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.
How the word moved
In July 2018 I called it shorthand for human power in the anthropocene, a system of machines that swallows the earth and represents it back to us. In February 2025 it was the juridical idea of humanity sitting behind the RBIO, and my verdict was blunt: the Globe is not enough.
Then it moved. By October 2025 I'd made it one half of the Planet, the human and more than human world of trade, culture, law and technology, now fused with the Earth. In March 2026 it was planetary time chopped up into election cycles and fiscal years. Yes, I keep rearranging the furniture.
In my words
"The globe is nothing but the earth swallowed, digested and represented by humans"
from 2018 Newsletter 12: Megamaya, 4 Jul 2018
"What we are seeing now with metabolic competition is the Globe acknowledging the Earth, but also trying to control it."
from Bhumics: Planetarity as Philosophical Engineering (PAPE), Part 1, 23 Oct 2025
Related
- Inherited from Gayatri Spivak - "allow the planet to overwrite the globe" is hers.
- Contradicts Planet - Globe and Planet are the core pair of my planetary writing.
- Related Rules-Based International Order - the RBIO is the Globe in its legal clothes.
- Related Megamaya - I introduced the Globe in the Megamaya essay.
- Related Planetary Duree - the Globe is planetary time turned into space.
- Related Cosmopolitan Globe - one historical form the Globe has taken.
Still open
In October 2025 the Planet includes the Globe, and in April 2026 the Planet stands against the Globe as alterity. I use it both ways and I don't know yet which one wins.