The problem of agency in the technosphere has much in common with Marx’s treatment of agency in capitalism. In capitalism agency is endogenous to the system: Capitalists are not the bad guys who expropriate workers with sinister intentions, but the forces of ‘capital’ subject them to this type of behavioural governance. The system drives their …
In a Climate-neutral Solar Economy, Would the Technosphere Outcompete the Biosphere? A Provocation.
In his recent post, Axel Kleidon offered a grand view on the thermodynamics of the Earth system that includes the human domain. His fundamental point is that the human economy follows the same systemic dynamics as the Earth system, i.e. Lotka’s Maximum Power principle. That means, it manifests an inherent physical trend towards maximizing energy …
A Unified Evolutionary Approach to the Biosphere and the Technosphere?
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 …
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Solving the Puzzle of Emergent Order: The Case for Maximum Entropy Thinking
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 …
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The Challenge: Agency in the Technosphere
For some scholars, the technosphere should be approached as a physical phenomenon in the first place. For example, geologists would measure it in terms of artefacts that accumulate in layers of sediments, such as plastics, or Earth system scientists would approach it as the artefacts that make up the infrastructure of human societies, buildings, roads, …
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Our goals
This blog was inspired by two workshops held in 2018 at Lancaster University and at Erfurt (Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies) devoted to agency and technosphere. The blog is managed by Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Max Weber Centre, who is also a lead contributor, and is supported by a team of regular contributors: …
The technosphere, our agency, our planet 