World Machines

= " contraptions that embody the logic of how the entire world works for a period of time." [1]

Description

Chor Pharn :

"The idea of world-machines belongs to the writer and systems theorist Venkatesh Rao. In a series of essays and the collaborative reading project Contraptions Book Club, he proposed that history can be read as a succession of machines, each built to coordinate a planet increasingly aware of itself. The first “modernity machine,” he suggests, was assembled between 1200 and 1600, during the Mongol and Islamic ages of exchange. It ran on navigation, accounting, and gunpowder. Around 1600, it gave way to the industrial-financial order that powered the modern world. Each machine, he notes, takes about four hundred years to build before being “switched on” in a single generation; each is designed to solve the bottleneck left by its predecessor. The industrial machine solved the bottleneck of energy; the financial machine solved the bottleneck of capital. The next one, he believes, will have to solve the bottleneck of continuity.

The language of machines is useful because it restores the sense of engineering to history. Civilisations are not just stories or ideas; they are systems of coordination. They depend on synchrony—between state and market, law and technology, mind and infrastructure. When that synchrony fails, progress becomes noise. The world of 2025 is noisy in precisely this way. Artificial intelligence learns faster than governments can legislate; markets revise themselves faster than societies can adapt; ecosystems react over centuries to decisions made in minutes. The question that binds these crises together is not one of morality or ideology but of tempo. Who, or what, will keep the clocks in time?"

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-mnemonic-stack)

Research Methodology

Venkatesh Rao:

"The modernity machine that we studied in 2025 was constructed 1200-1600 and operated at a steady plateau of capability 1600-2000. It is now undergoing rapid, partially scheduled disassembly. The divergence machine was constructed 1600-2000 and has been operating in fully deployed mode for about 25 years so far.

By our grand theory, at any given time, one world machine is in operation, another is under construction, and a third may be undergoing (usually rapid) decline/dismantlement/destruction (aka rapid, partially scheduled disassembly, to adapt a term of art from rocketry). So at any given time, you have to understand the logics of two, possibly three world machines in tension to understand how the world works.

The meta-logic is derived from the Gramsci Gap and the idea of worlds being born and dying, with monsters appearing in the passages between, though the mapping is not perfect (the “world being born” is actually two worlds — a completed new world entering full production mode, and the seeds of a future world being planted)."

(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-divergence-machine)