The following is a repost of an article originally published in The Conversation and The Idependent.

The coffee tasted bad. Acrid and with a sweet, sickly smell. The sort of coffee that results from overfilling the filter machine and then leaving the brew to stew on the hot plate for several hours. The sort of coffee I would drink continually during the day to keep whatever gears left in my head turning.

Odours are powerfully connected to memories. And so it’s the smell of that bad coffee which has become entwined with the memory of my sudden realisation that we are facing utter ruin.

It was the spring of 2011, and I had managed to corner a very senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) during a coffee break at a workshop. The IPCC was established in 1988 as a response to increasing concern that the observed changes in the Earth’s climate are being largely caused by humans.

The IPCC reviews the vast amounts of science being generated around climate change and produces assessment reports every four years. Given the impact the IPPC’s findings can have on policy and industry, great care is made to carefully present and communicate its scientific findings. So I wasn’t expecting much when I straight out asked him how much warming he thought we were going to achieve before we manage to make the required cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

“Oh, I think we’re heading towards 3°C at least,” he said.

“Ah, yes, but heading towards,” I countered: “We won’t get to 3°C, will we?” (Because whatever you think of the 2°C threshold that separates “safe” from “dangerous” climate change, 3°C is well beyond what much of the world could bear.)

“Not so,” he replied.

That wasn’t his hedge, but his best assessment of where, after all the political, economic, and social wrangling we will end up.

“But what about the many millions of people directly threatened,” I went on. “Those living in low-lying nations, the farmers affected by abrupt changes in weather, kids exposed to new diseases?”

He gave a sigh, paused for a few seconds, and a sad, resigned smile crept over his face. He then simply said: “They will die.”

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That episode marked a clear boundary between two stages of my academic career. At the time, I was a new lecturer in the area of complex systems and Earth system science. Previously, I had worked as a research scientist on an international astrobiology project based in Germany.

In many ways, that had been my dream job. As a young boy, I had lain on the grass on clear summer evenings and looked up at one of the dots in the night sky and wondered if around that star a planet orbited with beings that could look up from the surface of their world and similarly wonder about the chances of life being found within the unremarkable solar system we call home in the universe. Years later, my research involves thinking about how surface life can affect the atmosphere, oceans and even rocks of the planet it lives on.

That’s certainly the case with life on Earth. At a global scale, the air we all breathe contains oxygen largely as a result of photosynthetic life, while an important part of the UK’s national identity for some – the white cliffs of Dover – are comprised of countless numbers of tiny marine organisms that lived more than 70m years ago.

So it wasn’t a very large step from thinking about how life has radically altered the Earth over billions of years to my new research that considers how a particular species has wrought major changes within the most recent few centuries. Whatever other attributes Homo sapiens may have – and much is made of our opposable thumbs, upright walking and big brains – our capacity to impact the environment far and wide is perhaps unprecedented in all of life’s history. If nothing else, we humans can make an almighty mess.

Change within a lifetime

I was born in the early 1970s. This means in my lifetime the number of people on Earth has doubled, while the size of wild animal populations has been reduced by 60%. Humanity has swung a wrecking ball through the biosphere. We have chopped down over half of the world’s rainforests and by the middle of this century there may not be much more than a quarter left. This has been accompanied by a massive loss in biodiversity, such that the biosphere may be entering one of the great mass extinction events in the history of life on Earth.

What makes this even more disturbing, is that these impacts are as yet largely unaffected by climate change. Climate change is the ghosts of impacts future. It has the potential to ratchet up whatever humans have done to even higher levels. Credible assessments conclude that one in six species are threatened with extinction if climate change continues.

The scientific community has been sounding the alarm over climate change for decades. The political and economic response has been at best sluggish. We know that in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need to rapidly reduce emissions now.

The sudden increase in media coverage of climate change as a result of the actions of Extinction Rebellion and school strike for climate pioneer Greta Thunburg, demonstrates that wider society is waking up to the need for urgent action. Why has it taken the occupation of Parliament Square in London or children across the world walking out of school to get this message heard?

There is another way of looking at how we have been responding to climate change and other environmental challenges. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying. Exhilarating because it offers a new perspective that could cut through inaction. Terrifying as it could, if we are not careful, lead to resignation and paralysis.

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Because one explanation for our collective failure on climate change is that such collective action is perhaps impossible. It’s not that we don’t want to change, but that we can’t. We are locked into a planetary-scale system that while built by humans, is largely beyond our control. This system is called the technosphere.

The technosphere

Coined by US geoscientist Peter Haff in 2014, the technosphere is the system that consists of individual humans, human societies – and stuff. In terms of stuff, humans have produced an extraordinary 30 trillion metric tons of things. From skyscrapers to CDs, fountains to fondue sets. A good deal of this is infrastructure, such as roads and railways, which links humanity together.

Along with the physical transport of humans and the goods they consume is the transfer of information between humans and their machines. First through the spoken word, then parchment and paper-based documents, then radio waves converted to sound and pictures, and subsequently digital information sent via the internet. These networks facilitate human communities. From roving bands of hunter-gatherers and small farming tribes, right up to the inhabitants of a megacity that teams with over 10m inhabitants, Homo sapiens is a fundamentally social species.

Just as important, but much less tangible, is society and culture. The realm of ideas and beliefs, of habits and norms. Humans do a great many different things because in important ways they see the world in different ways. These differences are often held to be the root cause of our inability to take effective global action. There is no global government, for a start.

But as different as we all are, the vast majority of humanity is now behaving in fundamentally similar ways. Yes, there are still some nomads who roam tropical rainforests, still some roving sea gypsies. But more than half of the global population now lives in urban environments and nearly all are in some way connected to industrialised activities. Most of humanity is tightly enmeshed into a globalised, industrialised complex system – that of the technosphere.

Importantly, the size, scale and power of the technosphere has dramatically grown since World War II. This tremendous increase in the number of humans, their energy and material consumption, food production and environmental impact has been dubbed the Great Acceleration.

The tyranny of growth

It seems sensible to assume that the reason products and services are made is so that they can be bought and sold and so the makers can turn a profit. So the drive for innovation – for faster, smaller phones, for example – is driven by being able to make more money by selling more phones. In line with this, the environmental writer George Monbiot argued that the root cause of climate change and other environmental calamities is capitalism and consequently any attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will ultimately fail if we allow capitalism to continue.

But zooming out from the toil of individual manufacturers, and even humanity, allows us to take a fundamentally different perspective, one that transcends critiques of capitalism and other forms of government.

Humans consume. In the first instance, we must eat and drink in order to maintain our metabolism, to stay alive. Beyond that, we need shelter and protection from physical elements.

There are also the things we need to perform our different jobs and activities and to travel to and from our jobs and activities. And beyond that is more discretional consumption: TVs, games consoles, jewellery, fashion.

The purpose of humans in this context is to consume products and services. The more we consume, the more materials will be extracted from the Earth, and the more energy resources consumed, the more factories and infrastructure built. And ultimately, the more the technosphere will grow.

The emergence and development of capitalism obviously lead to the growth of the technosphere: the application of markets and legal systems allows increased consumption and so growth. But other political systems may serve the same purpose, with varying degrees of success. Recall the industrial output and environmental pollution of the former Soviet Union. In the modern world, all that matters is growth.

The idea that growth is ultimately behind our unsustainable civilisation is not a new concept. Thomas Malthus famously argued there were limits to human population growth, while the Club of Rome’s 1972 book, Limits to Growth, presented simulation results that pointed to a collapse in global civilisation.

Today, alternative narratives to the growth agenda are, perhaps, getting political traction with an All Party Parliamentary Group convening meetings and activities that seriously consider de-growth policies. And curbing growth within environmental limits is central to the idea of a Green New Deal, which is now being discussed seriously in the US, UK, and other nations.

If growth is the problem, then we just have to work at that, right? This won’t be easy, as growth is baked into every aspect of politics and economics. But we can at least imagine what a de-growth economy would look like.

My fear, however, is that we will not be able to slow down the growth of the technosphere even if we tried – because we are not actually in control.

Limits to freedom

It may seem nonsense that humans are unable to make important changes to the system they have built. But just how free are we? Rather than being masters of our own destiny, we may be very constrained in how we can act.

Like individual blood cells coursing through capillaries, humans are part of a global-scale system that provides for all their needs and so has led them to rely on it entirely. Tokyo train commuters travelling to work.

If you jump in your car to get to a particular destination, you can’t travel in a straight line “as the crow flies”. You will use roads that in some instances are older than your car, you, or even your nation. A significant fraction of human effort and endeavour is devoted to maintaining this fabric of the technosphere: fixing roads, railways, and buildings, for example.

In that respect, any change must be incremental because it must use what current and previous generations have built. The channelling of people via road networks seems a trivial way to demonstrate that what happened far in the past can constrain the present, but humanity’s path to decarbonisation isn’t going to be direct. It has to start from here and at least in the beginning use existing routes of development.

This isn’t meant to excuse policymakers for their failure of ambition, or lack of bravery. But it indicates that there may be deeper reasons why carbon emissions are not decreasing even when there appears to be increasingly good news about alternatives to fossil fuels.

Think about it: at the global scale, we have witnessed a phenomenal rate of deployment of solar, wind, and other sources of renewable energy generation. But global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. This is because renewables promote growth – they simply represent another method of extracting energy, rather than replacing an existing one.

The relationship between the size of the global economy and carbon emissions is so robust that US physicist Tim Garrett has proposed a very simple formula that links the two with startling accuracy. Using this method, an atmospheric scientist can predict the size of the global economy for the past 60 years with tremendous precision.

But correlation does not necessarily mean causation. That there has been a tight link between economic growth and carbon emissions does not mean that has to continue indefinitely. The tantalisingly simple explanation for this link is that the technosphere can be viewed like an engine: one that works to make cars, roads, clothes, and stuff – even people – using available energy.

The technosphere still has access to abundant supplies of high energy density fossil fuels. And so the absolute decoupling of global carbon emissions from economic growth will not happen until they either run out or the technosphere eventually transitions to alternative energy generation. That may be well beyond the danger zone for humans.

A repugnant conclusion

We have just come to appreciate that our impacts on the Earth system are so large that we have possibly ushered in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The Earth’s rocks will bear witness to humans’ impacts long after we disappear. The technosphere can be seen as the engine of the Anthropocene. But that does not mean we are driving it. We may have created this system, but it is not built for our communal benefit. This runs completely counter to how we view our relationship with the Earth system.

Take the planetary boundaries concept, which has generated much interest scientifically, economically, and politically. This idea frames human development as impacting on nine planetary boundaries, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification. If we push past these boundaries, then the Earth system will change in ways that will make human civilisation very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain. The value of, say, the biosphere here is that it provides goods and services to us. This represents what we can literally get from the system.

This very human-centric approach should lead to more sustainable development. It should constrain growth. But the technological world system we have built is clever at getting around such constraints. It uses the ingenuity of humans to build new technologies – such as geoengineering – to reduce surface temperatures. That would not halt ocean acidification and so would lead to the potential collapse of ocean ecosystems. No matter. The climate constraint would have been avoided and the technosphere could then get to work overcoming any side effects of biodiversity loss. Fish stocks collapse? Shift to farmed fish or intensively grown algae.

As defined so far, there appears nothing to stop the technosphere liquidating most of the Earth’s biosphere to satisfy its growth. Just as long as goods and services are consumed, the technosphere can continue to grow.

And so those who fear the collapse of civilisation or those who have enduring faith in human innovation being able to solve all sustainability challenges may both be wrong.

After all, a much smaller and much richer population of the order of hundreds of millions could consume more than the current population of 7.6 billion or the projected population of nine billion by the middle of this century. While there would be widespread disruption, the technosphere may be able to weather climate change beyond 3°C. It does not care, cannot care, that billions of people would have died.

And at some point in the future, the technosphere could even function without humans. We worry about robots taking over human’s jobs. Perhaps we should be more concerned with them taking over our role as apex consumers.

Escape plan

The situation, then, may all seem rather hopeless. Whether or not my argument is an accurate representation of our civilisation, there is the risk it produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if we believe we can’t slow down the growth of the technosphere, then why bother?

This goes beyond the question of “what difference could I make?” to “what difference can anyone make?” While flying less, cutting down on eating meat and dairy and cycling to work are all commendable steps to take, they do not constitute living outside the technosphere.

It’s not just that we give tacit consent to the technosphere by using its roads, computers, or intensively farmed food. It’s that by being a productive member of society, by earning and spending, above all by consuming, we further the technosphere’s growth.

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Perhaps the way out from fatalism and disaster is an acceptance that humans may not actually be in control of our planet. This would be the vital first step that could lead to a broader outlook that encompasses more than humans.

For example, the mainstream economic attitude about trees, frogs, mountains, and lakes is that these things only have value if they provide something to us. This mindset sets them up as nothing more than resources to exploit and sinks for waste.

What if we thought of them as components or even our companions in the complex Earth system? Questions about sustainable development then become questions about how growth in the technosphere can be accommodated with their concerns, interests, and welfare as well as ours.

This may produce questions that seem absurd. What are the concerns or interests of a mountain? Of a flea? But if we continue to frame the situation in terms of “us against them”, of human well-being trumping everything else in the Earth system, then we may be effectively hacking away the best form of protection against a dangerously rampant technosphere.

And so the most effective guard against climate breakdown may not be technological solutions, but a more fundamental reimagining of what constitutes a good life on this particular planet. We may be critically constrained in our abilities to change and rework the technosphere, but we should be free to envisage alternative futures. So far our response to the challenge of climate change exposes a fundamental failure of our collective imagination.

To understand you are in a prison, you must first be able to see the bars. That this prison was created by humans over many generations doesn’t change the conclusion that we are currently tightly bound up within a system that could, if we do not act, lead to the impoverishment, and even death of billions of people.

Eight years ago, I woke up to the real possibility that humanity is facing disaster. I can still smell that bad coffee, I can still recall the memory of scrabbling to make sense of the words I was hearing. Embracing the reality of the technosphere doesn’t mean giving up, of meekly returning to our cells. It means grabbing a vital new piece of the map and planning our escape.

Two weeks ago, I attended the meeting of the European Society for Ecological Economics at Turku, Finland. The core topic of the conference was ‘co-creation’. Many people attending had no clear idea what that means, including myself. However, as I had been invited as a keynote speaker, in the recent months I invested some intellectual effort into developing my own approach to it. My keynote was devoted to ‘The Art of Co-Creation’. You can find my paper here, and also a science shot on Youtube.

Co-creation directly relates to the question of agency. In the narrower sense, which, in my perception, was prevalent in the Turku discussions, co-creation is about topics such as participatory modelling and democratic inclusion. That means, whereas in the standard policy process agency is often centred on certain organizations and networks of decision-makers and their advisers, a co-creative process would engage many more stakeholders and concerned parties. A typical example is the activation of grassroots level communities in biodiversity initiatives. This does not only involve decision-making as such, but also the activation of local knowledge.

My view on co-creation is much broader. For example, as ventilated on this blogsite, the question is how far technology co-creates outcomes of human action, so that agency is not only centred on humans, but networks of humans and artefacts (‘agencements’ in Actor-Network Theory). A most interesting issue is co-creation in the biosphere, because this ties up with the narrower meaning of co-creation.

There is no doubt that in ecological systems, the performance of the system is co-created by all entities that make it up. In this sense, the notion of ‘Anthropocene’ is indeed misleading, as we humans may have disproportionally strong impact on the biosphere, but that does not nullify the role of other biological entities as actors which respond to our action, and co-create the result of our actions. Now, the exciting question is, can we acknowledge the agency of other actors and include them in our own systems of deciding our actions? Can we imagine institutional designs that would allow for including other biological actors in our human body politic?

That question is strikingly akin to co-creation as participatory modelling or democratic inclusion. If the biosphere is co-created by all biological entities, how can we give them voice and recognize them as stakeholders of our own society and economy? There are two major problems that call for (co?)creative solutions.

The first is that we must establish institutional forms of representation. That might sound outlandish, since even our beloved pets cannot talk to us and vote over our decisions (although it seems that they have many communicative means to express their will and even subject our agency to their interests, see here). But in fact, it is straightforward if we create institutions in which other biological entities would be represented by humans: that is, legal persons and chartered organizations which would be based on pertinent constitutional rules and which have the legal responsibility of biosphere representation. This idea has been already explored by Bruno Latour, and I think that the only limitation is our own lack of imagination. After all, we treat physically non-existent beings as actors in our society, such as public corporations or endowments. Why not animals?

However, the second problem is how could human representatives of other biological beings communicate with them and fully understand their interests? There is small subfield in biology and behavioural ecology that tackles this issue, sometimes labelled ‘zoosemiotics’, and which goes back to Jakob von Uexkuell’s theory of ‘Umwelten’. This is a scientific way to reconstruct the worldview of other biological entities and may enable us to translate the semiotic systems of other species into our own. I think that this eventually integrates science and art, as discussed in my keynote. We must develop linguistic and other creative means to enable us imagining how other beings think and act.

To sum up, co-creation is indeed a powerful conceptual frame to elaborate new institutional forms of agency in the Earth system. In Hegelian terms, as I have argued elsewhere, this is creating a ‘second nature’. Only in such a comprehensive institutional approach, we can also regain control of the technosphere. In fact, we can even view the suggested institutional set-up as ‘social technology’ and hence a means to establish a co-creative relationship between biosphere and technosphere.

John Maynard-Smith and Eörs Szathmáry (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995; Szathmáry and Maynard Smith 1995) famously argued that evolution has undergone highly significant ‘major transitions’ in the very units of evolution and the mechanisms by which evolution proceeds. Incorporating the technosphere fully within their schema of ‘major transitions’ would involve expanding the definition of the latter away from its emphasis on the biological organism. Nevertheless, it is possible, with care, to use the analysis of earlier transitions to shed light on the technosphere.[1]

Here I want to focus on one feature shared by many major transitions: the combination of formerly distinct individuals into stable new evolutionary and ecological individuals. The clearest examples of these are the enclosure of replicating molecules within a membrane, the fusion of unrelated prokaryotes into the eukaryotic cell, and the organisation and specialisation of genetically identical cells into multi-cellular plants, fungi and animals. Can we regard the emergence of the technosphere as a major transition to a new kind of stable association, even though it is neither a functional and evolutionary ‘individual’ itself, nor composed of stable individual cyborgs, but a continuously shifting coupling of organic and inorganic matter? To help us here, we need to move to a more dynamic understanding of hierarchical structure in complex systems.

Peter Haff (2014a) argues that the entities that make up any system can be described as organised into three strata – Stratum I, Stratum II and Stratum III – each of which contains entities which are progressively larger and at higher organisational levels than the previous stratum.  In Haff’s terminology, an evolutionary individual is composed of a number of Stratum I units such as cells, but is itself a Stratum II entity that associates with other Stratum II entities (whether belonging to the same genetic lineage or not) in Stratum III structures such as societies, symbioses and ecosystems. But as Carl Simpson (2011) and others argue, hierarchies in living systems are not static but themselves evolve.  In such ‘transitions in individuality’, evolutionary fitness passes from the Stratum II entities to the Stratum III structures, which become a new kind of evolutionary individual.

Crucially, for each such transition in individuality to become permanent, mechanisms must emerge which prevent the new, higher-level individuals reverting to their constituent parts. In Haff’s language, the new individuals must find new methods of enforcing his ‘six rules’, especially the ‘rule of performance’ which ensures that each constituent unit supports the functioning of the whole. For example, in the eukaryotic cell, the energy-giving mitochondria, once free-living eukaryotes, are now completely dependent on the wider cell architecture for their reproduction.  Similarly, in multicellular animals a division of labour between germ and soma cells prevents any cell from defecting back to solitary living by ensuring that no cell possesses both the capacity for independent metabolism and that of reproduction (Michod and Roze 1997; Simpson 2012).

Against this background, the balance of mutual dependency concerning both metabolism and reproduction in the evolving association between humans and technology seems to be shifting in interesting ways.

Firstly, the individual components of the technosphere – both humans and technologies – are increasingly dependent on their membership of the technosphere.  Haff (2014a; 2014b) has drawn attention to how humans find it increasingly hard to leave the technosphere; but technologies too are becoming more tied in, both metabolically (for example in terms of their energy needs) and reproductively (in complex networks of manufacturing and innovation).  In this sense, the evolution of the technosphere seems to follow the pattern of earlier macroevolutionary transitions on the Earth.

Secondly, however, there is also a shifting distribution of powers between the human and technical components of the technosphere, and here the pattern is rather different.  If indeed technologies are moving towards ‘general intelligence’ and self-replication, then it rather appears that, unlike for example the prokaryotes which became the mitochondria within the eukaryotic cell, technologies are being granted the powers of reproduction and independent teleonomic purpose rather than having them taken away.  Placed in the light of evolutionary biology, contemporary concerns about the technological singularity and impending human obsolescence (Bostrom 2013; Shanahan 2015) start to feel like the latest twist in a story that is almost as old as the Earth itself.

Notes

[1] For more on this argument, see (Szerszynski 2016).

References

Bostrom, Nick (2013) Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haff, Peter K. (2014a) ‘Humans and technology in the Anthropocene: six rules,’ The Anthropocene Review, 1(2), pp. 126-36.

Haff, Peter K. (2014b) ‘Technology as a geological phenomenon: implications for human well-being,’ Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 395(1), pp. 301-9.

Maynard Smith, John and Eörs Szathmáry (1995) The Major Transitions in Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Michod, Richard E. and Denis Roze (1997) ‘Transitions in individuality,’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 264(1383), pp. 853-7.

Shanahan, Murray (2015) The Technological Singularity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Simpson, Carl (2011) ‘How many levels are there? How insights from evolutionary transitions in individuality help measure the hierarchical complexity of life,’ in The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited, ed. Brett Calcott and Kim Sterelny, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 200-25.

Simpson, Carl (2012) ‘The evolutionary history of division of labour,’ Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 279(1726), pp. 116-21.

Szathmáry, Eörs and John Maynard Smith (1995) ‘The major evolutionary transitions,’ Nature, 374(6519), pp. 227-32.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2016) ‘Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light,’ The Anthropocene Review, 4(2), pp. 92-102.

 

What does it mean to be an agent in the ‘critical zone’, the near-surface environment of the Earth where most living things reside and have evolved?  This is a complex, dense, folded world, a commons where the powers of each entity – abiotic, living or technological – are dependent on those around it. The character of the critical zone does not just distribute agency but alters its very condition of possibility.  I want to unpack this a little by reference to two Latin verbs, agere and gerere, the influence on European thought of which can be traced in our thinking about agency.

Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition points out how in ancient Greek and Latin there are two words with which to designate the verb ‘to act’.  In Latin there is agere,[i] ‘to set into motion’ (from which we get the words ‘agent’, ‘act’ and ‘action’) but also gerere , ‘to bear’ or ‘to sustain’ (Arendt 1958: 189).[ii]  Here, she says, we can see a crucial split occurring in European thought about agency and action, a split as consequential as that between nature and culture that Latour (1993) describes as the modern constitution. This is the division between a beginning made by a single person, and the achievement in which many join by ‘bearing’ and ‘finishing’ the enterprise, by seeing it through; between the one who leads and the others that follow.  Because of this diremption of spirit, agere came to mean ‘to lead’, giving us the Western masculinist political imaginary of a ruler who rules alone, who rules because he is alone, who rules through his own isolation and is isolated because he rules.  The ruler, Arendt says interestingly, is ‘isolated against others by his force’ (Arendt 1958: 189).

In the same book Arendt also gave us the wonderful idea of ‘acting into nature’ – that with modern technology our struggle with nature comes to take on the unpredictability and fragility exhibited by action and speech in the human sphere, so prone to misinterpretation and ironic consequences (Arendt 1958: 231).  And this invites us to apply her genealogy of political rule to the human relation with nature as a whole.  Thinking of ‘making’ in a hylomorphic way – as simply imposing an imagined and desired form on passive matter (Galarraga and Szerszynski 2012) – is to imagine the agent as isolated by their striving: to imagine that humans can ‘act’, and non-humans will simply ‘bear’ or ‘sustain’ the effects of their action.

Yet this isolation is always an illusion, as it was in the case of Prince Kutuzov in War and Peace (Tolstoy 1889).  As Arendt puts it, ‘the actor always moves among and in relation to other acting beings … he is never merely a ‘doer’ but always and at the same time a sufferer’ (Arendt 1958: 190).

Here one thinks of Michel Serres’ reflection in The Natural Contract (1995) on Goya’s Fighters with Clubs – that in the painting, nature is not just a backdrop for the human agon but an actor, one that is threatening to envelop the human pair. The club fighters in Goya’s painting are both actors and bearers – they suffer in the agon of battle, they are in agony, but are also somehow ‘carrying out’ something where their wills have been subsumed within a wider story of humans and nature.  Perhaps we should call the painting Clavigers, so that we can use this word for ‘club-bearers’ to smuggle in the verb gerere.[iii]

Amongst the multiple agencies of the critical zone, there is no simple division between initiator and bearer, between leader and follower, active and passive.  We need to find new ways of talking about action in the grammatical ‘middle voice’, that don’t make a simplistic division between things that simply act and things that simply bear or carry through the results of those actions (Szerszynski 2019).

References

Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Galarraga, Maialen and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2012) ‘Making climates: solar radiation management and the ethics of fabrication,’ in Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management, ed. Christopher Preston, Lexington, MA: Lexington, pp. 211-25.

Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Serres, Michel (1995) The Natural Contract, tr. Elizabeth MacArthur and William  Paulson, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2019) ‘Drift as a planetary phenomenon,’ Performance Research, 23(7), pp. 136-44.

Tolstoy, Leo (1889) War and Peace, tr. Nathan Haskell Dole, New York: T.Y. Crowell & Co.

Notes

[i] Gk agein, from the PIE root ag- – to drive, to move or to draw out.

[ii] Gerere gives us words such as gestate (to carry), suggest (to carry or bring up) and jest or gest (to perform).

[iii] Claviger, from clava ‘club, knotty branch’ + stem of gerere ‘to bear’.

In current debates about the technosphere, human agency is often taken as a given: Humans are conceived as creators of the technosphere. Anthropocentrism seems also implicit in the term ‘anthropocene’, as many critics point out. One reason for this human-centred approach is that the evolutionary framework for analysing the technosphere is not well developed. Some authors directly aim at tying the physics of the technosphere with human social systems, thus blanking out what I regard as a crucial intermediary level of theorizing, evolutionary theory. We can switch to this view if we just reflect upon the relationship between the biosphere and the technosphere: Do they follow the same evolutionary principles? How exactly did the technosphere evolve from the biosphere? How does the technosphere impact on the evolution of the biosphere? And so on.

We do not need to invent the wheel anew: Clearly, the rich literature on gene-culture evolution that was launched in the early days of sociobiology (Lumsden and Wilson, Boyd and Richerson, Dawkins and others) is directly relevant because ‘culture’ is approached as a material phenomenon: For example, Dawkin’s ‘memes’ are real entities with causal impact on behaviour, even though they are referred to as ‘mental’. But they are material in the sense of being cultural artefacts, such as certain symbols that are embodied in soundwaves or artwork. Today, we have a rich pool of hypotheses and theories about the relationship between biological and cultural evolution on which an evolutionary approach to the technosphere can build, and which has moved beyond these early attempts, overcoming many of their flaws. This literature has been converging on a universal theory of evolution which discards the dualistic thinking of early co-evolutionary theory. In my view, the core ideas driving this convergence are:

Conceiving ‘evolution’ as a statistical process that is embodied in many and diverse domains and is most generally described by Price’s theory of selection and the Price’s equation, which allows to derive other fundamental principles of evolutionary theory, such as Fisher’s equation. This view has been adopted in some contributions to Evolutionary Economics, which centres analytically on innovation and technological change.

Overcoming the gene-centred view of the ‘Neodarwinian synthesis’ and thinking in terms of multiple forms of heredity of biologically relevant, i.e. adaptive information, such as synthesized in contributions such as Jablonka and Lamb or Mesoudhi. This allows for establishing many links between genetic and cultural evolution, for example, improving our understanding of the biological and cultural forces that drive the evolution of human preferences.

Recognizing the role of the environment as a medium of information transmission, beyond a mere selective force, and adopting a systemic view on evolution that allows for a better understanding of its creative forces, as in evolutionary transitions. Exemplary contributions are niche construction theory or the developmental systems literature. In Ecological Economics, this focuses our view on phenomena like the relationship between human hyper-sociality and the technosphere.

If we put all these ideas together, we can move beyond the naïve idea that humans are creators of the technosphere: Humans are an important factor, but the driver and medium of the technosphere are more general evolutionary processes. As my examples already revealed, I think that the economy is a central domain where such evolutionary processes unfold. In other words, a general evolutionary theory of the technosphere would build on biological evolutionary theory, with the intermediate, though essential layer of the human economy. That would activate the rich literature in Evolutionary Economics for the study of the technosphere.

In addition, in current research on the technosphere, there is a tendency of reducing it to a narrow meaning of ‘materiality’, i.e. just conceiving it as the sum of material artefacts (such as when measuring the ‘mass’ of the technosphere). This blanks out the very advanced state of research on technology which agrees on approaching technology as a complex systemic phenomenon that involves artefacts and human behaviour as governed by rules and institutions. In this sense, technology cannot be separated from humans, but technology is a many-level system involving both, macro and micro phenomena. For example, the shape that the internet technology assumes cannot be separated from the dynamics of market processes that govern it, in turn embedded in a complex set of institutional and organizational phenomena, and the emergence of individual user patterns on a systemic level. As far as human agency is concerned, nobody controls and designs this technological evolution. What is true for the market, should also hold for the technosphere.

How can we build a universal evolutionary theory of the technosphere? In my view, there are several starting points. The first is to approach the technosphere as a phenomenon of niche construction enabled by culture as a biological phenomenon. My hunch is that the domestication of fire is the original event of this evolutionary transition. Fire is one of the simplest, yet essential technologies that drove many evolutionary adaptations of the evolving human species, including somatic changes such as the size and functioning of the digestive system via the diffusion of cooking as a cultural practice. The niche construction view is liberating in many ways, such as including the recognition that the technosphere already includes large parts of the biosphere, i.e. via the dominance of domesticated animals and plants in the biomass of the Earth system. The human niche includes symbiotic relationships in many forms, thus merging biosphere and technosphere.

Another important question is the role of the technosphere in inheriting adaptive information. One consequence of the increasing recognition of non-genetic channels of evolution in biology is that we realize that evolution evolves, that is, evolution includes the emergence of new evolutionary mechanisms. In which sense is the technosphere a ‘new stage’ in the evolution of evolution? I can only hint at some possibilities. One is that we need to realize that the technosphere grounds in the evolution of culture: Hence, perhaps what counts is not the direct emergence of technosphere from biosphere, but more specifically, the emergence of the technosphere from cultural evolution. For example, the technosphere may overcome certain limitations on cultural information transmission via embodying culture in artefacts. In that view, technology may be interpreted as an extended memory system for enacting culture.

Perhaps to open our mind for this way of thinking about the technosphere, we need to delink it from debates about the Anthropocene and the ‘Great Acceleration’, which narrows our mind on most recent forms of technology. If we were to approach fire as the common ancestor of human technology, the conceptual link between technosphere and Anthropocene would suggest that the Anthropocene would have begun at a time when homo sapiens sapiens was not yet on Earth, which would certainly be nonsense. But that would suggest an outrageous thought: Did the technosphere emerge earlier than us, and are we modern humans a product of the co-evolution of biosphere and technosphere?

In Andrew Jarvis’ previous post I read that on the one hand we might just observe evolutions that are “most likely”, and on the other hand that the economy is a “low-probability” structure. How can a low-probability structure be most likely? This apparent contradiction applies for all living systems. The Maximum Entropy approach to evolution solves this problem, because it distinguishes neatly between a system and its environment, and the meta-system of both: A system that assumes states of higher complexity and order (hence, ‘low probability’) exports entropy to the environment so that the entropy of the meta-system increases. The latter observation means, that the state of the meta-system is the most likely one. Thus, the economy is an ‘unlikely’ structure, but it exports disorder to the global environment, and therefore the combined state is ‘most likely’.

Of course, this argument is very coarse and over-simplified. But I believe that it deserves to be explored when thinking about agency in the technosphere. In order to start the discussion, let me focus on one specific aspect. The Maximum Entropy approach comes in two variants, as it has been employed in the Earth system sciences and the life sciences. The first variant is strictly statistical and is a way to explain and analyse complex systems (following Jaynes’ theory of probability). It is also well known to econometricians. Maximum Entropy reasoning explains and predicts systems behaviour by means of the constraints that govern its evolution. Regarding the behaviour of the systems constituents, i.e. the ‘agents’, and even systems architecture, you do not need to introduce any more detailed information, because you just assume that the system will move to the most likely state, given the constraints. The second version of the Maximum Entropy approach now asks the question, does the system that behaves in this way also physically maximize entropy production? You can follow the first version without accepting the second. But the fact is that the Maximum Entropy approach is a powerful theory to explain the emergence of order as expression of the Second Law of thermodynamics in the evolution of living systems.

In this post, I only want to reflect on the first version, against the backdrop of our topic ‘agency in the technosphere’. If you apply this version on the economy, it would just mean that you analyse the constraints under which the economy operates on the aggregate level (not the individual level) and then assume that no matter what agents think and do individually, on the aggregate they will move to a state which is the most likely one. In other words, individual agency would not matter at all for economic explanations! In fact, this idea is not unfamiliar to macroeconomists, especially in the Keynesian tradition. Keynes’s famous paradox of savings tells us a similar story: Individual agents might wish to save, but they end up with less savings than intended, because the evolution of the system is governed by fundamental accounting interdependencies in a monetary economy (savings, investment and income). Given the constraints, this is the most likely outcome.

Interestingly, for decades macroeconomists have tried to combine this insight with the so-called ‘micro-foundations’ program. A Nobel award was given to Robert Lucas for introducing the notion of rational expectations and the analytical construct of the representative agent. The aggregate movements of the macro-economy are explained by introducing a ‘rational agent’ who reflects a kind of statistical average of the population. That saves the deep conviction upheld by many economists that only individual agency matters in explanations (‘methodological individualism’). But at what a price! Today, many economists are frustrated with the state of macroeconomics. But the trouble is, as Keynes wanted to show, that any explanation that starts out from ‘real’ individual agents would probably always result in the conclusion that market failure will be endemic because of information externalities, collective action problems, miscommunication, you name it. The ghost of the ‘representative agent’ was created to rescue normative beliefs about the optimality of markets.

Maximum Entropy thinking would just neutralize all these messy methodological and normative issues in treating all individual-level phenomena as random events and exclusively focusing on the constraints. What are the implications for our understanding of the technosphere?

Let me just give an example: There is the Whiggish account of the ‘rise of Europe’ and of industrialization as reflecting unique Western values, enlightenment intellectual achievements and entrepreneurial spirit, for example, in comparisons with Imperial China. But you can also explain the ‘Great Divergence’ just as reflecting the constraints that governed the evolution of the Chinese and the European economy in between the 17^th and the 20^th century, especially the energy system, land resources and population. From that point of view, European industrialization was indeed the ‘most likely’ trajectory (and certainly not a ‘miracle’), once certain technological innovations were randomly generated that released ‘hang ups’ (Peter Haff’s term), i.e. constraints that governed the activation of fossil fuels for economic uses. China’s ‘failure’ was not due to deficient values, beliefs and institutions, but was a ‘most likely outcome’. No matter what individuals might have pursued and wished for, the aggregate trajectory was shaped by the constraints.

Therefore, the question is, what is the nature of the constraints that govern the evolution of the technosphere and the economy today? Perhaps this is more important to know than pondering what human agents can achieve, both individually and collectively. They throw the dices, and the most likely result will obtain.