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

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

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

That contradiction fuels our approach to planetary stewardship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Planetary Alterity: The Alien at Home

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

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

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

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

4. Planetary Stewardship, Metabology, and Sapience

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

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

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

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

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

5. Habitability: An Umbrella Concept

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

In short: habitability is at the core of metabology

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

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

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

To repeat what I have said earlier:

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

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

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

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

The Myth of the Passive Container

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

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

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

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

The Octopus, the Earthworm, and the Mahayana

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

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

Viscosity and the Swarm: The Reality of Hyperobjects

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

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

The Exoplanetary Mirror and the Flight to the Stars

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Philosophical Engineering and the Earthworm’s Labor

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

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

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

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

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

To have and hold, but not possess.

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

Spivak and Morton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impey and Winn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Latour

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

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

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

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

The End

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

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

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

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

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

The Epistemological Rupture: Apprehending the Anthropocene

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

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

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

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

The Alien Planet

Readings for this month:

1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Death of a Discipline.

2. Bruno Latour: Facing Gaia.

3. Timothy Morton: Hyperobjects.

4. Chris Impey: Worlds Without End.

5. Joshua Winn: The Little Book of Exoplanets.

On Planetary Alterity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaia and Hyperobjects

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

Exoplanets

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

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

The condition of Planetarity is characterized by qualitative and quantitative alterity

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.

The only enlightenment worth striving for is shared enlightenment.

1. Governing the Planet

2. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack”

3. The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman.

4. The Planetary Steward

Introductory Note

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

Narrow Planetary Institutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how? BG have some suggestions.

Excerpts from BG

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

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

Which would be a marked improvement over our current situation where

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in its planetary avatar:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not only is the appropriation of the Earth by humanity wrong, it is also a contradiction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But an important level is missing!

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

We can’t ignore that level because:

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

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

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

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

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

Planetary institutions cannot and should not be confined to solving anthropogenic challenges.

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

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

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

Upholding the World

I’ll end these reflections with two thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is what it is to uphold the world.

1. Governing the Planet

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

3. The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman.

4. The Planetary Steward

Introduction: A New Machine makes a New World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snippets of the Stack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

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

Stacking the Planet

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

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

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

There’s no Earth without the Stack.

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The Metabology of the Stack

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

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

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

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

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

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

TLDR; Computational institutions must also be metabolic institutions.

1. Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack”

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

3. The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman.

4. The Planetary Steward

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

In short: my life is mediated.

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

Did Heidegger go far enough?

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

Can we think our way beyond history into geological time?

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

Now for some logistics:

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

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

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

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

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

Month One: Planetary Governance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Now?

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

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

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

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

What then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metabolic Order

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you accept this shift?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the doorway into what I call metabology.

Why ideology is no longer enough

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

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

And then the slogan meets the grid.

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

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

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

Metabology is a name for this middle realm.

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

What metabology actually is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competing metabolic orders

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can already anticipate what the arenas will be.

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

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

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

Parting Thoughts on Hyperproblems and Metabology as a Hyperproblem

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

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

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

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

But this is precisely why metabology is itself a hyperproblem.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Some years ago, no, many years ago, some college friends and I boarded a bus from Kanpur to Almora, and then another bus from Almora to Jageshwar, a temple town in the lower Himalayas. It’s an old temple town.

Wikipedia says: “Jageshwar Temples, also referred to as Jageswar Temples or Jageshwar Valley Temples, are a group of 125 ancient Hindu temples dated between 7th and 14th century.”

We arrived in Jageshwar in the late afternoon, as the shadows were lengthening and the smoke from stoves across the valley swirled in the air. The four of us were famished, not having eaten all day, but Jageshwar didn’t have a single restaurant back then. Only a U.P (it was still U.P back then) state guest house that was kept under lock and key by a guard who had to be fetched from the village before he could open the door for us.

The guard called his brother over, who presented himself as an odd-job man: temple guide, cook, driver, dispenser of wisdom - you name it. I will call him M for the rest of this anecdote. We arranged to have M’s Swiss Army knife at our side for the next two days. The rate M quoted us was a pittance even by our impoverished student standards. The hills have never been known for their economy, which leads to terrible decisions like cutting down old growth forests for a buck or two.

Anyways.

That evening M was a cook, turning a portable stove into a temporary kitchen from which arrived hot rotis, some dal and a curry.

Delicious!

We retreated to our guest house after dinner and spent the night shivering in the coldest weather we had ever experienced - like it or not, sub-zero temperatures with no heating and inadequate blankets will force you into spooning with your fellow men. The next morning, after eating a hearty breakfast (M) and filling our bottles with water, the four of us set out with our guide (M) for a trek to a sister temple about a two hour climb up a hill close to the main temple. I don’t remember much about the winding path, except that we spent the time talking and joking, being the young men that we were.

A couple of hours later, the top of that little mountain came into view, with the temple showing brief glimpses as the switchback took us ever closer and then further away. After paying respects to the temple deity we asked M if there was something else to do up there. He suggested we take a walk past the stand of trees about 100 feet down a gentle slope from the temple.

Why not? Little did we know about the surprise awaiting us.

The smokers among us wanted a break (even the thought of leaving cigarette stubs up in the sacred landscape fills me with shame now - but at least I wasn’t one of those lighting up) and all of us felt like a quick rest before trekking to the next village. As we were passing the last line of trees, we noticed the most amazing sight: the tree line ended abruptly at the mountain’s edge, from where was a steep drop - felt like several thousand feet - to the valley where (most likely) the Sarju (Sarayu) river snaked its way to its appointment with the Sharada. The Sarju split the 20 mile valley in half, with small villages dotting the landscape on both sides. The surprise waited patiently on the other side of the valley: the white mountains of the greater Himalayas in a line of unending glory from west to east, a vision both in the literal and in the metaphorical sense, the most breathtaking sight I had ever experienced in my life.

The others felt the same.

Three boisterous young men were reduced to silence, not speaking a word for, I don’t know how long, an hour, two hours. We just stared as our feet dangled over the edge. We had walked up a green hill and chanced upon the tallest mountains in the world.

Like humans strolling up the hill of history and encountering the planet.

I should also say: the expanse is terrifyingly awesome, but it’s more than human in a reachable way if we stretch ourselves - there’s a thread of continuity connecting the first proto-cell to us. Stretch it even more, and we can see ourselves in the wider solar system. The wider universe, on the other hand, is terra incognita, not for humans, or even the rest of the living planet.

Long detour but the detour is the journey. Like a solar eclipse, we cannot view the planet directly in our mind’s eye, but rather approach it aslant. Our next detour takes a bite out of Hegel and after that, a bite out of Marx.

Hegel Revisited

In the preface to his 1820 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel penned one of modern philosophy’s most enduring dicta: “philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought”. With this pronouncement, Hegel decisively positioned philosophy not as a practice of timeless speculation, detached from the contingencies of history, but as a rigorous form of historical self-consciousness. That statement of Hegel has now been reduced to a cliche, but if we read the Philosophy of Right, we come upon other statements that reveal his position. For example, Hegel says:

apart from anything else, philosophy with us is not, as it was with the Greeks for instance, pursued as a private art, but has an existence in the open, in contact with the public, and especially, or even only, in the service of the state.

This contact with the public, of thinking things over with others is an important departure from earlier times, when the public didn’t exist, at least not in the way that modern mass politics brings into being. Elsewhere, Hegel says (all translations from the Oxford World Classics Edition):

since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the comprehension of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a beyond

To philosophize, on this view, is to undertake the systematic labor of comprehending the essential character of one’s own epoch, to render in the clarity of the concept that which is otherwise lived as immediate, often opaque, experience. By Hegel’s time, that experience was of an existence lived in public, in view of the state. He says:

This book, then, containing as it does the science of the state, is to be nothing other than the endeavour to apprehend and present the state

Let’s change one word in that sentence:

This book, then, containing as it does the science of the planet, is to be nothing other than the endeavour to apprehend and present the planet

Marxian Praxis

A generation later, Karl Marx issued a sharp rejoinder that would reorient the philosophical project for centuries to come. In his first thesis on Fuerbach, Marx says (all translations from the Oxford:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in Das Wesen des Christentums, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity.

and later on, in the now famous 11th thesis:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Read against the backdrop of the Hegelian mandate, this is not, as it is often misunderstood, a simple rejection of apprehension in favor of blind activism. Rather, it is a radical intensification of it. For Marx, to truly apprehend one’s age is not merely to interpret it but to seize it, to arrest its destructive logic, and ultimately, to bring its contradictions to a revolutionary resolution.

Marx shifts the object of apprehension to the material reality of Capital—the specific mode of production and the “ensemble of social relations” that structure exploitation and alienation. The goal is no longer reconciliation with an existing order that is shown to be rational, but the practical overthrow of a social order that is revealed to be fundamentally self-contradictory. In this framework, the truth of thinking is no longer a purely theoretical question to be settled in the quiet of a study; it is a practical question that must be proven in the crucible of “revolutionary practice”.

The university is not the natural home of the philosopher!

How does that exiled philosopher make their way from the ivory tower to the union hall to the marshland and the forest?

The Planetary Rupture

This romantic vision of the philosopher as worldly investigator and agent of history, born from the creative tension between Hegel and Marx, has animated critical thought for nearly two centuries. Yet today, the world that philosophy is called upon to apprehend has undergone a transformation so profound that it challenges both apprehension and praxis. We are confronted with the Anthropocene: a new geological epoch defined by the fact that human beings have become a planetary-scale force, altering the fundamental systems of the Earth—its climate, its biosphere, its chemical cycles. The “age” that must now be apprehended is no longer reducible to a set of human social, political, or economic relations.

The object of apprehension - the Planet - is an entangled, dynamic system in which human and natural histories have become irrevocably coupled.

This planetary rupture displaces the anthropocentric objects of both Hegel and Marx. The state and capital remain crucial, but they are now understood as components within a much larger, more complex system whose dynamics operate on scales of time and space that dwarf human history.

To fulfill Hegel and Marx’s mandate today, i.e., to apprehend our age in thought and to seize it in praxis, is to face the Planet. This task compels a radical rethinking of philosophy’s most basic questions: What is being apprehended? Who is doing the apprehending? And by what means is this apprehension to be achieved? The answer to each question forces philosophy to transform, to move beyond its traditional humanist boundaries and toward a new, planetary horizon.

TLDR; to grasp the planet is to move toward a planetary constitution, a practice that can only be described as philosophical engineering. This is not a break from the tradition of critical thought, but its necessary culmination in an age where our object of concern is the Earth system itself.

Preface

I first wrote about planetarity in early 2018, now almost eight years ago. Even then, I knew that the planet is a lot greater than climate. Climate is only one of three key attributes of planetarity, the C in its ABC. Since then, my belief that we need a planetary politics not just climate politics has only grown and grown and grown, but I didn’t have much reason to act upon that belief. Not until recently.

Back then, climate politics felt like the train with the greatest momentum in late 2018 when the squad was elected and the Green New Deal was in the air. Every Democratic politician since then has had to have a public stance on climate action. I invested a lot of my time working towards the possibility of a GND in India, and that journey continues, but in late 2024 when Trump was elected, I came to the conclusion that climate politics is never going to happen. Certainly not at a global scale, but likely not at all.

The failure of climate action is also the failure of the liberal order more generally. It might still be rescued; maybe a Democrat will come to power in 2028 and we will all pretend as if Trump never happened, but I don’t think so. Whoever comes to power in DC in 2028 is going to face a brave new world.

The interregnum.

While the failure of climate action at a global level is tragic (it does make me think that climate change is inherently American as a sociotechnical formation, but that’s an argument for a different day), it’s also given us an opening for a much more expanded politics. The interregnum throws up monsters, but maybe, like Pandora’s box, there is hope at the bottom.

That hope for me is Bhumics - a way of embracing all of life in a new imagination of our collective future. I’ve been writing about Bhumics regularly for the last 10 months and today I am ready to take it up a notch.

I want to share my imagination of the future at the planetary scale. I am calling it Philosophical Engineering, but it could have easily been called Philosophical Architecture or Philosophical Gardening. Don’t worry about the name so much.

This is a first draft of ideas that I have just about beginning to congeal into a coherent framework - you may not even see as being connected with each other! - that I will be expanding upon diligently over the coming weeks and months. I will be posting twice a week just to put out the material that I have on hand. The Weekly Planets will continue as usual, but there will be an additional post on Thursdays (like this one) until I am done dumping my head on the page. Let’s start that journey with a provocation:

Planetarity as Philosophical Engineering

Philosophy, said Hegel, is its time apprehended in thought. Marx added that the point is not only to interpret the world but to change it. Today, the world has changed beyond what either could imagine. The question now is: what kind of thinking can help us make the planet we are already remaking? Not in our image, but for the flourishing of all beings.

The Task Ahead

For centuries, philosophers have sought to understand the human condition. Now the condition itself has widened. Our actions shape the chemistry of the atmosphere, the course of rivers, the metabolism of forests. We live not just in societies but in a world of feedback loops that link the human and the planetary.

The maps we draw in science, in politics, in design, help shape the terrain they describe. Our algorithms shape our attention; our models alter the climate policies they aim to explain. In this world of entanglement, the boundary between knowing and making dissolves. To paraphrase a famous line of Kant:

Knowing without making is sterile; making without knowing is fatal

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.

Earth and Globe

The Planet is an extension of nature as well as society, or to use another duality: the Planet is the Earth — the physical, chemical, biological system that science measures and describes and the Globe — the human and more than human world of trade, culture, law, and technology.

For most of history these seemed separate. The Earth was nature: vast, bountiful, indifferent, beyond our control. The Globe was civilization: the stage of human ambition and conflict. But in our time these two spheres have fused. The atmosphere carries the signatures of our industries; the oceans reek of acid exhaust.

To think of them together is to glimpse the planet — not just as a place, but as a dynamic field of interaction where human and nonhuman systems constantly remake each other. Planetarity means seeing the Earth not as background, nor as resource, but as a leading actor in every story we tell. Remember the in- in inhabit!

What we are seeing now with metabolic competition is the Globe acknowledging the Earth, but also trying to control it.

Terraforma

Science fiction once imagined “terraforming” as a way of reshaping distant planets to make them habitable. But we have already done that here, unwittingly. Every dam and data center, every field of wheat and ton of carbon, alters the texture of the biosphere. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are terraformers.

The question is whether we can become good ones. Good for whom?

To terraform well means to design planetary systems — economic, ecological, legal, and technical — so that they support life rather than deplete it. It means recognizing that our infrastructures are moral architectures, encoding values about who and what will flourish. The task of philosophical engineering is to make those architectures just, reciprocal, and durable. For all beings.

The Age of Cyborg Science

The sciences that reveal the planet to us — climate modeling, satellite sensing, data analysis — also transform it. Observation has become a form of intervention.

To study the atmosphere, we launch constellations of machines that orbit above it. To model ecosystems, we build computers that consume the energy of small cities. Our sciences are no longer separate from our technologies; they are part of the same planetary machinery. The technosphere (about which more in a minute) has to be integrated into the geosphere.

This is cyborg science: the blending of human, living, and machinic intelligence into a single fabric of planetary self-perception. We cannot separate knowledge from power, model from policy, algorithm from effect. We have to ensure that the architectures of knowing serve the architectures of life so that our technologies of insight become technologies of care.

The Anatomy of Planetarity

To make sense of something as large as the planet, we need anatomy - think of anatomy as the engineering analog of ontology. Some years ago, Wilfrid Sellars gave an influential definition of philosophy:

how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term

The task of philosophical engineering is to make the planet hang together in the broadest possible sense of that term; and for that purpose, we need to understand its anatomy. Today, I imagine planetary anatomy as a hand with five interlocking fingers: Metabolics, Expanse, Multitude, Technosphere, and Mahayanics.

Metabolics concerns the flows of energy and information that sustain life. The biosphere runs on sunlight and DNA; our civilization runs on fossil fuels and computation. The crisis of our age is a metabolic mismatch — the burning of ancient sunlight and the harvesting of human attention in ways that destabilize every living system. To repair this metabolism, we must align human energy and information flows with those of the biosphere — to build systems that regenerate rather than extract.

I have been talking about Metabolics in the Weekly Planet for the last month or so.

Expanse (aside: my favorite SF show ever) refers to the vast scales of time and space that not only exceed human perception, they exceed our tools of meaning making as well. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old; its processes move in rhythms too slow and long for human politics. Climate change and extinction are what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects” — phenomena so massive and distributed that they warp our sense of cause and effect. To engineer the expanse is to cultivate patience: institutions, habits, and models that make deep time visible and operative.

Multitude reminds us that the planet is not a single world but many, each inhabited by its own species, its own senses and meanings. Every creature lives in what biologists call an Umwelt — a bubble of perception and significance. Forests, fungi, whales, bacteria — each weaves its own thread in the planetary fabric. To honor the multitude is to extend justice beyond the human, to design institutions that give nonhuman life a seat at the table: the rights of rivers, the guardianship of forests, the voice of the more-than-human.

Sometimes I use the term “Multispecies” instead, but I will stick to “Multitude” in this series, because the multitude also references the different ways in which the planet is sensed: not just vision which is the dominant sense for us, but also other senses such as touch and smell, and senses that humans don’t possess such as magnetic senses and ultraviolet senses.The worlds of other species differ from ours qualitatively as well as quantitatively. They are the multitude.

Technosphere names the vast infrastructure humans have built — cables, roads, grids, data centers, satellites. This too is now planetary, with its own metabolism and inertia. It shapes weather, perception, and power. The technosphere is no longer an appendage; it is a limb of the Earth. The challenge is to make it accountable to the rest of the planet - to treat its protocols and codes as the new constitutional documents of the Earth.

And finally, Mahayanics - the thumb that gives the planetary hand its grasp.

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 compassion operationalized: a moral logic written into our systems. A Mahayanic economy values regeneration over profit; a Mahayanic technologist codes as if empathy were a feature, not a bug. The only enlightenment worth striving for is shared.

I will be writing about these five fingers extensively over the next few months. Now for some speculative engineering

Learning to Think in Deep Time

Re: The Expanse - of all the dimensions of planetarity, deep time may be the hardest to grasp in the way Hegel grasped history. Human institutions are short-sighted: elections, markets, and news cycles compress attention into months. The Earth, by contrast, moves in millennia.

The Expanse is long and our lives are short.

To bridge that gap, we need new instruments of patience — temporal impact assessments that ask not only what a project emits, but how long its effects will last; long-term trusts for nuclear waste and ecological restoration; civic rituals that honor planetary cycles. To design for time is to align our governance with the rhythms of the world that sustains us.

I have this vague idea that I will start with Bergson’s idea of time, what he called ‘la duree,’ but then adapt it for the very longue duree.

A New Kind of Knowing

Every philosophy imagines a knower. The Enlightenment imagined a solitary rational subject gazing at a passive world. That image no longer holds. The planetary knower is plural - part human, part machine, part fungus and part mountain.

Hopefully, the technosphere will help us expand our solidarity with other knowing beings. That would be a much better use of AI than what we have today.

Satellites see in wavelengths our eyes can’t, but maybe they can beam warnings to bacteria who can? Algorithms process patterns too vast for thought - hyperdata for hyperobjects. Maybe ASI will digest these stores of data and present them to us in understandable nuggets. Indigenous cosmologies read rivers as living archives of memory. The philosophical engineer must learn to think with all these intelligences - to act as an interpreter and bridge among them.

Protocols can replace theories.

Protocols as Philosophy

If ideas once lived in books, today they live in code, contracts, and protocols. The rules that govern data, energy, and finance shape our shared reality more deeply than most political declarations. To design a protocol, then, is to write philosophy in executable form. A carbon tariff, a blockchain standard, an environmental treaty — each is a moral proposition with material consequences. Can we design these systems with reciprocity, transparency, and care?

Planetary design principles might begin with five:

1. Reciprocity by default: give back to everything that gives.

2. Presence of consequences: decisions are made in the sight of those affected.

3. Polycentric subsidiarity: coordinate globally only what must be global. ps: the Globe is suspect, though not for the reasons xenophobes think it so.

4. Multiscalar transparency: ensure every system can be read from soil to sky. Read by whom though?

5. Accountability of infrastructure: treat code and standards as public constitutions.

These are the building blocks of a livable planet.

The Work Already Underway

Philosophical engineering is already happening, often quietly, under other names.

• When a river gains legal personhood, law evolves toward ecology.

• When farmers practice regenerative agriculture, they restore planetary metabolism.

• When architects design for pollinators and microbes, they expand the circle of citizens.

• When writers imagine solarpunk futures, they prototype new myths of belonging.

These experiments are mostly isolated. Together they form the murmurings of a planetary constitution: distributed, revisable, and oriented toward flourishing. Our job as planetary engineers is to connect the murmurs so everyone can hear their symphony.