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)
Characteristics
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)
Temporalities
Venkatesh Rao:
"The Paleolithic world machine probably had a lifespan of 100,000+ years. The Neolithic world machine had a lifespan of at least 15,000 years. The Bronze Age world machine probably lasted about 4000 years. Over the really longue duree, world-machine lifespans appear to be falling.
But even more importantly, world machine temporalities appear to be — complicating. Later historical machines feature more complex multi-temporalities, suffused with more kinds of atemporalities in their interstices, than earlier ones. To quote the tenth Doctor Who, they are bigger balls of “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.” The temporal vorticity of history increases with chronological time, and is systematically higher with each new world machine. This is one reason the future always looks more chaotic from perspectives rooted in the past.
Beyond helping book-keep cause and effect, and correlate human events with natural ones, raw chronological time is not as useful for studying history as you might think. Periodizing into “world machine” epochs, while it might seem like a caricaturing move, is surprisingly helpful in organizing our understandings.
This is why there is no problem with continuing to study history after the end of history. Fukuyama’s End of History argument, a staple of my thinking and this book club, rests on a particular ontological of history (his intellectual ancestor, Alexander Kojeve, is on the shortlist for our book club). It is possible to study history in “end of history” conditions, making use of Fukuyama’s models, without being exclusively committed to his ontology of history.
Thanks to the acceleration of history and the shortening of world-machine lifespans, the unnamed AI-powered world machine now being seeded might very well have a lifespan of only 300 years total perhaps, rather than 900-1000, and cut short the reign of the divergence machine now entering production. Given that it accelerates the rerun-heavy nature of post-End-of-History temporalities, those 300 years might feel a great deal more atemporal. And a lot more wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey too."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-divergence-machine(