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.

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.

Preface

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.

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.

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.

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.