Noopolitics

Discussion

The Evolution of Noopolitical Discourse

David Ronfeldt:

" I began thinking seriously about the noosphere in 1998 when RAND colleague John Arquilla and I had a research project to come up with new ideas for future U.S information strategy. We chose to focus on the emergence of the noosphere as a new strategic arena, and propose noopolitik as a concept for strategy and statecraft. We formulated it as a future-oriented way to improve the positive use of “soft power” and as an alternative to traditional realpolitik and its emphasis on “hard power.” Our idea was that “whose story wins” was becoming as significant as “whose weaponry wins” (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1999).

Over the next 20 years we watched as U.S. theorists and strategists ignored the noosphere’s emergence, muddled their use of soft power, and dismissed noopolitik as well as kindred concepts like cyberpolitik, infopolitik, and netpolitik. We increasingly worried that various state and non-state actors were effectively employing dark forms of noopolitik (weaponized narratives, epistemic attacks, etc.) against U.S. interests and ideals, not only abroad but inside our society.

So, we wrote a new paper, again hailing the noosphere’s rise and urging noopolitik as a forward-looking concept for adapting U.S. strategy and statecraft to the information age. Our first version responded to a request in 2018 for an updated chapter for the second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy (Snow & Cull, 2020). Then, though we were no longer at RAND — I had retired, John was at the Naval Postgraduate School — RAND graciously offered to publish a fuller version (Ronfeldt & Arquilla, 2020).

Back in 1995, Wired magazine’s John Perry Barlow famously said, “With cyberspace, we are essentially hardwiring the noosphere” (Cobb, 1995). Yet the noosphere concept received scant attention during the next 25 years. We tried with our two reports, and so did environmentalists Paul Samson and David Pitt with their admirable collection, The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader (1999). But few other scientists showed interest in the noosphere, though some provided helpful new ideas about related concepts: such as collective intelligence, global consciousness, and the global brain. Meanwhile, U.S. national-security theorists and strategists remained generally unreceptive to our research and analysis. Moreover, no general “community of interest” developed around noosphere matters during these 25 years.

I’m delighted to see that the environment has suddenly improved in the past few years.

First, thanks to a landmark effort by the Kacyra Family Foundation and its Human Energy program, a “Science of the Noosphere” project took off, initially with an interview series (2021–2022), then with an online Master Class directed by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson (July–October 2022), in which John and I participated. These activities led to the N2 Conference: The Noosphere At 100 — The Future Of Human Collective Consciousness, a seminal international gathering in November 2023 at the University of California, Berkeley. Altogether a remarkable set of activities that has created a new transnational community of interest for sustained attention — a high point in efforts to spread awareness of the noosphere’s long-predicted emergence. Human Energy, now an independent entity, continues at the center of this community-building effort.

A second landmark in the construction of a global community of interest arrived with the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Noosphere and Humanities, at the Institute of Science, Technology and Society, School of Philosophy, Nanjing University, China, during May 29–31, 2026. I’ve long wondered about Chinese interest in the noosphere concept. My online searches returned little information until this year. Now, thanks to the addition of AI-powered search engines, I’m learning that Chinese interest has a long history, and that scholarly studies have expanded remarkably in the past few years. The Proceedings for this conference (Pan, 2026) shows that Chinese theorizing about AI and the noosphere is advancing.

Another new effort at community-building is the Noosphere Lab, located at the School of Thinking of the Center Leo Apostel at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. Also significant is the Laboratory of the Noosphere & AI, (NooLab), a scientific research unit established at the European University in Switzerland in 2024. But I have no knowledge it aims to help build a global community of interest in the noosphere."

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