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.

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.

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.

1. Governing the Planet

2. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack”

3. The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman.

4. The Planetary Steward

Introductory Note

Like last time, I have way too many notes on Blake and Gilman’s book to cover it from end to end; I have focused my remarks on the principle of planetary subsidiarity, which, along with a call for functionally delineated planetary institutions, is the most important contribution of the book IMHO. At any rate, this is not a book review, but a record of my thoughts as I was reading it. I am going to postpone my reading of the Gilman edited volume on “The Planetary” to next week, since its chapters connect themes raised by “The Stack” and “Children of a Modest Star.”

Narrow Planetary Institutions

Once upon a time, when the Gold Standard reigned over the world, every currency was pegged to gold. If I had gold reserves, it didn’t matter whether my currency was the rupee or the baht or the pound; I could buy something from you as long as I was willing to hand over an equivalent amount of gold to you. No need to convert my currency into dollars and send you a check in that denomination.

It wasn’t a perfect system. Far from it, for what if you didn’t have gold reserves? You were out of luck; when India became independent in 1947, it was owed a substantial amount of sterling debt (about 1.6 billion pounds), most of which Britain refused to pay in convertible hard currency - either gold or dollars - so India was unable to use what it was owed to buy machinery from the Americans, who were the only producers at that time. Then Britain devalued its currency by 30% in 1949, India’s capacity to import also dropped 30%, despite having no say in the decision. By the time the debt was repaid, devaluation and post-war inflation had reduced the value of the sterling debt to a fraction of its original amount. Not only did the British war effort cost India millions of lives (the Bengal famine was in part due to inflation caused by the RBI’s printing money to pay for the war), it perpetuated Indian poverty after independence. That great ‘liberal’ economist, Keynes, was adamant that Britain shouldn’t pay India back right away.

Never forget that the so-called defenders of freedom didn’t bat an eyelid as Indians starved by the millions, and their successors sent bomb after bomb to another defender of freedom committing a genocide of Palestinians in plain sight.

The Gold Standard is gone, and good riddance, but there’s still the dream that trade and finance should be denominated in something truly valuable. Wearing a planetary hat, we might consider pegging currencies to a commodity of some biogeochemical significance. What about carbon? Wouldn’t it be nice if currencies were backstopped by carbon? I thought so, and some years ago, I worked with my colleagues on a piece of design fiction called Carbonomics (now there’s a book on the carbon currencies!). Several iterations and modifications later, it became a private members bill tabled in the Indian parliament, but sadly, it never became the law.

Nevertheless, if adopted, a carbon standard - or a global carbon accounting system - would instantly embed our economies into planetary processes, and a global institution designed to manage that standard (and that standard alone) would be an example of a narrow functionally defined planetary institution that Blake and Gilman (BG henceforth) write about in their book. A carbon standard will likely violate their principle of subsidiarity, for money penetrates every scale from neighborhood to planet and - for example - devaluation of the carbon standard for planetary reasons will have knockdown effects on every village in the world, but that’s all the more reason to take BG’s architectural patterns seriously. Monetary tyranny is one of many forms of long-distance control and a legitimate fear if we ever create planetary economic institutions.

TLDR; The planet needs to be governed as a planet. We need institutions with teeth that can tackle planetary challenges at the only scale they can be tackled: at the scale of the planet.

But how? BG have some suggestions.

Excerpts from BG

In the previous essay on the Stack, we took a winding route to planetary governance, stopping to view several computational scenes along the way. Not so this time; we are going to make a direct assault on the peak, or as BG say:

What would governance look like if our planetary condition was central rather than ancillary to our political self-­conceptions? What issues would become paramount, and how might this change our views?

Which would be a marked improvement over our current situation where

The present global system...was and is designed, therefore, to represent the interests of its member national states in international forums. It is fundamentally not geared toward addressing planetary challenges like pandemics.

I don’t want to keep you waiting for their answer, which they deliver before the asked the question:

The answer that we come to—­a reconstructed governance architecture for the planet, or “planetary governance,” guided by the principle of planetary subsidiarity—­is not meant to provide a quick fix. If realized, it will represent a thorough structural transformation of the means of governance from the largest scale, the planet itself, to hyperspecific, localized scales.

“Children of a Modest Star” isn’t lacking in ambition, but is that ambition realistic? What will it take to make it real? Not the right question; while BG aren’t utopian (“We have not set out to write some “kind of hope- lessly utopian ideal political theory [that] orients us toward an ideal regime that has no likelihood of being brought into being,””), they are also not afraid to be at the bleeding edge (“Yes, we push things further than they are currently willing to go, and critics will likely ​​place us, with Landemore’s good company, “in the camp of . . . utopian and hopeless dreamers.” So be it.”). I read “Children of a Modest Star” as a form of design fiction, painting a future that could come to pass in our lifetimes. Or not. But like the Stack, it’s naming a development that can’t be unnamed once we have spoken it.

The reigning structure of multilevel governance is no longer adequate to the challenges of our current age, an age that some scholars have come to refer to as the Planetary....At the heart of the idea of the Planetary is a holistic vision of the planet as consisting of an almost infinitely complex interlaced and nested array of dynami- cally interacting biological, chemical, energetic, and geological systems.

That vision, which is fleshed out by an unprecedented explosion of knowledge about the Earth’s interconnected systems (Planetary Sapience, which we read about in the previous essay too), leads them to an ethical imperative:

our governance institutions must promote habitability in order to enable multispecies flourishing.

What’s the architecture of these habitability and multispecies flourishing promoting institutions? Much of BG’s book is devoted to answering that question. The key architectural principle is that of planetary subsidiarity:

The principle of subsidiarity states that authority within a pluralistic system of administration should be allocated to the smallest-­scale governing institution capable of managing the task effectively.

And in its planetary avatar:

A key argument of planetary subsidiarity is that the condition of planetarity makes clear that the smallest scale at which planetary issues can be governed effectively is the planet itself.

The language of administration, tasks and scales suggests a form of planetary technocratic management, but BG deny that, though I am not convinced their architecture encourages politics instead of merely tolerating it. Regardless, politics isn’t their main concern:

In the end, of course, there is no escape from politics....And so this book, while primarily concerned with planetary governance, also underscores the need for a new form of planetary politics.

As not-so-utopians, BG want to arrive at the planetary by arguing that it’s possible to extricate ourselves from today’s suffocating governance architecture, of which the nation state is the dominant element.

Indeed, the position of the national state is “so dominant,” observed the sociologist Charles Tilly in 1990, “that anyone who dreams of a stateless world seems a heedless visionary.”

Let’s nod our heads in agreement, but if it’s design fiction we are after, why not start at the planetary scale? Do we still believe we can tame nature and subdue the Earth? Do we still believe we can flatten the planet with no consequences? -- no we don’t, so let’s roll up our sleeves and design for the planet.

First stop: the planet isn’t humanity’s inheritance to squander. If we want to promote habitability and multispecies flourishing, we have to start with a planet that belongs to all of life:

The global of global climate change, by contrast, frames Earth with-out specific reference to humans. This globe references a vast, unified system fueled by solar rays, whose most salient features are physical and biogeochemical processes: fluxes of gases, liquids, solids, and energy on and around the third celestial object from the Sun. This vision of the globe makes plain that Earth is not humanity’s alone.

Schmitt’s nomos is physical (previous essay), with boundaries made clear by walls and fences. But there’s no wall separating humans from other species; even our bodies aren’t ours alone - our gut microbiome contains more bacteria than there are cells in the human body, and the microbiome affects everything from our mood to our metabolism.

BG narrate how the planet emerged as a scale of concern, starting with Vernadsky’s Biosphere and with increasing urgency after the Club of Rome’s report on “Limits to Growth.” Here’s a representative sample of their reasoning:

Their prediction of “sudden and uncontrollable decline” generated a shockwave among those accustomed to the seemingly limitless growth of the postwar boom.The report helped to define a set of world-­scale problems and problems of the world itself: it turned attention to “the carrying capacity of this planet” and whether human behavior at a global scale could “overshoot” it. But behind the environmental anxieties that Limits to Growth unleashed was an innovative perspective on the world. The report’s findings presented “the alternatives confront- ing not one nation or people but all nations and all peoples.” That is, they imagined the “planet as a whole.” And by doing so, they opened the possibility for, in the words of an endorsement on the book’s back cover, “planetary planning.”

The culmination of these developments is the crowning of humanity’s domination of the earth as a geological age, the “anthropocene.” Geologists rejected that label in 2024, but the phrase continues to live an unofficial life, and even if the anthropocene is purged from geology textbooks, it opens the door for planetary issues to take center stage in the near future.What are these planetary issues exactly?

Planetary issues are, at their base, defined by four core characteristics: they are critical to multispecies flourishing; they are enmeshed in the history of life on Earth; they operate on scales of time or size that are beyond direct, individual human experience; and they exhibit some degree of human involvement.

BG offer an institutional architecture for addressing planetary issues through their principle of planetary subsidiarity, which is a principle regulating multilevel structures from the local to the planet. They note that multilevel systems aren’t new:

multilevel structures have been increasingly common forms for the organization of governance within national states. Likewise, the current global governance system that coordinates among national states is itself a multilevel system. For nearly every important policy area today, decisions are made and poli- cies are implemented at multiple levels of government institutions and nonstate actors, with varying degrees of authority.

But an important level is missing!

Today, in particular, we lack planetary governance institutions—­that is, institutions tasked with and capable of managing planetary challenges.

We can’t ignore that level because:

planetary institutions are the minimum viable organization for the direct management of planetary challenges. These are institutions with specifically delimited authority at the planetary scale over specific and specifically planetary phenomena.

Absolutely, but does this mean we need to be thinking about a governmental unit at the planetary scale, like the nation state is at the national scale? That would threaten a lot of entrenched interests at the national and sub-national scales, and besides the push-back from the current lot in power, a planetary Leviathan could easily become a tyranny with no hope of exit.

BG’s greatest design innovation, in my opinion, is to turn this challenge - of planetary governance without a planetary government- into an opportunity, and to argue that instead of planetary institutions being units (say a planetary government that has monopoly over violence over the entire planet with sub-units governing the land surface, the ocean surface and the atmosphere) we should conceive of planetary institutions along functional lines - i.e., institutions that perform a narrowly scoped function such as regulating a carbon currency. Instead of appropriating the Earth’s territory (thereby triggering nomos fears in the way Schmitt and Bratton argue), planetary institutions should address one planetary challenge well, and use the principle of planetary subsidiarity to devolve power to smaller scale governance units as needed:

we must learn to prioritize governance functions over governance units....Our argument, by contrast, is to begin with the issue or problem in need of governance and then consider all governance units that might have a role in the matter. The result of this fundamental rethink is that national states should give up many of their governance functions, tasks, and decision rights: planetary functions should move to planetary institutions, while many other functions should move to local institutions. The allocation of authority isn’t a one-­time event, however; the system must be dynamic. Putting function first means recognizing that the appropriate unit or scale can change over time.

In the future, our idea of scale might shift away from its current administrative (district → state → nation) or Cartesian (millimeter → meter → kilometer) units to more ecologically or geophysically relevant units so that a watershed or a bioregion is the right unit of subsidiarity. Once we recognize that functionally defined institutions are not just for humans, but for multispecies flourishing, we will be led towards new entities - for example, should planetary institutions intervene between lions and zebras on the savannah, brokering what constitutes reasonable hunting? Don’t laugh at me, I am being serious!

It reminds me a lot of urban governance, which privileges functional service provision like waste collection and policing and differential of space by function - let’s say business district or green space - over territorial sovereignty. Mayors have a different job from chief ministers and presidents - it’s rare for a mayor to become a national leader in most countries with only three US presidents having ever served as a mayor. If design is what works, as Steve Jobs famously said, we want to design planetary institutions that work and get out of the way, instead of aggregating power. Perhaps what BG should have said, but didn’t is: let’s govern the planet as if it were a city, with citizens of all species.

An added bonus - if these planetary institutions work well as intended, there will be downward pressure to turn some nation state functions into standalone functional units (perhaps organized by bioregion or watershed instead of administrative boundary) and that will turn the state into less of a Leviathan - particularly important at a time when states are becoming more and more intrusive. Planetary institutions and their functionally defined responsibilities might offer a check against unit based tyranny at lower levels.

One can hope, though the desire to dominate never goes away.

Upholding the World

I’ll end these reflections with two thoughts:

First, a short speculation: are humans the right sapients to be running planetary institutions? We have poor attention spans; our capacity to ingest the massive amounts of data generated by satellites and other sensors is extremely limited. In contrast, AI is already good and getting better at the bureaucratic forms of reasoning we need to run planetary institutions - should they be the shoggoths who run the planet? Delimiting artificial institutions by functional goals will also prevent AGI overreach.

Even if these institutions aren’t entirely automated, the Stack must surely be repurposed to respond to planetary challenges? What kind of institution design do we need to make them happen? How do we fit other species into cybernetic institutions where nonhuman beings also have decision making power? What does a cyborg (in the sense of Donna Haraway) bureaucracy look like?

It’s very hard to predict, especially the future, but I just don’t see how to maintain metabolic order without cyborg institutions.

And a longer meditation: in turning the Anthropocene into a geological age, we highlight the deep impact of human activity on the earth’s biogeochemical systems - on nitrogen fixation, on carbon emissions, on biodiversity etc - but we also run the risk of naturalizing our planetary condition, of turning it into something that ‘just happens’ like the ebbing of the tides. Therefore, some authors like to call our age the capitalocene, emphasizing the role of the capitalist mode of production in the various compounding polycrises.

Both the anthropocene and the capitalocene are preceded by a primal act, the domination of the earth by humans; we can’t brush the brutality of this original act of appropriation in the name of a future law, or subsume that will to power under some system of exchange, capitalist or socialist. There’s no doubt that the planet needs governance, and some system of laws - or computational protocols - will constitute and constrain future planetary institutions, but we must first bear witness to what we have done first.

What does it mean to cut down forests in order to plant rows of palm trees or consign billions of sentient animals to a lifetime of cruelty in factory farms? Many centuries ago, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka looked on with horror at the carnage on the battlefield after his armies had defeated his Kalingan opponents. Ashoka did not hide the scale of the violence; instead, he immortalized his remorse in stone. In Rock Edict XIII, he admits that the war resulted in the killing of 100,000 people and the deportation of 150,000 others:

Directly after the Kalingas had been annexed began His Sacred Majesty’s zealous protection of the Dhamma, his love of that Law, and his inculcation of that Law. Thence arises the remorse of His Sacred Majesty for having conquered the Kalingas, because the conquest of a country previously unconquered involves the slaughter, death, and carrying away captive of the people. That is a matter of profound sorrow and regret to His Sacred Majesty.

We cannot erect planetary institutions without first acknowledging profound sorrow and regret for what we have done, of which destabilizing planetary metabolism is the greatest harm. The dharma of the future is metabolic as much as moral. I said this in the essay introducing the syllabus:

We are learning that social order depends on metabolic order: the maintained pattern of planetary and infrastructural flows that keeps a world habitable, and makes flourishing possible - not only for humans, but for the wider community of species entangled with us. Metabolic order is not an ideal. It is a working condition. It is what allows the social world to exist without constantly collapsing into emergency.

Thesis: The maintenance of planetary metabolic order is our primary collective task as a species.

It is literally the foundation for everything else. Habitability is no longer a background assumption. It is something that must be deliberately secured. Flourishing is no longer only a matter of rights, incomes, and recognition. It is also a matter of whether the life-support systems that sustain agency and experience can continue to function under stress.

That is what it is to uphold the world.

1. Governing the Planet

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

3. The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman.

4. The Planetary Steward

Introduction: A New Machine makes a New World

Last week I had mentioned there were three books in the Governance section of the Planetarity Syllabus - Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack,” Blake and Gilman’s “Children of a Modest Star,” and “The Planetary” edited by Gilman. Today’s essay is a response to Bratton alone - I have way too many notes on The Stack to also cover the other two books in one essay. In fact, I have so many notes that I am going to stop at the Fourth Chapter “Earth Layer” - where the Stack meets the Planet. The other two books will be covered in a subsequent essay later this week.

The word “response” should give you a clue that my essay ( and future Planetarity Syllabus essays) are less about representing the authors’ ideas faithfully and more about the thoughts they evoked in me. I am a fanboy - a book is in the syllabus only because it has influenced my thinking on topics close to my heart. I want to be fair to the syllabus authors’ ideas and acknowledge how they have influenced my thinking, but I am also in a “good artists borrow, great artists steal” frame of mind.

If I had to nominate a concept for the ‘most important concept of the last 500 years’ prize, I would pick the machine. Machines, mechanisms and their cognates influence every single thing we do, from how we think about nature to how we run our societies and how we produce art. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are all mediated by the machine.

The machine isn’t an Aristotelian category, but rather a graded, family resemblance category of the kind Eleanor Rosch has researched over the decades. As a graded category, its prototypes have changed over time. Brief introduction to Rosch’s ideas below:

In the classical view, a category is like a digital switch: something is either a bird or it isn’t. In Rosch’s view, membership is graded (analog).

• The Prototype: The “center” of a category is the prototype - the clearest, best example of that concept. For the category Bird, a robin is a prototype. It has all the salient features (feathers, flies, chirps, small).

• Fuzzy Boundaries: As you move away from the prototype, membership becomes “fuzzier.” A penguin is technically a bird, but it is a “bad” example because it doesn’t fly. It sits on the periphery of the category.

• Family Resemblance: Members of a category don’t share a single defining definition; instead, they share a network of overlapping similarities (a concept Rosch adapted from Wittgenstein).

Every shift in mechanical prototype has accompanied changes in our intuitions about collective life, of society, of nature etc. Once upon a time, the clock was the prototype; the Newtonian Universe dominated science for a couple of hundred years. Clock-like military discipline can be seen in parades across the world to this day.

Then came the Engine. The steam engine and the factory led to Marxian ideas about production being the most important principle ordering society, with changes in the mode of production leading to changes in social structures. The Dark Satanic Mills that Blake railed against gave us a glimpse of automation but they were a far cry from the Dark Factories dotting the Chinese Landscape today. That needed the development of the computer, which is the most general idea of mechanism that exists today. Our understanding of computation started in mathematics, but the computer escaped its formal confines a while ago, and now it influences every aspect of society.

We don’t (yet) have a computational ordering principle that can compete with production as the reigning principle of collective life. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack” is the first book I have read that gives me confidence that it’s possible to theorize collective existence on computational grounds. It’s a difficult book; it’s a long book, and it’s on occasion infuriating. I have disagreements with many of its claims, and as a result of the explosion of AI, I think the Stack has been superseded by Intelligence as the core computational idea (or even better, the generic term “Compute”), but Bratton has named something that can never be unnamed, even if the moniker changes. That’s why it’s an important book and essential to the Planetarity Syllabus.

The next section is a sampler of my notes on the first hundred thirty odd pages of The Stack.

Snippets of the Stack

We are all aware that in the historical blink of one’s eye, computers have emerged like a Godzilla made of sand and upended everything. But the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk and it wants to know: what does this computational coup mean? The first answer is that there’s no logic or grand design to this coup; it’s an accident that’s emerged from a series of technological, design, economic and political choices.

scrambled territories, institutions, constitutions, sovereignties, citizenships, hard- wares, softwares, protocols, interfaces, databases, patterns, platforms, cities, muscles, skins, organs, failing presumptions, exotic refrains, domains, settlements, penultimate boundaries....As such, any design authorship must understand that the dynamics at work now are—for better and worse—simultaneously and interchangeably both futuristic and archaic, at once both technocratic and theocratic.

But the Owl won’t be satisfied with this answer, for this accidental Godzilla, once created, has a discernable structure. Not one that can be captured by a definition; that would be weird after I dissed the Aristotelian way in favor of graded categories at the outset. I am so convinced Stacks are a cognitive category that I would have rejected Bratton’s definition even if he had provided one. But the Stack isn’t formless:

this book proposes a specific model for the design of political geography tuned to this era of planetary-scale computation. It works from the inside out, from technology to governing systems....To do this, it draws on the multilayered structure of software, hardware, and network “stacks” that arrange different technologies vertically within a modular, interdependent order.

Instead of a definition, Bratton gives us an architecture (wearing my cognitive hat, I would call it a schema) that inscribes stacks on to our world:

The Stack, as examined here, comprises six interdependent layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User....The scenario described in the chapters to follow, and appearing before us in the real world, can be summarized as one in which Users, human or nonhuman, are cohered in relation to Interfaces, which provide synthetic total images of the Addressed landscapes and networks of the whole, from the physical and virtual envelopes of the City, to the geographic archipelagos of the Cloud and the autophagic consumption of Earth’s minerals, electrons, and climates that power all of the above.

This architecture is nothing like that of the State - in whose schema one might see entities such as citizen, boundary, parliament etc. What happens when the State absorbs the Stack (or is it the other way around?): when I engage with the India Stack, am I a user or a citizen? In principle, the latter, but in practice, the former. I interface with the UPI system with the Aadhar card serving as an address, and then the transaction goes off into the cloud. Citizenship is, at best, an authenticating mechanism in this interaction, not a bearer of rights. As it so happens, most of these transactions happen within the geographical boundaries of India, but surely that doesn’t have to be so. The nation state might soon become a graded category, with the virtual and the physical layers coinciding at the prototypical center of the category, but with tendrils that spread across the world. These tendrils don’t have to be digital either; consider China’s OBOR initiative - to the extent that a Pakistan or a Zambia is tied to Chinese supply chains with no economically viable alternatives, one might say that the infrastructural sovereignty of the China Stack weakens the territorial sovereignty of seemingly independent nation states. Bratton argues the Stack’s usurpation of territorial sovereignty doesn’t turn space into an abstraction. Far from it.

But even as strange geographies corrugate, fracture, and smear worldly scale and tempo, the ground isn’t somehow evaporated into virtual information flux; to the contrary, we are brought to a certain end of nonplace. For this, a different kind of placefulness is reestablished, one that is not the organic inverse of artificial abstraction, but an experience of place as one resonant scale within a much larger telescoping between local and global consolidations.

The telescoping between local and global consolidations triggers the thought that the Stack is a Sheaf in the mathematical sense of that term - layers of data that sit on top of a location that can spawn new global invariants. I think geometry of the sheaf-like variety is at the heart of the stack - if I had more time, I would recast the six layer architecture in those geometro-topological terms. Raincheck. Bratton argues that nomos of the cloud both builds upon and supplants the earlier nomos of territorial appropriation:

The Stack model is also perhaps also a contemporary version of what Schmitt called the nomos, and perhaps it is what retires the Schmittian nomos altogether. This slippery concept refers to the historically evolving structure of the world order (more specifically for him, an Earth-order) and the corresponding partitioning of political space according to which sovereign entities are constituted. Is there a nomos of the Cloud?

I have a different take - geometrizing the Stack would also make it continuous with the territorial nomos we inherit from the Westphalian era, which is inherently spatial. The virtual thickening of the Earth’s surface using sheaf-like structures is a model of the stack worth fleshing out. Raincheck once again.

Almost done with these excerpts - there’s a lot more where it came from. Before I move on to the next section, I owe you an explanation - ‘nomos’ has been mentioned several times without saying what it is. Bratton borrows the term from Carl Schmitt:

Schmitt defined nomos as “the Greek word for the first measure of all subsequent mea- sures, for the first land appropriation understood as the first partite and classification of space, for the primeval division and distribution, is nomos....Nomos is described as prior to every legal, economic, and social order;it is constituted by appropriation, distribution, and production, and only through this can it move from the particular to the universal: from arbitrary territorial capture, to representations of spatial delineation and to a geopolitical order.

Ted Chiang and others have argued that the fear of AI is really the fear of capitalism, but I wonder if we need to take a step back, that the Stack’s nomos lies one layer or more below the layer that’s captured by capital; we might be apprehensive about tech’s capture of society but the AGI-pilled fear of being turned into paper-clips isn’t coming from capitalism but an earlier appropriative stage - the Columbian conquest that precedes settler colonialism.

What do you think?

Here’s what I think: we are in the very early appropriative stage of the Stack whose acts of violence may yet be absorbed by existing political structures or destabilize them so much that they fall apart. There’s also a third alternative related to the second: that the Stack opens up the possibility for planetary institutions of the kind we will read about in Blake and Gilman - they have to be computation forward, for how else would we form them?

Stacking the Planet

The will to power that Schmitt describes as the ‘nomos’ precedes every form of settled order. It also overflows those settled orders. For the last seventy five years, we thought the nation state order would contain our desire to dominate, and perhaps Pax Americana did that for a while (don’t ask the Vietnamese or the Afghans), but the Stack was digging into the innards of the earth this entire time, releasing every demon like Pandora’s Box. Bratton says:

there is no Stack without a vast immolation and involution of the Earth’s mineral cavities. The Stack terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices and spitting up mobile phones.

Kate Crawford’s “Atlas of AI” has a thorough analysis of the vast immolation and involution of the Earth’s mineral cavities that goes into the making of the Stack. The Stack - just to be clear, the actual megastructure we have created, not the book - gives off a strong Computational Leviathan vibe, though Bratton doesn’t cite Hobbes much. “Hobbes” occurs three times in the book of which only one is in the text, and “Leviathan” also occurs three times in the book of which only one is in the text, but just as the nation state was the consequence of a series of accidents and appropriations, so is the Stack. These accidents aren’t cheap; we wouldn’t be talking about “Extinction Rebellions” without the orgy of violence that accompanied the nomos of the Stack. Fortunately, there’s still some hope left at the bottom of the box, for:

There’s no Earth without the Stack.

There are at least two ways of reading this statement. There’s a deep history version, which gives Lovelock and Margulis’ Gaia a computational twist. All life and all intelligence is computational (most recently argued here), and the self-regulation of Earth Systems that makes life possible is at heart a computational process.

Many things process information algorithmically and could be said to “compute” in a meaningful sense (DNA and RNA, for example) without also demanding that we must see in them the reflection of our computing machines. We might even assume that the “next machines” (the ones that come after planetary-scale computation) will look less like today’s computers and more like biology itself.

There’s also a recent history version, for without the airborne mapping of the planet’s surface that was then intensified by undersea sensors and satellites revolving around the Earth, we wouldn’t understand the Earth as we do today, including the anthropogenic origins of climate change. Sensors and simulations are the vast machine that makes the Earth as we understand it. We will read about this more in the context of planetary sapience, a theme prominent in the other two books.

Our emerging planetary consciousness is a form of self-understanding that presupposes the Stack. The previous information technology that led to a new self-consciousness was print - the spread of print culture led to novels and national literature, and along with news media, it led to national consciousness and to a larger conception of humanity itself. When Shylock says to Salerio, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”, we resonate with his invocation of our common humanity, but I didn’t hear those words spoken on the stage at the Strand, but in a classroom in Delhi, where I read them on a page. Stories have traveled across the ages, but it is print that bound us into a single species-being.

Might computation - as the stack, as compute, as something else - bind all life together? It is very hard to predict, especially the future, but I have a strong bias towards computational institutions being the missing link.

Conclusion: The Metabology of the Stack

The Stack is both algorithmic and material; we can’t ignore either its informational or energetic metabolism, or as Bratton says:

The Stack is a hungry machine, and while its curated population of algorithms may be all but massless, their processing of Earthly material is a physical event, and therefore the range of possible translations between informa- tion and mechanical appetites has another limit that is not mathematical but defined by the real finitude of substances that can force communication between both sides of this encounter.Furthermore, like any megamachine the Earth layer is as socially constrained as it is technologically configured, and so there are political economies of Turing machines that are only accessible through misaligned and uneven hierarchies of geography, energy, and programmability.

If the Stack is the accidental Godzilla that has emerged from our technological choices, then Metabology is the discipline required to tame it before it consumes the world. Bratton argues that the Stack “terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices”, a vivid description of a machine that is deeply entangled with the Earth’s geology but indifferent to its habitability. This is precisely where the concept of the Stack must meet the demands of Metabolic Order. As I said in the introduction to the Planetarity Syllabus:

The maintenance of planetary metabolic order is our primary collective task as a species.It is literally the foundation for everything else.

Today’s AI enhanced Stack is a colossal engine of Prediction Metabology. It excels at sensing, modeling, and steering behavior through data, turning uncertainty into managed risk. However, prediction is insufficient if it is not coupled with the material capacity to maintain life support systems. The Stack provides the protocols that write the constitution of our society in practice, but currently, those protocols are optimized for extraction and engagement rather than the maintenance of planetary metabolic order.

To align the Stack with the needs of the Planetary Age, we must reorient it towards an institutional design where computation serves as the nervous system for planetary repair. The Stack offers the sensing and coordination capabilities required to manage carbon budgets, biodiversity, and energy flows at scale. It should be the infrastructure for the nested ecology of governance I call for in Metabology.

TLDR; Computational institutions must also be metabolic institutions.

1. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack”

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

3. The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman.

4. The Planetary Steward

If you’re a knowledge worker like me, you have no idea of our earthly condition. I don’t gather or hunt my food, the water I drink comes out of a faucet and the air I am breathing right now is heated in my basement before it’s piped into my home office. When I fall sick, I pop a pill. I am insulated - some might say alienated - from the vagaries of the flesh by an interlocking series of technological systems.

In short: my life is mediated.

That’s A-OK with me. I am no homesteader, I have no interest in going off the grid, and any attempt by people like me to ‘go back’ is a posture, not a program. Nevertheless, if mediation is OK, alienation isn’t. If we are to survive as a species, and not cause untold suffering to other species, we need to embrace the condition of Planetarity. Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, claimed the history of Western Philosophy was a history of the forgetting of Being, that we got lost in the trees of beings and missed the forest of Being as such. He dedicated much of his life to the recovery of the meaning of Being.

Did Heidegger go far enough?

What if history itself - not just the history of Western philosophy - is the history of forgetting the Planet, of treating nature as a Standing Reserve (to use a Heideggerian term)? What if the historical Time in ‘Being and Time’ (Heidegger’s masterpiece) is woefully inadequate?

Can we think our way beyond history into geological time?

We can’t grasp the planet through thought alone, but thought has a role, and for thought to play that role, philosophy has to be rethought from the ground up. Philosophy’s grasping the human condition (beginning with the Axial Age across many cultures) has to be replaced with its grappling with the planetary condition. I don’t know how that phase transition in thinking will happen, but I know it needs to.

Now for some logistics:

Grasping our planetary condition is a hyperproblem (more on hyperproblems here), and we will have to bring many lenses to the condition of Planetarity. The goal of the Planetarity Syllabus is to cover a variety of lenses, digest their insights, and bring those digested insights to bear on our understanding of Planet, in the manner Heidegger attempted with Being. I will cover one lens a month for a total of 10 lenses (Feb - Nov) and a final synthesis at the end of the year. Each lens will be scaffolded by a cluster of representative readings. I am planning to write four essays per lens:

1. Essay One: General remarks that lay out the lens and its distinctive features and a gesture towards the readings for the month. (Today’s essay is an example)

2. Essay Two: introducing the the individual readings within the lens.

3. Essay Three: connecting the readings explicitly with one another and abstracting blended concepts (for conceptual blending see Fauconnier and Turner).

4. Essay Four: present a partially digested take on the lens as a whole, building upon the blended concepts in Essay Three. If conceptual metabolism is a cow, then Essay Four is the cud after it’s made its way through the first of four stomachs.

Month One: Planetary Governance.

At the very beginning of Asimov’s Foundation series, Gaal Dornick swoops in from the edges of the galaxy to the imperial capital, Trantor. As his ship orbits the heart of the empire, Gaal is eager to see Trantor, but the viewport is closed during the final descent. The officer who gives Gaal the bad news suggests he take a space-tour after arriving, just as you and I might hope on a tour bus in London or New York. Trantor is a planetary city of fifty billion people, a world that has been paved over by the Empire.

The Planetary City, or the ‘Ecumenopolis‘ as the Greek Urban Planner Constantinos Doxiadis (fun fact: Doxiadis planned Islamabad, just as Le Corbusier did so for Chandigarh) called it, is a common trope in Science Fiction; an entire planet remade as urban settlement. Doxiadis imagined urban areas expanding and merging over time -from cities → metropolitan regions → megalopolises- until they form a global “world city”. The Ecumenolopis is the ultimate realization of the Globe as universal human settlement. What it implies in practice or as thought-experiment:

• Continuous built environment + infrastructure across continents (transport, energy, data, logistics).

• Functional integration: even if there are parks, farms, deserts, and protected zones, they’re managed as parts of one urban system

• Planetary-scale governance problems: water, waste, food, disease, climate, inequality, surveillance, mobility

• A new ecology: not “city vs nature,” but a thoroughly engineered biosphere, whether humane and resilient or brittle and extractive

In Foundation (the new TV series inspired by Asimov and only loosely based on the books), Trantor is a gleaming blur of metal and glass, with manicured gardens in the style of Versailles adding drops of green to a mass of silver. Does the Ecumenopolis have to be a monument to metal and stone, colonized at every scale by human artifice? Could it be different, offering room for the nonhuman multitude alongside humans and their artificial creations? An alternative imagination of the Planetary City as ‘Gaiapolis’ might look a lot more like the Earth than like a city, except it too would be crisscrossed by the structures of governance of an urban sort, subdivided into functional departments, some of whom might be tasked with biodiversity just as today’s cities attend to water or waste.

IMHO, conceiving the planet as a city is the only way to govern it as a whole.

Why Now?

The emergence of the Planet as a plausible unit of governance (the largest one can imagine today) is both necessitated by the compounding climate and ecological crises, and made possible by the interconnected information and energy technologies. Additionally, planetary politics is the only candidate for an inspirational politics of the future; its competitors such as international politics are barbaric - the arena of “The Strong do what they can while the Weak suffer as they must” - or in the case of national politics, irredeemably compromised; it’s hard to shake off one’s cynicism about national politics with their capture by corporate and sectarian interests.

A mass planetary movement that expresses solidarity with all living beings is the only struggle worth having today, but for that to happen, we need planetary institutions that help create the arena for planetary politics. Planetary institutions need not precede mass planetary politics; chances are they will arise in parallel, but every institutional development will likely create space for new political developments. I would be surprised and saddened (though I won’t be alive to see it) if there weren’t some form of planetary politics with wide appeal by the end of this century.

Now is the time to turn the plausible into the probable to use Dunne and Raby’s framework for speculative design.

One process that straddles thinking and acting is ‘governance’ and ‘government.’ The diversity of human needs and the fear of anarchy makes the case for institutions of governance, even if they have a tendency towards tyranny and elite capture. The Nation State is, by far, the most important unit of governance today, but it’s not that old and in the post-War era, the nation state has learned to live with transnational institutions - such as the WTO - that constrain the state’s capacity to act as it pleases. Nevertheless, attempts to go beyond the nation state towards world government have been an abject failure. Is planetary governance plausible? It’s too soon to tell, but it’s clear to me that the nation state isn’t the organizational form for governing the planet.

What then?

Maybe we should let a benevolent AI run the earth while we stick to mismanaging human affairs. The idea has some appeal, but I have a feeling Rule by Robot is not going to be popular as long as humans are running the show. Our ASI overlords don’t need my counsel, so let’s let the robots wait in the wings. Essay two in the Planetary Governance series is on three books bursting with ideas about governance at the planetary scale:

1. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack“ - now out in a 10th Anniversary edition.

2. Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman’s “Children of a Modest Star.”

3. “The Planetary,” a volume edited by Gilman, with essays by Gilman, Blake and Bratton among others.

The three books have a common genealogy in the Berggruen Institute, the institution most committed to Planetarity of any I know. What I like most about conceptions of the Planet coming out of Berggruen:

1. The rejection of a sentimental, environmentalist framing of the condition of Planetarity, in a manner similar to Latour and his approach to Gaia.

2. The embrace of computation as the code through which we grasp the planet. As I hinted at in my essay on Metabology, computation is important for planetary governance because, unlike the law, it’s executable. A constitution can’t regulate a smokestack directly, but a protocol can.

When taken together, these two stances help us arrive at surprising conclusions, such as the emergence of AI isn’t a sideshow to the ongoing ecological and climate crises, but an essential component in the condition of Planetarity. At the risk of massive oversimplification, Blake and Gilman offer arguments for new planetary institutions with the power to regulate and enforce carbon emission reductions, and Bratton’s Stack offers us a new computational architecture/grammar for these institutions. The merger of the two points towards Cyborg institutions of the near future.

I will reflect on this merger and more in Essay Four, but I am getting ahead of myself; I want to let the readings speak before I offer my take.

Of course.

I have a different POV: writing for reading (WFR). I can’t read until I have written enough that I have a toolbox of concepts and ideas to which I can fit what I am reading. Of course, the reading will modify those concepts, sometimes drastically, but without a strong yet flexible point of view of my own, I am in danger of being subjugated by the author’s ideas.

Which I don’t like. In order to read a lot, I have to write a lot.

This essay sets the stage for planetary and metabological WFRs of some key contemporary texts; I am going to create a foundational syllabus for Bhumics, which will have everything from the ancient to the modern. The syllabus should be useful for everyone who cares about a living planet; my take on the texts in it is of course, my own. As of this writing, I want to sample contemporary (i.e., written after 1945) texts along three dimensions:

1. Space: expanding our political imagination from the social to the planetary requires us to open the borders of that imagination - both literally, as in dissolving national boundaries and including the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere and the atmosphere in our idea of ‘territory,’ and metaphorically, in including nonhuman species and their ecological worlds as spaces that deserve our care. Representative texts: Staying with the Trouble, Children of a Modest Star, When Animals Speak.

2. Time: An equally, if not more, important challenge is to imagine ourselves as inheritors of a very long history, a history in which humans are recent actors and of governing not just for today or tomorrow, but for centuries and millennia and more. Representative texts: The Climate of History, Timefulness, Long Problems.

3. Speculation: expanding our spatial and our temporal horizons will need new sources of data, but also new sources of imagination. Or to put differently; failures of the imagination,of possibilities we can reasonably inhabit are as likely to hold us back as greed and violence. Representative texts: Speculative Everything, A Pattern Language, Wonderbook.

I will be commenting on these books and more in 2026, starting with a review of Gilman and Blake’s “Children of a Modest Star” in a couple of weeks. But in the spirit of WFR I am starting this syllabus series with a framing essay (see below - very long, sorry!) on metabolic order. The key claim, which will be repeated in the essay as well:

The maintenance of planetary metabolic order is our primary collective task as a species.It is literally the foundation for everything else.

Metabolic Order

For most of history, thinkers were concerned about the breakdown of social order. It’s no surprise that doctrines of harmony and centralized authority arose in China during the warring states period. A harsh government is preferable to the war of all against all, as Hobbes might say. Sometimes the source of disorder lies beyond the human - an earthquake or a flood or a drought might devastate a land, and people might reach for the hand of a wrathful God for an explanation.

For the most part, the modern era hasn’t had to worry about the ground beneath our feet or the clouds in the sky. Whether you begin with Hobbes and the state, Smith and the market, Weber and the bureaucracy, or Marx and the struggle over production, the basic assumption remains remarkably stable: the world is given, and the challenge is to coordinate human beings within it. Institutions are the scaffolding of that coordination. They secure legitimacy, enforce contracts, allocate resources, stabilize expectations, and keep conflict within a tolerable range. Even when these institutions fail, the failure is usually described in social terms: corruption, capture, inequality, alienation, polarization, administrative decay. When Gandhi blamed the earthquake in Bihar on the evils of untouchability, he was roundly criticized for being superstitious.

Our imminent condition of Planetarity forces a different starting point. Geology has become a matter of life and death. We are now recognizing that social order sits on a deeper stratum of planetary processes; when they start crumbling, our social institutions will lose a foundation they took for granted. Biogeochemical stocks and flows are the conditions that make any society possible in the first place. Stable climate patterns. Functioning water cycles. Fertile soils. Reliable energy systems. Tolerable air and ocean chemistry. Living ecosystems that provide pollination, disease regulation, carbon storage, and disease regulation. A planet that can absorb waste without flipping into a new regime. A built environment that can keep bodies alive through heat waves and storms.

For a long time these conditions were “there” in the background, not because they were metaphysically guaranteed, but because the Holocene’s stability made them feel like a permanent stage. The stage is now wobbling. And when the stage wobbles, every social drama becomes a different kind of drama. We are learning that social order depends on metabolic order: the maintained pattern of planetary and infrastructural flows that keeps a world habitable, and makes flourishing possible - not only for humans, but for the wider community of species entangled with us. Metabolic order is not an ideal. It is a working condition. It is what allows the social world to exist without constantly collapsing into emergency.

Thesis: The maintenance of planetary metabolic order is our primary collective task as a species.

It is literally the foundation for everything else. Habitability is no longer a background assumption. It is something that must be deliberately secured. Flourishing is no longer only a matter of rights, incomes, and recognition. It is also a matter of whether the life-support systems that sustain agency and experience can continue to function under stress.

Do you accept this shift?

1. No I don’t. Tell me how you’re planning to address the permanent existential risks that stem from that refusal. It doesn’t matter if the threat is nuclear weapons or climate change or a planetary pandemic - species wide existential risk is our lot as long as we refuse to recognize the condition of planetarity. The more we ignore metabolic order, the more extinction becomes possible.

2. Yes, I do! Those of us who recognize the importance of metabolic order have it scarcely better, for a consequence follows almost immediately: all our inherited institutions are misaligned.

The modern state is designed to manage territory, legitimacy, and security. The market is designed to allocate through price. The bureaucracy is designed to routinize decisions, reduce arbitrariness, and scale governance. All of them can help with metabolic stability, and in practice they will have to. But none of them were built with habitability or life-support as their explicit mission. Their reflexes - growth as default, extraction as baseline, “externalities” as someone else’s problem, short time-horizons baked into incentives - are increasingly at odds with a world of ecological limits and cascading risks.

There’s the “Planetary Boundaries” literature, which embeds human society as a circle inside the larger biosphere, on which it depends. As of today, we have breached six out of nine critical boundaries, which is troubling, to say the least. However, I am not a fan of ‘boundary logic,’ which maintains a separation between the human and the non-human. There’s no “safe operating space for humanity,” no social inside surrounded by the planetary outside: the planet is everywhere.

So the Planetary Age is not merely a new set of policy problems for old institutions. We will need a new class of institutions whose purpose is to produce, reproduce, and maintain metabolic order - to sense stresses early, coordinate response, repair breakdowns, and keep vital systems within safe bounds. And these institutions cannot exist only “at the top,” the planetary frosting on the social cake, because metabolic order is inherently multi-scale. It is kept or broken in neighborhoods (drainage, waste, heat islands, local water bodies), in cities (air quality, mobility, energy demand), in regions (watersheds, agriculture, grids), in nations (industrial policy, land use, extraction), and at the planetary level (carbon budgets, biodiversity protection, ocean governance). The form we need is not one monolithic sovereign, but a nested ecology of governance: structures that can act locally while remaining legible to planetary limits.

The Leviathan won’t save us, even if he wears a green cape.

Once habitability and planetary flourishing become primary, politics and economics can no longer be thought of as decisions and struggles over distribution within a stable world. Whatever comes next, and whether we call it politics of economics or something else (my name for it is Bhumics, as you know), it will be contest over the constitution of the world, struggles over whether the world can remain livable, and over the design of the institutions that can keep it so.

That is the doorway into what I call metabology.

Why ideology is no longer enough

In the realm of ideology, politics is largely a matter of beliefs. An ideology offers a picture of the good society, an account of how power should be organized, and a moral vocabulary for identifying enemies and allies. It’s easy to convey the struggle in simple terms: the means of production should be socially owned; markets should be free; the nation must be secured; growth must be maximized; inequality must be corrected; tradition must be protected. From these maxims, we derive policy goals. We assemble coalitions. We win elections. We write plans.

Consider a familiar example: a commitment to cheap, abundant electricity as a social good. From an ideological stance - say, a socialist one - electricity is necessary for dignity and participation, so the state should ensure universal access. A Planning Commission incorporates this into a national development program. Targets are set. Subsidies are announced. A new slogan enters public life: power for all.

And then the slogan meets the grid.

On paper, the ideology is coherent. But the grid is not a paper object. It is a system of generation capacity, fuel supply, transmission bottlenecks, transformer failures, billing cycles, theft, demand spikes, maintenance schedules, dispatch priorities, debt, and politics. It is a living system that must be kept alive every day. And every day, the system encounters scarcity and friction.

Who gets power when there isn’t enough? Not “the people” in general, but the feeder that has a hospital on it, or the feeder that serves an industrial client that pays on time, or the feeder whose local office has the right relationships. A subsidy exists on paper, but in practice it becomes a tariff category, a form, a meter type, a billing algorithm, a disconnection policy, a complaints queue. A promise of cheap electricity becomes a choreography of procurement rules, payment cycles, maintenance routines, emergency exemptions, and load-shedding rosters.

This is not a marginal detail. This is the point at which the real constitution of society shows itself - not the constitution written in founding documents, but the constitution written in procedures and protocols. That is why ideology so often feels like it “fails” in practice. It doesn’t fail because the ideas are necessarily wrong. It fails because ideas do not move matter. However, protocols do: unlike writing, computing is a technology that both points and pushes.

Metabology is a name for this middle realm.

It is the study, and the deliberate design, of how we mediate norms, values, supply chains, solar cycles, generative models and other nodes of modern life to organize reality itself, not just its representation on paper. The Planetary Age makes this shift from ideas to protocols unavoidable, because metabolic order itself is maintained or broken at precisely this level. A carbon budget is not a moral exhortation; it is a set of constraints that must be translated into permitting rules, grid upgrades, industrial standards, financing conditions, and enforcement capacities: even better if those rules and contracts are automated. A watershed is not a symbol; it is a physical system that must be protected through land-use rules, monitoring protocols, agricultural practices, and infrastructure maintenance. A heat wave is not an opinion; it is a physiological assault that requires cooling access, urban design, reliable electricity, and emergency planning. If we are serious about habitability, we have to become serious about protocols.

What metabology actually is

Energy must be generated and delivered. Water must be stored, purified, and routed. Food must be grown, transported, inspected, sold. Housing must be financed, permitted, built, maintained. Materials must be mined, refined, moved, and turned into things. Waste must be collected, processed, and absorbed without poisoning the world. Information must be recorded, processed, and acted upon to coordinate all of this. These are not just “sectors.” They are metabolic systems. They ingest resources, convert them through institutions, and distribute outputs that make life possible.

Every society has gates. Some are literal: a valve, a port, a pipeline, a checkpoint, a transformer. Some are administrative: a permit, a tender, a clearance, a subsidy rule, a compliance certificate. Some are computational: an eligibility score, a ranking model, a fraud flag, a dispatch algorithm, a platform’s default setting. At each gate, there’s a negotiation: budgets become allotments, rights become entitlements, files get held up or passed. There might be rules set from up above, but at each checkpoint, there’s a soldier who might let you through or shoot at you: we might as well start with the patterns on the ground and generalize from those, even if the global rules have high predictive value.

This is why metabology is not merely a synonym for “infrastructure policy.” It is a theory of governance at the level where the social meets the physical and increasingly, the biogeochemical. It treats infrastructure and institutions as one coupled system. It insists that the moral and the material are entangled, because moral commitments only become real when they are converted into stable procedures that can withstand bad days.

Who is served first when a system is stressed? What failure modes are tolerated? What is measured, and therefore optimized? What is invisible, and therefore neglected? What is automated, and therefore hardened into default? To think metabologically is to become attentive to the often-invisible machinery of collective life. It is to recognize that the most consequential political decisions are increasingly made not only in parliaments and courts, but in standards bodies, procurement contracts, logistics systems, software platforms, and grid control rooms. It is to understand that “policy” is not only a document; it is an executable sequence of operations.

If the Planetary Age requires the maintenance of metabolic order, we need institutions that can do three things reliably:

1. Sense: monitor vital flows and detect stress early (not only through scientific measurement, but through everyday feedback from those who live in the system).

2. Coordinate: align action across scales and sectors when a disturbance propagates (because in a coupled system, no agency can act alone).

3. Repair and reproduce: maintain the mundane capacities - maintenance crews, spare parts, governance routines, financial stability - that keep systems from decaying.

These are not glamorous functions. Urban governance is a good model - most of the fights are over waste collection, road laying and school bus routes. Urban governance is already metabolic! I am only adding a line of (admittedly vast) generalization: think of the planet itself as a city.

Once the planetary city takes root in our minds, we are immediately impressed with its fractal character: the city exists at all scales from the neighborhood to the planet as a whole. A neighborhood metabolic institution might look like a localized heat and water resilience organization: monitoring temperatures, ensuring cooling access, maintaining drainage, managing local waste, protecting a water body, coordinating emergency response. A city’s metabolic institution might integrate grid resilience, mobility, housing retrofits, air quality, and public health. A regional one might govern a watershed or an agricultural belt, aligning land use with ecological thresholds. A national one might coordinate industrial policy, energy transition, and critical supply chains. A planetary one might maintain carbon accounting, biodiversity protection, and the governance of shared commons like oceans and atmosphere.

The point is not to imagine one perfect institution that solves everything. The point is to name the missing layer: planetary institutions that treat habitability maintenance as their primary mission, and that can translate planetary constraints into operational reality without collapsing into either technocratic fantasy or ideological theater.

In Asimov’s Foundation series, the highest official in the (first) Foundation was the Mayor of Terminus.

Competing metabolic orders

Earlier forms of conflict aren’t going away; the post war ideological poles of geopolitics such as democracy vs authoritarianism, or the language of national interest such as security dilemmas and the balance of power, and the language of economics such as trade, investment and supply chains: these will disappear slowly, if ever, but the Planetary Age adds a contest at the stratum that lies beneath them: a contest over metabolic systems.

In a constrained world, power increasingly belongs to those who can secure and coordinate life-support flows: energy, food, water, materials, logistics, and now, crucially, computation. In the future, we will have competing visions of the institutional architectures for keeping systems running, different philosophies of coordination between state, market, and platform. We can see a glimpse of this future already, where China’s ability to build energy, information, transportation and manufacturing infrastructure at scale is both a matter of envy and fear. American teens are consuming Chinese metabology with relish, even as the ideology is far from attractive. I sense an emerging contrast between two large-scale metabolic orientations: a prediction metabology and a production metabology.

The prediction metabology - the US is the archetype - is centered on the capacity to sense, model, and steer complex systems through information. It treats data, compute, software platforms, financial networks, and standards regimes as the primary instruments of power. Its advantage is not only technological; it is organizational. It excels at building systems where prediction becomes a lever over behavior: advertising markets, credit scoring, risk pricing, logistics optimization, automated compliance, algorithmic governance. It builds a world in which uncertainty is turned into a tradable object and then managed through models.

The production metabology - China is the archetype - is centered on the capacity to make and move physical things at scale: industrial ecosystems, manufacturing capacity, infrastructure build-out, resource processing, and the logistics that connect them. It treats the control of supply chains, ports, industrial standards, and energy/material throughput as the primary instruments of power. Its advantage is also organizational. It excels at aligning state capacity, industrial policy, and manufacturing ecosystems to accomplish physical transformation quickly, often through long time-horizons and coordinated investment.

These are ideal types, not caricatures. Each system contains the other. A production metabology needs prediction to optimize and coordinate. A prediction metabology needs production to build the chips, the data centers, the grids, and the physical substrate of computation. But the emphasis matters. It shapes what gets built first, what is treated as strategic, and what kinds of institutions are cultivated. Maintaining metabolic order in a warming, volatile world requires both kinds of capacity: the ability to predict and coordinate across coupled systems, and the ability to build and repair physical infrastructure at speed. It also requires something even harder: the ability to cooperate on shared constraints while competing for advantage.

Carbon does not respect borders. Biodiversity loss cascades across regions. Supply chain shocks propagate through oceans. Climate disasters trigger migration, instability, and conflict. Yet the institutions capable of acting at planetary scale are weak, contested, and often captured by narrow interests. So the likely future is not a neat story of global unity, nor a neat story of total fragmentation. It is a messy, intermittent pattern: cooperation where metabolic interdependence is unavoidable, competition where metabolic advantage is at stake.

We can already anticipate what the arenas will be.

On the cooperative side: disaster response norms, pandemic surveillance, methane reduction, certain forms of grid interconnection, shared scientific monitoring, and possibly baseline agreements on carbon accounting. Not because of enlightenment, but because failure to cooperate will be too costly even for rivals. In a coupled system, some coordination becomes a matter of self-preservation. On the competitive side: control over critical minerals and processing, dominance over chip supply chains and advanced manufacturing, standards-setting for energy technologies, influence over infrastructure corridors, ownership of data and platforms, the governance of undersea cables and satellite networks, the terms of climate finance, and the emerging architectures of “green industrial policy.” Here metabolic order becomes strategic: whoever sets the protocols of transition shapes the distribution of future flourishing.

In such a world, the decisive political question becomes: what metabology will govern habitability? Will metabolic order be maintained through institutions oriented toward repair, resilience, and shared flourishing? Or will it be maintained through architectures that deepen inequality, externalize burdens, and treat large parts of the planet as sacrifice zones?

Even if we agree we are in a Planetary Age where metabolic order is primary, that metabolic order does not maintain itself. It is produced and reproduced through protocols, and protocols are housed in institutions. Metabology is how we approach the design of those institutions. It is a wager that we can learn to design institutions that treat habitability as a public good at every scale from the neighborhood to the planet. It’s a wager that we can build systems that keep the lights on and the water clean and the air breathable, while also keeping contestation, accountability, plurality alive. I foresee a not too distant future in which the deepest conflict is not between left and right, or between democracy and authoritarianism, or even between nations. It will be between competing metabologies: competing architectures for maintaining a livable world, and competing answers to the question of who gets to flourish inside it.

Parting Thoughts on Hyperproblems and Metabology as a Hyperproblem

And once you see that, it becomes obvious why metabology is not something you can “get right” with a clever essay, a good election, or even a well-funded five-year plan. It is not a position. It is not a platform. It is not a single reform. It is an attempt to redesign the operating conditions of collective life in a world whose basic background assumptions are now unstable.

Which is another way of saying: metabology belongs to the domain of the hyperproblem.

A hyperproblem is not just a hard problem. It is not even a wicked problem with better branding. Think of a hyperobject, but as a problem. It is a challenge that exceeds the cognitive bandwidth of any single individual and the coordination capacity of any single existing institution. It is large not only in size but in kind: it unfolds across long time horizons, spills across planetary spatial scales, and refuses to be reduced without losing the very thing you were trying to understand. Hyperproblems require models, prototypes, simulations - ways of exploring possibility space rather than merely arguing inside it.

Now notice what happens if you bring this back to metabology, which is a hyperproblem par excellence. Metabology began, in this essay, as a refusal to treat politics as a debate club. The core claim was that ideology is no longer enough because it cannot reliably cross the membrane between moral intention and material consequence. It produces slogans, and then the slogan meets the grid. What actually governs the world is the constitution written in procedures and protocols. Metabology names the study, and the deliberate design, of that executable layer, where the social meets the physical and, increasingly, the biogeochemical.

But this is precisely why metabology is itself a hyperproblem.

Think about what metabology is trying to do. It is trying to design institutions and protocols that can maintain metabolic order - stable, habitable flows - across a planet-sized city whose neighborhoods are watersheds, grids, supply chains, forests, ports, and data centers. It is trying to translate planetary constraints into operational reality without collapsing into technocratic fantasy or ideological theater. And it is trying to do this while keeping contestation, accountability, and plurality alive, while the systems themselves are stressed, politicized, and weaponized.

No single mind can hold this. No single institution can coordinate it. No single discipline can even describe it cleanly, because the object itself is a coupled system: energy linked to water, water linked to food, food linked to land use, land use linked to biodiversity, biodiversity linked to disease, disease linked to governance, governance linked to computation, computation linked back to energy. The whole point of metabology was that the moral and the material are entangled; that entanglement is also what makes the problem irreducible. You can partition it, yes, but you cannot solve the partitions “in isolation” without the solutions colliding downstream, sometimes violently.

And then there is time. Metabolic order is not something you install like software and forget. It is reproduced. Maintained. Repaired. It is a daily choreography of sensing, coordination, and care - mundane capacities that make the difference between resilience and collapse. Even if you “solve” a local protocol today, a new heat regime, a new migration pattern, a new geopolitical sanction, or a new platform default will change the boundary conditions tomorrow. Metabology is not a problem with an endpoint. It is a form of inquiry that must persist across generations, across civilizations, across -cenes (holocene, anthropocene…). It’s governance with the longue duree in mind, a method for civilizational self-governance under planetary constraints.

If that sounds like an impossible task, good. Hyperproblems are supposed to sound impossible. The point is not to make them smaller than they are. The point is to build protocols that allow finite beings to act intelligently inside the impossible.

Last essay of the year.

TLDR;

Ideology tells us what kind of world we think we are building. It provides the map of intentions, the moral compass, and the political manifesto. Metabology reveals the world we are actually building. It is found in the contracts signed, the dashboards monitored, the sensors installed, the favors exchanged, the algorithms deployed, and the energy consumed.

To understand modern power —and more importantly, to change it— we must descend from the high altitude of ideologies and laws into the tangle of metabologies on the ground. In this last essay of the year, I argue that civilization is metabolism before it is politics, economy, or culture.

Metabology is a guide to the flows of energy, matter, and information that constitute the material basis of social life, and an invitation to rewrite the protocols that govern them.

The Ideological Cascade

Consider socialism. As an ideology, it posits that the means of production should be socially owned. If you are a state socialist, you believe the state should hold that ownership. From this ideological stance, a specific policy goal might emerge: providing abundant, cheap electricity to everyone. This is consistent with the belief that access to energy is a social good. In the realm of ideology, this belief must translate into policy.

• The Plan: A Planning Commission incorporates this into a “Five-Year Plan,” promising, for example, one kilowatt of free electricity to every family.

• The Bureaucracy: The Ministry of Power allocates budgets to different regions based on reported needs.

• The Distribution: Regional ministries receive funds and invite tenders from power suppliers to install solar capacity.

• The Outcome: Contracts are signed, panels are imported and wired, and - in theory - electricity flows into the grid.

This entire chain, from the high-level principle to the final kilowatt, operates within the logic of the ideological model. Get it? No? Let me say it again:

The Ideological Cascade Illustrated

Let’s say you think the means of production should be owned by the state. In that case, one of the things the state might want to do is provide abundant, cheap electricity to everyone. Ideologically, that’s consistent with the state owning the means of production and with the belief that access to abundant energy is a social good. All of that is still in the realm of ideology.

But then someone has to take that ideological belief and turn it into actual electricity flowing into people’s homes. So maybe - as used to happen in actually existing socialist states - there’s a planning commission that says: in this five-year plan, we are going to provide one kilowatt of free electricity to every family in the country. The party secretariat and the planning commission agree that this is how the principle of socialized energy will translate into a policy outcome: one kilowatt per family.

But how are you going to get to that one kilowatt?

They might say: “We have the Ministry of Power, and the Ministry of Power has to allocate its budget to different regions in such a way that we build solar farms that actually produce that energy.” Different regions then apply to the Ministry of Power, saying: “This is what we need. This is our average electricity production, here’s how we’re falling short of our one-kilowatt goal, and please give us this much money.”

The Ministry of Power distributes money to all the local or state-level or regional power authorities. Those local authorities then have to distribute funds to people who will actually install the capacity and “get the wires going,” so to speak. Each local ministry invites tenders from power suppliers, solar power suppliers in this case. They say: “Bid for our contracts and tell us how much you’ll charge for installing this much solar capacity in this region, in this year.”

Once the contracts are awarded, the solar companies hire people, import solar panels from China, and eventually you start seeing solar panels going up. They’re wired into the grid, and assuming every family has a connection, they start getting electricity - one kilowatt of installed capacity per family.

The Metabolic Reality

Now, strip away the ministries and the high-level abstractions. Look simply at the coordination occurring on the ground. You have solar companies, local agencies, financial flows, and material constraints like sunlight availability, grid stability, and roof space.

How exactly are information, finance, and materials combined to execute this? What rules or heuristics govern those local interactions?

This is metabology. It starts with embodied interactions - people shaking hands over a contract or a solar installer climbing on a roof - and builds abstractions on top of those. Currently, we often view these ground-level mechanics merely as the “last mile” of ideological policy. However, the reality on the ground is often messy and distinct from the theory. For instance, a contractor might bribe a bureaucrat to secure a bid. That corruption is certainly not “socializing the means of production,” yet it is part of how the system actually functions.

Metabology asks us to treat those messy mechanics not as noise or “implementation details,” but as the main story. Instead of starting from grand principles and working downward, metabology starts from the ground up and asks: what are the protocols by which decisions actually get made, resources actually move, and systems actually run?

Think of metabology as the operating system of a society’s material life. Where ideology tells you why energy ought to be shared and who ought to own the means of production, metabology tells you how, step by step, that belief turns into electrons moving through wires, steel being poured, or food showing up in a neighborhood market. It is concerned with rules-of-thumb, bidding procedures, software systems, bribes and favors, informal hierarchies, physical bottlenecks, and data flows. All of these together form a set of protocols - formal and informal - that govern the flow of energy, information, money, and matter.

In an idealized socialist story, the Planning Commission decides, the Ministry allocates, the regions comply, and the kilowatt appears. A metabolic description refuses to stop at the planning document. It asks: “Who gets to submit a bid, and who is quietly told not to bother? What data about “need” and “shortfall” actually enters the Ministry’s spreadsheet, and what never gets recorded? What software system ranks the tenders, and what weights has some underpaid consultant baked into the algorithm?
When the deadline looms, who cuts corners on installation, and who looks the other way at the inspection stage?”

All of these are questions about protocols, not principles. A protocol might be explicit — an e-procurement platform where bids are automatically ranked according to a published formula. But most protocols are tacit: “We always give at least one contract to the politically connected firm,” or “We slow-walk paperwork for villages that didn’t vote for us,” or “We only approve rooftop solar where the grid is already stable because we don’t want headaches.” These are not written in manifestos, but they are how the machine runs.

From a metabolic point of view, the crucial move is to model these protocols as the real structure of the system, not as accidental deviations from a pure, ideological design. The ideology might say “socialized energy,” the law might say “transparent tendering,” but the metabology says: “Here is the actual pattern of flows that emerges when these rules, incentives, habits, and infrastructures interact.”

It is less like a moral code and more like a wiring diagram.

Metabology as Protocol

Once you see that, you can imagine designing metabologies as carefully as we design constitutions or party platforms. You could, for example, build a contracting protocol in which every bid, every need assessment, every delivery milestone is logged in a public ledger; where algorithms are audited; where communities can veto installations that don’t match their needs; where payments are automatically released only upon verified performance. In that world, “provide one kilowatt to every family” isn’t just a slogan; it’s compiled down into stepwise rules that are close to the metal, operating where people, machines, and materials actually meet.

None of this was possible to formalize at large scale before the age of digital infrastructure and big data. We simply did not have the capacity to track flows of energy, money, and information in real time, let alone adjust them through fine-grained rules. Today, we do. That doesn’t mean we automatically have good metabologies; it means we are, for the first time, consciously in the business of writing and rewriting the protocols that run our material life. Metabology is not an abstract model of how the machine should work; it is the set of rules describing how the machine actually runs. It takes into consideration the physical, human, material, and social inputs as they exist in reality.

Even protocols might appear too top-down to some; they might prefer to record existing transactions in a ledger and fit a statistical model on that ledger because metabolic patterns might be too complex for humans to capture in a protocol. We may need AI as an essential intermediary between human metabology and messy life in the real world.

Messy Business

Let me repeat: there’s no need to reduce the complexity of our messy realities. Metabology is very much an account of heterogeneity; it’s not this essence that binds all members of a society in a web of energy and information. Far from it. Instead, consider this quote from Bruno Latour (from ‘Reassembling the Social’):

It claims that there is nothing specific to social order; that there is no social dimension of any sort, no ‘social context’, no distinct domain of reality to which the label ‘social’ or ‘society’ could be attributed; that no ‘social force’ is available to ‘explain’ the residual features other domains cannot account for; that members know very well what they are doing even if they don’t articulate it to the satisfaction of the observers; that actors are never embedded in a social context and so are always much more than ‘mere informants’; that there is thus no meaning in adding some ‘social factors’ to other scientific specialties; that political relevance obtained through a ‘science of society’ is not necessarily desirable; and that ‘society’, far from being the context ‘in which’ everything is framed, should rather be construed as one of the many connecting elements circulating inside tiny conduits.

Now replace ‘social’ by ‘metabolic,’ and run this argument anew. One account of metabology will look for the energetic and informational underpinnings of existing social processes; all those solar panels need paperwork to be completed before they are installed; and all that local paperwork first requires state-level authorities to adopt central policy directives and all those policy directives require the planning commission to approve them, and before you know it, you’re back in ideology. Instead, consider that the paperwork is filed alongside the purchasing of the solar panels - some entrepreneur shook hands with his counterpart in China to buy the panels as soon as the paperwork is completed. Metabolic activity proceeds in parallel; information and material flows proceed in parallel.

Metabology is a science of connection. Its protocols don’t live behind the veil of everyday activity; rather they are executed alongside those activities.

Metabology as Ground vs Metabology as Figure

In gestalt psychology and its offshoots, it’s common to notice that human perception is organized in terms of ‘figure’ and ‘ground.’ During a war scene, when the movie camera pans to the hero’s face, the hero is the figure while battle raging around him is the ground. The figure is what we pay attention to, the entity whose capacity - or lack thereof - to change the world is of interest to us. When the hero is fighting the villain, we want to know who is winning; we don’t care that thousands of other soldiers are being wounded or dying right next to them. The ground, on the other hand, is either inert or, at best, an enabler. The props and the NPCs so to speak. The figure and the ground aren’t fixed. To the writer of a family drama, the argument between the wife and the husband is the figure, and the furniture is a prop. To the set designer, the furniture is the prop and the dialog is someone else’s problem.

In much metabolic analysis - Smil’s “Energy and Civilization” comes to mind - energy and information are enablers, the ground of social structure. That’s not my view: my account of metabology is an account of energy and information as prime movers, as heroes in our social journey. Energy and information don’t create social order behind the scene; no, not at all. They are right there: when an entrepreneur shakes hands with their Chinese supplier for the inputs for a solar farm, the handshake acts as a high-information signal that can then trigger future material flows. Information - the handshake, in case you were wondering - is right there; it’s part of the scene, not behind the scenes. If I were a movie director, I would focus the camera on the hands, not at the flunkies cheering in the background.

This shift in perspective - from prioritizing the ideological “figure” to scrutinizing the metabolic “ground” to refocusing on the metabolic “figure” is the key to grasping and reshaping modern power. Ideologies offer a grand narrative of intention, but metabologies provide the concrete script of execution. By focusing on protocols, data flows, and material transactions, we move past distant principles and into the realm of actionable change.

To build a genuinely new world, we must stop debating manifestos alone and start designing better metabologies - both stacks and protocols - for our shared material reality.

Rain Check

Let me end with a short list of Metabological ideas I have written about in the past and want to flesh out in greater detail in the future plus a couple of ideas for which I have notes but I haven’t written anything.

• I explored Metabolic Sovereignty, moving beyond the sovereignty of borders to the sovereignty of flows. We will see that power belongs to those who control the conversion points - the semiconductor fabs, the shipping lanes, and the data centers.

• I (briefly) examined Metabolic Development, asking how we can expand human capabilities not through infinite GDP growth, but through reorganizing material flows to fit within planetary boundaries.

• I am yet to map the US and Chinese Metabolic Stacks, analyzing the geopolitical divergence between the “Prediction Stack” (US/organized around AI and data) and the “Production Stack” (Chinese/organized around energy and matter).

• I am yet to explain ‘Mandalarity,’ a new geometry of world order that replaces the ‘poles’ of the Cold War with the overlapping, radiating circles of a networked world.

I am not sure when I will get to these, for I have a completely different topic that I want to explore in 2026.

I hope the end of the year treats you well!

1. Metabolic Stack

2. Metabolic Wars

3. Metabolic Sovereignty

4. The AI Bubble, but really, the Interverse

I also had a standalone series on Planetarity as Philosophical Engineering that serves as an introduction to the glossary. This week, I want to introduce the idea of Development with Metabolic Characteristics, where Development in this context is in the same family as Economic Development or Developing Countries. Let me start with a provocation:

In 2025, every nation is a developing nation

Once upon a time, “development” divided the world into those who had it and those who didn’t. Developed nations are/were wealthy, industrial, modern, and developing ones are poor, agrarian, aspirational. Development was a one-way street: the periphery would catch up with the core. Factories, infrastructure, and education would close the gap; history would converge.

End of History. QED.

That story no longer holds. In 2025, the French revolution is in the rearview mirror while the planet is looming on the horizon. In the condition of Planetarity, every country is once again a developing country - not in the sense of being poor or backward, but in the sense of being unfinished, adaptive, and metabolically entangled. No society today possesses a stable model of prosperity within planetary limits. Every society is learning, under pressure, how to reorganize its flows of energy, matter, and meaning so that life can go on.

That is why we need a new kind of development thinking - neither modernization nor post-development, but metabolic development: the study and practice of how societies transform within the ecological and informational constraints of the planet.

1. The End of the Development Divide

For most of the twentieth century, development was a geopolitical project. Rich nations exported capital, poor nations imported expertise, and success was measured by GDP per capita. The developmental state promised take-off through industrialization; the global market promised convergence through trade.

Today, the wealthy world faces infrastructural decay, carbon lock-in, and social fatigue. The poorer world faces heat, displacement, and resource stress. Both are bound by the same planetary metabolism: the finite capacity of the Earth to absorb, renew, and sustain. The new divide is not only between North and South (though that isn’t going away), but also between metabolic literacy and metabolic blindness, between those who can reorganize their flows and those trapped in inherited infrastructures.

2. Growth Under Planetary Conditions

To think metabolically is to recognize that economies are not factories joined by trade - boxes and lines in a systems diagram; they are living systems exchanging with the biosphere.

Every act of development is thus a metabolic act: reorganizing how a society eats, moves, builds, and computes. Development policy, reimagined, is the art of rewiring metabolism—redirecting energy and information so that human flourishing aligns with planetary regeneration. In that sense, the development challenge has come full circle. The 1950s dreamed of escaping scarcity; the 2020s must dream of escaping overshoot.

Metabolic development begins with a hard truth: that economic growth is a terrible model of growth, which is much better conceptualized as a metabolic rather than economic process. Growth and Development come with a heavy biological hand: as properties of living systems that help them evolve, adapt, and regenerate. The question is not whether we grow, but how we grow—what grows, where, and at what energetic and ecological cost.

Further, biologizing growth will also wean us away from the linear GDP growth indices we have become used to. Growth has room for Domestic Product, Domestic Happiness and much more.

Planetary development is about qualitative growth: the expansion of complexity, knowledge, and capability within finite energy budgets. A solar panel, an algorithm, a mangrove forest—all are growth processes of different kinds, linked by energy and information flows. To grow well under planetary conditions is to maintain the circulatory integrity of the Earth system, to ensure that the human metabolism amplifies rather than undermines the larger metabolism that hosts it. In 2025, every nation faces the same paradoxical task:

1. To decarbonize while electrifying.

2. To digitize while democratizing.

3. To globalize while localizing resilience.

4. To grow while regenerating.

The United States and China wrestle with energy transition and data governance; India and Nigeria grapple with urban heat and agricultural stress; Europe experiments with circular economies while importing materials from elsewhere. Each is a development laboratory testing new metabolic configurations under the same planetary constraints.

Thus, “developing” no longer means “catching up”; it means learning to adapt. The hierarchy has collapsed into a shared predicament: how to sustain complexity without exhausting the substrate that supports it.

3. Hirschman and Sen

Every social metabolism runs on three interlocking pillars:

1. Energy – the physical throughput that powers transformation.

2. Information – the patterns and feedbacks that coordinate energy use.

3. Organization – the institutions, values, and technologies that bind them together.

Twentieth-century development emphasized energy (mainly fossil) and organization via state and market but ignored information, the feedback systems that inform us about nonlinearity and complexity and warn us when flows become unsustainable. Only through intelligent sensing can we manage a finite metabolism wisely. Metabolic development, therefore, is development as learning—the construction of societies that can read, model, and correct their own energetic and ecological footprints in real time.

Easier said than done.

Every transition begins in stress: blackouts, shortages, migrations, protests. The aim is not to eliminate disruption but to metabolize it into innovation and coordination. Here, we need to channel Albert Hirschman; his mid-century insight that development advances through disequilibria, linkages, and creative tension feels newly prophetic. What he called “unbalanced growth” we now recognize as metabolic stress: localized perturbations that trigger systemic learning. The subtitle of this essay is The Strategy of Metabolic Development, a homage to Hirschman’s masterpiece “The Strategy of Economic Development.” I hope to reimagine his ideas for a world of energy grids, data centers, and ecological feedbacks.

From Hirschman to another hero: Amartya Sen.

If Hirschman gives metabolic development its dynamics, Amartya Sen gives it its ethics. Freedom, in the metabolic view, is not an abstraction but a function of access to energy and information - the conditions of possibility of capability. I want to build upon Sen’s Development as Freedom and ask: what metabolic substrate do we need to make that Freedom possible? How can we design societies in which energy and information circulate in ways that sustain freedom for humans and non-humans alike?

4. Institutions for a Living Economy

Metabolic development demands new architectures of coordination:

• Energy commons that distribute generation and ownership.

• Data cooperatives that treat information as a public utility.

• Circular economies that close material loops.

• Ecological states that measure success by restoration rather than extraction.

To be sure, these are utopias in comparison to our lived realities but they are also necessities if we are to survive the condition of planetarity. The old dichotomy between state and market dissolves into a more fluid topology of governance as metabolism - networks of feedback and reciprocity linking households, ecosystems, and algorithms.

Policy, in this light, becomes metabolic design: structuring flows so that feedback sustains, rather than erodes, vitality.

The Anthropocene’s core design challenge is to make that learning conscious. It requires humility (to recognize limits), intelligence (to sense patterns), and imagination (to build new pathways). No country has mastered it; the distinction between rich and poor gives way to the distinction between responsive and rigid.

Those who receive tutelage from the planet will thrive.

The strategy of metabolic development is the strategy of:

1. sensing imbalance,

2. reallocating flows,

3. evolving new structures that maintain coherence through change.

It is neither laissez-faire nor command-and-control but a disciplined responsiveness - a dance between design and emergence. Such strategy requires not only institutions but philosophy: a renewed understanding of what it means to grow, to learn, to act. It recognizes that human metabolism is now planetary in scale and must therefore be planetary in responsibility.

5. Conclusion: The Developing Planet

When future historians look back at the 2025, may they see the decade when the world rediscovered development as a permanent condition of life on a finite planet. All nations are developing nations because the planet itself is in development - reorganizing its energy flows, recalibrating its climates, renegotiating the terms of coexistence.

Hirschman reminds us that imbalance is opportunity. Sen reminds us that capability is metabolism. Together they will help us sketch a planetary art of thriving within limits. That’s the hope anyway!

To end a series on bubbles with culture is to assert that technology is not simply a machine; it is a way of making worlds. Rail rearranged distance; electricity rearranged nights; the internet rearranged attention. AI’s cultural bubble invites one more rearrangement.

I want to name that world with a term from an earlier essay: the Interverse. If the Metaverse was the technologist’s fantasy of immersion, the Interverse is the humanist’s reality of connection. In the Interverse, computation recedes to the background, like writing or electricity. It becomes the grammar of our collective life - ambient, taken for granted, everywhere and nowhere at once. Near-term, that means a human–human Interverse, a mature, intelligent internet that connects people rather than just machines. Longer-term, it gestures toward an interspecies Interverse, a world where whales, forests, and cities have voices we can hear. Both paths are plausible; both require AI as the enabling substrate.

The Interverse can go dystopian as easily as it can go humane. It inherits the old monsters - platforms, bureaucracies, and markets -that already shape our lives. It’s very hard to predict, especially the future, but it might be possible to specify what becomes possible when intelligence itself becomes infrastructure, and to design institutions for a human and more-than-human world.

10 thoughts follow

1) From shoggoths to scaffolds

A useful starting point comes from Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi’s provocation that large language models are not alien invaders so much as familiar monsters, akin to markets and bureaucracies. These systems compress diffuse human knowledge into prices, forms, ballots, and direct action based on that compression. They are vast, impersonal, sometimes indifferent to individual suffering, and yet indispensable for coordination at scale. LLMs are simply the newest members of this family of cognitive machinery. The right question is not, “Will they become our overlords?” but, “How will they interlock with the institutions we already have?”

If models are cultural technologies, then culture changes as we retrofit our newsrooms, schools, hospitals, studios, city halls to incorporate AI. In the short run, the cultural bubble looks like a flood of synthetic text and images; in the medium run, it looks like new routines: fact-checking that is continuous rather than episodic; translation and subtitling by default; collaborative drafts that lower the cost of getting to version 1. In the long run, it looks like ambient general competence, i.e., service-level cognition available when needed, whose value rises and falls with the quality of the institutions that contain it.

2) Prediction as a cultural regime

One reason this shift feels strange is that AI advances under the banner of prediction. Prediction is everywhere in our daily lives: “for you” feeds, estimated arrival times, portfolio signals, health risk flags, model-assisted hiring, promptable assistants that fill the calendar before we ask. A recent argument, mounted from Andreesen Horowitz, so take it with a pinch of salt, suggests that prediction is becoming a successor cultural logic to postmodernism. Whether or not you buy the grand claim, the narrower point is hard to dispute: people now perform identity by making public forecasts and memetic bets; they consume content as anticipatory participation. To be predictive rather than predicted is a posture, even a status claim (should remind you of “If you are not the customer, you’re the product”).

Markets and social media feel the same: always on, always scoring, always about timing. The thing that circulates is not only the work; it is the expectation attached to it. If you view culture this way, the AI bubble isn’t merely hype; it’s a generalized anticipation machine, i.e., an economy where forecasting has become entertainment, and entertainment a bet.

But a culture of prediction is not yet the Interverse; the bridge between them is ubiquitous computing.

3) Weiser’s forgotten wisdom

Mark Weiser’s classic essay, “The Computer for the 21st Century,” announced a deceptively radical idea: the most profound technologies are those that disappear into the background. He called this “embodied virtuality” - not putting people inside simulated worlds like VR, but drawing computation out into the world with people. By pushing computers to the periphery, he argued, we free attention to focus on others and on goals.

This is the Interverse’s cultural posture. The real work is to let AI recede, to fold it into places, practices, and publics until the machines become grammar rather than protagonist. Intelligent culture is not about immersion in the singularity, but relationships with other beings.

Here a fork emerges that mirrors the AGI distinction between General Predictive Intelligence (GPreI) and General Productive Intelligence (GProI) from last week. The US cultural build tends toward the predictive: cloud devices, assistants, knowledge work, media; cognition as a service delivered by data centers to screens and earbuds. The Chinese cultural build tends toward the productive: robots, logistics, smart city fabrics; cognition living in sites and systems. Each path tells a different story of how intelligent culture will be made: as anticipation or as embodiment.

The Interverse must hold both.

4) The predictive mind and the cultural self

If prediction animates our platforms, it also animates our minds - at least on one influential view. Predictive processing sees the brain as a generative model minimizing error; perception is controlled hallucination, corrected by incoming data. DeepMind’s Generative Query Network demonstrated how a system can infer a 3-D scene from sparse 2-D glimpses by predicting novel viewpoints.

Predictive culture will feel like model alignment at the human scale. We will triangulate the predictions we borrow from machines against the priors we carry in our heads, and those priors will be shaped, in turn, by the scaffolds we inhabit such as schools, feeds, churches, unions, labs. The Interverse’s ethical imperative is to design scaffolds that help us revise our priors in public, with humility: common intelligence to go along with common sense.

5) From human–human to interspecies culture

Culture has always been global, for stories, religious and philosophical beliefs, music and trinkets have traveled the globe for a millennia. However, print culture dramatically accelerated the spread of culture, and novels, radio and movies brought distant people into our lives.

How might AI expand our cultural circle?

The possibility that excites me most is the prospect of bringing non-human animals into our cultural universe. The Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) applies machine learning to sperm-whale codas - structured click patterns used in sperm whale social groups - to probe whether they display duality of patterning and other linguistic features. The effort is technically daunting: tagging challenges, massive datasets, distributed stations. Even if it falls short of “full translation,” CETI is a demonstration of the Interverse’s trajectory: AI extends our cultural circle by making other minds legible.

Should we do so though? Will it make it easier for us to exploit animals even more than we do today?

Law and policy might should inform the interverse: personhood debates, habitat rights, ocean governance.

6) Two ways the cultural bubble pops

Bubbles end badly when the thing being sold never had substance. They end productively when exuberance directs investment in infrastructure the next era needs. With AI and culture, two endings are plausible.

Ending A: the Slop Trap. If the economics of attention continue to reward raw engagement, we risk a flood of synthetic slop - cheap content tuned to keep people scrolling, with predictive metrics as judge as well as jury. We’ve seen lesser versions of this for a decade; AI makes it exponential. The cultural bubble then pops into cynicism where the public assumes fakery by default (my sense is that young people already have a ton of this kind of cynicism), and a creator class forced to chase engagement signals, and institutions that privilege simulation from substance (already the way both India and the US are governed today).

Ending B: the Ambient Scaffold. If we push AI into background utilities- translation, retrieval, summarization, simulation, co-drafting, accessibility- and tie them to institutional standards and accountability, the bubble can melt into an Interverse substrate. In that world, independent creators gain leverage; local institutions upgrade their cognitive capacity; publics get tools to compare claims and origins. Inshallah!

We cannot pick B by wishing. We pick it by architecture and protocols: provenance systems, rights frameworks, civic APIs, and procurement rules that favor augmentation over extraction. Weiser’s advice again: push computation to the periphery so people can reappear at the center.

7) The politics of the Interverse

If the Interverse solidifies, it will rewrite who governs the cognitive public realm. A few axes to watch:

• Platform power vs. public power. If cultural AI remains concentrated in private stacks, we will outsource agenda-setting to entities optimized for profit. It’s super important to build Public Intelligence! Farrell & Shalizi’s point again: the monsters are ours; they can be governed.

• Prediction markets vs. democratic deliberation. If “being predictive” becomes the dominant civic posture, betting could become the primary mode of democratic engagement. But prediction can also assist democracy: scenario tools, budget simulators, participatory planning models, but those can’t be technical tools alone - we will need a culture of imagination that weaves possibilities and prediction together. Speculative Design has a major role to play!

• Cloud centralization vs. site embodiment. If cultural AI lives only in the cloud, it defaults to the Brave New Feed. If it also lives in places such as libraries, schools, galleries, parks, studios, culture regains its public character. I can’t overemphasize the importance of embodiment - not (only) in the sense of the Wuhan AI project, but in making AI public through physical presence in the Weiser sense of that term. This is the GPreI/GProI split applied to the arts and everyday life: cognition as feed, or cognition as fabric.

• Human exceptionalism vs. more-than-human publics. If we succeed at interspecies communication, however partial, the Interverse will acquire non-human constituencies. That is not science fiction; it is a governance challenge that we should be embracing with all our hearts.

It’s hard to predict the future, and I am mostly of the mind that we should build datacenter overcapacity, align on a strong moral purpose for AI and let the world reveal what it wants, but here’s a brief list of ‘great to haves.’

8) The human–human Interverse

What should we plausibly see at scale?

• Cultural memory aids. Public-grade retrieval over local archives, museums, libraries, newsrooms; explainable provenance attached to works.

• Civic copilots. Municipal drafting, grant writing, participatory planning with model-assisted scenario tools; translation and accessibility as defaults.

• Studio-in-a-browser. Broadcast-quality editing, scoring, and compositing in ordinary devices; collaborative rooms with rights baked in.

• Ambient interpretation. On-device captioning, sign-to-speech and speech-to-sign, description for the visually impaired, reading-level adaptation.

• Translingual publics. Real-time subtitling across languages for education, performances, town halls.

Each item is technically feasible now; the hard work will be institutional: standards, rights, and the humility to place connection before product.

9) The interspecies Interverse

Here the Interverse leans into “fiction science”—not fantasies, but research trajectories.

• Ocean listening stations that stream marine codas as public signal, annotated by models and humans in the loop.

• Forest observatories that turn sensor nets into the lively presence of chorusing birds, water tables, tree electrical activity—so land management becomes conversational.

• Urban non-human forums - for rivers, air, pollinators, you name it - where models summarize conditions and residents deliberate with more-than-human stakeholders.

Nonhuman minds may never become transparent to us; we may still only pattern-match and predict responses, but with enough data and the right models, other minds become legible enough to matter in public.

10) Omega

In the near future, we will experience a lot of slop and with any luck, some emerging scaffolds. But the deeper arc is one of intelligence becoming infrastructure for everyday life - the lasting transformation of the order of electrification or more. I’ve talked about the Interverse as one imagination of that fully fleshed out cognitive society: the moment when AI lets computation finally do what Weiser promised - move to the background so relations can move to the front.

Farrell and Shalizi remind us not to mystify the moment: we have always lived with monsters of our own making. If the industrial age organized matter, and the first digital age organized information, this next age will organize relations, both human to human, and, if we are lucky and careful, human to more-than-human too. Prediction will be part of it, and so will embodiment and production. The Interverse is the public space in which intelligence disappears into the background so that our shared work of meaning-making can take center stage.

Both views capture something real, yet neither fully explains why the largest technology firms are pouring extraordinary sums into data centers, chips, energy, and model training. To see the pattern clearly, it helps to place AGI inside a longer arc: the shift, over decades, from an economy centered on factories to one centered on knowledge, coordination, and platforms, i.e., cognitive capitalism. In that frame, AGI stops looking like a purely technical goal and starts looking like a frontier myth of a system seeking its next organizational form. The result is both more mundane and more consequential than the hype suggests. It is less about an artificial “person” and more about how human groups, tools, and infrastructures combine into new institutions of intelligence, new cultural technologies to replace the old.

This essay develops that claim in five steps.

First, it reframes AGI from an individual benchmark to an institutional one. Second, it explains why scaling computation - not encoding human expertise - has proved the most reliable path forward, and what follows when intelligence becomes cheap. Third, it outlines two strategic pathways now visible in practice: an American, cloud-centric General Predictive Intelligence and a Chinese, embodied General Productive Intelligence (my terms, and I am not attached to them). Fourth, it considers embodiment and geography: where cognition happens, and how that choice shapes power. Finally, it situates safety debates and existential fears within a broader set of questions about institutions, governance, and the kinds of futures intelligence infrastructure makes possible.

1) From “smart machines” to intelligent institutions

Conversations about AGI usually start from a person-centric premise: can a machine match the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult? The unit of analysis is the individual mind. Progress is measured by performance on exams, code problems, math contests, or professional tasks. That anthropocentric lens is understandable but it omits the most important fact about modern intelligence: human capability is already institutional. Science labs, hospitals, airlines, courts, universities, logistics networks, and city governments coordinate knowledge in ways no single person can match. The last century’s greatest leaps in capability came not from smarter individuals but from better organizations.

If we take AI seriously as a cultural technology, akin to writing, bureaucracy, accounting, or the modern firm, then a more useful definition of AGI becomes:

AGI is a collective institution that can match or exceed the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult, or of existing institutions composed out of well-educated adults.

In other words, the relevant achievement is not a solitary software mind but an assembly of models, tools, workflows, norms, and people that produces general competence across many tasks. A high-school biology team that, with AI assistance, diagnoses complex cases more accurately than a Harvard Medical School specialist; a municipal planning office that uses simulation and optimization to design safer streets; a newsroom that integrates fact-checking, retrieval, and analysis to raise accuracy and throughput - each is an example of institutional augmentation.

The capability does not “reside” in the model; it emerges from the institutional stack in which the model participates.

This shift in viewpoint aligns neatly with the economic story of cognitive capitalism from last week. AGI, reframed, is the next step: institutions that compose those means into generalized service-level intelligence.

We are accustomed to thinking of bureaucracies as incompetent or rule-bound; have you ever imagined an adaptive, flexible and competent bureaucracy? Congratulations: you have AGI on your mind!

2) The bitter lesson and the price curve of intelligence

For seven decades, a recurring pattern has frustrated efforts to encode human expertise directly into machines. The “bitter lesson,” as Rich Sutton calls it, is that general methods that scale with computation - not carefully hard coded human-readable structures -win in the long run. Search and learning, given more compute and data, outstrip systems designed around human theories of mind. This is not a slight against expertise; it is a recognition that the real world is irreducibly complex, and that meta-methods which can absorb that complexity tend to outperform polished simplifications.

Simplifications works for us, and for human expertise to reduce complexity. Just don’t expect an AI expert to understand the same simplifcations.

If that’s right, then two practical conclusions follow. First, the most reliable path to more capable systems is to increase compute, improve data pipelines, and refine training, i.e., to invest in infrastructure. Second, as compute becomes cheaper and models get better, the effective price of intelligence falls. Intelligence becomes more like electricity: available on tap, embedded in services, called when needed. When the price falls, consumption rises—a Jevons-style response. We do not merely replace existing uses; we invent new ones. A radiology analysis that costs $10 instead of $1,000 will be ordered more often; clinical workflows will adapt; quality control will change; only later do staffing patterns shift.

This dynamic suggests that “AGI” might not appear as a single, dramatic moment when a system surpasses all human tests. It may feel more like a steady rise in the background competence of everyday tools and processes. The visible frontier becomes less “a machine smarter than a person” and more ambient general intelligence delivered as a service.

The desired good is not a new mind; it is reliable coverage across many tasks at acceptable cost.

If that is the economic logic, then the strategic logic for firms is obvious: build the infrastructure that makes ambient intelligence available and cheap, and position yourself at bottlenecks where value accumulates - chips, data centers, model pipelines, deployment, and distribution. That’s the reason hyperscalers are spending so aggressively: a world in which radiology exams cost a fraction of what they cost today is one in which their data centers will have many more uses than they do today.

3) Two pathways: predictive vs. productive general intelligence

With the infrastructure logic in view, we can distinguish two pathways that correspond, roughly, to existing national strengths in the US and China respectively.

PS: As I said before, the two GPI’s are not standard descriptors of AI capacity (maybe they will one day!)

General Predictive Intelligence (GPreI) is the American pattern: centralized training of large models in hyperscale data centers; distribution via APIs and assistants into consumer and enterprise software; optimization for predictive and generative tasks across text, code, images, and more. The firm playbook is to integrate the cognitive stack - chips, training clusters, models, orchestration, deployment - and capture value at the platform layer. Governance leans market-first and the unit of deployment is often the cloud account or developer surface.

General Productive Intelligence (GProI) is the Chinese pattern: embedding AI throughout physical infrastructure - factories, vehicles, logistics, energy grids, city systems, robotics. The focus is less on universal chat interfaces and more on perception-action loops in the world. The institutional playbook combines state direction, industrial policy, and scale manufacturing to integrate sensors, actuators, and models into productive systems. Governance leans toward national planning; pilots scale through municipalities and state-aligned firms; and the unit of deployment is often the site - a plant, a port, a district.

Both pathways are coherent. Both can produce real capability. They differ not only in technical emphasis but in (one of our favorite phrases!) metabolism - how energy, matter, and information flow through the economy. The American approach deepens the cognitive metabolism built by platforms; the Chinese approach extends the material metabolism of manufacturing and infrastructure. Where one concentrates compute in data centers and exports cognition via networks, the other distributes embodied cognition across places and machines.

The contrast is not absolute; each country mixes both elements. But as a first approximation it clarifies today’s strategy space:

• Stack position: cloud and models vs. robotics and systems integration

• Deployment: virtual distribution vs. embedded roll-out

• Moat: platform lock-in vs. supply-chain and site control

• Scaling loop: data-driven product usage vs. production throughput

• Policy alignment: antitrust-bounded private platforms vs. state-coordinated industrial ecosystems

Seen this way, “who wins AGI” is the wrong question. The more relevant question is: which institutional pathway most efficiently converts energy and computation into reliable capability in the domains that matter? The answers will vary by sector. Predictive systems may dominate knowledge services; productive systems may dominate logistics, mobility, and urban management. The frontier is the fit between architecture and task.

4) Embodiment, cloud, and the geography of cognition

A decade plus ago, many believed that general intelligence would require embodiment - machines moving, sensing, and learning in the physical world. The rapid rise of large, disembodied models overturned that assumption for language, code, and many reasoning tasks. Yet embodiment has not disappeared; it has migrated into robotics, industrial control, and the mesh of sensors and actuators that define modern infrastructure.

Why does embodiment matter? Because intelligence is not only inference; it is coordination under constraints - time, space, energy, safety, law, and human expectation. A predictive engine in the cloud can answer questions. A productive system in the world must act, and acting binds intelligence to place. As more AI is bound to place - on factory floors, in distribution centers, at traffic intersections - the geography of cognition changes. Data centers remain critical, but they are complemented by sites where perception and action matter. The physical world becomes addressable by software, and software becomes accountable to the physical world.

This geographic turn extends the idea of metabolic sovereignty. Nations have always cared about energy and materials; now they must also care about compute logistics - power for data centers, grid stability, semiconductor supply, fiber routes, cooling water, and the land footprint of industrial computing. Under cognitive capitalism, “the cloud” felt abstract. Under the coming regime, cognition has materiality, even in the pursuit of predictive intelligence.

Embodiment thus does not refute the cloud; it grounds it. Predictive infrastructure and productive infrastructure will interlock, and institutions that manage that interlock - balancing centralization with locality - will accumulate advantage.

The test of the emerging AGI bureaucracies (see section 1) will be their nimbleness in switching from prediction to production and vice versa.

5) Safety, speculation, and what really matters

No discussion of AGI is complete without acknowledging fears about misalignment and existential risk. Thoughtful researchers warn that advanced systems might deceive, manipulate, or optimize for goals that harm humans; others fear misuse by malicious actors; still others worry about brittle dependencies as cognition becomes infrastructure. These concerns merit serious attention. But the public debate often collapses into two unsatisfying extremes: eschatology, which imagines civilization-ending outcomes, and dismissal, which treats safety as a cover for competitive positioning.

A more productive stance keeps risk on the table while widening the frame. The central questions for the near-to-medium term are institutional:

• How do we govern systems that blend public rules and private infrastructure?

• Where should authority sit for auditing high-impact models and deployments?

• What forms of transparency and recourse are owed to citizens as decisions become machine-supported?

• How do we align incentives so that reliability and safety improve alongside capability?

• How do we keep state capacity and cloud capacity from collapsing into unaccountable power?

The dominance of neoliberalism meant that the first era of cognitive capitalism was very poorly regulated; now that we are back to thinking about industrial policy everywhere, maybe the AI avatar of cognitive capitalism will have better oversight.

What deserves emphasis is not only danger but direction. The most important outcomes will turn on how societies compose intelligence into institutions: schools, clinics, courts, utilities, research labs, and city halls. The work ahead is less about summoning a supermind and more about designing arrangements that extend human agency, improve judgment, and distribute benefits broadly.

6) Why “AGI as a smarter person” is the wrong frontier

If AGI is framed as machines surpassing humans at everything humans do, we make human capability the ceiling of intelligence. That is a natural reflex, but it unintentionally narrows our ambition. We do not evaluate telescopes by how well they mimic the eye; we evaluate them by what new worlds they reveal. Likewise, the most interesting question is not whether AI can replace a novelist or out-argue a lawyer, but what forms of imagination and coordination become possible with reliable, cheap, general-purpose cognition as a substrate.

Some of those forms will be familiar: faster science, better logistics, improved safety in complex systems. Others will be less obvious: new institutional species that do not yet exist because they are infeasible without ambient intelligence. Consider the gap between what a small town would like to plan - streets, energy, housing, health - and what it can plan with its current staff. Imagine that town’s manager having 90th percentile talent in urban planning available on tap. Or the gap between the problems a small research lab wants to attack and the problems it can realistically explore. With service-level cognition available, those gaps shrink.

The value is not that AI “thinks like us but better,” but that institutions can think at levels previously reserved for the largest and richest organizations.

This is why AGI (using the definition I gave at the beginning of this essay) matters even if the eschatological debates feel remote. The systems worth designing are institutional, not anthropomorphic, along with protocols that form the new governance layer of these institutions.

7) A measured conclusion: AGI beyond AGI

Placed within the history of cognitive capitalism, the AGI conversation looks different. It is not a rupture so much as a continuation: the steady migration of value from physical production toward the coordination of knowledge and decision. Hyperscaler spending on data centers and chips is not a fad; it is the infrastructure strategy of firms whose business model is organizing cognition at global scale. The American path emphasizes predictive platforms. The Chinese path emphasizes productive systems.

1. Embodiment is important because action binds intelligence to place.

2. Governance via protocol becomes central when cognition becomes infrastructure.

The rhetoric around AGI (not my definition, but the commonly accepted one), whether utopian or apocalyptic, has a life of its own and I don’t have the expertise to judge where it’s going. Nevertheless, my institutional re-definition of AGI points toward a profoundly important question:

What intelligent institutions do we want and how do we build them?

If the industrial era was defined by machines that processed matter, and the first digital era by platforms that organized information, the era now opening may be defined by institutions that process both—converting energy and computation into judgment, coordination, and care. That is AGI after cognitive capitalism: not a brain in a box, but a society that learns to compose minds, machines, and infrastructures into systems that reliably do what needs doing, and, occasionally, make new things possible.

More next week when we turn towards culture.

Artificial intelligence is the latest and greatest buzzword of our technological moment (remember when Facebook changed its name to Meta because the Metaverse was the thing?) - every week brings a new model, a new benchmark, a new claim about the future of cognition and work. There is excitement; there is fear; and there is uncertainty.

One interpretation sees this moment as a technological breakthrough: machines learning to reason, software gaining new abilities, industries preparing to automate tasks once reserved for skilled workers. A different view, often voiced by skeptics, treats the boom as a speculative bubble, inflated by hype, investor optimism, and semi-religious belief destined to correct itself. Both perspectives capture part of the truth, but neither fully explains why the largest technology firms in the world are undertaking the most extensive capital expenditure program in modern history - building data centers, electricity infrastructure, chip supply chains, and model-training pipelines at a pace that rivals wartime industrial mobilization.

Understanding this requires a broader frame. AI is not emerging into an empty landscape; it is arriving at the end of a long arc of economic transformation - the era of cognitive capitalism, in which value flows through the organization of knowledge, communication, and attention rather than primarily through the fabrication of physical goods.

Crucially, knowledge work cannot be outsourced in the same way manufacturing could. A lawyer in another country can’t easily try cases in U.S. courts; a Wall Street trader can’t operate under foreign regulatory regimes. Yet this is exactly where AI becomes so appealing: it promises to “outsource” knowledge work — not to cheaper labor markets abroad, but to machines owned by U.S.-based firms.

Companies that built their power by capturing the surplus generated from knowledge work now see AI as a way to deepen their hold on the most profitable sectors of the economy, i.e., not just replacing jobs or automating tasks — though that’s part of the story, but also about becoming indispensable to how knowledge is produced and monetized.

Of course, knowledge work is not just accounting and lawyering; it’s also the way of war - drones, airpower and surveillance. Sometimes I think of the US as a brain in a tank.

TLDR; The AI build-out is not a break with that system of cognitive capital. It is an extension and intensification of it - and, in some ways, its logical culmination.

From Industrial Capital to Cognitive Capital

For most of the 20th century, “advanced economies,” with the US as the archetype, were defined by factories, production lines, and mass manufacturing. Steel mills, automobile plants, petrochemical complexes, and defense industries formed the backbone of economic strength and national power. But beginning in the late 1970s, this model shifted. Globalization and trade liberalization made overseas production cheaper. Deregulation and financial innovation opened new avenues for capital returns. Manufacturing capacity migrated, first gradually and then rapidly, to East Asia.

The shock of deindustrialization was real, and its effects remain visible in many regions; I remember driving through Gary, Indiana, and thinking: this place has seen better times. Yet the story is not solely one of decline. As industrial capacity moved outward, a new economic center formed around knowledge-intensive industries - finance, software, biotech, professional services, media, and later, platform-enabled digital networks. Companies like Microsoft and Apple, born at the dawn of the personal-computer era, matured into architects of global information systems. Google built the index of human knowledge; Meta scaled social connection; Amazon created the logistics and cloud backbone of digital commerce.

The internet wasn’t invented by Al Gore, but it was certainly invented in America.

These firms did not simply create products. They built infrastructures for cognition: systems that manage search, communication, coordination, and decision-making at scale. The raw material was attention, data, and human mental activity; the output was value extracted from organizing that activity more efficiently than before.

Cognitive capitalism elevated the ability to manage information flows as the central economic capability.

Sidebar: Bell Labs and the Origin of Scaled Knowledge Production

Bell Labs was one of the first institutional settings to organize scientific discovery as an integrated system - fusing research, engineering, and industrial application. Its innovations in transistors, lasers, radio astronomy etc etc created a lot of cognitive capital before its time. Owned by Nokia of all fates!

The Tribulations of Scale

By the early 2020s, the largest technology companies reached a size that distorted conventional categories. Together, the “Magnificent Seven” accounted for roughly one-third of all U.S. equity market value. Their revenues rival national budgets. Their platforms mediate cultural discourse, labor markets, and political communication. Their cloud infrastructure underpinned entire industries. They are, in many ways, the central institutions of the global economy.

But extreme scale produces a structural challenge: the problem of reinvestment. When a company is valued in trillions, it cannot maintain its valuation simply by selling more advertising or devices. It must find new domains large enough to absorb capital and produce durable strategic advantage.

For much of the last decade, cloud computing served this role. But even cloud growth has natural ceilings. Artificial intelligence, understood not merely as software but as a new computational and energy infrastructure layer, offers a fresh expansion frontier. It demands data centers, chips, transmission lines, cooling systems, software pipelines, and talent on a scale that few institutions can muster.

The AI boom, in other words, is not only enthusiasm. It is the industrial policy (or should I say, cognitive policy?) of capital at scale: a reinvestment imperative masquerading as technological inevitability.

The Stack as Strategic Terrain

Once committed to AI, hyperscalers face a second question: where in the emerging AI stack should value be captured? The current landscape reveals two broad strategic patterns.

Microsoft has positioned itself as the orchestrator of a distributed ecosystem: a deep alliance with OpenAI, flexible partnerships with Nvidia and other chip suppliers, and Azure as the backbone through which models reach customers. It is a federation strategy - leverage external innovation, integrate it into cloud and enterprise channels, and reinforce network effects. Incidentally, similar to how Windows became the default in the pre-internet era, so MS might be leaning on institutional memory here.

Google has chosen a vertically integrated route: proprietary tensor-processing units, internal research through Google DeepMind, extensive model-training capacity, and a unified product stack. It aims for internal coherence and efficiency gains from controlling the chain end-to-end. Google is the Apple of AI. Gemini 3 - the leader of the AI pack as of this writing - was trained on Google’s own TPUs. Seems to be working!

These strategies differ, but the underlying logic is shared: own or coordinate the infrastructure for producing and distributing machine cognition. In the industrial age, control over steel, rubber, and assembly lines created durable advantage. In the cognitive age, that logic applies to silicon, data, compute clusters, and inference pipelines.

This is why so much current innovation - and capital spend - concentrates not at the application layer but in chip design, data-center architecture, training infrastructure, and energy access. AI is not simply a software revolution; it is a hardware and power-infrastructure revolution disguised as one.

Sidebar: Fordism and the Logic of Control

Ford Motor Company’s early success was rooted in controlling an integrated supply chain, from materials to manufacturing to distribution. This vertical integration reduced costs and increased reliability. Today’s technology firms pursue a similar logic across compute, energy, software, and distribution channels. It is Fordism applied to cognition.

A Mirror from Elsewhere: The Chinese Production Lesson

The rationale becomes even clearer when viewed through global comparison. In the electric-vehicle sector, China has built a vertically integrated industrial ecosystem. Companies like BYD manufacture batteries, design chips, control mineral supply chains, and operate massive domestic factories — supported by long-term industrial policy and state coordination.

This strategy has already reshaped the global EV market. Western automakers, which favored outsourced production and “asset-light” strategies, now find themselves facing a competitor that treats manufacturing scale not as a burden but as a moat.

I talked about the US response in my posts about compute and energy sovereignty: not only in EVs (by doubling down on ICE tech - apropos in Trump’s America…), but also in semiconductors and AI. The CHIPS Act, IRA energy provisions, and hyperscaler infrastructure build-out all reflect an effort to restore or reconstruct sovereign industrial capability in critical domains. In one sphere - EVs - China has led materially. In another - AI - the U.S. is moving to lead cognitively and computationally.

Sidebar: The Japan Shock as Precedent

In the 1970s, Japanese automakers stunned global markets by combining efficiency, quality, and integrated supply planning. Their success forced Western firms to rethink manufacturing and supply-chain strategy. China’s EV sector plays a similar role today -demonstrating what coordinated industrial capability can achieve.

Entering the Metabolic Phase

To make sense of this convergence, it helps to return to a concept we have explored previously: metabolism. Societies depend on flows of energy and material. Coal powered the steam era. Oil powered the automotive and aviation eras. Electricity reorganized manufacturing and urban life.

Digital networks added a new metabolic layer: information and attention. AI adds a further one: computational metabolism, i.e., the ability to convert energy and data into automated inference.

Crucially, this is not (only) abstract. Data centers require vast electricity supply, land, cooling water, specialized hardware, and highly trained labor. The cloud was once described as “weightless”; AI reveals its weight. The system that organizes cognition turns out to be deeply material.

We may be returning, in a new form, to a world where the core institutions of economic power are not only digital platforms but infrastructural builders - firms that command energy, compute, chips, and talent.

The metaphor of “the cloud” is giving way to actual geography: substations, fiber routes, transformer stations, and industrial-scale computing campuses. AI, in this sense, brings digital capitalism back into contact with the physical world

Speculation and the Lessons of History

None of this eliminates the possibility of a bubble. Indeed, history suggests that major infrastructure shifts often coincide with periods of financial excess. The 1920s radio boom, the railroad speculation of the late 19th century, and the dot-com surge of the 1990s shared characteristics with the current moment: transformative technology, unclear business models, and optimism that sometimes exceeded reality.

But history also shows that speculation can coexist with structural change. Most early railroads failed financially but rail networks still reshaped the world. The dot-com bubble burst but the internet matured into core infrastructure. Many early radio firms folded but radio transformed communication.

No doubt bubbles are irrational, but they can also accompany transitions in the underlying metabolism of an economy. Crises often create the regulatory frameworks and governance norms that stabilize the next era. After 1929 came the SEC and financial reform. After 2008 came new capital rules. A future AI recalibration could produce oversight, safety institutions, antitrust interventions, energy planning frameworks, or new forms of industrial coordination.

BTW, Subprime might be back…

Where We Are Headed

The AI moment looks less surprising when viewed through this longer lens. What appears at first as a technological leap or a speculative craze also reflects deeper structural forces:

• the maturation of cognitive capitalism,

• the investment needs of firms operating at unprecedented scale,

• the reemergence of industrial-scale integration,

• the geopolitical race for technological and metabolic sovereignty, and

• the beginning of a new infrastructure cycle centered on compute and energy.

AI turns knowledge work into an energy-intensive, resource-dependent industrial system (builders love that, climate be damned!) - one that still involves human judgment, but now interacts with machine inference and automated prediction.

This shift does not answer every social or ethical question that AI raises. Nor does it guarantee efficiency or productivity gains on the timeline markets expect. Some expectations will prove prescient; others will fade. But the underlying trajectory toward integrated systems that combine energy, compute, data, and cognitive labor feels like the foreshadowing of a cyborg future: an emerging era defined by systems that integrate computation, energy, and intelligence into a single metabolic whole.

We are still early in this process. It will take time to see what endures, what adjusts, and what requires rethinking. But the scale and character of current investments suggest that the world is not returning to older models.

There are at least three distinct bubbles forming around artificial intelligence, each with its own logic, its own risks, and its own potential to reshape our world. The question isn’t just whether there’s an AI bubble. The question is which bubbles matter, how they interact, and what they mean for the future we’re building. We’re living through multiple overlapping stories at once: a financial drama, a technical quest, and a cultural revolution. Understanding each bubble on its own terms helps us navigate all three with clearer eyes.

The Economic Bubble: A Familiar Story With Unfamiliar Scale

The economic bubble is the easiest to recognize because we’ve seen this movie before. It has all the classic ingredients: massive capital expenditures, soaring valuations, and a compelling narrative promising outsized returns. Over the past year, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon have collectively poured more than $360 billion into capital expenditures, with Amazon alone planning to invest $125 billion this year. NVIDIA recently hit a $5 trillion market valuation. Salaries for top AI researchers have reached stratospheric heights. If the economic outcomes don’t match these investments, capital will rush for the exits and there will be a crash.

Yet this bubble has peculiar characteristics that distinguish it from previous speculative manias. For one thing, the money isn’t chasing imaginary demand. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have all reported that they don’t have enough computing power to meet customer needs, despite their enormous spending on data centers. This isn’t pets.com selling dog food at a loss and hoping to make it up in volume. There’s real revenue growth - OpenAI went from $200 million in early 2023 to $13 billion by mid-2025. The demand is there. The question is whether it can sustain the investment.

The scale of projected losses is also unprecedented. OpenAI expects to lose $45 billion by 2028, a figure that dwarfs the losses of other high-growth companies. The company has arranged intricate financing with chipmakers and cloud providers - circular investments that, while not inherently unsound, add layers of complexity and interdependence to the financial structure. And increasingly, these infrastructure projects rely on debt financing. Even companies that have been printing money can’t conjure the trillions they want to spend on AI. It’s got to be debt-funded, and even with financial engineering that keeps these debts off big tech’s balance sheets, it’s someone’s debt. The Bank of England has warned that if AI fails to meet expectations or requires less computing power than anticipated, the potential for financial instability could rise significantly.

Peter Wildeford offers a thoughtful defense against bubble alarmism. He argues that what we’re witnessing is better understood as an infrastructure bubble, similar to Britain’s Railway Mania or the late 1990s telecommunications crash. In those historical episodes, the underlying technology was genuinely transformative, but excessive and overlapping investments created financial instability. The railways did revolutionize Britain; the fiber optic cables did enable the internet age. Many investors just lost their shirts in the process.

Wildeford points out that AI infrastructure offers more flexibility than those earlier examples. Data centers and GPUs can adapt to various workloads, reducing the risk of completely wasted capacity. Unlike railroad tracks laid to the wrong destination or fiber optic cables buried where no one needed them, computing infrastructure can pivot. The hyperscalers don’t currently have excess capacity - if anything, they’re struggling to keep up with demand. The critical uncertainty is simply whether AI capabilities will advance swiftly enough to generate the economic returns necessary to justify these investments.

So the economic bubble exists, but it may not be irrational. There’s genuine demand, demonstrated revenue growth, and adaptable infrastructure. What makes it precarious is the sheer scale of the bet and the debt financing it requires. A market correction remains possible if growth falters, but there’s at least a plausible path to eventual profitability.

Deflating profits aren’t the only bubble we are looking at here. Let me quote Altman again:

“Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.”

This was written before OpenAI was founded, but gives you a sense of the metaphysical ambition behind AI.

The Technical Bubble: The Metaphysics of Intelligence

Let’s start with the claim that AGI - artificial general intelligence-, perhaps even ASI, artificial superintelligence, is just around the corner, a near future in which machines that can do everything we do, but better. This is where Mark Zuckerberg talks about the strategic importance of building AI infrastructure now, preparing for a future where “superintelligence” could transform industries. It’s a semi-religious belief that money reliably converts to compute, which in turn converts to capability, and that AGI is merely a matter of scale and investment.

In some tasks, the claim is already true. Large language models can do mathematics better than most people, even while making mistakes you or I might not. They can write emails and documents better than most people, at least in English. What we used to call “smart” is suddenly less impressive. Think of it this way: there was a time when people were feted for being fast at arithmetic with Roman numerals. If you’ve ever tried to add or multiply in Roman numerals, you know how hard it is. The invention of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, with place value and the number zero, revolutionized calculation so thoroughly that schoolchildren could do what once passed for brilliance.

BTW, Romans computed with devices like the abacus, so no one was doing complex arithmetic in their heads, but with the Hindu-Arabic numerals, you can!

AI may do something similar to today’s notion of intelligence. But recent evidence suggests that AGI is further down the road than enthusiasts think. Over the past few months, expert opinions have been converging around a more skeptical view. A pivotal moment came in June 2025 with an Apple reasoning paper demonstrating that even enhanced reasoning capabilities in large language models fail to overcome the critical problem of distribution shift. The arrival of GPT-5 in August 2025, anticipated as a major leap forward, ultimately fell short of expectations.

Gary Marcus has long been pointing out the limitations of large language models. BTW, he was a participant in an earlier takedown of neural networks for language learning through his PhD advisor, Steven Pinker. Marcus sayeth:

LLMs have their place, but anyone expecting the current paradigm to be close to AGI is delusional

And he’s not alone anymore. Rich Sutton, a Turing Award winner renowned for his work in reinforcement learning and author of the influential “Bitter Lesson,” has publicly acknowledged critiques of LLMs and agreed that they are far from achieving AGI. Andrej Karpathy, a respected machine learning expert with experience at Tesla and OpenAI, estimated that AGI remains at least a decade away, emphasizing that current agent-based models are nowhere near the required level of sophistication.

The metaphysical conviction that AGI is near helps sustain today’s valuations. There’s a mix of snake oil and sincere conviction in Silicon Valley about this, and it matters economically because it shapes investment decisions and market expectations.

Interestingly, AGI fever hasn’t spread through Chinese AI communities the way it has in Silicon Valley. Chinese entrepreneurs draw on a different intellectual canon - a blend of Western business classics like Peter Thiel’s Zero to One with the “Red Canon” of political texts including Mao’s selected works and Xi Jinping’s writings on governance. These provide tactical guidance on organizational mobilization and survival in fiercely competitive markets. Complementing this is the “Grey Canon” of classical Chinese philosophy- Confucius, Laozi, Han Feizi - which shapes how entrepreneurs navigate power structures and balance innovation with tradition. Near contemporary works like Jin Yong’s martial-arts novels and Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem offer frameworks for thinking about loyalty, strategy, and geopolitics.

I read Jin Yong’s Legend of the Condor Heroes series last year for reasons completely unrelated to AI. Very entertaining! And Liu’s Three-Body Problem (I mean the trilogy, not just the first novel) is the best science fiction I have read this century - again, for reasons unrelated to AI.

This produces a distinctly different approach to AI development, one less focused on metaphysical speculation about superintelligence and more grounded in practical applications and alignment with national strategic goals.

The technophilosophical bubble may be culturally specific.

The Cultural Bubble: How We Live With One Another

The third bubble asks whether AI will transform how we live, work and play - in short, how we relate to one another, about the rhythms of daily life. This is the bubble most analogous to the internet story.

Yes, there was a dot-com crash that took the Nasdaq and plenty of companies down with it. Yet the internet still reorganized human culture as well as our economies. Take a look at the top 10 companies by market cap in 2000 versus today. Microsoft is the constant, but note how tech has taken over the cap table. Wouldn’t have happened without the internet. So even if you invested in pets.com and lost your shirt, the internet still remade the world.

The question is whether AI will follow that pattern - revolutionizing how we live with one another regardless of whether AGI arrives soon, and regardless of whether today’s economic exuberance cools. The energy needs alone are reshaping global infrastructure. The demand for data centers is ramping up so quickly that orders for gas turbines are expected to reach over a thousand units in 2025. The three dominant manufacturers - Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Siemens Energy, and GE Vernova - are struggling to keep pace, leading to wait times of at least three years.

This has global ripple effects.

Data centers require continuous power, and gas turbines are being deployed as a stopgap. The rush has concentrated demand in the United States, which now accounts for nearly half of global turbine orders, sidelining Asian markets like Vietnam and the Philippines that need turbines for their own energy transitions. The AI boom isn’t just affecting tech companies - it’s keeping the fossil fuel industry alive, complicating climate commitments, and reshaping energy geopolitics. Not good!

Gas turbine technology is one area where China doesn’t dominate, adding another layer to great power competition.

But the cultural transformation goes deeper than infrastructure. It’s rare - once in a generation? once in a century? once in a civilization?- that there’s a technology promising to change how we work, fight, and pray at once. When SEC investigators worried about subprime loans, they didn’t meet with the Pope. But AI pioneers have. Pope Leo XIV has warned that AI risks undermining Christian humanism and the inviolable dignity of the person, cautioning against a future where humans become mere functions or algorithms. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, some worry that the rise of cybernetics and technological dominance threatens to extinguish the deeper essence of Being, leaving humanity spiritually diminished.

From its beginning at Dartmouth in 1956, AI has prompted fundamental questions about human meaning and purpose, not just economic productivity. It’s forcing us to ask what makes us distinctively human (maybe nothing?), what kinds of work and creativity we value, and how we want to structure our societies. These questions matter whether or not AGI arrives, whether or not today’s investments pay off.

What Matters in the Long Run

We should think about all three bubbles at once.

The economic bubble draws attention for obvious reasons—fortunes will be made and lost, companies will rise and fall, and financial stability hangs in the balance. The technical bubble attracts fervor from researchers and entrepreneurs convinced they’re building god-like intelligence. But the cultural bubble - the ways AI might reshape our shared life- may be the one that matters most in the long run.

The economic bubble will eventually resolve one way or another. Either the investments will generate sufficient returns, or there will be a correction. Either way, capital will find its level. The technical bubble, too, will face reality. We’ll discover whether AGI is five years away, fifty years away, or fundamentally misconceived. Time will tell.

But the cultural transformation is already underway and may be largely irreversible. AI is already changing how we write, how we search for information, how we create images and analyze data. It’s already reshaping energy infrastructure and geopolitical competition. It’s already forcing us to reconsider what we mean by intelligence, creativity, and meaningful work. These changes will compound and accelerate regardless of whether the stock market crashes or AGI arrives.

The internet analogy is instructive. Many investors lost money in the dot-com crash, but that didn’t stop the internet from reorganizing human society. Pets.com failed, but Amazon thrived. Webvan collapsed, but online grocery delivery eventually succeeded. The bubble popped, but the cultural transformation continued.

AI may follow a similar trajectory. Today’s valuations might be excessive. AGI might remain elusive for decades. But the technology is already useful enough, transformative enough, to reshape how we live with one another. That’s the bubble we should watch most carefully - not because it’s the most likely to burst, but because it’s the most certain to change us, whether we’re ready or not.

On Protocols

The Rise of the Technosphere: A New Geological Medium

Just as the object and subject of philosophy must be reconfigured, so too must its means. For most ‘worldly philosophers’ apprehension is mediated by the analysis of the great institutions of recent times: the nation-state, the market, the political party. These are the organizational forms that shaped consciousness and action. Today, the material medium in which and through which we apprehend our world has fundamentally changed. We now live within the technosphere. Coined by engineers and geologists, the term refers to the vast, interlinked, planetary-scale system of technologies, infrastructures, and communication networks that metabolize energy and resources to sustain modern human civilization.

As argued by geologist Peter Haff, the technosphere can be understood as an emergent geological phenomenon, a new stratum of the Earth system on par with the biosphere or atmosphere. With an estimated mass of 30 trillion tons—five orders of magnitude greater than the total biomass of humanity—it is the “defining system of the Anthropocene”. It comprises our cities, factories, transportation grids, energy systems, and digital networks. Haff and others raise profound philosophical questions about its nature, suggesting it operates as a “quasi-autonomous system” with its own dynamics, which has “entrained humans as essential components” rather than being fully under our control. Whether we see it as a tool, a habitat, or an autonomous agent, the technosphere constitutes the material infrastructure of contemporary life. It is the medium through which planetary processes are both enacted (e.g., through global supply chains and fossil fuel combustion) and apprehended (satellites, data centers etc).

Computation as Planetary Sensorium

At the heart of the technosphere, functioning as its central nervous system, is computation. Digital networks, satellite systems, vast sensor arrays, and planetary-scale climate models have become the primary means by which we are able to apprehend hyperobjects like global warming. These computational systems form a planetary sensorium, a distributed cognitive apparatus that allows us to perceive and make sense of phenomena that are too vast, too slow, or too complex for unassisted human cognition. They are the instruments that translate the nonlocal and phased nature of hyperobjects into data, simulations, and visualizations that we can comprehend. Without the computational power to model the Earth’s climate system or the satellite networks to monitor ice sheets and ocean temperatures, the Anthropocene as a coherent concept would be literally unthinkable. Computation is the very medium that makes the planetary scale apprehensible.

In other words, computation is a condition of possibility of Planetarity

This medium, however, is profoundly ambivalent. The same computational infrastructures that model climate change are used to optimize fossil fuel extraction. The same networks that connect global communities are used for mass surveillance and the commodification of attention. The means of apprehension can thus become a means of enclosure, reinforcing the very systems of extraction and control that philosophical apprehension must critique and overcome.

Philosophical Engineering in Practice: The Power of Protocol

This challenge brings us to the practical necessity of philosophical engineering. The inventor of the World Wide Web - no, not Al Gore , but Tim Berners-Lee - was acutely aware that the act of creating a protocol like HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is not a neutral technical task. It is an act of world-building. He explains: “when you create a protocol you get the right to ‘play God’ and define what words mean. You can define a philosophy, to define a new world”. That’s why he called his work Philosophical Engineering. As he says:

The phrase came about when we were originally discussing the idea of Web Science, and I was tickled by the fact that when you study and take exams in physics at Oxford, formally the subject is actually not physics but experimental philosophy. I thought that was quite an interesting way of thinking about physics, a kind of philosophy that one does by “dropping things and seeing if they continue to drop” – in other words, “thinking about the stuff you do by dropping things.” Then it came up again when trying to explain to people that when we design Web protocols, we actually get a chance to define and create the way a new world works. It struck me what we ended up calling “Web Science” could have been called “philosophical engineering,” because effectively when you create a protocol you get the right to “play God” and define what words mean.

To design a protocol is to establish the fundamental rules of interaction for a given system. It defines what counts as a valid entity (e.g., a URL), what actions are possible (e.g., a GET request), and how different agents relate to one another. When people use a system, Berners-Lee notes, “they have to leave their previous philosophy at the door and they have to join in and agree they will work with your system”. Protocols are, in essence, encoded philosophies. They are abstract rule-sets that structure the space of possibility for all who operate within them.

Protocols are executable conditions of possibility

This is precisely the point of intervention for a philosophy that seeks not just to interpret the world but to change it. If the technosphere runs on protocols, and these protocols currently encode values of extraction, centralization, and control, then the task of a planetary philosophy is to design and advocate for new protocols that embed different values: reciprocity, decentralization, multispecies justice, and ecological care. This is the concrete site where apprehension becomes engineering, where critique becomes code.

Yesterday’s institutions - the state, the market, the party - aren’t going away. These were the social “protocols” of their time. Today, the protocols that structure our reality are increasingly computational and networked, forming the invisible architecture of the technosphere. The very nature of this computational medium—its global reach, its capacity for simulation, its algorithmic governance—is what makes the planetary scale of the Anthropocene apprehensible in the first place. This leads to a powerful conclusion: the medium that allows us to apprehend the problem is also one of the primary sites where we must act on the problem. The means of apprehension has become the object of engineering. Philosophy can no longer afford to remain at the level of textual critique or abstract speculation. It must become technically and institutionally literate, ready to intervene at the level of protocol design, because that is where the foundations of our planetary future are being laid.

Conclusion: The Mandate for Philosophical Engineering

The Hegelian dictum that philosophy is its age apprehended in thought remains our starting point, but the emergence of the Anthropocene is forcing a radical expansion of practical philosophy’s most fundamental components. Its object has shifted from the enclosed sphere of human society to the planetary condition itself, a complex of hyperobjects and agentic systems. Its subject has widened from the solitary, classical philosopher to a multitude whose wisdom is essential for our survival. Its means have evolved from the primacy of text and debate to the critical engagement with computation and the design of protocols.

I want to end with a quote from an article I will be talking about at length on other occasions:

This simultaneity forces an uncomfortable question: Is political legitimacy purely about procedural democracy? Or must it also encompass performance, delivery, competence, and resilience? Can the virtues of technocratic governance—its efficiency, its ability to plan and build and manufacture at scale—be adopted without succumbing to authoritarian temptation?

I can’t imagine answering the questions at the end of that quote without the use of protocols for the engineering of Planetarity.

This week, I am back to metabolic sovereignty after a deepish dive into energy and compute sovereignty in the previous two weeks. My main goal is to show that the Anthropocene is:

1. Willy-nilly an exercise in metabolic sovereignty for all humans

2. Unfortunately, that human-wide metabolic sovereignty has justified an enormously unequal metabolic pyramid.

3. And even if we could ensure distributional justice for all humans, we would still be mistaken, because we can’t ensure metabolic stability until we expand the scope of sovereignty to include non-humans as well.

The Age of Metabolism

We are living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. The term, popularized in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, named a stark reality: human activity has become a dominant force shaping the planet, rivaling the power of ice ages and asteroid impacts. This force is metabolic at its very core. The Anthropocene is the result of a planetary metabolic revolution, a staggering acceleration in the flows of matter and energy commandeered by a single species.

Consider the sheer scale.

In the last three centuries, the human population has swelled tenfold, while our cattle herds have reached 1.4 billion. Our industrial output skyrocketed forty-fold in the 20th century alone. We now appropriate more than half of all accessible freshwater and harvest up to 35% of the life in our most productive ocean regions. We are consuming the deep past by burning fossil fuels that took millions of years to form. Through technology, industry, and sheer numbers, humanity has asserted a form of “metabolic sovereignty” over the planet’s life-support systems, redirecting the flows of carbon, water, and energy to suit our purposes.

This perspective reframes our civilization. Society is not just a collection of cultures, economies, and political systems; it is a biophysical entity with a colossal metabolism. But framing this as the work of “Anthropos”- humanity as a whole - is misleading. The engine of this change was not some abstract, unified species, but a specific economic order rooted in industrial capitalism and colonial expansion. The crucial question is not that we have seized control of the planet’s metabolism, but how this control is wielded, for whom it works, and who is left behind.

The Metabolic Pyramid

While humanity may have collectively seized the reins of the planet’s metabolism, that power is distributed unequally. We live within a metabolic pyramid, where a tiny fraction of the global population commands an outsized share of the world’s energy and resources, while billions subsist on the scraps.

Energy consumption provides a stark illustration. The richest 1% of people consume roughly 14% of the world’s energy, and the top 10% devour nearly half. By contrast, the poorest 50% of humanity—billions of people—use only about 13%, an amount comparable to the top 1% alone. A citizen in a wealthy nation may command 100 times more energy than someone in the poorest countries.

770 million people have no access to electricity at all, and billions more rely on burning wood and dung for cooking, with devastating consequences for their health and local environments. Energy poverty is a trap; it cripples access to clean water, education, healthcare, and economic opportunity. It cements the very inequality it stems from.

The tragedy is that the climate crisis, overwhelmingly caused by the emissions of the high-consuming few, will inflict its most severe damage on the energy-poor. Those who have benefited least from the fossil fuel era are the most vulnerable to the droughts, floods, and famines it is unleashing. This is the moral and ecological failure of our current metabolic order.

The Great Entanglement

Our metabolic dominion has shattered the foundational concepts that once ordered our world. For centuries, we maintained a clean division between “human history” and “natural history.” Nature was the static backdrop against which the drama of human culture, politics, and freedom unfolded. Climate change has obliterated this distinction. Human and natural history have violently converged.

Every flip of a switch is a geological act, altering the atmosphere and melting glaciers. Conversely, a drought-fueled wildfire is a political event, capable of toppling governments and sparking migrations. As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, we can no longer tell our story as if it were separate from the planet’s. The history of industrial capitalism is inseparable from the history of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Our political freedoms have always depended on the unspoken foundation of a stable Holocene climate—a gift of deep time we took for granted and have now broken.

Darwin told us almost two hundred years ago that we are a species among species, but so far we have only assimilated that insight into the ‘order of nature’ not into the ‘order of society,’ which would make us realize that our fate deeply enmeshed with the health of the biosphere. The mass extinction event we are causing is not a tragedy happening “out there” in nature; it is a direct threat to the complex web of life that sustains us. We depend on the metabolic work of forests, pollinators, and soil microbes for our own survival. The climate crisis has revealed, as Chakrabarty notes, the biophysical “conditions for the existence of life in the human form,” conditions that have far more to do with the co-evolution of life on Earth than with our economic theories. We are not masters of a separate domain, but participants in a living, breathing web of metabolism that meshes human and non-human together.

The Geopolitical Metabolism: Petrostates vs. Electrostates

As the world awakens to these stakes, a new geopolitical contest is taking shape, defined by the struggle for energy sovereignty. In the 20th century, oil meant money and power. In the 21st century, renewable energy and electric infrastructure are poised to do the same. We are witnessing a global metabolic chess match between the fossil-fueled powers of the old order and the rising “electrostates” of the new.

China provides the most dramatic example of a nation strategically pursuing this new form of sovereignty. Recognizing its dependence on imported fossil fuels as a profound vulnerability, Beijing launched an all-out industrial revolution to dominate the technologies of the green economy. Today, China leads the world in nearly every clean energy metric: solar panel manufacturing, wind turbine production, battery supply chains, and electric vehicle adoption. In 2024, its clean energy sector contributed a staggering 10% of the country’s GDP. This is a deliberate bid for metabolic independence—an attempt to power its future with domestic sun and wind rather than foreign oil and gas. In the process, China has positioned itself as the central supplier for the global energy transition, giving it immense leverage.

On the other side stands a coalition of petrostates and fossil-fuel interests determined to prolong the age of hydrocarbons. From Russia to Saudi Arabia, these nations’ economies and political identities are deeply tied to oil and gas extraction. They have often resisted the green transition, framing it as a threat to their national sovereignty. This clash between the electrostate model and the petrostate model is now a defining feature of our world. The United States and Europe find themselves caught in the middle, attempting to accelerate their own transitions while grappling with their deep-rooted fossil fuel dependencies and the need to catch up with China’s manufacturing might. Sovereignty is being redefined in metabolic terms: it is the ability to power one’s society securely and sustainably.

However, the very idea of a smooth “energy transition” is a dangerous myth. History teaches us a sobering lesson: we have never truly transitioned from an energy source, we have only ever added new ones. Coal did not replace wood, and oil did not replace coal; each new source was piled on top of the last, fueling an ever-greater accumulation of total energy consumption. Our civilization’s history is one of “more and more and more.”

This means that our current goal—to deliberately and rapidly phase out our dominant energy source—is historically unprecedented. We are attempting to leave immensely powerful resources in the ground, voluntarily, because we understand their consequences. Believing in a natural, seamless transition lulls us into a false sense of security, suggesting that market forces and technology will save us without the need for disruptive political action. The reality is that renewables are often being added to the global energy mix, not displacing fossil fuels one-for-one. The so-called transition is not a gentle slide into a green future; it is a political fight that requires actively dismantling the old system, not just building a new one alongside it.

The Shock to the System

No event revealed the fragility and interconnectedness of our global metabolism more starkly than the COVID-19 pandemic. Overnight, the frenetic flows of people, goods, and energy that constitute the world’s economic bloodstream seized up. It was a forced downshift, a moment when the planet-spanning human enterprise held its breath.

The pandemic exposed the fiction of national sovereignty in the face of a borderless biological threat. While nations scrambled to hoard masks, ventilators, and vaccines in a display of “vaccine apartheid,” the virus itself was a lesson in our profound interdependence. A microscopic agent, likely originating from a wild animal (or was it a lab?), hitched a ride on the vectors of globalization and brought the world to its knees. It was a violent reminder that the wall between “civilization” and “nature” is an illusion. Our health is inextricably linked to the health of ecosystems.

The global response demonstrated both our greatest strengths and our deepest flaws. We witnessed an astonishing capacity for collective action, as billions changed their behavior to protect public health. Yet this came at a cost, and the burdens were distributed unequally, with essential workers bearing the greatest risk. The crisis also opened the door to a new paradigm of biosecurity and surveillance, a “reflex of control,” as writer Charles Eisenstein called it, that threatens to permanently curtail personal freedoms in the name of safety. The pandemic was a mirror reflecting our societal priorities, forcing us to ask what we value more: individual liberty or collective wellbeing, short-term economic activity or long-term resilience. It revealed how un-sovereign we truly are in the face of nature’s smallest agents and gave us a glimpse of the global coordination required to face the slower, more complex pandemic of climate change.

Towards a Multispecies Sovereignty

This journey through the Anthropocene, from its metabolic engine to its geopolitical fractures, leads to a radical conclusion: sustainable and just metabolic sovereignty cannot be a purely human affair. Our attempt to assert absolute dominion - let’s call it Anthropic Sovereignty - over the planet’s material flows has backfired, destabilizing the very systems that support us. The only viable path forward is to expand the circle of sovereignty to include the more-than-human world.

What does a multispecies sovereignty look like? It begins by recognizing that other species and ecosystems—forests, oceans, pollinators, rivers—are not mere resources but active participants in planetary metabolism. They perform essential work, and their health is a precondition for our own. This recognition is already taking root in the “Rights of Nature” movement, where countries from Ecuador to New Zealand have granted legal personhood to rivers and forests, allowing legal guardians to defend them in court. It means shifting our view of nature from property to a partner in our moral and legal community.

It also means honoring and empowering the indigenous cultures that have long practiced a form of metabolic reciprocity, managing lands and waters in ways that sustain them for generations. Indigenous-managed lands consistently show better conservation outcomes, demonstrating that true sovereignty is found not in domination, but in stewardship.

Expanding sovereignty in this way is not about giving a tree a vote in parliament. It is about embedding ecological reality into our governance. It means establishing firm, science-based limits on our metabolic activity—like a planetary carbon budget—and making biodiversity impacts a central consideration in all major decisions. It requires us to institutionalize a voice for the non-human world and for future generations.

Ultimately, this is a shift in values, from the modernist dream of separation and control to an embrace of our role as co-members of a living community. The age of separation is over. We are all—humans, animals, microbes, forests—swirling together in a shared metabolic soup. Our fates are intertwined. A multispecies sovereignty is therefore not an act of charity, but of enlightened self-interest. Ensuring the “sovereignty” of pollinators is essential for our food security. Protecting the “sovereignty” of rainforests is vital for stabilizing our climate.

This is the great task of our time: to reinvent our societies as embedded in the Earth, not sealed off from it. It requires new economic models that value the well being of all beings, and a new politics that represents the common interests of all life. The choice is between retreating into fortress societies on a dying planet, and embracing a higher form of cooperation with each other, and with the rest of the planet.

From the Global to the Planetary: De-Centering the Human

The first step in apprehending the Anthropocene is to clarify the nature of the object that has entered philosophy’s frame. This requires a crucial distinction, articulated by thinkers like Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, between the “global” and the “planetary”. In the second thesis of his book on “The Climate of History,” Dipesh Chakrabarty says:

Thesis 2: The Idea of the Anthropocene, the New Geological Epoch When Humans Exist as a Geological Force, Severely Qualifies Humanist Histories of Modernity/Globalization

The “global” is an intrinsically human-centric construct. It refers to the world as it has been scaled up and integrated by human systems, primarily through the expansion of capitalism, technology, and colonial power. Globalization, in this sense, is the process of creating a single, interconnected space of human activity, a world made in our image. History written from a global perspective, as Chakrabarty notes, fundamentally centers the human story. As his third thesis says:

Thesis 3: The Geological Hypothesis Regarding the Anthropocene Requires Us to Put Global Histories of Capital in Conversation with the Species History of Humans

The “planetary” de-centers the human. It refers to the Earth not as a passive backdrop for human history, but as an agent in its own right—a complex, dynamic system with its own history, rhythms, and logics that operate on scales far exceeding the human. Planetary history is the history of deep time, of tectonic shifts, evolutionary pathways, and biogeochemical cycles. The Anthropocene marks the moment when these two histories - the global history of human expansion and the planetary history of the Earth system - have collided and become entangled. To apprehend our age is therefore:

1. (Worse): hyperscale the global so that it embeds itself deeper into the earth - this is the path being blazed by the Chinese Electrostate. I call this the stage of Planetary Colonialism that succeeds the stage of Planetary Plunder, like how the European colonization of Asia (spreading civilization, from what I have been told) succeeded the straightforward genocide and slavery of the Colombian expansion.

2. (Better) Shift our conceptual framework from the globe to the planet. It is to heed Spivak’s call to “imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents,” a shift that is at once epistemological, ethical, and political.

We know how to do the first - the Chinese are already doing it and soon the rest of us will be doing it too. The second is much harder than the first; we don’t know how to do it any scale, let alone the hyperscale that’s needed today. Nevertheless, both share the recognition that we are not masters of a globe of our own making, but inhabitants of a planet whose agency has to be taken into account, even if with brutality.

Entangled: Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide

The emergence of the planetary as the object of apprehension signals the collapse of a foundational pillar of modern thought: the ontological dualism between Nature and Culture. Dipesh’s first thesis captures it so:

Thesis 1: Anthropogenic Explanations of Climate Change Spell the Collapse of the Humanist Distinction between Natural History and Human History

For centuries, Western philosophy has operated on the assumption of a stable, passive, and law-like Nature that serves as the stage upon which the dynamic drama of human Culture, history, and politics unfolds. Nature was the realm of necessity, Culture the realm of freedom. The Anthropocene renders this division untenable. As Clive Hamilton and others have argued, in our current epoch, “social, cultural and political orders are woven into and co-evolve with techno-natural orders of specific matter and energy flow at a global level”. The burning of fossil fuels is not merely an economic activity; it is a geological event that alters the chemistry of the atmosphere. Industrial agriculture is not just a mode of production; it is a planetary force that reshapes the nitrogen cycle.

To grasp this new reality, we need concepts that transcend the old dichotomy. The philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour offers one such concept in his figure of Gaia. Latour’s Gaia is not the romantic, harmonious superorganism of New Age spirituality, nor is it the old, inert “Nature” of modern science. It is a secular, political, and profoundly agentic figure that names the tangled mess of living and non-living actors whose interactions constitute the Earth system. Gaia, for Latour, is “an entity composed of multiple, reciprocally linked, but ungoverned self-advancing processes”. It is a system characterized by feedback loops, unpredictable emergences, and a distinct lack of centralized control. To “face Gaia” is to apprehend this complex entanglement without resorting to the comforting fictions of either a mastered Nature or a transcendent Mother Earth. This resonates with the broader philosophical turn toward “ecological entanglement,” which insists that humans and non-humans are not separate entities but are deeply and inextricably interwoven, co-constituting one another at every level.

The object of apprehension in the Anthropocene is no longer a world of discrete subjects and objects, but a thick, messy, and agentic mesh of relations.

Anatomy of a Hyperobject

To give a more precise philosophical anatomy to this new, entangled object, the work of Timothy Morton is useful. Morton introduces the concept of “hyperobjects” to describe entities that are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” to such a degree that they defy our traditional modes of perception and conception.¹ Global warming is the quintessential hyperobject: we can measure its effects, witness its local manifestations (a hurricane, a drought, a heatwave), and model its dynamics, but we can never see or touch the thing itself in its totality. Other hyperobjects include the planetary carbon cycle, the totality of plastic in the oceans, or the radioactive material dispersed across the globe by nuclear activity. The Anthropocene is a hyperobject, and so is the planet. Morton identifies five key characteristics that define hyperobjects and make them so difficult to apprehend:

1. Viscous: Hyperobjects stick to you. They undermine the possibility of maintaining a detached, critical distance. We are not outside of global warming looking in; we are inside it, breathing it, contributing to it, and subject to its effects. It adheres to our being.

2. Molten: Hyperobjects are so massive and fluid that they challenge our conventional, three-dimensional understanding of space and time. They warp the field of relations, making it impossible to map them onto a simple, fixed grid.

3. Nonlocal: A hyperobject is not fully present in any of its local manifestations. The storm that floods a city is a real and devastating event, but it is not, in itself, climate change. The hyperobject is fundamentally withdrawn from direct experience, accessible only through its traces and effects across a vast network.

4. Phased: Hyperobjects occupy a higher-dimensional phase space, meaning that we, as three-dimensional beings, can only ever perceive “slices” or temporal cross-sections of them. We see the weather, but the climate remains an abstraction.

5. Interobjective: A hyperobject is not a single, monolithic thing but is formed by the relations between a multitude of other objects. Climate change, for instance, emerges from the interactions between the sun, the atmosphere, oceans, fossil fuels, human economies, and countless other entities. We perceive it only through its effects on other objects—thermometer readings, ice core data, sea level measurements.

That’s quite the hypermarketing for hyperobjects, and I worry that we have gone way overboard, but there’s something useful here for sure.

The flows of carbon, nitrogen, and silicon that the Anthropocene forces us to confront are precisely these kinds of hyperobjects. The planetary carbon cycle, for example, is a vast, ancient process operating across the biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and geosphere over millennia. Human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, has violently accelerated one part of this cycle, injecting carbon into the atmosphere at a rate far exceeding the system’s capacity to absorb it, thereby creating the hyperobject of anthropogenic climate change.

To apprehend the Anthropocene is to learn to think at the scale of these un-graspable, yet world-shaping, entities.

The Ethics of Flourishing: Multispecies Justice

This radical shift in the object of apprehension—from the human social world to the entangled planetary condition—carries with it a profound ethical weight. If philosophy once centered its ethical inquiries on the question, “What is the good life for humans?”, the planetary condition compels a much broader question: “What constitutes the flourishing of beings?”. The scope of justice must necessarily enlarge from a concern with distributions and recognitions within human communities to a concern for the well-being of the various species that inhabit the planet.

This ethical expansion finds its most rigorous expression in the emerging field of Multispecies Justice (MSJ). MSJ is not merely an attempt to extend pre-existing human-centered theories of justice to include animals or ecosystems. Instead, it calls for a “fundamental reconceptualization of justice itself within the context of ecological interconnectedness”.⁵² It begins with the premise that justice must account for the interests and claims of all “Earth others”—animals, plants, rivers, forests, microbial communities—and the complex relationships that enable their functioning and flourishing.⁵² Core concepts like rights, harm, freedom, and repair must be rethought from a non-anthropocentric perspective. A dam, for example, is not just an infrastructure project with human costs and benefits; it is an act of profound injustice against a river and the entire web of life that depends on its flow. Industrial agriculture is not just an economic system; it is a regime of multispecies violence. Apprehending the planetary condition, therefore, is an inherently ethical act. It means recognizing the conditioned nature of all life and the co-dependence of all beings within fragile, interconnected Earth systems.

This reconceptualization reveals a crucial feature of our new philosophical situation.The planetary condition is not a passive object awaiting our comprehension. As a hyperobject, it is viscous and nonlocal; as Gaia, it is an unpredictable assemblage of unruly agents. The planet is not waiting to be apprehended; it is actively making its presence felt through cascading crises, from climate disruption to mass extinction. Latour’s “intrusion of Gaia” is an active event; the planet is forcing a confrontation, compelling us to reckon with its agency. This means the act of apprehension is no longer a one-way street where a human subject grasps a non-human object. Apprehension has to become a dynamic act, more a dance of beings than the detached view of the Planet from a safe distance.

Note 1: I am a little ashamed to admit that this essay is full of social science/humanities jargon that is

1. is hard to understand and worse

2. might be empty of content.

It’s the best we have got right now as we try to merge the Earth System and Ecological Sciences with the more-than human Social Sciences and Humanities.

Note 2: We need to do much better, and I desperately want to do so, but I am a ruminant, and this material is making its way through my first stomach. It has to be processed at least a couple more times before I can metabolize it into a system I can be proud of.