Incomputable Earth
Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis
Will be published approx. on 19. February 2026
Book
Hardback
520 pages
978-1-350-26497-7 (ISBN)
Description
Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis challenges the dominant narrative that positions technological solutions as the primary response to ecological crisis.
This open access collection argues that climate breakdown represents an irreducibly incomputable problem that cannot be resolved through algorithmic optimization or cybernetic planetary management. Radically interrogating the political epistemology underlying the Anthropocene hypothesis against the backdrop of new regimes of algorithmic classification and prediction, this volume addresses the crucial need to rethink the meaning and inter-relationality of "human," "nature," and "technology." Drawing on feminist science studies, decolonial epistemologies, and historical materialist analysis, the contributors examine how computational frameworks transform Earth's complex relationships into extractable data, perpetuating the very logics that created planetary crisis.
Examining new forms of subjectivity and resistance, this timely volume provides both rigorous critique of technoscientific planetary governance and speculative horizons for collective response to climate breakdown-offering a blueprint for reclaiming abstraction from computational capture while centering radically transformed ways of knowing and being human.
This book is available open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com It is funded by The Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
This open access collection argues that climate breakdown represents an irreducibly incomputable problem that cannot be resolved through algorithmic optimization or cybernetic planetary management. Radically interrogating the political epistemology underlying the Anthropocene hypothesis against the backdrop of new regimes of algorithmic classification and prediction, this volume addresses the crucial need to rethink the meaning and inter-relationality of "human," "nature," and "technology." Drawing on feminist science studies, decolonial epistemologies, and historical materialist analysis, the contributors examine how computational frameworks transform Earth's complex relationships into extractable data, perpetuating the very logics that created planetary crisis.
Examining new forms of subjectivity and resistance, this timely volume provides both rigorous critique of technoscientific planetary governance and speculative horizons for collective response to climate breakdown-offering a blueprint for reclaiming abstraction from computational capture while centering radically transformed ways of knowing and being human.
This book is available open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com It is funded by The Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
Reviews / Votes
A blazing intervention into the Anthropocene's mono-epistemic trap. This electrifying collection dismantles the cybernetic fantasies of planetary control, exposing their roots in capital's real abstractions that reduce life to computable units. * Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015) * By unearthing the entangled histories of computation, colonialism, and ecological crisis, this volume opens space for plural, radical imaginaries beyond extractivism. This is a necessary call for action related to ecological and epistemic justice: Decolonise digital futures! * Federico Demaria, co-editor of Degrowth (2014) and Pluriverse (2019) Lecturer in Economics, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain * What is the shape of of the Anthropocene? As authors in this compelling collection argue, it is nothing like a grid, nothing like a material motherboard, but is rather something like shape-shifting incompleteness theorem, with materiality overrunning attempts at full epistemological capture. * Stefan Helmreich, Professor of Cultural Anthopology, MIT, USA * A powerful mix of indignant perspectives unite in a profound critique of the transformation of the world into an abstract machine. There are many gems of undisciplined brilliance. * - Alf Hornborg, author of The Magic Technology: The Machine as a Transformation of Slavery (2022) * A crucial set of essays for further theorization of the colonial Anthropocene as an extractive and digital project that produces epistemological and material violence as planetary. This is a vital intervention towards undoing and unthinking how territory can be sustained, returned and regenerated through technological solutions that only push us deeper into the abyss of capitalism's destructive capacities. * Macarena Gomez-Barris, Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor Chair, Modern Culture and Media Faculty, Brown Arts Institute * This extraordinary collection is an invaluable resource for those of us working to articulate the legacies and limits of computation as a technopolitics of command and control. * Lucy Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007) *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Laminated cover
Illustrations
60 bw illus
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 31 mm
Weight
844 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-350-26497-7 (9781350264977)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Antonia Majaca is a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy, where her research within the ERC-funded HealthXCross project examines microbiome technoscience through decolonial feminist and historical materialist analysis. She founded and coordinates the research cluster "Radical Epistemologies: Political Ecology and Transversal Praxis" at the NICHE Institute for Environmental Humanities, Ca' Foscari. She was Principal Investigator of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) artistic research project "The Incomputable," from which this volume emerged. She has directed research, curatorial, discursive, and publishing projects for Documenta 14, the Venice Biennale, Berlin Biennale, and HKW Berlin.
Content
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Series Preface
1. Introduction: The Anthropocene Hypothesis and the Incomputable, Antonia Majaca
Part I: The Political Economy of Anthropocene Technologies
2. Externality and Necessity Between Materialism and Ecology, Marina Vishmidt
3. Between the Planet and the Market, Gary Zhexi Zhang
4. The Automaton of the Anthropocene: On Carbosilicon Machines and Cyberfossil Capital, Matteo Pasquinelli
5. Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an Anatomical Map of Human Labor, Data, and Planetary Resources, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
Part II: The Epistemologies of Cosmotechne
6. Black Ecologies: An Opening, an Offering, Imani Jacqueline Brown
7. Pluriversal Horizons: Notes for an Onto-epistemic Reorientation of Technology, Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma
8. Systems Representing Themselves, Juaniko Moreno
9. A Conversation on Art and Cosmotechnics, Yuk Hui and Brian Kuan Wood
10. The Rise of the Coyote: Towards a Socio-Technological Approach to Worldmaking, Sara Garzon
Part III: Artificial Earth
11. The Artificial Earth: A Conceptual Morphology, Conrad Moriarty-Cole and James Phillips
12. The Environment Is Not a System, Tega Brain
13. At the Limits of Computational Technocracy, Victor G. Garcia-Castaneda
14. Prologue to the Sky River, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari, and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng
15. Designed to Disappear: On the Ambiguity of "Nature" in Dutch Coastal Engineering, Michaela Buesse and Konstantin Mitrokhov
Part IV: Planetary Scientia
16. Poetics of Science / Dialogic Curiosities / Incomputabilities, Fields Harrington and Katherine McKittrick
17. At the End of Autopoiesis: Nonaxiomatic Patterns and Millions of Incomputable Earths, Luciana Parisi
18. Subaquatic Sensoriums and the Incomputable Ocean, Margarida Mendes
19. Pending Xenophora, Mari Bastashevski
Part V: For the End of This World
20. Nature, Estranged from the Idea: Gendered Metaphors and Evolutionary Allegories in the Long Nineteenth Century, Ana Teixeira Pinto
21. The Time Machine Stops, Kevin Walker
22. The Pain of Thinking at Light Speed: Posthuman Play as Response to "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", Conor McKeown
23. Organic Technologies in the Works of Patricia Domiguez, Daniela Zyman
Bibliography
Index
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Series Preface
1. Introduction: The Anthropocene Hypothesis and the Incomputable, Antonia Majaca
Part I: The Political Economy of Anthropocene Technologies
2. Externality and Necessity Between Materialism and Ecology, Marina Vishmidt
3. Between the Planet and the Market, Gary Zhexi Zhang
4. The Automaton of the Anthropocene: On Carbosilicon Machines and Cyberfossil Capital, Matteo Pasquinelli
5. Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an Anatomical Map of Human Labor, Data, and Planetary Resources, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
Part II: The Epistemologies of Cosmotechne
6. Black Ecologies: An Opening, an Offering, Imani Jacqueline Brown
7. Pluriversal Horizons: Notes for an Onto-epistemic Reorientation of Technology, Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma
8. Systems Representing Themselves, Juaniko Moreno
9. A Conversation on Art and Cosmotechnics, Yuk Hui and Brian Kuan Wood
10. The Rise of the Coyote: Towards a Socio-Technological Approach to Worldmaking, Sara Garzon
Part III: Artificial Earth
11. The Artificial Earth: A Conceptual Morphology, Conrad Moriarty-Cole and James Phillips
12. The Environment Is Not a System, Tega Brain
13. At the Limits of Computational Technocracy, Victor G. Garcia-Castaneda
14. Prologue to the Sky River, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari, and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng
15. Designed to Disappear: On the Ambiguity of "Nature" in Dutch Coastal Engineering, Michaela Buesse and Konstantin Mitrokhov
Part IV: Planetary Scientia
16. Poetics of Science / Dialogic Curiosities / Incomputabilities, Fields Harrington and Katherine McKittrick
17. At the End of Autopoiesis: Nonaxiomatic Patterns and Millions of Incomputable Earths, Luciana Parisi
18. Subaquatic Sensoriums and the Incomputable Ocean, Margarida Mendes
19. Pending Xenophora, Mari Bastashevski
Part V: For the End of This World
20. Nature, Estranged from the Idea: Gendered Metaphors and Evolutionary Allegories in the Long Nineteenth Century, Ana Teixeira Pinto
21. The Time Machine Stops, Kevin Walker
22. The Pain of Thinking at Light Speed: Posthuman Play as Response to "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", Conor McKeown
23. Organic Technologies in the Works of Patricia Domiguez, Daniela Zyman
Bibliography
Index