Welcome to the Cybercene (original) (raw)
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Planet Earth, with its plethora of natural (im)balances, has a venerable age of 4.54 billion years; the (industrial) imprint placed by the human species on it, considered to be not negligible, counts of just little over two centuries; while the digital/IT&C/virtual existence of man, in what we call cyberspace, is reduced to just a few decades. An amorphous world, hastily assimilated to the Internet, the cyberspace is the sum or, better said, the synergy created by links between computers (and other compatible devices), servers, routers and various items of global IT and telecommunications infrastructures. A sort of fiefdom for tech computing power, but also a field of geo-political-economic power calculus, the cyberspace raises another dilemma: is it the salutary alternative to the bodice of a physical environment subject to depletion/plunder and degradation/pollution of its scarce resources? This article aims to capture, in an original way, how the translation of a great part of the world and social life into cyberspace, especially in the wake of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, relieves the natural environment/climate of Anthropocene pressures (e.g., via optimizations of production processes, favoured by artificial intelligence etc.), or, on the contrary, a less noticeable aspect, how it worsens certain components of it (e.g., via the amplified need for energy or for rare minerals, critical to new technologies etc.). Moreover, the above-mentioned ecological alleviations (labelled as of software nature) and (hardware) aggravations brought by digitalization are duly emphasized and evaluated in the light of the (un)intended consequences occurring at the highly sensitive intersection between markets (private practices) and states (public policies), pointing to the case of the European Union.
On the age of computation in the epoch of humankind
2018
In a white paper, Christoph Rosol, Benjamin Steininger, Jürgen Renn and Robert Schlögl outline the significance of digitalization in the Anthropocene and outline the background and goals of the new research field of geoanthropology. The researchers aim to analyse global change in a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach of natural sciences, humanities and technology, developing perspectives for the conservation of the Earth's habitat.
Welcome to The Anthropocene: Humanity's Epoch
Welcome to The Anthropocene: Humanity's Epoch, 2022
We are witnessing a transition in epochs: from the Anthropocene, in which human activities shaped our environment, to what I call the "Automacene" -the epoch that machines will direct what we do and how we do it. My research findings indicates that there's 60 percent chance the revolution will be capable of completing "all human tasks" by 2040, allowing humans to move to a trans-humanist society. Further, the research reflects what it means to be human in the age of technology and artificial intelligence "Cyborgs, Robots, Machines...etc.". By researching how does the artificial intelligence and how does human intelligence can affect the environment in reworking and adapting it to their own needs, we can conclude that the Anthropocene is reshaping our planet in profound ways. Scientific research reflects that the changes that have occurred in the last 50 to 200 years have led scientists to investigate about the anthropogenic and the transhumanist impacts on the Earth
FROM THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER TO THE ANTHROPOCENE: A CONVERSATION WITH FRED TURNER
This conversation tracks and critiques the human journey from the electronic frontier to the Anthropocene through the lens of the history of digital media. The first part of the conversation reveals complex trajectories between countercultures of the 1960s and their predecessors in the 1950s and 1940s. It links information technologies with historical struggles against totalitarianism, and inquires their contemporary potentials for creating a more tolerant society. The second part of the conversation analyses the main differences between the New Communalists and the New Left of the " Psychedelic Sixties. " Using the example of the Burning Man festival, it outlines trajectories of these movements into present and future of our consumerist society. The conversation explores the complex relationships between counterculture, cyberculture, and capitalism, and asks whether the age of information needs its own religion. Looking at mechanisms in which traditional inequalities have been reproduced in the communes of the 1960s, it touches upon contemporary Silicon Valley's " soft discrimination. " The third part of the conversation explores contemporary transformations of various occupations. Looking at journalism, it shows that consequences of its transformation from watchdog of democracy into a tool of global neoliberalism are yet unclear, and seeks one possible solution in " computational journalism. " It also explores how the arts have often legitimated ideologies peddled by information technologies. Looking at human learning, it inquires the role of teachers in the contemporary society, and links it to the role of public intellectuals as writers of scholarly texts and builders of human networks. The last part of the conversation explores the main issues with cyber-knowledge. It examines traditional divisions between disciplines, and links them to cybernetics. It introduces the " biological metaphor " for describing the Internet and compares it to the traditional " computational metaphor. " It discusses the main pros and cons of Donna Haraway's cyborg metaphor, and inquires whether the Internet needs to be
Although both ignorance and denialism still persist in some quarters, it can hardly bedoubted anymore for anyone with the slightest awareness of the Zeitgeist, that humanity is about to enter a phase in its history which will be characterized by massive changes in the earth's biosphere, i.e., in the global ecological system that has up until now silently and robustly supported its cultural-historical projects ( Greer 2008, Martenson 2011, Crutzen & Schwägerl 2011, Barnosky et al 2012). Humanity's largely destructive influence on its unique planetary life support system has gained such a momentum lately that geologists and Earth System scientists have suggested for some time now that we have entered a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, in which the human has become the most influential geological (f)actor, trumping the natural ones in every respect (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000, Steffen et al. 2011, Latour 2014, Schwägerl 2014, Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016). The prime significance of the anthropocene, which presents us with a biosphere that is fundamentally different from that of its microbial and metazoan stages due to the technosphere produced by human techno-cultural evolution (Williams et al. 2015), is that it sets a different trajectory for the planet or what is called the Earth system nowadays (Waters et al. 2014, Hamilton 2015, Davies 2016). Whilst the anthropocene attests to the enormous if not uncanny power of a techno-scientifically potentialized humanity (a power Dominique Janicaud has called a ‘hyperpower’) to radically disrupt the earthly ecosystem upon which it fundamentally depends for its very survival, it simultaneously, and even more crucially, brings to light the ultimate impotence of that power (Janicaud 1994). However that may be, what is clear, as the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler points out, is that the anthropocene reveals the toxic and entropic character of the process of capitalist industrialization and that the big challenge it imposes on us is how to exit from it and invent a negentropic, curative and attentive technological modus vivendi (Stiegler 2014, 2016), if possible (Blok 2015). And since we are massively unprepared for this unprecedented challenge, we might do well to start ‘thinking the unthinkable’, as the American philosopher of technology Langdon Winner has stated using a famous phrase by cold war nuclear conflict theorist/futurist Herman Kahn (Winner 2013). In this track, we aim to explore the question how philosophy of technology should respond to this challenge, i.e., to this new and unprecedented ‘human condition’ that is bound to seriously disrupt the agendas of philosophical and social inquiry in the decades to come and that we would like to characterize as the anthropocenic condition. In particular, we aim to explore what it would mean for philosophy of technology to engage with the earth system and its principles of composition, to consider different technical modalities of fostering and maintaining them, and to adopt an explicitly planetary orientation (Lemmens & Hui 2016, Lemmens 2017). Possible questions and themes to be explored include: • What exactly does the anthropocene – sometimes also referred to as the technocene – as a new and unprecedented planetary condition mean for the philosophy of technology? What are its implications for this discipline? Should it be the cause for a renewed reflection on its aims, goals, focus, methodologies, paradigms, presuppositions, organizational structure, educational guidelines, ‘engagement’, etc.? • What would a planetary orientation, assuming humanity as a ‘geological agency’ (Chakrabarty 2009), imply for philosophy of technology? What should ‘taking care of the earth’ (Steffen et al. 2011) or a ‘reconnection with the biosphere’ (Folke 2011) mean technologically? How should we attune our technologies, for instance the global digital network technologies, the NBIC technologies or the technosphere and noorspehere more generally, to this new situation? What would it mean technologically to heed the ‘planetary boundaries’ crucial for the ‘operating space of humanity’ (Rockström 2015). • What kind of new technologies and social institutions should be invented to deal with the impending energy crisis and climate catastrophes and what kind of changes in our technological thinking are needed for this new age of the anthropocene? • What kinds of technopolitics and ecopolitics are needed and what can we already see emerging on the horizon? How should we include nascent technopolitical movements such as open source, peer-to-peer and commons into an ecological perspective on techno-evolution? • What should we think of proposed solutions like geo-engineering, ecotechnics and atmo-design, and what of new technological paradigms like homeotechnology, biomimicry (Blok & Gremmen 2015) and the biobased economy (Zwier et al 2015)?
The Twilight of the Anthropocene ((Welcome to the Electrocene)).
Culture Machine 16 (2015): Drone Culture, eds. Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood, 2015
The converted transcription of a keynote-address presented at the ‘Tuning Speculations: Imaginary Networked Futures’ Conference on the seventh of November 2014 (a talk in which we described the networked future—‘already here, albeit unevenly distributed’—of an ‘Algorithmic Agartha’, taking the name ‘Agartha’ from the underground utopia envisioned in the works of Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. The networked system of global governance—or the ‘platform’, if you will—of his imagined Agartha was ‘synarchic’: a three-tiered/three-dimensional synthetic system of reticular regulation that triangulated political, ideological and financial principles, plans and programs, conjoining them in a remarkably cybernetic fashion, with a nod here, obliquely, to André-Marie Ampère. What we did was take Saint-Yves’s synarchic vision and project it onto the unfolding landscape of our present situation, envisioning in so doing an Agartha of the digital era: Synarchy-à-la-Saint-Yves in the globe-girdling epoch of ‘electro-governance’ [[the domain and dominion of the digital which we dubbed ‘the electrocene’]]. It turns out, in turn, that in addition we enacted and articulated an aspect of Rob and Dean’s Culture_Machine CFP, since that which was below [[Saint-Yves’s envisioned Agartha]] was shown in our lecture to be that which is above [[interlinked systems of surveillance based on Drone’s-Eye-View/Eye-in-the-Sky/All-Seeing-Eye Saurontology]], reflecting the title of the call-for-papers: ‘As Above, So Below: Drone Culture’).
The Pandemic Within, 2021
According to many climate and environmental scientists, we are entering a phase in human history which will be characterized by huge changes in the earth's atmosphere and biosphere-global warming of course being the most pressing issue. Humanity's largely destructive influence on its unique planetary life support system has gained such a momentum lately that earth system scientists declare we have entered a new geological era, the so-called Anthropocene, in which the human (anthropos) has become the most influential geological (f)actor, trumping the natural ones in every respect. While the Anthropocene attests to the enormous power of a techno-scientifically empowered humanity to radically disrupt the earthly ecosystem upon which it fundamentally depends for its very survival, it simultaneously reveals that utter dependence, and summons us to radically rethink our residence upon the planet. At this conference we reflect upon, inventory and systematize the challenges posed to us by these developments from the standpoint of SPM's core foci, with a special emphasis on issues of ontology, epistemology, practice and wider societal consequences concerning power and politics.