Bhumics Glossary

The first contradiction of the rules-based international order is that it needs someone credible on the Leviathan throne, and the US doesn't want the job anymore. It does want to keep its hands on the financial levers. Fair is fair - you can't have it both ways for long.

Affectology is my word for the study of the ruling emotions of an era, set against ideology. My test case is the passage from hope, which was the liberal mood, to fear, which is the illiberal one.

I think AGI is better defined as a collective institution that can match the cognitive versatility of a well-educated adult, or of the institutions we already have. The capability doesn't sit in the model. It emerges from the institutional stack the model lives in.

What I take from Hirschman is two things. His passions and interests give me the emotional basis of the rules-based order, and his unbalanced growth reads to me as metabolic stress, which is exactly where development happens.

What I take from Grothendieck is the rising sea. You don't crack a stubborn rock with a hammer; you let the water rise around it until the rock gives way. That's how I want to understand mega-systems like the planet.

What I take from Sen is the ethics of metabolic development. Freedom is a function of access to energy and information. Capability is metabolism.

The Anthropocene is the epoch in which humans became a geological force. I use the word all the time and I've criticized it for just as long, because it naturalizes what particular humans did and it erases everyone else's agency.

Hegel said philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, and Marx said the point is to change it. I read the two together. Once the object is the planet, I want to know what gets apprehended, who does the apprehending and by what means.

The Architect-Designer is a philosopher type I added to Justin Smith's list. This philosopher builds conceptual and institutional spaces, and artifacts, that let people act together. It's the bridge between speculative worldmaking and the actual kind.

Aristotle is one of the two distant gods of Epistry. The planet is the first object of epistry, and that's meant to echo his first philosophy.

I'd rather read AI as Augmented Intelligence: human institutions using computation to extend their cognition, sometimes with extraordinary results and sometimes with catastrophic stupidity.

Autopoiesis is the self-production of a living or social system. I use it to define the metabolic sovereign and, later, to say what habitability is: planetary autopoiesis.

Polyconflicts are intersectional in the most destructive sense of the word. Like water under pressure they find a society's oldest fault lines. That's why geoeconomic shocks land hardest on rural women.

Basal cognition is the biogenic view that cognition starts in single cells, as an evolved trait continuous with metabolism. It's the baseline for Cellosophy. In other words, you don't need a brain to have a mind.

What I take from Bratton is The Stack, which I read as the computational grammar for planetary institutions.

Bhumics is my name for a planetary framework that takes the Earth, Bhumi, as its unit of analysis and is meant to replace politics and economics as the ruling disciplines. When I first stated it, I said it was also a mood, an aesthetic.

The Book of the World is an artifact I'm hoping for. The printed book did this for Galileo's universe: it condensed understanding. I want something that does the same for the Earth and opens up the Planetary Durée, more-than-humanistic, held in the hand and spread across sensors.

What I take from Latour is his Gaia and his critique of "the social". My metabology reruns Reassembling the Social with "metabolic" in place of "social".

What I take from Schmitt is the grim aphorism: sovereign is he who decides on the exception. It's the ground for my metabolic exceptions, and for treating the grid as the place where the decision gets made.

Cellosophy is our attempt to understand cognition from the bottom up, starting with the living cell instead of the human brain. You don't need a brain to have a mind. Information is metabolized, and that's where I begin.

What I take from Alexander is the pattern language, which shapes how I do Habitability. We won't be able to do wise terraforming without his ideas.

The circle is a design pattern for local knowledge networks, organized around a core of people, a passion, a place or a practice. I set it against the inverse tree of courses and degrees, which is how universities like to arrange things.

Civic translators are people who can move between community knowledge, technical systems and institutional procedure. Public intelligence doesn't work without them.

Mann and Wainwright gave us four climate futures: Leviathan, Mao, Behemoth and X. I relied on their book for a while, then decided it was out of date once the liberal Leviathan walked off.

A Climate Panchayat is a participatory village assembly on climate that Socratus organized with partners in Odisha. At one of them the phrase "the mangrove forest is our protective shield" rang out. That's what the panchayat is for.

We're living through three revolutions at once: in production (AI), in reproduction (fertility) and in co-production (climate, i.e., the agency of the biosphere). Any order that ignores its conditions of production fails. That's my short version of the case for Bhumics.

Cognitive capitalism is the shift from an economy of factories to one of knowledge, coordination and platforms. Inside it, AGI looks less like a technical goal and more like a frontier myth.

Cognitive imperialism is the enclosure of humanity's collective intelligence inside rent-seeking foundation models owned by a few corporations. Those corporations then charge the very societies whose output built the models. It isn't a metaphor.

Cognitive metabolism is my three metabolisms applied to thinking. The external one is data, compute and models; the bodily one is situated deliberation; the political one is the institutions that set the terms for foreign cognitive artifacts.

Cognitive sovereignty is a society's capacity to think for itself, in its own language and at its own pace, and to refuse a cognitive dependency when that dependency turns coercive. I think it's the precondition for every other kind of sovereignty.

Collective wisdom is wisdom held and evoked by groups. Socratus is a bet that it's the next step in the wisdom traditions, and that design and technology can make it achievable. Socrates was a midwife; we're trying to build the maternity ward.

Common Source is open source plus people sharing. An organization releases its knowledge as a public good and also makes the people who are skilled in it available to the wider ecosystem.

The comprador class is the local elite that mediates cognitive imperialism and profits from it. In my account the Indian IT services stack is part of it.

Compute sovereignty is a sovereign's control over where the computing infrastructure behind AI sits, who owns it and where the chips come from. Computing power is shaping up to be a strategic resource of this century.

A computestate is a state whose power rests on computation: chips, fabs, data centers, cables. The US is primarily a chipstate IMHO, whatever its oil fields say.

Concept worlds are social design's version of concept cars. You build them to show what's possible at the limits, and nobody expects them on the assembly line.

The Connector is one of the philosopher types I added to Justin Smith's list. This philosopher practises the most general ecology of thought I can imagine, mapping relations across domains, species and scales without flattening the differences between them. It's a network weaver who doesn't untie the knots.

Cosiety is my word for collectivity that runs all the way from the sub-individual to the global, with cognitive as well as social features, and with room for institutions. Think of the microbiome and the caste system in the same frame. I proposed it as a question and I'm still asking it.

The Cosmopolitan Globe is the hopeful picture of globalization: one market, liberal democracy as the hegemonic form, culture flowing freely across borders. I didn't kill it and I didn't wish it dead. In 2025 I just found it bleeding its life out on the street.

Cyborg science is what the sciences of the planet have become: human, living and machine intelligence blended into one apparatus of satellites, sensors and climate models. In that apparatus, observing the Earth already changes it. Haraway would recognize the cyborg, I think.

The Daily Planet is my habit of posting short daily updates that survey what's happening on the planet, then pulling them together once a week as The Weekly Planet. It lets a wide-angle scan of the news sit beside slow reading of systems thinkers.

The defense of durée is my claim that every violation of cognitive sovereignty squeezes the time people have to deliberate. So defending durée, the right to think at your own pace, is defending self-government. The word is Bergson's and I'm using it for politics.

Deshakala is the Indian notion of the place and time, desha and kala, in which something arises. I've said that design is the science of Deshakala. An idea is always an answer to its own Deshakala.

The design of philosophy is my claim that philosophy is a craft like design. Philosophical ideas are solutions to the design problems of their time and place, and if we do it properly, philosophy could matter to future technology the way design matters today. That's a big if.

The design of vigilance is one task I give philosophy: prototyping practices that keep the source of all knowledge in view even as knowledge multiplies in the sciences. I borrow the vigilance from Merleau-Ponty. The technologies are from India and other contemplative traditions, from simple breath awareness on up.

Design-philosophy is my twist on David Chalmers's technophilosophy. Design becomes a method for grasping philosophical problems, and the artifacts we build become explorations of philosophical ideas. In other words, you can think with a thing as well as about it.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the historian whose distinction between the global and the planetary sits under my whole idea of planetarity. What I take from him is that we can't tell the human story apart from the planet's story anymore. His collision of histories is also behind my planetary durée.

Distributed cognition is Edwin Hutchins's finding that in complex institutions thinking is spread across people, tools and organization. Put it next to 4E cognition and you get half of my frame for Augmented Intelligence. The unit of analysis isn't the lone mind.

Draft Protocol is the rule-maker's pattern. You specify what a system senses, whom it recognizes, how it responds and how its decisions can be challenged. That's how I give a concept an executable form.

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby wrote Speculative Everything, one of the founding documents of design fiction. What I take from them is the move of turning the plausible into the probable. Presearch owes them a lot.

The earthworm view is the embedded, situated stance, sensing the vibrations of the soil from inside, against the bird's eye view of cybernetics and complexity science. By 2026 the cosmic earthworm had become something like our species-dharma. I'm more worm than eagle, and proud of it.

An Ecosystem Programming Interface is an API for social and ecological ecosystems: a defined interface through which organizations exchange people, knowledge and resources. I wanted a computational mindset to build relays in our social and ecological ecosystems. Later I started saying Ecological Programming Interface.

Edwin Hutchins is the cognitive scientist who studied navigation on a Navy ship and found the cognition spread across people and instruments. What I take from him is that the intelligence of an operation lives in the system. He's one half of how I think about AI.

The Electric Stack is the bundle of batteries, magnets, motors, power electronics and embedded compute that sits behind everything electric. China controls it. It's the new oil, I've argued, except you manufacture it and it gets better with time.

An electrostate is a country that runs more of its economy on electricity, which makes it a consumer electrostate, or builds and controls clean-energy technology, which makes it a producer electrostate. China is my archetype. It changes how power is generated in both senses of the word.

The Elephant is the philosopher who apprehends wholes. Indian philosophy's favourite error is mistaking a rope for a snake, and the Elephant would rather make that mistake than miss the animal altogether. It's also what I call the midwife of a planetary constitution.

Emptiness is Nagarjuna's claim that all phenomena lack intrinsic existence, and that includes emptiness itself. For me it means form resists capture at its core.

An empty world is one in which everything from politics to technology to science to health lacks intrinsic existence. Emptiness has escaped from the monastery into the street. Risk is its characteristic form, and that's how I wanted to approach AI.

Energy sovereignty is authorship over how a polity keeps its energy flowing: the standards, the code, the right to island off the grid. Energy security only asks about supply. I care about who gets to decide.

Energy-compute arbitrage is the Gulf's bet that cheap energy, land and capital can make it the place where the world's compute lives. It couples desalination, power and data centers into one loop, and I think war can break it.

An epistrator is someone who practises Epistry. The epistrator can't stay in the armchair and has to get deep into making technology, especially the infrastructure for doing science. Cyanobacteria were the OG epistrators.

Epistron is my most general term for a knowledge product, device or system made to satisfy our knowledge desires. Tablets, theorems, universities and search engines are all epistrons. I study them as designed objects.

Epistry is philosophy when it becomes executable. In 2014 it meant a merged design of epistemology, pedagogy and policy. In 2026 it's my umbrella for philosophical engineering, design, speculation and AI, all in one tent.

What I take from Eric Schliesser is my working definition of synthetic philosophy. He's also someone I talk with, on the page, when I read Machiavelli. Two debts, then.

This is Lucy Suchman's contrast between the European navigator, who makes a detailed plan and forces reality to fit it, and the Trukese navigator of Micronesia, who keeps adjusting to the waves, the stars and the wind. I map it onto aircraft carriers and drone swarms. Then onto the American and Chinese stacks.

Existential politics is what you get when the elemental obsessions, air, water, food, heat and climate, replace taxes as the business of government. A politics in which oceans and glaciers get a vote will look nothing like the one we have. I said that in 2018 and I'm sticking with it.

The Expanse is the second finger of planetarity: scales of time and space that exceed human perception and also our tools for making meaning. Engineering it, as I put it, means cultivating patience. The Expanse is long and our lives are short.

Field Note is the witness's pattern. You notice the planetary relations inside any room you're in: the power, the water, the materials, the labour, the waste. Seen that way, habitability is something we keep accomplishing every day.

The five fingers are my anatomy of planetarity: Metabolics, Expanse, Multitude and Technosphere, with Mahayanics as the thumb that gives the hand its grasp. Think of anatomy as the engineering analog of ontology. Philosophical engineering needs a body to work on.

A forestree is a problem that needs an engineering product and a political policy at the same time. It's my name for technology that pays attention to the forest and the trees. Good design, good data and a deep concern for social consequences, all in one solution.

Gaia, for me, is mostly Latour's secular Gaia, an agent with ungoverned self-advancing processes, along with Lovelock and Margulis's self-regulating biosphere. I use it against sentimental Mother Earth and against inert Nature. Bhumics is Gaia gone adulting.

Gaiapolitik is Nathan Gardels's word for a politics aimed at a livable biosphere for all, in place of the old realpolitik of securing national interests. I quote it with approval. It's his term, though, and I've kept it that way.

Galileo was my first scientific hero, and he's never really left. His telescope pointed at the sky and his grand book of the universe keep turning up in my writing, from 2014 all the way to 2026.

Gandhi is where I get Swaraj, and these days I read Swaraj as grounded agency. His reply to Tagore, the bit about the windows and refusing to be blown off his feet, is also my working definition of cognitive sovereignty.

Spivak gave me two things I keep using. One is the planet as an alterity we only have "on loan". The other is her call to imagine ourselves as planetary subjects instead of global agents.

I see two roads to AGI. There's an American General Predictive Intelligence that lives in the cloud, and a Chinese General Productive Intelligence that's embodied in robots and industry. I'm not attached to the names.

Geocracy is the rule of the Earth. I wanted a word that takes politics back to first principles, i.e., human control over flows of energy and information, and the fights over value and violence that come with that control.

Nils Gilman and Jonathan Blake think hard about planetary institutions, subsidiarity and an ecological Cold War. I read them closely and I argue with them, sometimes in the same paragraph.

The Globe is the Earth as humans have mapped, owned and legislated it, the surface of trade, law and technology. I set it against the Planet, and that pairing runs through most of what I've written on planetarity.

What I take from Gramsci is the interregnum, the time of monsters when the old order is dying and the new one can't be born yet. It's the frame for the whole Bhumics project.

The Great Enclosure is what the foundation-model companies are doing to the cognitive commons - our data, art, languages and institutional knowledge - much as the English enclosures fenced off common land. And it's the business model, plain and simple.

Grounded agency is my reading of Swaraj. It's the capacity of people in a place to create and sustain the conditions for their own flourishing, and for the flourishing of the other beings who live there.

Habitability is a relational, metabolic achievement, something living systems produce as much as they require. I've made it the first concept of planetary epistry, and I'm proposing it as the replacement for sovereignty.

What I take from Hegel is one sentence: philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought. I swap "planet" in where he had "state" and run with it.

Bergson is the philosopher of durée, lived time that won't sit still on a ruler. I stretch his durée out to geological scale and call it the Planetary Durée.

Herman Kahn is the Cold War systems thinker I was "writing to read" when the Daily Planet started. RAND, his institution, is for me the emblem of the first age of systems thinking.

What I take from Hobson and Lenin is the idea that imperialism comes in stages. I'm pushing their sequence one step further, to the export of inference capital, i.e., the highest stage of the algorithm.

These are two complexes that sell comforting stories, one about hope and one about harmony. The comfort has a price. It weakens the Pauper's capacity to act on production, reproduction and co-production.

Horizontal epistemology says knowing is knowing what to do at the right time and place and with the right crowd, and that this knowing is spread across many agents. I set it against the vertical, god-like picture of justified true belief.

Humainity is the podcast and newsletter I did with Richard Russell, looking for a "humaine" middle path on AI between the technologists and the ethicists. Yes, the pun's the point.

Hyperobject is Timothy Morton's word for things so spread out in time and space that you can't see them whole, like global warming or the carbon cycle. I use it for the planet and the Anthropocene, with some misgivings.

A hyperproblem is a problem too big for any one person's head and too big for any one institution to coordinate, stretched over long times and planetary space. It's Morton's hyperobject recast as a problem.

An ideoplex is my word for a cluster of ideas, ideals, identities and institutions that together make up a way of grasping the world. New ones tend to look like cults, because they question what everyone else treats as unquestionable.

The Indian Anthropocene is the Anthropocene seen from India, and it looks very different from here than it does from the West. It's also the working title of the first Bhumics book.

That's what AI targeting does to war. It compresses the kill chain and swaps human deliberative time for algorithmic quotas - quantity over quality, in the worst sense of the phrase.

Inference capital is rented cognition. My suggestion is that exporting it is taking over from finance capital as the leading edge of imperial control - the highest stage of the algorithm, if you'll forgive me for borrowing from Lenin.

That's how I describe Socratus now. We're a cluster of capabilities that lets people understand, decide, build and correct course together after the meeting ends, which makes the phrase a brief for institutional design as much as a description.

The institutional prototype is the constituent pattern in my pattern language. I start from a philosophical claim and ask what institution would have to exist for that claim to acquire heft. It joins the two meanings of "agency", our power to change the world and the kind of body that serves a collective purpose, like USAID.

Interregnum is Gramsci's "between reigns", the stretch when the old order can't rule anymore and the new one hasn't been born. It's my name for the present, caught between the Globe and the Planet.

This is a speculative currency whose unit is a verified metabolic carbon event, written into DNA with CRISPR so that the DNA itself is the ledger. It's my worked example of a Draft Protocol, and yes, it's as science fictional as it sounds.

The Interverse is the humanist's answer to the metaverse: realities connected to each other, with the technology kept in the background. It started as human to human and later grew to take in other species.

Adam Smith had his invisible hand. I gave the planet an invisible fist, the hidden force at work in the actions of many actors, "from the man on the street to the whale in the ocean".

What I take from Isabelle Stengers is cosmopolitics. It turns the question of who apprehends from a problem of knowledge into a problem of political design.

Jakob von Uexküll is the biologist of the Umwelt, and one of my all time favorites. He's behind Multitude, the Weltist and Cellosophy.

Justin E. H. Smith sorted philosophers into six types. I added three of my own, the Elephant, the Architect and the Connector, and later recast his six as skills.

A knowledge studio is part graduate seminar and part design studio, a place where ideas get judged for novelty and everyone midwifes everyone else's creativity. In the Epistry synthesis I sum it up as creative, cosocratic and compositional.

His incompleteness theorem showed that any rich enough system of axioms contains true statements it can't prove. What I take from Gödel is that this ends the perfectionist dream of axiomatic systems.

What I take from Machiavelli is The Prince read against the grain, as a positive science of power. Then I turn it upside down, and that's The Pauper.

Mahayanics is the thumb of planetarity. It's the Bodhisattva vow turned into a design brief: build for the flourishing of all beings or don't bother building. I call it compassion operationalized.

Mandalarity is my placeholder for a new geometry of world order. Drop the poles of the Cold War and picture overlapping, radiating circles instead - a networked world drawn like a mandala.

What I take from Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright is the four futures of Climate Leviathan. I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with that book: I adopted its futures, then called them outdated, then picked them up again.

What I take from Manuel DeLanda is a material footing for duration: history as flows of matter and energy moving at different speeds. I like the flows. I'm less sure about the layers.

What I take from Marcia Bjornerud is timefulness, i.e., the sense that the Earth is made of time. It's a geologist's antidote to treating the planet as a backdrop for human history.

What I take from Heidegger is a question. He said philosophy forgot Being. I wonder whether history is the forgetting of the Planet.

What I take from Marx is the spirit of critique. Capital calls itself a critique of political economy, and Bhumics wants to be that kind of book. I also take "the point is to change it" and his suspicion of the juridical superstructure.

What I take from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela is autopoiesis, a system that produces itself. I use it, with Luhmann, to describe the metabolic sovereign. Varela is also one of my Ishtadevatas.

The Mauhaus was my Bauhaus for the metaverse. I read the metaverse as the skin of the world, a successor to writing, and I wanted a design school for it. It's also where I defined the sensome.

Megamaya is human sovereignty extended by machines, then by systems of machines, then by systems of systems, until the globe becomes a real, worldly maya. I refused to define it. It's a radial category, and I meant that.

Metabolic development is the study and practice of how societies transform within the planet's ecological and informational limits. In 2025, every nation is a developing nation, rich ones included.

A metabolic exception is what happens when normal politics can't protect the flows of life - a heatwave, a drought, a grid failure - and leaders reach for extra-legal powers to restore metabolic order. It's Schmitt's exception in metabolic clothing.

Metabolic order is the maintained pattern of planetary and infrastructural flows that keeps a world habitable. Social order sits on top of it. Keeping it going is, IMHO, our primary collective task as a species.

The metabolic pyramid is how humanity's metabolic power is actually shared out. A tiny fraction commands most of the energy and resources, while billions live in energy poverty.

Metabolic sovereignty is a community's capacity to organize and secure the flows of energy and information that keep it alive, and to say no to a dependency when it turns coercive. The community can be a nation. It can also be a village.

Metabolics is the study of how all human activity rests on flows of energy and information that plug us into the nonhuman world. Its fundamental principle is simple: everything is built on top of bits and volts.

Metabolism wars are geopolitical fights over metabolic capacity - the energy, information and materials that power a civilization. Ideology still makes noise. The chips and cables do the work.

Metabology is the study and design of the protocols, formal and informal, that govern how energy, matter and information actually move through societies. Ideology tells you what we intend. Metabology tells you what we're building.

What I take from Foucault is political technology and docile bodies. He's half of my Augmented Intelligence frame. I also quote him against the juridical picture of power, the one where power is mostly about law.

The Ministry for the Distant Future is an institutional prototype that's only allowed to deliberate on consequences more than a thousand years out. "Ministry for X" is the pattern. You can fill in many futures.

Monsterology is the study of the monsters that turn up in an interregnum. My hunch is that the next hegemonic monster will be planetary in scale.

Moral immanence is the direct experience of cosmic order in daily life. We lost it before modernity got going, and power and profit rushed into the vacuum.

Multispecies justice means rethinking justice so it includes the interests of "Earth others" - animals, rivers, forests, microbes - and the relations that let them flourish.

Multispecies sovereignty widens the circle of sovereignty over planetary metabolism so other species and ecosystems count as participants. It's my answer to an Anthropic Sovereignty that has backfired on us.

The multitude is the third finger of planetarity. The planet is many worlds, each species with its own Umwelt and its own senses, and honouring that means extending justice beyond the human.

What I take from Nagarjuna is emptiness, and the nerve to apply it to itself. He's one of the two distant gods of Epistry. At the risk of being reductive, Aristotle inspires my head and Nagarjuna touches my heart.

Openings are ideas that intrude on consciousness and overwhelm us with their importance. The ancients must have felt that way about Brahman or God, and Capital has that quality for us. I think we're at the cusp of another one.

My pattern language for habitability has four recurring artifacts through which ideas meet the world: the Field Note, where I'm a witness; the Institutional Prototype, where I'm a constituent; the Draft Protocol, where I'm a rule-maker; and the Speculative World, where I'm an inhabitant. They feed into each other in a circle.

The Pauper is the Prince turned upside down: the defeated person without a throne who still has to act. For the Pauper I rewrote Machiavelli as a manual for planetary politics from below.

There are two kinds of system. Perfectionist systems chase flawless understanding from a few principles, and productionist systems chase what works. Perfection seeks certainty; production satisfices. The Anthropocene is what productionist anthropocentrism looks like at planetary scale.

A petrostate is a polity whose economy and politics are tied to hydrocarbon rents. With Nils Gilman, I see an axis of petrostates dragging its feet on decarbonization.

A philoflaneur is a philosopher who walks the city as a stage and helps make spaces of not-knowing. Wise cities should leave room for surprise.

Philohacking is writing philosophy as code, with arguments as modules. I think of code as a third medium, sitting between logic and mathematics.

A philopreneur is philosophy meeting decentralization: someone who, working with others, conceives and builds alternative social systems by futuring, the science fiction part, and solving, the detective story part. If the party intellectual is philosophy plus centralization, the philopreneur is the other thing.

One job of philosophy is changing intuitions, and the philosopher as conceptual designer does it by designing conceptual interfaces that make certain thoughts easy. Think UX, for ideas.

Philosophical engineering is philosophy as composition: building concepts, institutions, protocols and tools that make the planet livable for all beings. I took the phrase from Tim Berners-Lee, and in 2026 Epistry swallowed it. I could just as easily have called it Philosophical Architecture or Philosophical Gardening.

The planet is the Earth taken as an agentic, entangled system of human and nonhuman processes running across deep time. For me it's the ultimate giver of order. It's also the first object of thought, which is a big claim, I know.

Climate is one issue domain. The planet is the coupled system of bio, geo and tech processes that the issue sits inside, and that's the unit I want to analyse. Treat climate as a standalone policy problem and you'll keep fixing the wrong thing.

Planetarity is the condition of living on a planet whose energetic, ecological and informational foundations are now out in the open. It's also the politics that answers that condition, a solidarity that runs across species.

Planetary Alterity is the Earth as a radically alien system, one that won't be totalized or controlled, which we inhabit on loan. I think of it as the third decentring, after Copernicus kicked us out of the centre of the cosmos and Darwin out of the centre of life.

The Planetary City is the planet thought of as a city, fractal from the neighbourhood up to the globe, so that it can be governed as a whole. My preferred version is a Gaiapolis with room for the nonhuman multitude. Trantor with more trees and a lot more critters, if you like.

Planetary Colonialism is the stage that comes after planetary plunder. The global gets hyperscaled until it's embedded deeper in the earth itself, and I'd say the Chinese electrostate is blazing that path.

A Planetary Constitution is a distributed, revisable constitution for a livable planet. I expect it to be written as code more than as laws. Grasping the planet means moving toward one, whether we like it or not.

The Planetary Cyborg is the fused human-machine apparatus of militaries and institutions, from the post-war cybernetic complex to today's AI targeting systems. It can destroy a continent and still can't understand a village.

Planetary Design is design and technology for the planet. Done right, it makes the ecological choice the default in everyday life. I think it has to become our most important design discipline.

Planetary Durée is Bergson's durée stretched out to geological time. The Earth is a living, accumulating duration, and human consciousness is one fast-moving, highly conscious clot in it.

Planetary Philosophy is philosophy remade as a material practice that apprehends the planet. It thinks with many cultures, many beings and many things. I like to call it the yet to awaken third eye of cybernetics. Shiva would approve, I hope.

Planetary Politics is politics at planetary scale, and IMHO it's the only politics worth doing. It can come in a caring form or a ruthless, competitive one, and I'm not sure which we'll get.

Planetary Sapience is the planet becoming aware of itself through human cognition, sensors and computation. We humans are that part of the planet responsible for it. Grandiose, sure, but someone has to do the job.

The Planetary Sensorium is the distributed cognitive apparatus of networks, satellites, sensors and models that makes hyperobjects perceivable. Without it there's no climate to see. In other words, computation is a condition of possibility of Planetarity.

The Planetary Steward is a philosopher who isn't a king. I imagine about 70 million human stewards, and as many nonhuman ones, maintaining metabolic order at every scale. A steward has to be a good neighbour and a good ancestor at the same time.

Planetary Subsidiarity is Blake and Gilman's principle that only what must be planetary should be governed at planetary scale. I offer it as one possible answer to the question of who maintains habitability. It's their idea, and I'm borrowing it with gratitude.

Plausibility and correctibility are the design constraints for knowledge in an age of cheap data and fast communication. Descartes's certainty made sense for a world of scarce data and slow letters. That world's gone.

Political technology is Foucault's idea that institutions like militaries are technologies for formatting people into docile components. I apply it to AI stacks, which I think produce docile polities on top of docile bodies.

Polyconflict is my replacement for polycrisis. It names conflicts that are intertwined, structural and open-ended, with real parties and real stakes, which you can't manage back to equilibrium. You have to trace them commodity by commodity.

Polycrisis is Edgar Morin's term, made popular by Adam Tooze, for crises that interlock. I accept it as a diagnosis of the old order. What I reject is its assumption that crises are temporary and manageable.

Positive Bhumics is a Machiavellian description of planetary power and processes as they are. I hold it apart from the moral frameworks we've inherited, so that the normative can emerge in conversation with it. Description first, sermon later.

The practical philosopher is the universal knowledge profession that doesn't exist yet. I picture a knowledge bearer who's a midwife of wisdom and a weather vane for data and meaning.

The Prediction Stack is the American metabolic stack, built on chips, centralized cloud and proprietary models. It rents cognition to the world. It disciplines client states by threatening to take the compute away.

Presearch is the use of design as a tool to create ideas and theories, and more generally to prototype instruments of knowledge. It's speculative philosophy. I set it against philosophy as sanitation.

The Production Stack is the Chinese metabolic stack. It embeds intelligence in physical infrastructure, in ports, grids and factories, and it disciplines through dependency and switching costs. Once your grid runs on it, good luck leaving.

A protocol is a rule-set that says what a system senses, recognizes and does. For me protocols are encoded philosophies, executable conditions of possibility. It's where philosophy finally gets to run.

Public Intelligence is AI used for the public good, a commons approach that builds application layers connecting places, people and institutions. In 2026 it also became my name for the defense of durée against cognitive imperialism.

Quantemplation brings the ethical concerns of the contemplative together with the methods of the scientist. It's an exploration of the causes and conditions that underlie experience. Yes, the word is a mouthful.

Tagore is the poet whose Gitanjali 35 opens my Cognitive Sovereignty essay. I pair him with Gandhi. What I take from him is a voice for a mind without fear, and that's the right note for an essay on cognitive sovereignty.

The Rules-Based International Order is the post-1945 legal and institutional order. I treat it as a juridical conception of the Globe. It's collapsing, partly because its hegemon has abdicated and partly because it never saw the conditions of production and co-production.

Samsara is the world we inhabit and take for granted. I'd rather make it the object of inquiry than "the universe". The study I want is samsara qua samsara.

The Securitarian Globe is the second monster of the interregnum. Globalization is still planetary, but now it's driven by security and territory, and conflicts can be ordered with a click of a button. Less Davos, more Godfather.

The sensome is a way of getting the future into our bones, an immersive world in miniature. Later it became the Socratus name for our multispecies studio.

Shaktiville is a mythified Bangalore of 2023, which we built at Socratus somewhere between pure imagination and realism. Its citizens include nonhuman animals. Later it became home to the multispecies studio, and I'm still fond of it.

Silicarbon is my name for silicon and carbon as the two ruling elements of the Anthropocene. Carbon is at the heart of energy production, silicon at the heart of information production, and the second Cold War is organized around the pair. Two elements to rule them all.

Sinosophy is Planetarity with Chinese Characteristics. It's philosophy as mood or atmosphere, the evocative yin to the engineering yang of Habitability.

What I take from Socrates is the idea that the philosopher is a midwife of wisdom, someone who helps other people bring out what's already in them. He's also the namesake of Socratus, so I'm hardly a neutral party here.

Speculative Bhumics is the utopian half of Bhumics, the part that imagines planetary futures going further than greening capitalism. Positive Bhumics looks at the world as it is; this half gets to dream, and I borrowed the license from Thomas More.

A Speculative World is an imaginary environment where I put institutions, protocols, technologies and organisms together into a possible form of life, one you could actually move into and argue with. It's the inhabitant pattern in my pattern language for habitability.

Stack is the word I want in place of "ideology" as the unit of analysis. A stack is a bundle of design principles, protocols, interoperability rules and security measures, and polities organize their energy and information around one.

Street metaphysics is philosophy in the language of the street, i.e., reality as it shows up to you right now, before the scientist, the guru or the artist gets to filter it. Later I turned it into a way of doing Indian philosophy in a second infancy, where fun counts as much as truth.

Stuffistan is the modern world of stuff, where massive flows of matter and information keep destabilizing and renewing society, from pens and plastic bottles all the way to landfills. Yes, I named a civilization after its junk. I stand by it.

The Surrogate Sandbox is my name for the Gulf as the arena where the US and Chinese stacks compete by proxy. The Gulf states hedge between the two while chasing "sovereign AI", and I don't think the hedge buys them what they want.

Swaraj is Gandhi's self-rule, the idea that governing yourself and governing a polity are tied together. I reread it as grounded agency.

Synthetic philosophy is Eric Schliesser's name for philosophy that pulls the special sciences together into a coherent account of complex systems. I've adopted it as the philosopher's job in mapping planetary systems.

The technosphere is Haff's word for the planetary system of technologies and infrastructures that metabolizes energy and materials. I call it an artificial intelligence that already exists, and a limb of the Earth.

Terraforming is the deliberate making of a planet habitable. We're already terraforming Earth, blindly, and the question I care about is whether we can do it well.

The Thermocene is a warmer world where heat is a permanent condition. At Socratus we explore it through speculative material cultures, i.e., the objects, rituals and tools people might live with when it never really cools down.

What I take from Hobbes is the Leviathan, which frames my argument about its abdication. I also take his doubt: he wasn't sure the international state of nature needs a global sovereign, and I find that doubt useful.

Macaulay is a negative interlocutor for me. I read his 1835 Minute as a forerunner of the cognitive imperialism that foundation models now make possible.

What I take from Thomas More is permission to imagine. Utopia is my model for Speculative Bhumics, though I promised a reading of the book and never wrote it.

Systems theory has had three ages as I see it. Cybernetics came out of nuclear war and RAND, complex systems came out of globalization and Santa Fe, and the third age is keyed to planetarity, with AI as its technology and philosophy as its core discipline. Yes, a philosopher thinks philosophy is the core discipline. Shocking.

I see three bubbles around AI: an economic one, a technical one and a cultural one. The cultural bubble, how we live with one another, matters most to me because it's the most certain to change us.

Every society runs on three coupled metabolisms: an external one of energy and information flows, a bodily one of human biology, and a political one made of the institutions that govern how they couple. When the coupling fails, it's bodies that pay.

What I take from Tim Berners-Lee is the phrase "philosophical engineering". When you design a protocol you get to define what words mean, and he's the guy who did that for the Web.

Timefulness is Marcia Bjornerud's "acute, lived awareness" of being embedded in deep time. I take it up as the cure for our time-illiteracy.

What I take from Timothy Morton is the hyperobject. I adopted it with misgivings and turned it into my own hyperproblem.

A trace substance is a material that's small in volume and huge in civilizational weight, like coca, spices or silver. Follow it and you find the metabolism the official story hides.

What I take from Vaclav Smil is a way of writing about energy and materials, and I want that style for Silicarbon. Where I part ways is the idea that energy is only the ground of social life.

The vermin wild is the urban wilderness of ants, cockroaches, spiders and other pests that's left once our cities have poisoned and paved away almost everything bigger than a mouse. It's the limit of our moral commons, and the hardest test of it.

The weight of government is the creaking load of the state system, international organizations and the rules of global commerce, as distinct from the older arts of government. My question is why we can't bear it anymore.

A weltist is a world-maker who understands what worlds are and tries to reduce the suffering in them. I love the pun: welt is world in German and a painful injury in English, which packs the Indian intuition that all of samsara is suffering into one syllable. Weltists are more worm than eagle.

What I take from Wilfrid Sellars is his definition of philosophy as working out how things hang together. I turned it into a task: make the planet hang together.

Wisdom-centric design is the third thing I want from design, after Herbert Simon's problem solving and Don Norman's human-centred design. It adds trust, empathy and justice to what designed systems are supposed to serve.

The Worldmaker is the fourth of my new philosopher types, the one who speculates on parallel or alternate worlds that can inform ours. Think Tolkien with a policy brief.

Worldmaking means making worlds visible and imaginable before trying to improve them. At Socratus our hypothesis is worldmaking before world-bettering, and the word comes from Nelson Goodman.

Writing for reading is my reversal of reading for writing. I write first to build a toolbox of concepts, so that when I do read I'm not simply subjugated to the author's ideas.

A Wystem is a system for wisdom: computational, social and ecological networks woven together, with which communities think and act on wicked problems. Reasoning alone, Socrates-style, doesn't cut it anymore.