During inspiring discussions with Japanese economists, we came up with the idea of ‘commonism’: That would be defined as a market economy that is based on the commons as fundamental form of appropriation, and not private property. However, later I noticed that the term is already being used in a different way, namely referring to …
Designing the Technosphere for Life
Peregrine falcons are back in New York. They were inhabitants of Big Apple for many decades until DDT closed their fate. After DDT was prohibited, there were intensive efforts at restoring natural populations, and so citizens can again enjoy living together with the animals in what was originally designed as a purely human habitat, part …
Artificial Intelligence or Human Wisdom?
The tsunami of AI bots has been shaking our views about the future of humanity, both on a grand scale and in everyday life. This is my 50th post on this blog, so I deem this an appropriate topic. Will the technosphere ultimately take the seat of humanity in shaping the evolution of life on …
Reviving Vita Activa in the Technosphere
In his earlier post, Bronislaw Szerszysnky draws on Hannah Arendt’s influential work The Human Condition. I want to pick up this thread in reflecting on the relevance of her tripartite conception of Vita Activa, labour, work and action for understanding the relationship between humans and the technosphere. This distinction is perhaps confusing for the contemporary …
Infrastructure and co-evolutionary technology: Overcoming anthropocentrism in human niche construction
Almost half a century ago, niche construction theory was proposed as a major alternative or at least modification of the standard Neodarwinian model. This for two reasons. First, living beings change their environment in many ways, both as a side effect or with purposeful behaviour, such as nest or burrow construction. This changes the forces …
In praise of ‘kaputt’ technology
The German philosopher Oliver Schlaudt concludes his book on the ‘Technozän’ (‘technocene’; he told me, originally the idea was to title it ‘The technosphere’) with fascinating thoughts about debris and broken technological artefacts, inspired by a contribution of the philosopher Sohn-Rethel published in 1926 who praised ‘kaputt’ (broken, kaput) things. The argument is intriguing and …
Breaking the iron triangle: Technosphere, finance, land
Money is part and parcel of the technosphere. This includes the financial sector. Financial technology is all technical devices that manage financial objects aka assets. In old times, these were metal coins, gold and other valuables, and the means to store and transport them. Today, financial technology is mostly digital. Following social sciences approaches to …
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De-mystifying money: money as technology
In a recent paper, Inigo Wilkins and Bogdan Dragos develop the theory of money as a ‘machine’, building on earlier ideas of Mirowski and Cartelier. This theory perfectly dovetails with the arguments presented on money and the technosphere in this blog and in my related writings on the technosphere. If economists discuss technology, they rarely …
Who can stop the ‘blue acceleration’? The utopia of ‘ocean commons’
Recently I have been engaging in a collaboration with scholars in the field of geoethics and ocean sciences. We discuss the question whether and how the ocean can become an inspiration for developing entirely new ways of thinking about the future design of human societies and economies in the Anthropocene. One of them, Martin Bohle, …
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Ecology and More-than-human Property
This post was first published on the blog of the SFB Cooperative Research Center 'Structural Change of Property'. In responding to the challenge of climate change, the political focus is on decarbonizing the economy. This is certainly a priority, however it overlooks the issue that the catastrophic decline of biodiversity in recent decades was not …
The technosphere, our agency, our planet 
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