Planetary Thinking
I wrote an essay a while ago (gosh, almost a decade ago, as of this writing!) that we are entering an era of existential politics, where the current obsessions of government such as taxes are going to be replaced by the elemental obsessions of air, water, food & climate. That thought entered my head about a year ago. A few months later, when I read David Wallace-Wells' spectacular piece of climate pornography and learned that it was the most shared article in the history of New York Magazine, it struck me that I am not the only person in the world thinking about existential politics. Every hurricane, every fire and every drought increases the ranks of my fellow travelers.
We aren't used to inviting oceans into the senate but the survival of the human species depends on a politics that embraces the non-human world. A Planetary Politics.
Don't we know that already? Isn't the interrelation of all beings the oldest Indian insight? Nagarjuna scooped us by a couple of thousand years. Better late than never; it's good that we are relearning that lesson today. I don't need to tell you that a politics in which oceans and glaciers get a vote will be radically different from our current one. Existential politics will completely transform our idea of society; in fact, I think we will need to rework the basic categories through which we experience collective life - history, freedom, production and most importantly, the category human.
What happens when the human bubble bursts?
It's exciting to imagine a radical expansion of the political to include earthworms and sheep along with blue collar laborers in Michigan and subsistence farmers in Madhya Pradesh. Consider that a few centuries ago, only kings were considered sovereign but now, throughout the world, we take for granted (in principle, if not in practice) that people are sovereign.
Why did that happen?
The transition from kingdoms to democracies is certainly a sign of moral progress, but it's also a necessity -- you simply can't run a modern society along feudal lines: the changes in production, trade and consumption necessitated a new kind of society with an altered distribution of power. Similarly, the dramatic shifts we are seeing now necessitate a transition.
A transition to what?
Answer: to a planetary politics based on solidarity across species boundaries, a planetarity. Don't ask me what planetarity is, I am not going to give away the season in the pilot :) Instead, let me introduce the ABCs, the three planetary themes that I have been tracking:
A for Animals: we can't talk about the politics of the planet without talking about how we treat our fellow planetarians, which is to say, horrendously. Our treatment of animals, especially in factory farms, is easily the greatest moral failure of human society. On the flip side, expanding political rights to the nonhuman world is a key marker of planetarity. PS: Animals are a stand-in for all of life...
B for Brains: if physical machines and the factories that housed them marked the transition from a feudal to the industrial society, then planetary politics will be marked by intelligent machines and the networks that house them along with their biological counterparts. In the decade since I first wrote this paragraph, AI has gone from being a niche interest to a world-changing technology. That's not going to stop any time soon. I am particularly interested in unicellular intelligence - see Cellosophy.
C for Climate: many of my friends like to think of climate change as a moral crisis - civilization as we know it is about to end! what are we going to do about it! - but my view is that the moral crisis lies elsewhere, i.e., in our treatment of the nonhuman world. Instead, climate change is a human crisis that points out the limits of the complexity that can be handled by our current governance systems. Put another way, the expansion of our moral imagination to include earthworms has to go hand in hand with the expansion of our administrative imagination to embrace planetary governance.
There are plenty of people who think of each one of these themes separately; animal rights activists, roboticists and climate scientists come to mind, but my goal is to juxtapose them.
Why so?
Well, for one, because they are actually related; to give just one thread connecting the three, note that whatever machines and automation have done to human labor, they have completely destroyed animal labor, so if we want to understand what machines might do post intelligent automation, we might want to look at what mechanization did to animals. And of course, it's the exhaust from these machines (including the methane coming from mechanized factory farms) that's the underlying cause of climate change.
Second, each one of these themes adds a lens that illuminates the other two; for example, what if we look at climate change primarily from the point of view of the non-human world, might it start looking like a good thing? I am sure the end of human civilization will be applauded by the billions of pigs and chickens who live out their lives in crates the size of their bodies before they are slaughtered. Why shouldn't we be taking their side?
Third, drawing out the connections between these three helps us understand the planetary system in the Anthropocene, for it has many moving parts and no single theme can hope to capture the complexities of the system. In fact, the political embrace of the planet is the greatest complex system challenge of all time and should be of interest to scholars and thinkers for that reason alone. Just as the genesis of the modern nation state went hand in hand with the collection of statistics (and spurred much of its development), the planetarity of the future will go hand in hand with the development of big data and associated machine learning techniques.
In short: the planet is where the action is. Longer version: read the various threads on this site, or even better: subscribe.
This site is the front door. The Work, just below, maps everything currently in progress: Bhumics, Cellosophy, Polyconflicts, etc., most of it still being written. Two projects have grown into sites of their own, Sinosophy (reading Chinese thought for mood rather than doctrine) and Habitability (engineering habitability as a replacement for sovereignty). Essays are also through Ranganaut.
Bhumics, from bhumi, earth, is the umbrella name for a five book attempt to replace twentieth century politics and economics with a discipline that takes the planet's metabolism, not the state or the market, as its unit. Book One is The Indian Anthropocene, worldbuilding with India as the test case; its institutional twin is Shaktiville, a nine district planetary city built through Socratus.
A manuscript on what happens to a human being once AI turns thought itself into something exchanged. Cosiety names the resulting social form. Its central move is the cognitive stance: treating AI as an interlocutor without first settling whether it understands anything, because building culture around that fiction is what makes the fiction useful.
Two claims that turn out to rhyme. Cellosophy, with Sriram and Francis Steen, argues that cognition starts with the single cell, long before there is a nervous system to house it. Metabology argues that civilizations are the same kind of thing at a much larger scale: metabolic systems competing over energy, matter and information, with sovereignty reconceived as control over flows rather than territory.
Planetarity is the philosophy: Earth plus Globe equals Planet, and post-anthropocentric thought has to start there. Hyperproblems is the method, a manifesto for treating philosophy as world design: modeling and simulating civilizational problems instead of only arguing about them. The two are converging into one project.
Polyconflicts reads AI and resource geopolitics as conflicts with winners and losers, not the abstract "polycrisis" of Davos panels. Wystem argues that the missing ingredient in climate, inequality and AI concentration is collective wisdom, not better data. Both converge on Public Intelligence as the alternative to extractive commercial AI, and both are serialized first, weekly, in The Messenger.