Sputnik of our Time
For Hannah Arendt, the launching of Sputnik represented a “rebellion against human existence.” With what we now know as the Great Acceleration rumbling forward, it signaled that war on all fronts—far beyond even the scale of either World War—would be waged through a glorious techno-science. Now, with the disarmingly soft power of satellites in our palms, science, militarism, industry, high technology, nature, governance, mass media, and even individual subjectivities overlap one another incessantly, and unclaimed territories or even neutral parties are not that easily identified.
The concept of the technosphere is a Sputnik for our time. It suggests that technology should no longer be seen as an instrument or expression of some specific agency, even one as general as “techno-science,” but instead as a fundamental component—creator, even—of the world today. The technosphere concept warns of humankind’s embeddedness within and dependence on networks of technological systems, which it does not switch off, that it dare not switch off, and perhaps does not want to switch off.
Nearly three decades ago, when the Cold War and Great Acceleration were like twins, separated at birth yet somehow on parallel journeys, Hans Jonas could glimpse a new environment, “the total artifact,” an early warning of the Anthropocene. “The difference between the artificial and the natural has vanished, the natural is swallowed up in the sphere of the artificial, and at the same time the total artifact […] generates a ‘nature’ of its own, that is, a necessity with which human freedom has to cope in an entirely new sense.”1
For the last fifty years, then, both physicists and philosophers warn of humankind’s possible subservience to systems of its own making, systems that would function through the control or capture of nature. In the Anthropocene, we can indeed see that the technological systems comprising the technosphere are environmental at their core; seen as a whole they structure the metabolic, or material-energetic, regimes of our time. The global system is realized at last. It makes a hostile place for modern subjects, who are not accustomed to being metabolized en masse, to say little of modern social life and politics! Even a few chosen experts of the Earth system will be lucky to hold on as “managers” of this anti-Arcadia. Has humankind indeed entered such a deathly paradise?
Perhaps, in another view, it is the spectral character of such grand systems—their simultaneous omnipresence and opacity—that lends them so much rhetorical potency. The technosphere concept is surprisingly seductive; it leads the imagination on! And while it does point to something significant in the world, it provides precious little actionable information, any real knowledge of how and why such a formidable system emerged or is maintained, or how, in any except the most global terms, one might understand the social or material regime to which it corresponds. We don’t see its twins on parallel journeys. We can hardly distinguish those it privileges from those whom it disempowers, how it touches down in the everyday lives of people living in different places, and what, finally, might be done about it.
The “Co-evolutionary Perspectives” seminar was intended to bring the technosphere concept back down to Earth. The intention was to develop a deep historical and evolutionary perspective from which to examine the kinds of biological, cultural, technological, and institutional interactions that allow us today to confront it as an intellectual object, to consider its material thicknesses and thinnesses at different times and places, and so also to explore its various potentialities. The seminar was based around a set of preparatory readings, a number of prepared and impromptu presentations, and, most centrally for the collective learning experience, expansive and provocative discussion.
Two key texts, both co-authored by seminar conveners Jurgen Renn and Manfred Laubichler, set the frame. At their core (and as discussed in several contributions below), these papers provide a formidable conceptual framework, as they offer a structural and yet non-deterministic description of both biological and social (including technological) change through time. Combining theoretical developments in evolutionary theory, complex systems analysis, and history, extended evolution (or “co-evolution”) pays close attention to the dynamic—and even co-constitutive—interactions of and between agents in specific contexts that in turn enable or constrain innovations affecting long-term change or stability in both the individual and the environment. In a co-evolutionary perspective, in short, nothing is fixed or born whole, and even such a grand specter as “the technosphere” can be re-examined as a historical and emergent phenomenon.
Throughout the two and a half days, there was therefore an admirable intellectual effort not to “overinflate” the technosphere (so no loose Sputnik and missing twin metaphors!), and not to treat it as a unitary phenomenon, or even, sometimes, as a thing in itself. And this was not so easy. The effort was to examine the concept from within and without; to understand its arrival as an intellectual object as deeply as its workings as a socio-technical structure and mode of social interaction; and to revisit historical understandings of technology in human history, so that we could shine some new light on the qualities and intersections of technology, science, society, and the environment today.
Such a discussion must range widely and in this sense the value of the seminar cannot be distinguished from its participants, who included artists, activists, digital media savants, poets, critics, curators, and (sometimes the same individuals), of course, academics: archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, specialists in complex systems, governance, Eastern and Western philosophy, and a range of disciplines besides. At its best, there was a notable sense of immediacy to the discussion (and the Campus as a whole), of forthright engagement with the complexity of the technosphere and inspiration at the opportunity to collectively interrogate this ambitious and fraught concept.
The contributions presented below offer both early (pre-seminar) reflections on key seminar concepts as well as extensions of several key threads of the actual seminar discussion. As a whole, our seminar engagements are not likely to be summarized or synthesized from any single perspective, so they are presented below in two major categories according to the stage at which they were developed. The first set of contributions consists of fragments lifted from the pre-seminar assignments, as they offer a range of ideas that circled above key concepts, ready to be taken up in different ways.
The second set of contributions was made in the month following the Berlin Campus, and these tend to extend the seminar discussion in ways that resonate with individual interests and practices. There is a co-evolutionary dimension to each, but to different degrees one senses that they also reflect the learning process of the entire week-long Anthropocene Campus experience, in which ideas were explored over days which ran together from morning to night, at meals, during walks and field trips, in cafés and bars, and at performances.
Here again, the technosphere is often used as a point of reference—a potential rather than a fixed idea. It appears often as background, rather than center stage, coloring understandings of the past and imaginaries of the future. In this sense, the various pieces below provide an indication of the kinds of open-ended engagements that a co-evolutionary perspective can enable: equally interior (subjective, bodily, symbolic) and exterior (social, material, ecological), including prose, poetry, image and sound, and discussions of overlapping moments, processes, memories, insights, reinterpretations, and creations that are both the source and subject of human experience and a sense of place within the beauty beyond.
