Planetary Computation
Description
Benjamin Bratton:
" Imagine the famous blue marble image as a movie, one spanning all 4.5 billion years of Earth’s development. Watching this movie on super fast-forward, one would see the planet turn from red to blue and green, see continents form and break apart, see the emergence of life and an atmosphere, and, in the last few seconds, see something else that is remarkable. The planet would almost instantaneously grow an external layer of satellites, cities, and various physical networks, all of which constitute a kind of sensory epidermis or exoskeleton. In the last century, Earth has grown this artificial crust, through which it has realized incipient forms of animal–machinic cognition with terraforming-scale agency. This is planetary computation. It is not just a tool, it is a geological cognitive phenomenon.
It is this phenomenon—planetary computation defined in this way—that is Antikythera’s core interest. The term has at least two essential connotations: first, it refers to a global technological apparatus; second, it refers to all the ways that that apparatus reveals planetary conditions in a manner otherwise unthinkable. For the former, computation is an instrumental technology that enables new perceptions of and interactions with the world; for the latter, it is an epistemological technology that shifts fundamental presumptions about what is possible to know about the world at all."