It’s possible that the most suitable golden spike for marking the beginning of the Anthropocene does not yet exist.

What kind of sign is a marker? Jürgen Renn and Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson sketch the dual role of markers as traces in the strata and symptoms of a destabilized Earth System—an interface between natural archives and human societies.

Christoph Rosol reflects on the disturbing schism between geoscientific insights and the info-capitalist modus operandi diluting these insights to mere noise. Are we ready to comprehend what the Earth has already recorded?

Some of the most interesting work on the Anthropocene takes place in between places, in between disciplines, and even in between the lines.

Artists discuss sturgeons pushed to the edge of extinction and the future of a chemically polluted river near Cape Town.

Exploring the amorphous fabric of technologies, environments, and humans shaping Earth’s critical future.

Tracing the role folklore has played—and continues to play—in the quantification and gridification of American landscapes, and the harvesting of worth of all kinds

Mississippi. An Anthropocene River aims to make the Mississippi River Basin legible as a zone of ecological, historical, and social interaction between humans and the environment using novel forms of exchange, research, collaboration, and pedagogy.

Architect and food thinker Carolyn Steel provides a powerful prompt for us to move beyond the perils of the modern industrial food complex.

How does the current notion of “spheres” infiltrate thinking about the bio-techno-sphere, which today seems the best descriptive model for our own habitat?

The unleashing of the technosphere is, above all, the result of activating and operating numerous tiny switches. With the unfolding of information theory, cybernetics, and the microscopic power of the point-contact transistor, the year 1948 represents the material and theoretical starting point for a universal language of 0s and 1s. Contributions from theory and art oscillate between diagnostic and speculative accounts of the bit’s role in our present.

Starting from the Flash Crash of 2010, artist and theorist Gerald Nestler investigates the problem of information asymmetries in high-frequency trading.

“Now you’re sounding even weirder than Peter Haff.” The gloves are off! A lively dispute about the usefulness of the Technosphere concept in general.

An algorithmic intermediation between the next mega-earthquake and you: instructions for turning risk into facing up to your danger.

Biology is resilient because it is suboptimal at all scales. The technosphere, however, seems to take the route of increased optimization. Are we doomed?

How can we grasp the immense physical and temporal dimensions of the technosphere and why should we isolate the human agency within it? An argument for taking a metropolitan perspective.

What forms of futurity, speculation, and life do algorithmic intermediations produce? To explore this it seems expedient to focus on “smartness,” a term legitimating—as in the “smart home”—the increased introduction of computation in social life.

When the ticker was replaced by the monitor. A lecture on the information architecture of the global financial market.

How is the Technosphere governed? And how could it be governed otherwise? One way to tackle these issues is by looking at cybernetic finance—showing how a complex system can be overtaken by an excess of self-reference.

Applying transdisciplinary systems models to problems such as climate change or global food supply gives us useful heuristics, while forcing us to think about complexity and witness nonlinear and counterintuitive outcomes.

How can systems thinking help us in the analysis of a wicked problem?

Notes on wicked problems and complexity.