The technosphere, our agency, our planet
What can we do, what should we do?
Max Weber famously associated capitalism with rationalization, an ‘iron cage.’ Indeed, we can speak of adapting human thinking, practices, and worldviews to the technosphere as the environment in which most humans today live. This translates into secularism, means-ends instrumentalism, rational technocracy, and many other social forms of Western modernity. In economics, one expression treats the …
Continue reading "Ritual: Demarcating humanity from the technosphere"
Recently, I assumed the new task of editor-in-chief of the journal ‘Cultural Science. A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than-human culture’. In the Anthropocene, cultural science pursues the study of culture by liberating culture from anthropocentrism: We can no longer treat culture as a, or even ‘the’ human domain exclusively, both in the sense …
Continue reading "Cultural science: The study of more-than-human culture"
The Earth sciences have suggested the notion of ‘hybrid planet’ Earth. In principle, this idea relates to Lovelock’s notion of Gaia in the sense that thermodynamic disequilibrium is conceived as an indicator of emergent and evolving planetary activity, in the case of Gaia the biosphere. Life transforms solar energy into processes that change the Earth’s …
The German philosopher Tilo Wesche has published a book ‘Rights of Nature’ that submits an inspiring, important and comprehensive argument why ‘nature’ owns property that must be recognized in our legal systems and that would transform our societies to become ecologically sustainable, in an institutional regime of cohabitation between humans and ‘nature’ on the basis …
Continue reading "On Tilo Wesche’s ‘Die Rechte der Natur’ (‘Rights of Nature’)"
Recently I discovered landscape architecture and design as a fertile ground for thinking about the technosphere, especially in the context of the concept of 'landscape urbanism', a movement theorized by Charles Waldheim. This is a fascinating field because different from what most technosphere scholars do, the protagonists in this discipline mostly spend their time with …
Continue reading "The Landscape as mediator between Technosphere and Biosphere"
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The technosphere, our agency, our planet 
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