - there should be an equal number of non-human planetary stewards too, if not more.

The planetary-steward does not rule over a territory in the traditional sense, because the appropriation of the Earth by humanity is a contradiction. Sticking to human stewards, we need people who perform stewardship functions at every scale - these could be the narrow, functionally defined planetary institutions Blake and Gilman talk about, or a bioregional unit or an urban forest or some other aspect of the planetary city. Much of the bureaucratic aspects of stewardship can be offloaded to machines, for AI excels at many of the functions of the administrative state. The philosopher-steward of the future must work alongside systems engineers and designers who are building interfaces that connect humans and non-humans. The steward here acts as the Architect, engineering the abstractions that structure possibilities , and the Connector, bringing disparate entities - algorithms and ecosystems, humans and non-humans - into a moral commons, and the Elephant holding the entire system together.

Planetary stewardship will not happen overnight, we might not reach 70 million stewards even by the end of this century. And even if we get there in ten years, we will need to invest in our common planetary future for generations, expanding our governing circle steadily to include species that are more and more alien to our ways in each round of expansion. Just as we need planetary institutions that govern spatial challenges - climate change, pandemics etc - we also need new planetary institutions that govern temporal challenges too, to hold our collective responsibility over centuries and more.

TLDR; The planetary steward is responsible for both spatial and temporal flourishing, for being a good neighbor as well as being a good ancestor.

That’s it for governance for now; I am going to turn to time next month, and space the month after that.

1. Governing the Planet

2. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack”

3. Blake and Gilman’s “Children of a Modest Star”

4. The Planetary Steward

Sensing the Planet

In the first line of his introduction to “The Planetary,” Nils Gilman says the planetary is at once a technoscientific object, a philosophical event, and a call to new forms of governance. The earth is the condition of possibility of all life:

Planet Earth thus forms the primal ontological frame within which any human and nonhuman action becomes possible: everything about how we live, work, think, and politic is defined (quite literally) by this planet’s horizons. We cannot live anywhere else, except in a brutally constrained way. (Nils Gilman)

Or as Bratton puts it:

There is an astronomical planetarity and a political- philosophical planetarity, and while they are different, they should both inspire correspondence and mutual reinforcement. There is no workable political-philosophical planetarity that does not define itself through the disclosures of the astronomic understanding of what a planet is, where it goes, and how a sapient species emerges from it. (Benjamin Bratton)

Astronomy pointed inward is a very important new development, a counter-Galilean movement of knowledge. Galileo didn’t invent the refracting telescope, but he was the first to point them to the heavens, and in doing so, revealed the moons of Jupiter; the first celestial objects that were demonstrably orbiting an object different from the Earth. Copernicus had already - successfully - argued that the Earth and the other planets revolved around the sun; Galileo added insult to that injury, showing that the revolution business was a decentralized business. Celestial mechanics has very little to do with the metaphysical importance of humans and everything to do with bare mass. Telescopes and other sensors pointing at the sky have revealed a universe vaster than anyone could have imagined in 1610.

The telescope went hand in hand with equations and other textual technologies that helped write the book of the universe. Print also created the conditions for the nation state, and eventually, the recognition of humanity and its species-being. The “Globe” is the normative and practical ideal that arose out of the printed word: a single humanity whose dignity and freedom is recognized by a system of laws that knows no boundaries, and whose flourishing is engineered by a system of commerce that knows no boundaries either.

Planetary Sapience is a combination of the two; it directs the sensors away from the heavens and inward towards the Earth; it also motivates the expansion of the Globe outwards to include all life. The condition of Planetarity will be revealed in greater and greater details as these two processes continue apace, meeting and intertwining as the years go by. Equally importantly, the computer is a universal technology - it can play the role of the telescope, it can play the role of the book and it can fuse the two into one. The Planet is its preferred object, but our computationally driven planetary organ is not going to sense the Planet from afar, but rather, constitute it by merging the Globe and the Earth.

Unlike “The Stack” and “Children of a Modest Star,” “The Planetary” isn’t focused on governance alone, but its essays give us many clues on how planetary sensing technologies might help us govern the Earth better. Any sensing system that plugs into governance must live in the shadow of James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State,” and the will to power that drives knowledge when it is in the service of governance. The management of non-human populations is often a totalitarian enterprise - I can’t think of worse forms of knowledge than what keeps factory farms and animal testing going - and whatever we do, we shouldn’t create planetary systems that terrorize humans and non-humans in the name of governance.

Speculation: as an added bonus, investigating the planet will also reveal a new cybernetic perspective on computing that contrasts with the symbolic, Church-Turing foundation we have today.

Excerpts from “The Planetary”

Most of the excerpts, though not all, from “The Planetary” have to do with this new planetary sense organ and its influence on the institutions of planetary governance. Since this is an edited volume, I have included the author of each excerpt next to the quoted passage.

The Planetary is at once a technoscientific object, a philosophical event, and a call to new forms of governance. (Nils Gilman)

How do the first and the third interact? How do new forms of governance emerge from better technoscientific understanding? Perhaps planetary sapience is the answer:

This recently evolved exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer for the planet — is fostering fundamentally new forms of what Benjamin Bratton calls planetary sapience, which is stimulating new questions for scientists and researchers. (Nils Gilman).

Arguably, the planetary is where cybernetics finds its fullest expression:

Connected to this methodological holism, the systems theory and neo-cybernetics that subtend much philosophical reflection on the Planetary emphasize not so much alterity as relationality. Here, too, philosophers are taking cues from scientists. (Nils Gilman)

While the philosophers are followers rather than leaders (owl of minerva flies at dusk etc), I think there’s a need for planetary philosophy that absorbs these cybernetic developments and turns them into a ‘first science’ that bridges Western, Eastern and Indigenous philosophical traditions:

Indeed, virtually every traditional religion and Indigenous epistemology, forged before or outside the modernist rupture of the human from nature, has emphasized human embeddedness in nature and the need to respect and sustain the Earth. Thus the Planetary makes room for engaging and integrating Western philosophy with Indigenous and non- Western thought, including Eastern philosophies, as Song Bing’s contribution to this volume attests. (Nils Gilman)

Planetary inquiry needs its own instruments; fortunately, we have been creating them without always intending to do so:

Earth has also very recently evolved an intelligent exoskeleton, a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer capable of calculating how old the planet is and whether it is getting warmer (Benjamin Bratton)

And we use this organ as a guide as we terraform the earth:

Terraforming is a deliberate, practical, political, and programmatic project to conceive and compose a viable planetarity based on the secular disenchantment of Earth through the ongoing artificialization of intelligence and the emergence of a general sapience that conjoins human and nonhuman cognition. (Benjamin Bratton)

Automation and artificiality are key to this planetary future - we aren’t talking about returning to some edenic past:

Automation is a series of resolutions that build on one another, an ever-evolving operating infrastructure that inscribes decision-making power in agents and environments. Earth is, and has always been, an automated platform. In the age of planetary computation and artificial intelligence, automation can and must be harnessed to intentionally enable the development, survival, and governance of planet Earth. (Stephanie Sherman)

Once you start looking at the planet as an artificial entity, it’s natural to import the language of the Stack to describe the Earth even before human entered the scene:

Earth is a platform of platforms. The geologic definition of platform is a flat plane or plate of rock covered by sedimentary strata. Geological platforms, such as Earth’s continents, form by filling in a jagged or inconsistent formation to create a smooth base. These platforms, bounded by oceans or crusts, compose new layers of tectonic stability and homogeneity. Over time, these geologic platforms grow and degrade and migrate and splinter, precipitated by both slow tectonic shifts and accelerated by grand disruptions like volcanoes and earthquakes. (Stephanie Sherman)

The key contradiction/tension in our conception of the planetary (one I will cover in greater depth when discussing Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History” next month) is that between “too human” and “not human at all.” On the one hand, humanity’s impact on the earth’s systems is why planetary consciousness is a much needed development, and on the other hand, that consciousness has to deal with the anxiety that humans have existed only for a minuscule percentage of the earth’s history. The more we embed ourselves in the earth, the more alien it reveals itself to be. Historical time is embedded within planetary time, which cooks historical time, so to speak:

The Planetary also decenters humans entirely from the planetary story, forcing us to reckon with the eons in which nothing like human life was present, with timescales of change that far outlast any conceivable human civilization. Ultimately, it leads us to imagine a planet without us at all, just like all other planets (as far as we know).....History, Chakrabarty maintains, is based on human experience, but one face of the Planetary — and its long temporality — is beyond the possibility of human experience and so can only be grasped in an abstract way that does not permit rich, meaningful phenomenological content. (Milanese)

IMHO, these contradictions will not be resolved within the frameworks of the Western philosophical tradition; Song Bing has some ideas on how East Asian conceptions can help:

A planetary worldview of co-becoming is open to different ways of thinking. The modern notion of the individual, with its strong claim of human subjectivity, enjoys a philosophical brotherhood with dualism, which assumes two contrasting and mutually exclusive realities. The notion of co-becoming, by virtue of its acknowledgement of mutual embeddedness and co-generating processes across all forms of beings, blurs such a binary division. It also challenges one of the cardinal classical laws of thought — the principle of the excluded middle in logic. (Song Bing)

We will need new logics of conviviality, especially when mixing humans and non-humans in planetary institutions:

And when it comes to nonhuman others, we could consider embracing the notion of “companionship” in the spirit of universal camaraderie advocated by Neo-Confucianists. Such a philosophical move calls into question the maximization ethos in the pursuit of material wealth and the exploitation of the biosphere for human benefit, as well as the zero-sum mentality in economics and geopolitics, in favor of the virtues of modesty, self- restraint, empathy, compassion, and mutual support. (Song Bing)

And after all that, we are still left with the challenge of being a good ancestor and governing not just for today or tomorrow, but for a very distant future:

Addressing planetary challenges across scales of cause and effect and time and space requires strong institutions: a new general architecture for planetary governance. (Jonathan Blake)

And even after we have brought animals into the room and settled ourselves to reflect upon the distant future, we will still need new mechanisms for pooling our needs and desires:

The primary body for settling disputes about the allocation of decision rights could be called a subsidiarity assembly. The subsidiarity assembly is an institution that sits outside the general multiscalar governance architecture and makes decisions about the design of the multiscalar governance architecture itself. It is the system’s holder of meta-authority — the authority to resolve collisions between other sources of authority. The subsidiarity assembly, in other words, decides which units should have which decision rights in a domain. (Jonathan Blake)

This is where the planetary sense organ needs to expand to include not just technologies of sensing the Earth’s surface (satellites etc) but also technologies that help enter the worlds of other creatures and communicate with them. The machine learning tools being developed by initiatives such as Project CETI and the Earth Species Project are as important for planetary politics as climate models and geostationary satellites.

Planetary Philosophy

Our engagement with Planetarity proceeds on two registers: in the first, we recognize that all life, including human life, has always been entangled with planetary processes; in the second, we embrace a new self-consciousness as a planetary species:

Earth’s planetary conditions today are the results of ancient processes both extraterrestrial and local, but humans’ condition of planetarity is a philosophical attitude about our bounded position on and within Earth. (Claire Isabel Webb)

What object of study will emerge from these ancient processes and contemporary philosophical attitudes collide? Will it be a single object or will there be multiple planets? It’s too early to tell, as Chou en Lai said to Henry Kissinger (about the French Revolution, or was it about the street protests of 1968?). Both unity and fracture are important aspects of planetary thinking, and if we are willing to embrace contradictions as Song Bing says, we may not have to choose between one planet and many planets, and instead embrace both.

These contradictions along with epistemological challenges arising from planetary organs suggest a turn to “Planetary Philosophy,” a hybrid of natural philosophy and social philosophy, a future first science (though not metaphysics) that precedes the special sciences such as Earth System Science. As I said in an essay on Planetarity as Philosophical Engineering:

Philosophy can no longer be content with reflection alone. It must become a practice of composition — philosophical engineering that builds concepts, institutions, and tools that make the planet livable for all. To think planetarily is not to dream of escape into abstraction, but to craft ways of staying with the world we have made.

Planetary philosophy, as I conceive it, involves thinking with at least three types of sources that have never come together in one inquiry:

1. Thinking with many cultures, i.e., a genuinely cosmopolitan thought that criss-crosses between indigenous, Asian, Western, Latin American and African philosophical cultures; being critical of every tradition, while also being open to all of them.

2. Thinking with other beings: especially non-human creatures. A whale should be a legitimate interlocutor. Perhaps even a bacterium. How else will we sit together in a subsidiarity assembly or another planetary institution?

3. Thinking with other things: AI, for sure, but also rocks and mountains?

The inquiry that emerges from these sources is in service of planetary flourishing:

What forms of knowledge will promote the flourishing of humans and non-humans alike?

Liberal political theory has much to say about how knowledge (say, produced by disciplines such as economics and anthropology) can inform political institutions that promote human flourishing while avoiding the use of the very same knowledge by governments for oppressive purposes. The globe can still be governed the same way, but I believe we need radical new ideas when it comes to expanding the Globe to include the Earth. I have argued on other occasions that we need a “Mahayanic” consciousness regulating the emerging planetary sapience.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhisattva vows not to achieve enlightenment until all beings do so together. Mahayanics is a translation of that vow: the commitment to design for the flourishing of all beings, human and otherwise. To be Mahayanic is to see that one’s own thriving depends on the thriving of others - of oceans, microbes, forests, algorithms, and future generations. It is a compassion protocol, a moral logic inscribed into computing systems.

The only enlightenment worth striving for is shared enlightenment.

1. Governing the Planet

2. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack”

3. The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman.

4. The Planetary Steward

Introductory Note

Like last time, I have way too many notes on Blake and Gilman’s book to cover it from end to end; I have focused my remarks on the principle of planetary subsidiarity, which, along with a call for functionally delineated planetary institutions, is the most important contribution of the book IMHO. At any rate, this is not a book review, but a record of my thoughts as I was reading it. I am going to postpone my reading of the Gilman edited volume on “The Planetary” to next week, since its chapters connect themes raised by “The Stack” and “Children of a Modest Star.”

Narrow Planetary Institutions

Once upon a time, when the Gold Standard reigned over the world, every currency was pegged to gold. If I had gold reserves, it didn’t matter whether my currency was the rupee or the baht or the pound; I could buy something from you as long as I was willing to hand over an equivalent amount of gold to you. No need to convert my currency into dollars and send you a check in that denomination.

It wasn’t a perfect system. Far from it, for what if you didn’t have gold reserves? You were out of luck; when India became independent in 1947, it was owed a substantial amount of sterling debt (about 1.6 billion pounds), most of which Britain refused to pay in convertible hard currency - either gold or dollars - so India was unable to use what it was owed to buy machinery from the Americans, who were the only producers at that time. Then Britain devalued its currency by 30% in 1949, India’s capacity to import also dropped 30%, despite having no say in the decision. By the time the debt was repaid, devaluation and post-war inflation had reduced the value of the sterling debt to a fraction of its original amount. Not only did the British war effort cost India millions of lives (the Bengal famine was in part due to inflation caused by the RBI’s printing money to pay for the war), it perpetuated Indian poverty after independence. That great ‘liberal’ economist, Keynes, was adamant that Britain shouldn’t pay India back right away.

Never forget that the so-called defenders of freedom didn’t bat an eyelid as Indians starved by the millions, and their successors sent bomb after bomb to another defender of freedom committing a genocide of Palestinians in plain sight.

The Gold Standard is gone, and good riddance, but there’s still the dream that trade and finance should be denominated in something truly valuable. Wearing a planetary hat, we might consider pegging currencies to a commodity of some biogeochemical significance. What about carbon? Wouldn’t it be nice if currencies were backstopped by carbon? I thought so, and some years ago, I worked with my colleagues on a piece of design fiction called Carbonomics (now there’s a book on the carbon currencies!). Several iterations and modifications later, it became a private members bill tabled in the Indian parliament, but sadly, it never became the law.

Nevertheless, if adopted, a carbon standard - or a global carbon accounting system - would instantly embed our economies into planetary processes, and a global institution designed to manage that standard (and that standard alone) would be an example of a narrow functionally defined planetary institution that Blake and Gilman (BG henceforth) write about in their book. A carbon standard will likely violate their principle of subsidiarity, for money penetrates every scale from neighborhood to planet and - for example - devaluation of the carbon standard for planetary reasons will have knockdown effects on every village in the world, but that’s all the more reason to take BG’s architectural patterns seriously. Monetary tyranny is one of many forms of long-distance control and a legitimate fear if we ever create planetary economic institutions.

TLDR; The planet needs to be governed as a planet. We need institutions with teeth that can tackle planetary challenges at the only scale they can be tackled: at the scale of the planet.

But how? BG have some suggestions.

Excerpts from BG

In the previous essay on the Stack, we took a winding route to planetary governance, stopping to view several computational scenes along the way. Not so this time; we are going to make a direct assault on the peak, or as BG say:

What would governance look like if our planetary condition was central rather than ancillary to our political self-­conceptions? What issues would become paramount, and how might this change our views?

Which would be a marked improvement over our current situation where

The present global system...was and is designed, therefore, to represent the interests of its member national states in international forums. It is fundamentally not geared toward addressing planetary challenges like pandemics.

I don’t want to keep you waiting for their answer, which they deliver before the asked the question:

The answer that we come to—­a reconstructed governance architecture for the planet, or “planetary governance,” guided by the principle of planetary subsidiarity—­is not meant to provide a quick fix. If realized, it will represent a thorough structural transformation of the means of governance from the largest scale, the planet itself, to hyperspecific, localized scales.

“Children of a Modest Star” isn’t lacking in ambition, but is that ambition realistic? What will it take to make it real? Not the right question; while BG aren’t utopian (“We have not set out to write some “kind of hope- lessly utopian ideal political theory [that] orients us toward an ideal regime that has no likelihood of being brought into being,””), they are also not afraid to be at the bleeding edge (“Yes, we push things further than they are currently willing to go, and critics will likely ​​place us, with Landemore’s good company, “in the camp of . . . utopian and hopeless dreamers.” So be it.”). I read “Children of a Modest Star” as a form of design fiction, painting a future that could come to pass in our lifetimes. Or not. But like the Stack, it’s naming a development that can’t be unnamed once we have spoken it.

The reigning structure of multilevel governance is no longer adequate to the challenges of our current age, an age that some scholars have come to refer to as the Planetary....At the heart of the idea of the Planetary is a holistic vision of the planet as consisting of an almost infinitely complex interlaced and nested array of dynami- cally interacting biological, chemical, energetic, and geological systems.

That vision, which is fleshed out by an unprecedented explosion of knowledge about the Earth’s interconnected systems (Planetary Sapience, which we read about in the previous essay too), leads them to an ethical imperative:

our governance institutions must promote habitability in order to enable multispecies flourishing.

What’s the architecture of these habitability and multispecies flourishing promoting institutions? Much of BG’s book is devoted to answering that question. The key architectural principle is that of planetary subsidiarity:

The principle of subsidiarity states that authority within a pluralistic system of administration should be allocated to the smallest-­scale governing institution capable of managing the task effectively.

And in its planetary avatar:

A key argument of planetary subsidiarity is that the condition of planetarity makes clear that the smallest scale at which planetary issues can be governed effectively is the planet itself.

The language of administration, tasks and scales suggests a form of planetary technocratic management, but BG deny that, though I am not convinced their architecture encourages politics instead of merely tolerating it. Regardless, politics isn’t their main concern:

In the end, of course, there is no escape from politics....And so this book, while primarily concerned with planetary governance, also underscores the need for a new form of planetary politics.

As not-so-utopians, BG want to arrive at the planetary by arguing that it’s possible to extricate ourselves from today’s suffocating governance architecture, of which the nation state is the dominant element.

Indeed, the position of the national state is “so dominant,” observed the sociologist Charles Tilly in 1990, “that anyone who dreams of a stateless world seems a heedless visionary.”

Let’s nod our heads in agreement, but if it’s design fiction we are after, why not start at the planetary scale? Do we still believe we can tame nature and subdue the Earth? Do we still believe we can flatten the planet with no consequences? -- no we don’t, so let’s roll up our sleeves and design for the planet.

First stop: the planet isn’t humanity’s inheritance to squander. If we want to promote habitability and multispecies flourishing, we have to start with a planet that belongs to all of life:

The global of global climate change, by contrast, frames Earth with-out specific reference to humans. This globe references a vast, unified system fueled by solar rays, whose most salient features are physical and biogeochemical processes: fluxes of gases, liquids, solids, and energy on and around the third celestial object from the Sun. This vision of the globe makes plain that Earth is not humanity’s alone.

Schmitt’s nomos is physical (previous essay), with boundaries made clear by walls and fences. But there’s no wall separating humans from other species; even our bodies aren’t ours alone - our gut microbiome contains more bacteria than there are cells in the human body, and the microbiome affects everything from our mood to our metabolism.

Not only is the appropriation of the Earth by humanity wrong, it is also a contradiction.

BG narrate how the planet emerged as a scale of concern, starting with Vernadsky’s Biosphere and with increasing urgency after the Club of Rome’s report on “Limits to Growth.” Here’s a representative sample of their reasoning:

Their prediction of “sudden and uncontrollable decline” generated a shockwave among those accustomed to the seemingly limitless growth of the postwar boom.The report helped to define a set of world-­scale problems and problems of the world itself: it turned attention to “the carrying capacity of this planet” and whether human behavior at a global scale could “overshoot” it. But behind the environmental anxieties that Limits to Growth unleashed was an innovative perspective on the world. The report’s findings presented “the alternatives confront- ing not one nation or people but all nations and all peoples.” That is, they imagined the “planet as a whole.” And by doing so, they opened the possibility for, in the words of an endorsement on the book’s back cover, “planetary planning.”

The culmination of these developments is the crowning of humanity’s domination of the earth as a geological age, the “anthropocene.” Geologists rejected that label in 2024, but the phrase continues to live an unofficial life, and even if the anthropocene is purged from geology textbooks, it opens the door for planetary issues to take center stage in the near future.What are these planetary issues exactly?

Planetary issues are, at their base, defined by four core characteristics: they are critical to multispecies flourishing; they are enmeshed in the history of life on Earth; they operate on scales of time or size that are beyond direct, individual human experience; and they exhibit some degree of human involvement.

BG offer an institutional architecture for addressing planetary issues through their principle of planetary subsidiarity, which is a principle regulating multilevel structures from the local to the planet. They note that multilevel systems aren’t new:

multilevel structures have been increasingly common forms for the organization of governance within national states. Likewise, the current global governance system that coordinates among national states is itself a multilevel system. For nearly every important policy area today, decisions are made and poli- cies are implemented at multiple levels of government institutions and nonstate actors, with varying degrees of authority.

But an important level is missing!

Today, in particular, we lack planetary governance institutions—­that is, institutions tasked with and capable of managing planetary challenges.

We can’t ignore that level because:

planetary institutions are the minimum viable organization for the direct management of planetary challenges. These are institutions with specifically delimited authority at the planetary scale over specific and specifically planetary phenomena.

Absolutely, but does this mean we need to be thinking about a governmental unit at the planetary scale, like the nation state is at the national scale? That would threaten a lot of entrenched interests at the national and sub-national scales, and besides the push-back from the current lot in power, a planetary Leviathan could easily become a tyranny with no hope of exit.

BG’s greatest design innovation, in my opinion, is to turn this challenge - of planetary governance without a planetary government- into an opportunity, and to argue that instead of planetary institutions being units (say a planetary government that has monopoly over violence over the entire planet with sub-units governing the land surface, the ocean surface and the atmosphere) we should conceive of planetary institutions along functional lines - i.e., institutions that perform a narrowly scoped function such as regulating a carbon currency. Instead of appropriating the Earth’s territory (thereby triggering nomos fears in the way Schmitt and Bratton argue), planetary institutions should address one planetary challenge well, and use the principle of planetary subsidiarity to devolve power to smaller scale governance units as needed:

we must learn to prioritize governance functions over governance units....Our argument, by contrast, is to begin with the issue or problem in need of governance and then consider all governance units that might have a role in the matter. The result of this fundamental rethink is that national states should give up many of their governance functions, tasks, and decision rights: planetary functions should move to planetary institutions, while many other functions should move to local institutions. The allocation of authority isn’t a one-­time event, however; the system must be dynamic. Putting function first means recognizing that the appropriate unit or scale can change over time.

In the future, our idea of scale might shift away from its current administrative (district → state → nation) or Cartesian (millimeter → meter → kilometer) units to more ecologically or geophysically relevant units so that a watershed or a bioregion is the right unit of subsidiarity. Once we recognize that functionally defined institutions are not just for humans, but for multispecies flourishing, we will be led towards new entities - for example, should planetary institutions intervene between lions and zebras on the savannah, brokering what constitutes reasonable hunting? Don’t laugh at me, I am being serious!

Planetary institutions cannot and should not be confined to solving anthropogenic challenges.

It reminds me a lot of urban governance, which privileges functional service provision like waste collection and policing and differential of space by function - let’s say business district or green space - over territorial sovereignty. Mayors have a different job from chief ministers and presidents - it’s rare for a mayor to become a national leader in most countries with only three US presidents having ever served as a mayor. If design is what works, as Steve Jobs famously said, we want to design planetary institutions that work and get out of the way, instead of aggregating power. Perhaps what BG should have said, but didn’t is: let’s govern the planet as if it were a city, with citizens of all species.

An added bonus - if these planetary institutions work well as intended, there will be downward pressure to turn some nation state functions into standalone functional units (perhaps organized by bioregion or watershed instead of administrative boundary) and that will turn the state into less of a Leviathan - particularly important at a time when states are becoming more and more intrusive. Planetary institutions and their functionally defined responsibilities might offer a check against unit based tyranny at lower levels.

One can hope, though the desire to dominate never goes away.

Upholding the World

I’ll end these reflections with two thoughts:

First, a short speculation: are humans the right sapients to be running planetary institutions? We have poor attention spans; our capacity to ingest the massive amounts of data generated by satellites and other sensors is extremely limited. In contrast, AI is already good and getting better at the bureaucratic forms of reasoning we need to run planetary institutions - should they be the shoggoths who run the planet? Delimiting artificial institutions by functional goals will also prevent AGI overreach.

Even if these institutions aren’t entirely automated, the Stack must surely be repurposed to respond to planetary challenges? What kind of institution design do we need to make them happen? How do we fit other species into cybernetic institutions where nonhuman beings also have decision making power? What does a cyborg (in the sense of Donna Haraway) bureaucracy look like?

It’s very hard to predict, especially the future, but I just don’t see how to maintain metabolic order without cyborg institutions.

And a longer meditation: in turning the Anthropocene into a geological age, we highlight the deep impact of human activity on the earth’s biogeochemical systems - on nitrogen fixation, on carbon emissions, on biodiversity etc - but we also run the risk of naturalizing our planetary condition, of turning it into something that ‘just happens’ like the ebbing of the tides. Therefore, some authors like to call our age the capitalocene, emphasizing the role of the capitalist mode of production in the various compounding polycrises.

Both the anthropocene and the capitalocene are preceded by a primal act, the domination of the earth by humans; we can’t brush the brutality of this original act of appropriation in the name of a future law, or subsume that will to power under some system of exchange, capitalist or socialist. There’s no doubt that the planet needs governance, and some system of laws - or computational protocols - will constitute and constrain future planetary institutions, but we must first bear witness to what we have done first.

What does it mean to cut down forests in order to plant rows of palm trees or consign billions of sentient animals to a lifetime of cruelty in factory farms? Many centuries ago, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka looked on with horror at the carnage on the battlefield after his armies had defeated his Kalingan opponents. Ashoka did not hide the scale of the violence; instead, he immortalized his remorse in stone. In Rock Edict XIII, he admits that the war resulted in the killing of 100,000 people and the deportation of 150,000 others:

Directly after the Kalingas had been annexed began His Sacred Majesty’s zealous protection of the Dhamma, his love of that Law, and his inculcation of that Law. Thence arises the remorse of His Sacred Majesty for having conquered the Kalingas, because the conquest of a country previously unconquered involves the slaughter, death, and carrying away captive of the people. That is a matter of profound sorrow and regret to His Sacred Majesty.

We cannot erect planetary institutions without first acknowledging profound sorrow and regret for what we have done, of which destabilizing planetary metabolism is the greatest harm. The dharma of the future is metabolic as much as moral. I said this in the essay introducing the syllabus:

We are learning that social order depends on metabolic order: the maintained pattern of planetary and infrastructural flows that keeps a world habitable, and makes flourishing possible - not only for humans, but for the wider community of species entangled with us. Metabolic order is not an ideal. It is a working condition. It is what allows the social world to exist without constantly collapsing into emergency.

Thesis: The maintenance of planetary metabolic order is our primary collective task as a species.

It is literally the foundation for everything else. Habitability is no longer a background assumption. It is something that must be deliberately secured. Flourishing is no longer only a matter of rights, incomes, and recognition. It is also a matter of whether the life-support systems that sustain agency and experience can continue to function under stress.

That is what it is to uphold the world.

1. Governing the Planet

2. Blake and Gilman’s “Children of a Modest Star”

3. The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman.

4. The Planetary Steward

Introduction: A New Machine makes a New World

Last week I had mentioned there were three books in the Governance section of the Planetarity Syllabus - Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack,” Blake and Gilman’s “Children of a Modest Star,” and “The Planetary” edited by Gilman. Today’s essay is a response to Bratton alone - I have way too many notes on The Stack to also cover the other two books in one essay. In fact, I have so many notes that I am going to stop at the Fourth Chapter “Earth Layer” - where the Stack meets the Planet. The other two books will be covered in a subsequent essay later this week.

The word “response” should give you a clue that my essay ( and future Planetarity Syllabus essays) are less about representing the authors’ ideas faithfully and more about the thoughts they evoked in me. I am a fanboy - a book is in the syllabus only because it has influenced my thinking on topics close to my heart. I want to be fair to the syllabus authors’ ideas and acknowledge how they have influenced my thinking, but I am also in a “good artists borrow, great artists steal” frame of mind.

If I had to nominate a concept for the ‘most important concept of the last 500 years’ prize, I would pick the machine. Machines, mechanisms and their cognates influence every single thing we do, from how we think about nature to how we run our societies and how we produce art. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are all mediated by the machine.

The machine isn’t an Aristotelian category, but rather a graded, family resemblance category of the kind Eleanor Rosch has researched over the decades. As a graded category, its prototypes have changed over time. Brief introduction to Rosch’s ideas below:

In the classical view, a category is like a digital switch: something is either a bird or it isn’t. In Rosch’s view, membership is graded (analog).

• The Prototype: The “center” of a category is the prototype - the clearest, best example of that concept. For the category Bird, a robin is a prototype. It has all the salient features (feathers, flies, chirps, small).

• Fuzzy Boundaries: As you move away from the prototype, membership becomes “fuzzier.” A penguin is technically a bird, but it is a “bad” example because it doesn’t fly. It sits on the periphery of the category.

• Family Resemblance: Members of a category don’t share a single defining definition; instead, they share a network of overlapping similarities (a concept Rosch adapted from Wittgenstein).

Every shift in mechanical prototype has accompanied changes in our intuitions about collective life, of society, of nature etc. Once upon a time, the clock was the prototype; the Newtonian Universe dominated science for a couple of hundred years. Clock-like military discipline can be seen in parades across the world to this day.

Then came the Engine. The steam engine and the factory led to Marxian ideas about production being the most important principle ordering society, with changes in the mode of production leading to changes in social structures. The Dark Satanic Mills that Blake railed against gave us a glimpse of automation but they were a far cry from the Dark Factories dotting the Chinese Landscape today. That needed the development of the computer, which is the most general idea of mechanism that exists today. Our understanding of computation started in mathematics, but the computer escaped its formal confines a while ago, and now it influences every aspect of society.

We don’t (yet) have a computational ordering principle that can compete with production as the reigning principle of collective life. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack” is the first book I have read that gives me confidence that it’s possible to theorize collective existence on computational grounds. It’s a difficult book; it’s a long book, and it’s on occasion infuriating. I have disagreements with many of its claims, and as a result of the explosion of AI, I think the Stack has been superseded by Intelligence as the core computational idea (or even better, the generic term “Compute”), but Bratton has named something that can never be unnamed, even if the moniker changes. That’s why it’s an important book and essential to the Planetarity Syllabus.

The next section is a sampler of my notes on the first hundred thirty odd pages of The Stack.

Snippets of the Stack

We are all aware that in the historical blink of one’s eye, computers have emerged like a Godzilla made of sand and upended everything. But the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk and it wants to know: what does this computational coup mean? The first answer is that there’s no logic or grand design to this coup; it’s an accident that’s emerged from a series of technological, design, economic and political choices.

scrambled territories, institutions, constitutions, sovereignties, citizenships, hard- wares, softwares, protocols, interfaces, databases, patterns, platforms, cities, muscles, skins, organs, failing presumptions, exotic refrains, domains, settlements, penultimate boundaries....As such, any design authorship must understand that the dynamics at work now are—for better and worse—simultaneously and interchangeably both futuristic and archaic, at once both technocratic and theocratic.

But the Owl won’t be satisfied with this answer, for this accidental Godzilla, once created, has a discernable structure. Not one that can be captured by a definition; that would be weird after I dissed the Aristotelian way in favor of graded categories at the outset. I am so convinced Stacks are a cognitive category that I would have rejected Bratton’s definition even if he had provided one. But the Stack isn’t formless:

this book proposes a specific model for the design of political geography tuned to this era of planetary-scale computation. It works from the inside out, from technology to governing systems....To do this, it draws on the multilayered structure of software, hardware, and network “stacks” that arrange different technologies vertically within a modular, interdependent order.

Instead of a definition, Bratton gives us an architecture (wearing my cognitive hat, I would call it a schema) that inscribes stacks on to our world:

The Stack, as examined here, comprises six interdependent layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User....The scenario described in the chapters to follow, and appearing before us in the real world, can be summarized as one in which Users, human or nonhuman, are cohered in relation to Interfaces, which provide synthetic total images of the Addressed landscapes and networks of the whole, from the physical and virtual envelopes of the City, to the geographic archipelagos of the Cloud and the autophagic consumption of Earth’s minerals, electrons, and climates that power all of the above.

This architecture is nothing like that of the State - in whose schema one might see entities such as citizen, boundary, parliament etc. What happens when the State absorbs the Stack (or is it the other way around?): when I engage with the India Stack, am I a user or a citizen? In principle, the latter, but in practice, the former. I interface with the UPI system with the Aadhar card serving as an address, and then the transaction goes off into the cloud. Citizenship is, at best, an authenticating mechanism in this interaction, not a bearer of rights. As it so happens, most of these transactions happen within the geographical boundaries of India, but surely that doesn’t have to be so. The nation state might soon become a graded category, with the virtual and the physical layers coinciding at the prototypical center of the category, but with tendrils that spread across the world. These tendrils don’t have to be digital either; consider China’s OBOR initiative - to the extent that a Pakistan or a Zambia is tied to Chinese supply chains with no economically viable alternatives, one might say that the infrastructural sovereignty of the China Stack weakens the territorial sovereignty of seemingly independent nation states. Bratton argues the Stack’s usurpation of territorial sovereignty doesn’t turn space into an abstraction. Far from it.

But even as strange geographies corrugate, fracture, and smear worldly scale and tempo, the ground isn’t somehow evaporated into virtual information flux; to the contrary, we are brought to a certain end of nonplace. For this, a different kind of placefulness is reestablished, one that is not the organic inverse of artificial abstraction, but an experience of place as one resonant scale within a much larger telescoping between local and global consolidations.

The telescoping between local and global consolidations triggers the thought that the Stack is a Sheaf in the mathematical sense of that term - layers of data that sit on top of a location that can spawn new global invariants. I think geometry of the sheaf-like variety is at the heart of the stack - if I had more time, I would recast the six layer architecture in those geometro-topological terms. Raincheck. Bratton argues that nomos of the cloud both builds upon and supplants the earlier nomos of territorial appropriation:

The Stack model is also perhaps also a contemporary version of what Schmitt called the nomos, and perhaps it is what retires the Schmittian nomos altogether. This slippery concept refers to the historically evolving structure of the world order (more specifically for him, an Earth-order) and the corresponding partitioning of political space according to which sovereign entities are constituted. Is there a nomos of the Cloud?

I have a different take - geometrizing the Stack would also make it continuous with the territorial nomos we inherit from the Westphalian era, which is inherently spatial. The virtual thickening of the Earth’s surface using sheaf-like structures is a model of the stack worth fleshing out. Raincheck once again.

Almost done with these excerpts - there’s a lot more where it came from. Before I move on to the next section, I owe you an explanation - ‘nomos’ has been mentioned several times without saying what it is. Bratton borrows the term from Carl Schmitt:

Schmitt defined nomos as “the Greek word for the first measure of all subsequent mea- sures, for the first land appropriation understood as the first partite and classification of space, for the primeval division and distribution, is nomos....Nomos is described as prior to every legal, economic, and social order;it is constituted by appropriation, distribution, and production, and only through this can it move from the particular to the universal: from arbitrary territorial capture, to representations of spatial delineation and to a geopolitical order.

Ted Chiang and others have argued that the fear of AI is really the fear of capitalism, but I wonder if we need to take a step back, that the Stack’s nomos lies one layer or more below the layer that’s captured by capital; we might be apprehensive about tech’s capture of society but the AGI-pilled fear of being turned into paper-clips isn’t coming from capitalism but an earlier appropriative stage - the Columbian conquest that precedes settler colonialism.

What do you think?

Here’s what I think: we are in the very early appropriative stage of the Stack whose acts of violence may yet be absorbed by existing political structures or destabilize them so much that they fall apart. There’s also a third alternative related to the second: that the Stack opens up the possibility for planetary institutions of the kind we will read about in Blake and Gilman - they have to be computation forward, for how else would we form them?

Stacking the Planet

The will to power that Schmitt describes as the ‘nomos’ precedes every form of settled order. It also overflows those settled orders. For the last seventy five years, we thought the nation state order would contain our desire to dominate, and perhaps Pax Americana did that for a while (don’t ask the Vietnamese or the Afghans), but the Stack was digging into the innards of the earth this entire time, releasing every demon like Pandora’s Box. Bratton says:

there is no Stack without a vast immolation and involution of the Earth’s mineral cavities. The Stack terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices and spitting up mobile phones.

Kate Crawford’s “Atlas of AI” has a thorough analysis of the vast immolation and involution of the Earth’s mineral cavities that goes into the making of the Stack. The Stack - just to be clear, the actual megastructure we have created, not the book - gives off a strong Computational Leviathan vibe, though Bratton doesn’t cite Hobbes much. “Hobbes” occurs three times in the book of which only one is in the text, and “Leviathan” also occurs three times in the book of which only one is in the text, but just as the nation state was the consequence of a series of accidents and appropriations, so is the Stack. These accidents aren’t cheap; we wouldn’t be talking about “Extinction Rebellions” without the orgy of violence that accompanied the nomos of the Stack. Fortunately, there’s still some hope left at the bottom of the box, for:

There’s no Earth without the Stack.

There are at least two ways of reading this statement. There’s a deep history version, which gives Lovelock and Margulis’ Gaia a computational twist. All life and all intelligence is computational (most recently argued here), and the self-regulation of Earth Systems that makes life possible is at heart a computational process.

Many things process information algorithmically and could be said to “compute” in a meaningful sense (DNA and RNA, for example) without also demanding that we must see in them the reflection of our computing machines. We might even assume that the “next machines” (the ones that come after planetary-scale computation) will look less like today’s computers and more like biology itself.

There’s also a recent history version, for without the airborne mapping of the planet’s surface that was then intensified by undersea sensors and satellites revolving around the Earth, we wouldn’t understand the Earth as we do today, including the anthropogenic origins of climate change. Sensors and simulations are the vast machine that makes the Earth as we understand it. We will read about this more in the context of planetary sapience, a theme prominent in the other two books.

Our emerging planetary consciousness is a form of self-understanding that presupposes the Stack. The previous information technology that led to a new self-consciousness was print - the spread of print culture led to novels and national literature, and along with news media, it led to national consciousness and to a larger conception of humanity itself. When Shylock says to Salerio, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”, we resonate with his invocation of our common humanity, but I didn’t hear those words spoken on the stage at the Strand, but in a classroom in Delhi, where I read them on a page. Stories have traveled across the ages, but it is print that bound us into a single species-being.

Might computation - as the stack, as compute, as something else - bind all life together? It is very hard to predict, especially the future, but I have a strong bias towards computational institutions being the missing link.

Conclusion: The Metabology of the Stack

The Stack is both algorithmic and material; we can’t ignore either its informational or energetic metabolism, or as Bratton says:

The Stack is a hungry machine, and while its curated population of algorithms may be all but massless, their processing of Earthly material is a physical event, and therefore the range of possible translations between informa- tion and mechanical appetites has another limit that is not mathematical but defined by the real finitude of substances that can force communication between both sides of this encounter.Furthermore, like any megamachine the Earth layer is as socially constrained as it is technologically configured, and so there are political economies of Turing machines that are only accessible through misaligned and uneven hierarchies of geography, energy, and programmability.

If the Stack is the accidental Godzilla that has emerged from our technological choices, then Metabology is the discipline required to tame it before it consumes the world. Bratton argues that the Stack “terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices”, a vivid description of a machine that is deeply entangled with the Earth’s geology but indifferent to its habitability. This is precisely where the concept of the Stack must meet the demands of Metabolic Order. As I said in the introduction to the Planetarity Syllabus:

The maintenance of planetary metabolic order is our primary collective task as a species.It is literally the foundation for everything else.

Today’s AI enhanced Stack is a colossal engine of Prediction Metabology. It excels at sensing, modeling, and steering behavior through data, turning uncertainty into managed risk. However, prediction is insufficient if it is not coupled with the material capacity to maintain life support systems. The Stack provides the protocols that write the constitution of our society in practice, but currently, those protocols are optimized for extraction and engagement rather than the maintenance of planetary metabolic order.

To align the Stack with the needs of the Planetary Age, we must reorient it towards an institutional design where computation serves as the nervous system for planetary repair. The Stack offers the sensing and coordination capabilities required to manage carbon budgets, biodiversity, and energy flows at scale. It should be the infrastructure for the nested ecology of governance I call for in Metabology.

TLDR; Computational institutions must also be metabolic institutions.

1. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack”

2. Blake and Gilman’s “Children of a Modest Star”

3. The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman.

4. The Planetary Steward

If you’re a knowledge worker like me, you have no idea of our earthly condition. I don’t gather or hunt my food, the water I drink comes out of a faucet and the air I am breathing right now is heated in my basement before it’s piped into my home office. When I fall sick, I pop a pill. I am insulated - some might say alienated - from the vagaries of the flesh by an interlocking series of technological systems.

In short: my life is mediated.

That’s A-OK with me. I am no homesteader, I have no interest in going off the grid, and any attempt by people like me to ‘go back’ is a posture, not a program. Nevertheless, if mediation is OK, alienation isn’t. If we are to survive as a species, and not cause untold suffering to other species, we need to embrace the condition of Planetarity. Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, claimed the history of Western Philosophy was a history of the forgetting of Being, that we got lost in the trees of beings and missed the forest of Being as such. He dedicated much of his life to the recovery of the meaning of Being.

Did Heidegger go far enough?

What if history itself - not just the history of Western philosophy - is the history of forgetting the Planet, of treating nature as a Standing Reserve (to use a Heideggerian term)? What if the historical Time in ‘Being and Time’ (Heidegger’s masterpiece) is woefully inadequate?

Can we think our way beyond history into geological time?

We can’t grasp the planet through thought alone, but thought has a role, and for thought to play that role, philosophy has to be rethought from the ground up. Philosophy’s grasping the human condition (beginning with the Axial Age across many cultures) has to be replaced with its grappling with the planetary condition. I don’t know how that phase transition in thinking will happen, but I know it needs to.

Now for some logistics:

Grasping our planetary condition is a hyperproblem (more on hyperproblems here), and we will have to bring many lenses to the condition of Planetarity. The goal of the Planetarity Syllabus is to cover a variety of lenses, digest their insights, and bring those digested insights to bear on our understanding of Planet, in the manner Heidegger attempted with Being. I will cover one lens a month for a total of 10 lenses (Feb - Nov) and a final synthesis at the end of the year. Each lens will be scaffolded by a cluster of representative readings. I am planning to write four essays per lens:

1. Essay One: General remarks that lay out the lens and its distinctive features and a gesture towards the readings for the month. (Today’s essay is an example)

2. Essay Two: introducing the the individual readings within the lens.

3. Essay Three: connecting the readings explicitly with one another and abstracting blended concepts (for conceptual blending see Fauconnier and Turner).

4. Essay Four: present a partially digested take on the lens as a whole, building upon the blended concepts in Essay Three. If conceptual metabolism is a cow, then Essay Four is the cud after it’s made its way through the first of four stomachs.

Month One: Planetary Governance.

At the very beginning of Asimov’s Foundation series, Gaal Dornick swoops in from the edges of the galaxy to the imperial capital, Trantor. As his ship orbits the heart of the empire, Gaal is eager to see Trantor, but the viewport is closed during the final descent. The officer who gives Gaal the bad news suggests he take a space-tour after arriving, just as you and I might hope on a tour bus in London or New York. Trantor is a planetary city of fifty billion people, a world that has been paved over by the Empire.

The Planetary City, or the ‘Ecumenopolis‘ as the Greek Urban Planner Constantinos Doxiadis (fun fact: Doxiadis planned Islamabad, just as Le Corbusier did so for Chandigarh) called it, is a common trope in Science Fiction; an entire planet remade as urban settlement. Doxiadis imagined urban areas expanding and merging over time -from cities → metropolitan regions → megalopolises- until they form a global “world city”. The Ecumenolopis is the ultimate realization of the Globe as universal human settlement. What it implies in practice or as thought-experiment:

• Continuous built environment + infrastructure across continents (transport, energy, data, logistics).

• Functional integration: even if there are parks, farms, deserts, and protected zones, they’re managed as parts of one urban system

• Planetary-scale governance problems: water, waste, food, disease, climate, inequality, surveillance, mobility

• A new ecology: not “city vs nature,” but a thoroughly engineered biosphere, whether humane and resilient or brittle and extractive

In Foundation (the new TV series inspired by Asimov and only loosely based on the books), Trantor is a gleaming blur of metal and glass, with manicured gardens in the style of Versailles adding drops of green to a mass of silver. Does the Ecumenopolis have to be a monument to metal and stone, colonized at every scale by human artifice? Could it be different, offering room for the nonhuman multitude alongside humans and their artificial creations? An alternative imagination of the Planetary City as ‘Gaiapolis’ might look a lot more like the Earth than like a city, except it too would be crisscrossed by the structures of governance of an urban sort, subdivided into functional departments, some of whom might be tasked with biodiversity just as today’s cities attend to water or waste.

IMHO, conceiving the planet as a city is the only way to govern it as a whole.

Why Now?

The emergence of the Planet as a plausible unit of governance (the largest one can imagine today) is both necessitated by the compounding climate and ecological crises, and made possible by the interconnected information and energy technologies. Additionally, planetary politics is the only candidate for an inspirational politics of the future; its competitors such as international politics are barbaric - the arena of “The Strong do what they can while the Weak suffer as they must” - or in the case of national politics, irredeemably compromised; it’s hard to shake off one’s cynicism about national politics with their capture by corporate and sectarian interests.

A mass planetary movement that expresses solidarity with all living beings is the only struggle worth having today, but for that to happen, we need planetary institutions that help create the arena for planetary politics. Planetary institutions need not precede mass planetary politics; chances are they will arise in parallel, but every institutional development will likely create space for new political developments. I would be surprised and saddened (though I won’t be alive to see it) if there weren’t some form of planetary politics with wide appeal by the end of this century.

Now is the time to turn the plausible into the probable to use Dunne and Raby’s framework for speculative design.

One process that straddles thinking and acting is ‘governance’ and ‘government.’ The diversity of human needs and the fear of anarchy makes the case for institutions of governance, even if they have a tendency towards tyranny and elite capture. The Nation State is, by far, the most important unit of governance today, but it’s not that old and in the post-War era, the nation state has learned to live with transnational institutions - such as the WTO - that constrain the state’s capacity to act as it pleases. Nevertheless, attempts to go beyond the nation state towards world government have been an abject failure. Is planetary governance plausible? It’s too soon to tell, but it’s clear to me that the nation state isn’t the organizational form for governing the planet.

What then?

Maybe we should let a benevolent AI run the earth while we stick to mismanaging human affairs. The idea has some appeal, but I have a feeling Rule by Robot is not going to be popular as long as humans are running the show. Our ASI overlords don’t need my counsel, so let’s let the robots wait in the wings. Essay two in the Planetary Governance series is on three books bursting with ideas about governance at the planetary scale:

1. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack“ - now out in a 10th Anniversary edition.

2. Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman’s “Children of a Modest Star.”

3. “The Planetary,” a volume edited by Gilman, with essays by Gilman, Blake and Bratton among others.

The three books have a common genealogy in the Berggruen Institute, the institution most committed to Planetarity of any I know. What I like most about conceptions of the Planet coming out of Berggruen:

1. The rejection of a sentimental, environmentalist framing of the condition of Planetarity, in a manner similar to Latour and his approach to Gaia.

2. The embrace of computation as the code through which we grasp the planet. As I hinted at in my essay on Metabology, computation is important for planetary governance because, unlike the law, it’s executable. A constitution can’t regulate a smokestack directly, but a protocol can.

When taken together, these two stances help us arrive at surprising conclusions, such as the emergence of AI isn’t a sideshow to the ongoing ecological and climate crises, but an essential component in the condition of Planetarity. At the risk of massive oversimplification, Blake and Gilman offer arguments for new planetary institutions with the power to regulate and enforce carbon emission reductions, and Bratton’s Stack offers us a new computational architecture/grammar for these institutions. The merger of the two points towards Cyborg institutions of the near future.

I will reflect on this merger and more in Essay Four, but I am getting ahead of myself; I want to let the readings speak before I offer my take.

Of course.

I have a different POV: writing for reading (WFR). I can’t read until I have written enough that I have a toolbox of concepts and ideas to which I can fit what I am reading. Of course, the reading will modify those concepts, sometimes drastically, but without a strong yet flexible point of view of my own, I am in danger of being subjugated by the author’s ideas.

Which I don’t like. In order to read a lot, I have to write a lot.

This essay sets the stage for planetary and metabological WFRs of some key contemporary texts; I am going to create a foundational syllabus for Bhumics, which will have everything from the ancient to the modern. The syllabus should be useful for everyone who cares about a living planet; my take on the texts in it is of course, my own. As of this writing, I want to sample contemporary (i.e., written after 1945) texts along three dimensions:

1. Space: expanding our political imagination from the social to the planetary requires us to open the borders of that imagination - both literally, as in dissolving national boundaries and including the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere and the atmosphere in our idea of ‘territory,’ and metaphorically, in including nonhuman species and their ecological worlds as spaces that deserve our care. Representative texts: Staying with the Trouble, Children of a Modest Star, When Animals Speak.

2. Time: An equally, if not more, important challenge is to imagine ourselves as inheritors of a very long history, a history in which humans are recent actors and of governing not just for today or tomorrow, but for centuries and millennia and more. Representative texts: The Climate of History, Timefulness, Long Problems.

3. Speculation: expanding our spatial and our temporal horizons will need new sources of data, but also new sources of imagination. Or to put differently; failures of the imagination,of possibilities we can reasonably inhabit are as likely to hold us back as greed and violence. Representative texts: Speculative Everything, A Pattern Language, Wonderbook.

I will be commenting on these books and more in 2026, starting with a review of Gilman and Blake’s “Children of a Modest Star” in a couple of weeks. But in the spirit of WFR I am starting this syllabus series with a framing essay (see below - very long, sorry!) on metabolic order. The key claim, which will be repeated in the essay as well:

The maintenance of planetary metabolic order is our primary collective task as a species.It is literally the foundation for everything else.

Metabolic Order

For most of history, thinkers were concerned about the breakdown of social order. It’s no surprise that doctrines of harmony and centralized authority arose in China during the warring states period. A harsh government is preferable to the war of all against all, as Hobbes might say. Sometimes the source of disorder lies beyond the human - an earthquake or a flood or a drought might devastate a land, and people might reach for the hand of a wrathful God for an explanation.

For the most part, the modern era hasn’t had to worry about the ground beneath our feet or the clouds in the sky. Whether you begin with Hobbes and the state, Smith and the market, Weber and the bureaucracy, or Marx and the struggle over production, the basic assumption remains remarkably stable: the world is given, and the challenge is to coordinate human beings within it. Institutions are the scaffolding of that coordination. They secure legitimacy, enforce contracts, allocate resources, stabilize expectations, and keep conflict within a tolerable range. Even when these institutions fail, the failure is usually described in social terms: corruption, capture, inequality, alienation, polarization, administrative decay. When Gandhi blamed the earthquake in Bihar on the evils of untouchability, he was roundly criticized for being superstitious.

Our imminent condition of Planetarity forces a different starting point. Geology has become a matter of life and death. We are now recognizing that social order sits on a deeper stratum of planetary processes; when they start crumbling, our social institutions will lose a foundation they took for granted. Biogeochemical stocks and flows are the conditions that make any society possible in the first place. Stable climate patterns. Functioning water cycles. Fertile soils. Reliable energy systems. Tolerable air and ocean chemistry. Living ecosystems that provide pollination, disease regulation, carbon storage, and disease regulation. A planet that can absorb waste without flipping into a new regime. A built environment that can keep bodies alive through heat waves and storms.

For a long time these conditions were “there” in the background, not because they were metaphysically guaranteed, but because the Holocene’s stability made them feel like a permanent stage. The stage is now wobbling. And when the stage wobbles, every social drama becomes a different kind of drama. We are learning that social order depends on metabolic order: the maintained pattern of planetary and infrastructural flows that keeps a world habitable, and makes flourishing possible - not only for humans, but for the wider community of species entangled with us. Metabolic order is not an ideal. It is a working condition. It is what allows the social world to exist without constantly collapsing into emergency.

Thesis: The maintenance of planetary metabolic order is our primary collective task as a species.

It is literally the foundation for everything else. Habitability is no longer a background assumption. It is something that must be deliberately secured. Flourishing is no longer only a matter of rights, incomes, and recognition. It is also a matter of whether the life-support systems that sustain agency and experience can continue to function under stress.

Do you accept this shift?

1. No I don’t. Tell me how you’re planning to address the permanent existential risks that stem from that refusal. It doesn’t matter if the threat is nuclear weapons or climate change or a planetary pandemic - species wide existential risk is our lot as long as we refuse to recognize the condition of planetarity. The more we ignore metabolic order, the more extinction becomes possible.

2. Yes, I do! Those of us who recognize the importance of metabolic order have it scarcely better, for a consequence follows almost immediately: all our inherited institutions are misaligned.

The modern state is designed to manage territory, legitimacy, and security. The market is designed to allocate through price. The bureaucracy is designed to routinize decisions, reduce arbitrariness, and scale governance. All of them can help with metabolic stability, and in practice they will have to. But none of them were built with habitability or life-support as their explicit mission. Their reflexes - growth as default, extraction as baseline, “externalities” as someone else’s problem, short time-horizons baked into incentives - are increasingly at odds with a world of ecological limits and cascading risks.

There’s the “Planetary Boundaries” literature, which embeds human society as a circle inside the larger biosphere, on which it depends. As of today, we have breached six out of nine critical boundaries, which is troubling, to say the least. However, I am not a fan of ‘boundary logic,’ which maintains a separation between the human and the non-human. There’s no “safe operating space for humanity,” no social inside surrounded by the planetary outside: the planet is everywhere.

So the Planetary Age is not merely a new set of policy problems for old institutions. We will need a new class of institutions whose purpose is to produce, reproduce, and maintain metabolic order - to sense stresses early, coordinate response, repair breakdowns, and keep vital systems within safe bounds. And these institutions cannot exist only “at the top,” the planetary frosting on the social cake, because metabolic order is inherently multi-scale. It is kept or broken in neighborhoods (drainage, waste, heat islands, local water bodies), in cities (air quality, mobility, energy demand), in regions (watersheds, agriculture, grids), in nations (industrial policy, land use, extraction), and at the planetary level (carbon budgets, biodiversity protection, ocean governance). The form we need is not one monolithic sovereign, but a nested ecology of governance: structures that can act locally while remaining legible to planetary limits.

The Leviathan won’t save us, even if he wears a green cape.

Once habitability and planetary flourishing become primary, politics and economics can no longer be thought of as decisions and struggles over distribution within a stable world. Whatever comes next, and whether we call it politics of economics or something else (my name for it is Bhumics, as you know), it will be contest over the constitution of the world, struggles over whether the world can remain livable, and over the design of the institutions that can keep it so.

That is the doorway into what I call metabology.

Why ideology is no longer enough

In the realm of ideology, politics is largely a matter of beliefs. An ideology offers a picture of the good society, an account of how power should be organized, and a moral vocabulary for identifying enemies and allies. It’s easy to convey the struggle in simple terms: the means of production should be socially owned; markets should be free; the nation must be secured; growth must be maximized; inequality must be corrected; tradition must be protected. From these maxims, we derive policy goals. We assemble coalitions. We win elections. We write plans.

Consider a familiar example: a commitment to cheap, abundant electricity as a social good. From an ideological stance - say, a socialist one - electricity is necessary for dignity and participation, so the state should ensure universal access. A Planning Commission incorporates this into a national development program. Targets are set. Subsidies are announced. A new slogan enters public life: power for all.

And then the slogan meets the grid.

On paper, the ideology is coherent. But the grid is not a paper object. It is a system of generation capacity, fuel supply, transmission bottlenecks, transformer failures, billing cycles, theft, demand spikes, maintenance schedules, dispatch priorities, debt, and politics. It is a living system that must be kept alive every day. And every day, the system encounters scarcity and friction.

Who gets power when there isn’t enough? Not “the people” in general, but the feeder that has a hospital on it, or the feeder that serves an industrial client that pays on time, or the feeder whose local office has the right relationships. A subsidy exists on paper, but in practice it becomes a tariff category, a form, a meter type, a billing algorithm, a disconnection policy, a complaints queue. A promise of cheap electricity becomes a choreography of procurement rules, payment cycles, maintenance routines, emergency exemptions, and load-shedding rosters.

This is not a marginal detail. This is the point at which the real constitution of society shows itself - not the constitution written in founding documents, but the constitution written in procedures and protocols. That is why ideology so often feels like it “fails” in practice. It doesn’t fail because the ideas are necessarily wrong. It fails because ideas do not move matter. However, protocols do: unlike writing, computing is a technology that both points and pushes.

Metabology is a name for this middle realm.

It is the study, and the deliberate design, of how we mediate norms, values, supply chains, solar cycles, generative models and other nodes of modern life to organize reality itself, not just its representation on paper. The Planetary Age makes this shift from ideas to protocols unavoidable, because metabolic order itself is maintained or broken at precisely this level. A carbon budget is not a moral exhortation; it is a set of constraints that must be translated into permitting rules, grid upgrades, industrial standards, financing conditions, and enforcement capacities: even better if those rules and contracts are automated. A watershed is not a symbol; it is a physical system that must be protected through land-use rules, monitoring protocols, agricultural practices, and infrastructure maintenance. A heat wave is not an opinion; it is a physiological assault that requires cooling access, urban design, reliable electricity, and emergency planning. If we are serious about habitability, we have to become serious about protocols.

What metabology actually is

Energy must be generated and delivered. Water must be stored, purified, and routed. Food must be grown, transported, inspected, sold. Housing must be financed, permitted, built, maintained. Materials must be mined, refined, moved, and turned into things. Waste must be collected, processed, and absorbed without poisoning the world. Information must be recorded, processed, and acted upon to coordinate all of this. These are not just “sectors.” They are metabolic systems. They ingest resources, convert them through institutions, and distribute outputs that make life possible.

Every society has gates. Some are literal: a valve, a port, a pipeline, a checkpoint, a transformer. Some are administrative: a permit, a tender, a clearance, a subsidy rule, a compliance certificate. Some are computational: an eligibility score, a ranking model, a fraud flag, a dispatch algorithm, a platform’s default setting. At each gate, there’s a negotiation: budgets become allotments, rights become entitlements, files get held up or passed. There might be rules set from up above, but at each checkpoint, there’s a soldier who might let you through or shoot at you: we might as well start with the patterns on the ground and generalize from those, even if the global rules have high predictive value.

This is why metabology is not merely a synonym for “infrastructure policy.” It is a theory of governance at the level where the social meets the physical and increasingly, the biogeochemical. It treats infrastructure and institutions as one coupled system. It insists that the moral and the material are entangled, because moral commitments only become real when they are converted into stable procedures that can withstand bad days.

Who is served first when a system is stressed? What failure modes are tolerated? What is measured, and therefore optimized? What is invisible, and therefore neglected? What is automated, and therefore hardened into default? To think metabologically is to become attentive to the often-invisible machinery of collective life. It is to recognize that the most consequential political decisions are increasingly made not only in parliaments and courts, but in standards bodies, procurement contracts, logistics systems, software platforms, and grid control rooms. It is to understand that “policy” is not only a document; it is an executable sequence of operations.

If the Planetary Age requires the maintenance of metabolic order, we need institutions that can do three things reliably:

1. Sense: monitor vital flows and detect stress early (not only through scientific measurement, but through everyday feedback from those who live in the system).

2. Coordinate: align action across scales and sectors when a disturbance propagates (because in a coupled system, no agency can act alone).

3. Repair and reproduce: maintain the mundane capacities - maintenance crews, spare parts, governance routines, financial stability - that keep systems from decaying.

These are not glamorous functions. Urban governance is a good model - most of the fights are over waste collection, road laying and school bus routes. Urban governance is already metabolic! I am only adding a line of (admittedly vast) generalization: think of the planet itself as a city.

Once the planetary city takes root in our minds, we are immediately impressed with its fractal character: the city exists at all scales from the neighborhood to the planet as a whole. A neighborhood metabolic institution might look like a localized heat and water resilience organization: monitoring temperatures, ensuring cooling access, maintaining drainage, managing local waste, protecting a water body, coordinating emergency response. A city’s metabolic institution might integrate grid resilience, mobility, housing retrofits, air quality, and public health. A regional one might govern a watershed or an agricultural belt, aligning land use with ecological thresholds. A national one might coordinate industrial policy, energy transition, and critical supply chains. A planetary one might maintain carbon accounting, biodiversity protection, and the governance of shared commons like oceans and atmosphere.

The point is not to imagine one perfect institution that solves everything. The point is to name the missing layer: planetary institutions that treat habitability maintenance as their primary mission, and that can translate planetary constraints into operational reality without collapsing into either technocratic fantasy or ideological theater.

In Asimov’s Foundation series, the highest official in the (first) Foundation was the Mayor of Terminus.

Competing metabolic orders

Earlier forms of conflict aren’t going away; the post war ideological poles of geopolitics such as democracy vs authoritarianism, or the language of national interest such as security dilemmas and the balance of power, and the language of economics such as trade, investment and supply chains: these will disappear slowly, if ever, but the Planetary Age adds a contest at the stratum that lies beneath them: a contest over metabolic systems.

In a constrained world, power increasingly belongs to those who can secure and coordinate life-support flows: energy, food, water, materials, logistics, and now, crucially, computation. In the future, we will have competing visions of the institutional architectures for keeping systems running, different philosophies of coordination between state, market, and platform. We can see a glimpse of this future already, where China’s ability to build energy, information, transportation and manufacturing infrastructure at scale is both a matter of envy and fear. American teens are consuming Chinese metabology with relish, even as the ideology is far from attractive. I sense an emerging contrast between two large-scale metabolic orientations: a prediction metabology and a production metabology.

The prediction metabology - the US is the archetype - is centered on the capacity to sense, model, and steer complex systems through information. It treats data, compute, software platforms, financial networks, and standards regimes as the primary instruments of power. Its advantage is not only technological; it is organizational. It excels at building systems where prediction becomes a lever over behavior: advertising markets, credit scoring, risk pricing, logistics optimization, automated compliance, algorithmic governance. It builds a world in which uncertainty is turned into a tradable object and then managed through models.

The production metabology - China is the archetype - is centered on the capacity to make and move physical things at scale: industrial ecosystems, manufacturing capacity, infrastructure build-out, resource processing, and the logistics that connect them. It treats the control of supply chains, ports, industrial standards, and energy/material throughput as the primary instruments of power. Its advantage is also organizational. It excels at aligning state capacity, industrial policy, and manufacturing ecosystems to accomplish physical transformation quickly, often through long time-horizons and coordinated investment.

These are ideal types, not caricatures. Each system contains the other. A production metabology needs prediction to optimize and coordinate. A prediction metabology needs production to build the chips, the data centers, the grids, and the physical substrate of computation. But the emphasis matters. It shapes what gets built first, what is treated as strategic, and what kinds of institutions are cultivated. Maintaining metabolic order in a warming, volatile world requires both kinds of capacity: the ability to predict and coordinate across coupled systems, and the ability to build and repair physical infrastructure at speed. It also requires something even harder: the ability to cooperate on shared constraints while competing for advantage.

Carbon does not respect borders. Biodiversity loss cascades across regions. Supply chain shocks propagate through oceans. Climate disasters trigger migration, instability, and conflict. Yet the institutions capable of acting at planetary scale are weak, contested, and often captured by narrow interests. So the likely future is not a neat story of global unity, nor a neat story of total fragmentation. It is a messy, intermittent pattern: cooperation where metabolic interdependence is unavoidable, competition where metabolic advantage is at stake.

We can already anticipate what the arenas will be.

On the cooperative side: disaster response norms, pandemic surveillance, methane reduction, certain forms of grid interconnection, shared scientific monitoring, and possibly baseline agreements on carbon accounting. Not because of enlightenment, but because failure to cooperate will be too costly even for rivals. In a coupled system, some coordination becomes a matter of self-preservation. On the competitive side: control over critical minerals and processing, dominance over chip supply chains and advanced manufacturing, standards-setting for energy technologies, influence over infrastructure corridors, ownership of data and platforms, the governance of undersea cables and satellite networks, the terms of climate finance, and the emerging architectures of “green industrial policy.” Here metabolic order becomes strategic: whoever sets the protocols of transition shapes the distribution of future flourishing.

In such a world, the decisive political question becomes: what metabology will govern habitability? Will metabolic order be maintained through institutions oriented toward repair, resilience, and shared flourishing? Or will it be maintained through architectures that deepen inequality, externalize burdens, and treat large parts of the planet as sacrifice zones?

Even if we agree we are in a Planetary Age where metabolic order is primary, that metabolic order does not maintain itself. It is produced and reproduced through protocols, and protocols are housed in institutions. Metabology is how we approach the design of those institutions. It is a wager that we can learn to design institutions that treat habitability as a public good at every scale from the neighborhood to the planet. It’s a wager that we can build systems that keep the lights on and the water clean and the air breathable, while also keeping contestation, accountability, plurality alive. I foresee a not too distant future in which the deepest conflict is not between left and right, or between democracy and authoritarianism, or even between nations. It will be between competing metabologies: competing architectures for maintaining a livable world, and competing answers to the question of who gets to flourish inside it.

Parting Thoughts on Hyperproblems and Metabology as a Hyperproblem

And once you see that, it becomes obvious why metabology is not something you can “get right” with a clever essay, a good election, or even a well-funded five-year plan. It is not a position. It is not a platform. It is not a single reform. It is an attempt to redesign the operating conditions of collective life in a world whose basic background assumptions are now unstable.

Which is another way of saying: metabology belongs to the domain of the hyperproblem.

A hyperproblem is not just a hard problem. It is not even a wicked problem with better branding. Think of a hyperobject, but as a problem. It is a challenge that exceeds the cognitive bandwidth of any single individual and the coordination capacity of any single existing institution. It is large not only in size but in kind: it unfolds across long time horizons, spills across planetary spatial scales, and refuses to be reduced without losing the very thing you were trying to understand. Hyperproblems require models, prototypes, simulations - ways of exploring possibility space rather than merely arguing inside it.

Now notice what happens if you bring this back to metabology, which is a hyperproblem par excellence. Metabology began, in this essay, as a refusal to treat politics as a debate club. The core claim was that ideology is no longer enough because it cannot reliably cross the membrane between moral intention and material consequence. It produces slogans, and then the slogan meets the grid. What actually governs the world is the constitution written in procedures and protocols. Metabology names the study, and the deliberate design, of that executable layer, where the social meets the physical and, increasingly, the biogeochemical.

But this is precisely why metabology is itself a hyperproblem.

Think about what metabology is trying to do. It is trying to design institutions and protocols that can maintain metabolic order - stable, habitable flows - across a planet-sized city whose neighborhoods are watersheds, grids, supply chains, forests, ports, and data centers. It is trying to translate planetary constraints into operational reality without collapsing into technocratic fantasy or ideological theater. And it is trying to do this while keeping contestation, accountability, and plurality alive, while the systems themselves are stressed, politicized, and weaponized.

No single mind can hold this. No single institution can coordinate it. No single discipline can even describe it cleanly, because the object itself is a coupled system: energy linked to water, water linked to food, food linked to land use, land use linked to biodiversity, biodiversity linked to disease, disease linked to governance, governance linked to computation, computation linked back to energy. The whole point of metabology was that the moral and the material are entangled; that entanglement is also what makes the problem irreducible. You can partition it, yes, but you cannot solve the partitions “in isolation” without the solutions colliding downstream, sometimes violently.

And then there is time. Metabolic order is not something you install like software and forget. It is reproduced. Maintained. Repaired. It is a daily choreography of sensing, coordination, and care - mundane capacities that make the difference between resilience and collapse. Even if you “solve” a local protocol today, a new heat regime, a new migration pattern, a new geopolitical sanction, or a new platform default will change the boundary conditions tomorrow. Metabology is not a problem with an endpoint. It is a form of inquiry that must persist across generations, across civilizations, across -cenes (holocene, anthropocene…). It’s governance with the longue duree in mind, a method for civilizational self-governance under planetary constraints.

If that sounds like an impossible task, good. Hyperproblems are supposed to sound impossible. The point is not to make them smaller than they are. The point is to build protocols that allow finite beings to act intelligently inside the impossible.

Last essay of the year.

TLDR;

Ideology tells us what kind of world we think we are building. It provides the map of intentions, the moral compass, and the political manifesto. Metabology reveals the world we are actually building. It is found in the contracts signed, the dashboards monitored, the sensors installed, the favors exchanged, the algorithms deployed, and the energy consumed.

To understand modern power —and more importantly, to change it— we must descend from the high altitude of ideologies and laws into the tangle of metabologies on the ground. In this last essay of the year, I argue that civilization is metabolism before it is politics, economy, or culture.

Metabology is a guide to the flows of energy, matter, and information that constitute the material basis of social life, and an invitation to rewrite the protocols that govern them.

The Ideological Cascade

Consider socialism. As an ideology, it posits that the means of production should be socially owned. If you are a state socialist, you believe the state should hold that ownership. From this ideological stance, a specific policy goal might emerge: providing abundant, cheap electricity to everyone. This is consistent with the belief that access to energy is a social good. In the realm of ideology, this belief must translate into policy.

• The Plan: A Planning Commission incorporates this into a “Five-Year Plan,” promising, for example, one kilowatt of free electricity to every family.

• The Bureaucracy: The Ministry of Power allocates budgets to different regions based on reported needs.

• The Distribution: Regional ministries receive funds and invite tenders from power suppliers to install solar capacity.

• The Outcome: Contracts are signed, panels are imported and wired, and - in theory - electricity flows into the grid.

This entire chain, from the high-level principle to the final kilowatt, operates within the logic of the ideological model. Get it? No? Let me say it again:

The Ideological Cascade Illustrated

Let’s say you think the means of production should be owned by the state. In that case, one of the things the state might want to do is provide abundant, cheap electricity to everyone. Ideologically, that’s consistent with the state owning the means of production and with the belief that access to abundant energy is a social good. All of that is still in the realm of ideology.

But then someone has to take that ideological belief and turn it into actual electricity flowing into people’s homes. So maybe - as used to happen in actually existing socialist states - there’s a planning commission that says: in this five-year plan, we are going to provide one kilowatt of free electricity to every family in the country. The party secretariat and the planning commission agree that this is how the principle of socialized energy will translate into a policy outcome: one kilowatt per family.

But how are you going to get to that one kilowatt?

They might say: “We have the Ministry of Power, and the Ministry of Power has to allocate its budget to different regions in such a way that we build solar farms that actually produce that energy.” Different regions then apply to the Ministry of Power, saying: “This is what we need. This is our average electricity production, here’s how we’re falling short of our one-kilowatt goal, and please give us this much money.”

The Ministry of Power distributes money to all the local or state-level or regional power authorities. Those local authorities then have to distribute funds to people who will actually install the capacity and “get the wires going,” so to speak. Each local ministry invites tenders from power suppliers, solar power suppliers in this case. They say: “Bid for our contracts and tell us how much you’ll charge for installing this much solar capacity in this region, in this year.”

Once the contracts are awarded, the solar companies hire people, import solar panels from China, and eventually you start seeing solar panels going up. They’re wired into the grid, and assuming every family has a connection, they start getting electricity - one kilowatt of installed capacity per family.

The Metabolic Reality

Now, strip away the ministries and the high-level abstractions. Look simply at the coordination occurring on the ground. You have solar companies, local agencies, financial flows, and material constraints like sunlight availability, grid stability, and roof space.

How exactly are information, finance, and materials combined to execute this? What rules or heuristics govern those local interactions?

This is metabology. It starts with embodied interactions - people shaking hands over a contract or a solar installer climbing on a roof - and builds abstractions on top of those. Currently, we often view these ground-level mechanics merely as the “last mile” of ideological policy. However, the reality on the ground is often messy and distinct from the theory. For instance, a contractor might bribe a bureaucrat to secure a bid. That corruption is certainly not “socializing the means of production,” yet it is part of how the system actually functions.

Metabology asks us to treat those messy mechanics not as noise or “implementation details,” but as the main story. Instead of starting from grand principles and working downward, metabology starts from the ground up and asks: what are the protocols by which decisions actually get made, resources actually move, and systems actually run?

Think of metabology as the operating system of a society’s material life. Where ideology tells you why energy ought to be shared and who ought to own the means of production, metabology tells you how, step by step, that belief turns into electrons moving through wires, steel being poured, or food showing up in a neighborhood market. It is concerned with rules-of-thumb, bidding procedures, software systems, bribes and favors, informal hierarchies, physical bottlenecks, and data flows. All of these together form a set of protocols - formal and informal - that govern the flow of energy, information, money, and matter.

In an idealized socialist story, the Planning Commission decides, the Ministry allocates, the regions comply, and the kilowatt appears. A metabolic description refuses to stop at the planning document. It asks: “Who gets to submit a bid, and who is quietly told not to bother? What data about “need” and “shortfall” actually enters the Ministry’s spreadsheet, and what never gets recorded? What software system ranks the tenders, and what weights has some underpaid consultant baked into the algorithm?
When the deadline looms, who cuts corners on installation, and who looks the other way at the inspection stage?”

All of these are questions about protocols, not principles. A protocol might be explicit — an e-procurement platform where bids are automatically ranked according to a published formula. But most protocols are tacit: “We always give at least one contract to the politically connected firm,” or “We slow-walk paperwork for villages that didn’t vote for us,” or “We only approve rooftop solar where the grid is already stable because we don’t want headaches.” These are not written in manifestos, but they are how the machine runs.

From a metabolic point of view, the crucial move is to model these protocols as the real structure of the system, not as accidental deviations from a pure, ideological design. The ideology might say “socialized energy,” the law might say “transparent tendering,” but the metabology says: “Here is the actual pattern of flows that emerges when these rules, incentives, habits, and infrastructures interact.”

It is less like a moral code and more like a wiring diagram.

Metabology as Protocol

Once you see that, you can imagine designing metabologies as carefully as we design constitutions or party platforms. You could, for example, build a contracting protocol in which every bid, every need assessment, every delivery milestone is logged in a public ledger; where algorithms are audited; where communities can veto installations that don’t match their needs; where payments are automatically released only upon verified performance. In that world, “provide one kilowatt to every family” isn’t just a slogan; it’s compiled down into stepwise rules that are close to the metal, operating where people, machines, and materials actually meet.

None of this was possible to formalize at large scale before the age of digital infrastructure and big data. We simply did not have the capacity to track flows of energy, money, and information in real time, let alone adjust them through fine-grained rules. Today, we do. That doesn’t mean we automatically have good metabologies; it means we are, for the first time, consciously in the business of writing and rewriting the protocols that run our material life. Metabology is not an abstract model of how the machine should work; it is the set of rules describing how the machine actually runs. It takes into consideration the physical, human, material, and social inputs as they exist in reality.

Even protocols might appear too top-down to some; they might prefer to record existing transactions in a ledger and fit a statistical model on that ledger because metabolic patterns might be too complex for humans to capture in a protocol. We may need AI as an essential intermediary between human metabology and messy life in the real world.

Messy Business

Let me repeat: there’s no need to reduce the complexity of our messy realities. Metabology is very much an account of heterogeneity; it’s not this essence that binds all members of a society in a web of energy and information. Far from it. Instead, consider this quote from Bruno Latour (from ‘Reassembling the Social’):

It claims that there is nothing specific to social order; that there is no social dimension of any sort, no ‘social context’, no distinct domain of reality to which the label ‘social’ or ‘society’ could be attributed; that no ‘social force’ is available to ‘explain’ the residual features other domains cannot account for; that members know very well what they are doing even if they don’t articulate it to the satisfaction of the observers; that actors are never embedded in a social context and so are always much more than ‘mere informants’; that there is thus no meaning in adding some ‘social factors’ to other scientific specialties; that political relevance obtained through a ‘science of society’ is not necessarily desirable; and that ‘society’, far from being the context ‘in which’ everything is framed, should rather be construed as one of the many connecting elements circulating inside tiny conduits.

Now replace ‘social’ by ‘metabolic,’ and run this argument anew. One account of metabology will look for the energetic and informational underpinnings of existing social processes; all those solar panels need paperwork to be completed before they are installed; and all that local paperwork first requires state-level authorities to adopt central policy directives and all those policy directives require the planning commission to approve them, and before you know it, you’re back in ideology. Instead, consider that the paperwork is filed alongside the purchasing of the solar panels - some entrepreneur shook hands with his counterpart in China to buy the panels as soon as the paperwork is completed. Metabolic activity proceeds in parallel; information and material flows proceed in parallel.

Metabology is a science of connection. Its protocols don’t live behind the veil of everyday activity; rather they are executed alongside those activities.

Metabology as Ground vs Metabology as Figure

In gestalt psychology and its offshoots, it’s common to notice that human perception is organized in terms of ‘figure’ and ‘ground.’ During a war scene, when the movie camera pans to the hero’s face, the hero is the figure while battle raging around him is the ground. The figure is what we pay attention to, the entity whose capacity - or lack thereof - to change the world is of interest to us. When the hero is fighting the villain, we want to know who is winning; we don’t care that thousands of other soldiers are being wounded or dying right next to them. The ground, on the other hand, is either inert or, at best, an enabler. The props and the NPCs so to speak. The figure and the ground aren’t fixed. To the writer of a family drama, the argument between the wife and the husband is the figure, and the furniture is a prop. To the set designer, the furniture is the prop and the dialog is someone else’s problem.

In much metabolic analysis - Smil’s “Energy and Civilization” comes to mind - energy and information are enablers, the ground of social structure. That’s not my view: my account of metabology is an account of energy and information as prime movers, as heroes in our social journey. Energy and information don’t create social order behind the scene; no, not at all. They are right there: when an entrepreneur shakes hands with their Chinese supplier for the inputs for a solar farm, the handshake acts as a high-information signal that can then trigger future material flows. Information - the handshake, in case you were wondering - is right there; it’s part of the scene, not behind the scenes. If I were a movie director, I would focus the camera on the hands, not at the flunkies cheering in the background.

This shift in perspective - from prioritizing the ideological “figure” to scrutinizing the metabolic “ground” to refocusing on the metabolic “figure” is the key to grasping and reshaping modern power. Ideologies offer a grand narrative of intention, but metabologies provide the concrete script of execution. By focusing on protocols, data flows, and material transactions, we move past distant principles and into the realm of actionable change.

To build a genuinely new world, we must stop debating manifestos alone and start designing better metabologies - both stacks and protocols - for our shared material reality.

Rain Check

Let me end with a short list of Metabological ideas I have written about in the past and want to flesh out in greater detail in the future plus a couple of ideas for which I have notes but I haven’t written anything.

• I explored Metabolic Sovereignty, moving beyond the sovereignty of borders to the sovereignty of flows. We will see that power belongs to those who control the conversion points - the semiconductor fabs, the shipping lanes, and the data centers.

• I (briefly) examined Metabolic Development, asking how we can expand human capabilities not through infinite GDP growth, but through reorganizing material flows to fit within planetary boundaries.

• I am yet to map the US and Chinese Metabolic Stacks, analyzing the geopolitical divergence between the “Prediction Stack” (US/organized around AI and data) and the “Production Stack” (Chinese/organized around energy and matter).

• I am yet to explain ‘Mandalarity,’ a new geometry of world order that replaces the ‘poles’ of the Cold War with the overlapping, radiating circles of a networked world.

I am not sure when I will get to these, for I have a completely different topic that I want to explore in 2026.

I hope the end of the year treats you well!

1. Metabolic Stack

2. Metabolic Wars

3. Metabolic Sovereignty

4. The AI Bubble, but really, the Interverse

I also had a standalone series on Planetarity as Philosophical Engineering that serves as an introduction to the glossary. This week, I want to introduce the idea of Development with Metabolic Characteristics, where Development in this context is in the same family as Economic Development or Developing Countries. Let me start with a provocation:

In 2025, every nation is a developing nation

Once upon a time, “development” divided the world into those who had it and those who didn’t. Developed nations are/were wealthy, industrial, modern, and developing ones are poor, agrarian, aspirational. Development was a one-way street: the periphery would catch up with the core. Factories, infrastructure, and education would close the gap; history would converge.

End of History. QED.

That story no longer holds. In 2025, the French revolution is in the rearview mirror while the planet is looming on the horizon. In the condition of Planetarity, every country is once again a developing country - not in the sense of being poor or backward, but in the sense of being unfinished, adaptive, and metabolically entangled. No society today possesses a stable model of prosperity within planetary limits. Every society is learning, under pressure, how to reorganize its flows of energy, matter, and meaning so that life can go on.

That is why we need a new kind of development thinking - neither modernization nor post-development, but metabolic development: the study and practice of how societies transform within the ecological and informational constraints of the planet.

1. The End of the Development Divide

For most of the twentieth century, development was a geopolitical project. Rich nations exported capital, poor nations imported expertise, and success was measured by GDP per capita. The developmental state promised take-off through industrialization; the global market promised convergence through trade.

Today, the wealthy world faces infrastructural decay, carbon lock-in, and social fatigue. The poorer world faces heat, displacement, and resource stress. Both are bound by the same planetary metabolism: the finite capacity of the Earth to absorb, renew, and sustain. The new divide is not only between North and South (though that isn’t going away), but also between metabolic literacy and metabolic blindness, between those who can reorganize their flows and those trapped in inherited infrastructures.

2. Growth Under Planetary Conditions

To think metabolically is to recognize that economies are not factories joined by trade - boxes and lines in a systems diagram; they are living systems exchanging with the biosphere.

Every act of development is thus a metabolic act: reorganizing how a society eats, moves, builds, and computes. Development policy, reimagined, is the art of rewiring metabolism—redirecting energy and information so that human flourishing aligns with planetary regeneration. In that sense, the development challenge has come full circle. The 1950s dreamed of escaping scarcity; the 2020s must dream of escaping overshoot.

Metabolic development begins with a hard truth: that economic growth is a terrible model of growth, which is much better conceptualized as a metabolic rather than economic process. Growth and Development come with a heavy biological hand: as properties of living systems that help them evolve, adapt, and regenerate. The question is not whether we grow, but how we grow—what grows, where, and at what energetic and ecological cost.

Further, biologizing growth will also wean us away from the linear GDP growth indices we have become used to. Growth has room for Domestic Product, Domestic Happiness and much more.

Planetary development is about qualitative growth: the expansion of complexity, knowledge, and capability within finite energy budgets. A solar panel, an algorithm, a mangrove forest—all are growth processes of different kinds, linked by energy and information flows. To grow well under planetary conditions is to maintain the circulatory integrity of the Earth system, to ensure that the human metabolism amplifies rather than undermines the larger metabolism that hosts it. In 2025, every nation faces the same paradoxical task:

1. To decarbonize while electrifying.

2. To digitize while democratizing.

3. To globalize while localizing resilience.

4. To grow while regenerating.

The United States and China wrestle with energy transition and data governance; India and Nigeria grapple with urban heat and agricultural stress; Europe experiments with circular economies while importing materials from elsewhere. Each is a development laboratory testing new metabolic configurations under the same planetary constraints.

Thus, “developing” no longer means “catching up”; it means learning to adapt. The hierarchy has collapsed into a shared predicament: how to sustain complexity without exhausting the substrate that supports it.

3. Hirschman and Sen

Every social metabolism runs on three interlocking pillars:

1. Energy – the physical throughput that powers transformation.

2. Information – the patterns and feedbacks that coordinate energy use.

3. Organization – the institutions, values, and technologies that bind them together.

Twentieth-century development emphasized energy (mainly fossil) and organization via state and market but ignored information, the feedback systems that inform us about nonlinearity and complexity and warn us when flows become unsustainable. Only through intelligent sensing can we manage a finite metabolism wisely. Metabolic development, therefore, is development as learning—the construction of societies that can read, model, and correct their own energetic and ecological footprints in real time.

Easier said than done.

Every transition begins in stress: blackouts, shortages, migrations, protests. The aim is not to eliminate disruption but to metabolize it into innovation and coordination. Here, we need to channel Albert Hirschman; his mid-century insight that development advances through disequilibria, linkages, and creative tension feels newly prophetic. What he called “unbalanced growth” we now recognize as metabolic stress: localized perturbations that trigger systemic learning. The subtitle of this essay is The Strategy of Metabolic Development, a homage to Hirschman’s masterpiece “The Strategy of Economic Development.” I hope to reimagine his ideas for a world of energy grids, data centers, and ecological feedbacks.

From Hirschman to another hero: Amartya Sen.

If Hirschman gives metabolic development its dynamics, Amartya Sen gives it its ethics. Freedom, in the metabolic view, is not an abstraction but a function of access to energy and information - the conditions of possibility of capability. I want to build upon Sen’s Development as Freedom and ask: what metabolic substrate do we need to make that Freedom possible? How can we design societies in which energy and information circulate in ways that sustain freedom for humans and non-humans alike?

4. Institutions for a Living Economy

Metabolic development demands new architectures of coordination:

• Energy commons that distribute generation and ownership.

• Data cooperatives that treat information as a public utility.

• Circular economies that close material loops.

• Ecological states that measure success by restoration rather than extraction.

To be sure, these are utopias in comparison to our lived realities but they are also necessities if we are to survive the condition of planetarity. The old dichotomy between state and market dissolves into a more fluid topology of governance as metabolism - networks of feedback and reciprocity linking households, ecosystems, and algorithms.

Policy, in this light, becomes metabolic design: structuring flows so that feedback sustains, rather than erodes, vitality.

The Anthropocene’s core design challenge is to make that learning conscious. It requires humility (to recognize limits), intelligence (to sense patterns), and imagination (to build new pathways). No country has mastered it; the distinction between rich and poor gives way to the distinction between responsive and rigid.

Those who receive tutelage from the planet will thrive.

The strategy of metabolic development is the strategy of:

1. sensing imbalance,

2. reallocating flows,

3. evolving new structures that maintain coherence through change.

It is neither laissez-faire nor command-and-control but a disciplined responsiveness - a dance between design and emergence. Such strategy requires not only institutions but philosophy: a renewed understanding of what it means to grow, to learn, to act. It recognizes that human metabolism is now planetary in scale and must therefore be planetary in responsibility.

5. Conclusion: The Developing Planet

When future historians look back at the 2025, may they see the decade when the world rediscovered development as a permanent condition of life on a finite planet. All nations are developing nations because the planet itself is in development - reorganizing its energy flows, recalibrating its climates, renegotiating the terms of coexistence.

Hirschman reminds us that imbalance is opportunity. Sen reminds us that capability is metabolism. Together they will help us sketch a planetary art of thriving within limits. That’s the hope anyway!

To end a series on bubbles with culture is to assert that technology is not simply a machine; it is a way of making worlds. Rail rearranged distance; electricity rearranged nights; the internet rearranged attention. AI’s cultural bubble invites one more rearrangement.

I want to name that world with a term from an earlier essay: the Interverse. If the Metaverse was the technologist’s fantasy of immersion, the Interverse is the humanist’s reality of connection. In the Interverse, computation recedes to the background, like writing or electricity. It becomes the grammar of our collective life - ambient, taken for granted, everywhere and nowhere at once. Near-term, that means a human–human Interverse, a mature, intelligent internet that connects people rather than just machines. Longer-term, it gestures toward an interspecies Interverse, a world where whales, forests, and cities have voices we can hear. Both paths are plausible; both require AI as the enabling substrate.

The Interverse can go dystopian as easily as it can go humane. It inherits the old monsters - platforms, bureaucracies, and markets -that already shape our lives. It’s very hard to predict, especially the future, but it might be possible to specify what becomes possible when intelligence itself becomes infrastructure, and to design institutions for a human and more-than-human world.

10 thoughts follow

1) From shoggoths to scaffolds

A useful starting point comes from Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi’s provocation that large language models are not alien invaders so much as familiar monsters, akin to markets and bureaucracies. These systems compress diffuse human knowledge into prices, forms, ballots, and direct action based on that compression. They are vast, impersonal, sometimes indifferent to individual suffering, and yet indispensable for coordination at scale. LLMs are simply the newest members of this family of cognitive machinery. The right question is not, “Will they become our overlords?” but, “How will they interlock with the institutions we already have?”

If models are cultural technologies, then culture changes as we retrofit our newsrooms, schools, hospitals, studios, city halls to incorporate AI. In the short run, the cultural bubble looks like a flood of synthetic text and images; in the medium run, it looks like new routines: fact-checking that is continuous rather than episodic; translation and subtitling by default; collaborative drafts that lower the cost of getting to version 1. In the long run, it looks like ambient general competence, i.e., service-level cognition available when needed, whose value rises and falls with the quality of the institutions that contain it.

2) Prediction as a cultural regime

One reason this shift feels strange is that AI advances under the banner of prediction. Prediction is everywhere in our daily lives: “for you” feeds, estimated arrival times, portfolio signals, health risk flags, model-assisted hiring, promptable assistants that fill the calendar before we ask. A recent argument, mounted from Andreesen Horowitz, so take it with a pinch of salt, suggests that prediction is becoming a successor cultural logic to postmodernism. Whether or not you buy the grand claim, the narrower point is hard to dispute: people now perform identity by making public forecasts and memetic bets; they consume content as anticipatory participation. To be predictive rather than predicted is a posture, even a status claim (should remind you of “If you are not the customer, you’re the product”).

Markets and social media feel the same: always on, always scoring, always about timing. The thing that circulates is not only the work; it is the expectation attached to it. If you view culture this way, the AI bubble isn’t merely hype; it’s a generalized anticipation machine, i.e., an economy where forecasting has become entertainment, and entertainment a bet.

But a culture of prediction is not yet the Interverse; the bridge between them is ubiquitous computing.

3) Weiser’s forgotten wisdom

Mark Weiser’s classic essay, “The Computer for the 21st Century,” announced a deceptively radical idea: the most profound technologies are those that disappear into the background. He called this “embodied virtuality” - not putting people inside simulated worlds like VR, but drawing computation out into the world with people. By pushing computers to the periphery, he argued, we free attention to focus on others and on goals.

This is the Interverse’s cultural posture. The real work is to let AI recede, to fold it into places, practices, and publics until the machines become grammar rather than protagonist. Intelligent culture is not about immersion in the singularity, but relationships with other beings.

Here a fork emerges that mirrors the AGI distinction between General Predictive Intelligence (GPreI) and General Productive Intelligence (GProI) from last week. The US cultural build tends toward the predictive: cloud devices, assistants, knowledge work, media; cognition as a service delivered by data centers to screens and earbuds. The Chinese cultural build tends toward the productive: robots, logistics, smart city fabrics; cognition living in sites and systems. Each path tells a different story of how intelligent culture will be made: as anticipation or as embodiment.

The Interverse must hold both.

4) The predictive mind and the cultural self

If prediction animates our platforms, it also animates our minds - at least on one influential view. Predictive processing sees the brain as a generative model minimizing error; perception is controlled hallucination, corrected by incoming data. DeepMind’s Generative Query Network demonstrated how a system can infer a 3-D scene from sparse 2-D glimpses by predicting novel viewpoints.

Predictive culture will feel like model alignment at the human scale. We will triangulate the predictions we borrow from machines against the priors we carry in our heads, and those priors will be shaped, in turn, by the scaffolds we inhabit such as schools, feeds, churches, unions, labs. The Interverse’s ethical imperative is to design scaffolds that help us revise our priors in public, with humility: common intelligence to go along with common sense.

5) From human–human to interspecies culture

Culture has always been global, for stories, religious and philosophical beliefs, music and trinkets have traveled the globe for a millennia. However, print culture dramatically accelerated the spread of culture, and novels, radio and movies brought distant people into our lives.

How might AI expand our cultural circle?

The possibility that excites me most is the prospect of bringing non-human animals into our cultural universe. The Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) applies machine learning to sperm-whale codas - structured click patterns used in sperm whale social groups - to probe whether they display duality of patterning and other linguistic features. The effort is technically daunting: tagging challenges, massive datasets, distributed stations. Even if it falls short of “full translation,” CETI is a demonstration of the Interverse’s trajectory: AI extends our cultural circle by making other minds legible.

Should we do so though? Will it make it easier for us to exploit animals even more than we do today?

Law and policy might should inform the interverse: personhood debates, habitat rights, ocean governance.

6) Two ways the cultural bubble pops

Bubbles end badly when the thing being sold never had substance. They end productively when exuberance directs investment in infrastructure the next era needs. With AI and culture, two endings are plausible.

Ending A: the Slop Trap. If the economics of attention continue to reward raw engagement, we risk a flood of synthetic slop - cheap content tuned to keep people scrolling, with predictive metrics as judge as well as jury. We’ve seen lesser versions of this for a decade; AI makes it exponential. The cultural bubble then pops into cynicism where the public assumes fakery by default (my sense is that young people already have a ton of this kind of cynicism), and a creator class forced to chase engagement signals, and institutions that privilege simulation from substance (already the way both India and the US are governed today).

Ending B: the Ambient Scaffold. If we push AI into background utilities- translation, retrieval, summarization, simulation, co-drafting, accessibility- and tie them to institutional standards and accountability, the bubble can melt into an Interverse substrate. In that world, independent creators gain leverage; local institutions upgrade their cognitive capacity; publics get tools to compare claims and origins. Inshallah!

We cannot pick B by wishing. We pick it by architecture and protocols: provenance systems, rights frameworks, civic APIs, and procurement rules that favor augmentation over extraction. Weiser’s advice again: push computation to the periphery so people can reappear at the center.

7) The politics of the Interverse

If the Interverse solidifies, it will rewrite who governs the cognitive public realm. A few axes to watch:

• Platform power vs. public power. If cultural AI remains concentrated in private stacks, we will outsource agenda-setting to entities optimized for profit. It’s super important to build Public Intelligence! Farrell & Shalizi’s point again: the monsters are ours; they can be governed.

• Prediction markets vs. democratic deliberation. If “being predictive” becomes the dominant civic posture, betting could become the primary mode of democratic engagement. But prediction can also assist democracy: scenario tools, budget simulators, participatory planning models, but those can’t be technical tools alone - we will need a culture of imagination that weaves possibilities and prediction together. Speculative Design has a major role to play!

• Cloud centralization vs. site embodiment. If cultural AI lives only in the cloud, it defaults to the Brave New Feed. If it also lives in places such as libraries, schools, galleries, parks, studios, culture regains its public character. I can’t overemphasize the importance of embodiment - not (only) in the sense of the Wuhan AI project, but in making AI public through physical presence in the Weiser sense of that term. This is the GPreI/GProI split applied to the arts and everyday life: cognition as feed, or cognition as fabric.

• Human exceptionalism vs. more-than-human publics. If we succeed at interspecies communication, however partial, the Interverse will acquire non-human constituencies. That is not science fiction; it is a governance challenge that we should be embracing with all our hearts.

It’s hard to predict the future, and I am mostly of the mind that we should build datacenter overcapacity, align on a strong moral purpose for AI and let the world reveal what it wants, but here’s a brief list of ‘great to haves.’

8) The human–human Interverse

What should we plausibly see at scale?

• Cultural memory aids. Public-grade retrieval over local archives, museums, libraries, newsrooms; explainable provenance attached to works.

• Civic copilots. Municipal drafting, grant writing, participatory planning with model-assisted scenario tools; translation and accessibility as defaults.

• Studio-in-a-browser. Broadcast-quality editing, scoring, and compositing in ordinary devices; collaborative rooms with rights baked in.

• Ambient interpretation. On-device captioning, sign-to-speech and speech-to-sign, description for the visually impaired, reading-level adaptation.

• Translingual publics. Real-time subtitling across languages for education, performances, town halls.

Each item is technically feasible now; the hard work will be institutional: standards, rights, and the humility to place connection before product.

9) The interspecies Interverse

Here the Interverse leans into “fiction science”—not fantasies, but research trajectories.

• Ocean listening stations that stream marine codas as public signal, annotated by models and humans in the loop.

• Forest observatories that turn sensor nets into the lively presence of chorusing birds, water tables, tree electrical activity—so land management becomes conversational.

• Urban non-human forums - for rivers, air, pollinators, you name it - where models summarize conditions and residents deliberate with more-than-human stakeholders.

Nonhuman minds may never become transparent to us; we may still only pattern-match and predict responses, but with enough data and the right models, other minds become legible enough to matter in public.

10) Omega

In the near future, we will experience a lot of slop and with any luck, some emerging scaffolds. But the deeper arc is one of intelligence becoming infrastructure for everyday life - the lasting transformation of the order of electrification or more. I’ve talked about the Interverse as one imagination of that fully fleshed out cognitive society: the moment when AI lets computation finally do what Weiser promised - move to the background so relations can move to the front.

Farrell and Shalizi remind us not to mystify the moment: we have always lived with monsters of our own making. If the industrial age organized matter, and the first digital age organized information, this next age will organize relations, both human to human, and, if we are lucky and careful, human to more-than-human too. Prediction will be part of it, and so will embodiment and production. The Interverse is the public space in which intelligence disappears into the background so that our shared work of meaning-making can take center stage.