Our Planetary Predicament

The final boss mode of human coordination

It can be fun to imagine history as a series of upgrades to our social operating system. 

Each upgrade represents a major advance in human coordination. Better software changes how information is generated and organized. New features unlock new ways to organize society around greater degrees of complexity. Communication upgrades expand the reach and powers of cooperation. In this way, a new OS can change everything. And in the process, the users change as well.

According to this metaphor, new epochs are written into the history books one upgrade at a time. The first stable OS was agriculture, launching the early great civilizations. The interface was primitive, but soon organized religion upgrades helped scale the user base. The improved networking capacity of the printing press ushered in the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Then a new algorithm called capitalism combined with powerful microprocessors to drive the Industrial Revolution, working so well that our circuit boards started overheating…

Ok, this is getting too cute for its own good, but you get the idea. 

What I like about the OS metaphor is that it accounts for both humans and technology as the primary movers of history.  Starting around 500 years ago, these forces have become increasingly intertwined as historical agents of change. Since then, history can be seen as a story of human societies co-evolving with technology, all for the purpose of managing coordination challenges.

Of course not every upgrade goes smoothly. Sometimes coordination can go backwards. And any feature that allows for new modes of coordination will invariably bring new problems with it. In this way, the scale of our problems will always keep pace with our capacity to solve them. Whichever one happens to be ahead at any given moment is what determines our felt sense of progress.

It’s easy to look around and think that our current operating system—globalization, free-market capitalism, even the nation-state—is past due for an upgrade. Bugs and viruses seem rampant. It’s running on legacy software that seems increasingly out of date. A few users have hacked the system to hog all the memory. And customer support seems to be getting progressively worse for the rest of us.

In other words, more of us are sensing that the our problems are exceeding our capacity to solve them, and in many cases to an alarming degree. Our problems and our coordination are getting so far out of balance that some of us fear that an upgrade may not be enough.

Sometimes, you may need to rewrite the entire source code.

Our new planetary predicament

By now you’ve heard of the Anthropocene, the proposed label to define the current geological era of our planet. 

While previous eras were marked by geophysical causes like asteroid impacts or plate tectonics, those forces no longer qualify as the greatest agent of geological change. That title now belongs to us, human beings. 

Humanity now represents a force beyond anything this planet has experienced in its 4.5 billion years of history. We change the chemistry of the oceans, drive species to extinction, and alter the composition of the atmosphere. We have remade the face of the Earth in our image. Our livestock outweigh wild mammals by a factor of 15 and our farms take up half of all habitable land. The weight of our own production now exceeds all living biomass. 

Much of this has happened in the last 70 years. We’ve only really started noticing it in the last 30. From a planetary perspective, this is instantaneous. 

Not only is this dynamic new for the planet, it’s also new for us. What does the Anthropocene mean for what it means to be human? How does it affect the human condition to be in contact with forces so much bigger than we are? How do we think of human history when our future becomes so contingent on the past?

Philosophers, historians, and anthropologists who grapple with these questions have a name for this new perspective: the planetary.

The planetary tells a story that is much bigger than humanity. It is grounded in Earth systems science, which seeks to understand Earth through a holistic view of all the dynamic forces that affect it. It recognizes humanity as a vital but small fraction of life that exists on Earth, all in radical interdependence with each other. It re-centers the planet beyond the narrow boundaries that we’ve artificially imposed on it.

We can better understand the planetary by contrasting it with the global (as in the modern concept of globalization).

Globalization is a 500-year-old story with humans at its center. The role of Earth is seen as an unlimited resource, one that is uniquely ours and whose rightful place is in service to our relentless march of progress. The future of the Earth depends on its potential to sustain our human lives and continue our human projects. 

The planetary is a billion-year-old story with all of life at its center. Humans are completely dependent on the Earth and its ecosystems, just like every other life form. The future of the Earth depends on its potential to be habitable for all life, not just human’s.

Of course, the globe and the planet are not mutually exclusive. Technology connects them together in an increasingly intimate relationship. In this way, the planet recognizes the agency of the globe, but it also redefines it beyond anything that humanity will ever completely understand or control.

The planetary confronts our technological progress with a tragic irony.  On the one hand, our elevation to a planetary force is undeniably a spectacular achievement. In just a few millennia a puny, upright hominid somehow transformed into a geophysical force. On the other hand, those same forces now threaten to bring that evolution to a halt. 

In that sense, 1784 marks the paradoxical origin of two fateful paths. This was the year that carbon from industrial steam engines began to settle into the Earth’s strata and join our planet’s permanent record. The Industrial Revolution thus inaugurated the beginning of both material progress and existential threat. These paths followed similar trajectories of exponential growth—one up, the other down—that may yet converge to zero.

In all these ways, the planetary confronts the human project with forces and timescales beyond anything we’ve ever had to consider. It’s as if we’ve entered a new reality, one that that our OS was not designed for. The planetary simply overwhelms our global operating system. 

This is our planetary predicament. 

Final boss mode

Planetary problems are what I call “Ostrom Complete”¹. They require solutions that have zero room for any collective action problems, tragedy of the commons, or any other failures of coordination. If we somehow gain the ability to solve problems at the planetary scale, then we will have achieved peak human coordination. At that point, no problem could exist where a potential solution would be limited by our ability to coordinate.

To appreciate this we must first understand exactly how the planetary challenges our existing capacity to coordinate.

The planetary demands a single voice. The planet interfaces with humanity as a single and unified species. It does not care about nations, ethnicities or genders. There is only one “carbon budget” for humanity to work with. Global warming imposes the same timelines on all of us. The planetary speaks to “us”, but there is no “us” to respond, and history tells us that there never has been. What in our current operating system can enable us to speak as a single species?

Yet the planetary magnifies our differences. Humans are different in fundamental ways. Politics exists to navigate those differences, but it cannot erase them. There is no confrontation with the planetary that does not split us in response: between the rich and the poor, the north and south, the developed and developing. Any climate justice that prevents us from uniting is inherently self-defeating, yet these differences can’t be erased simply by the need to unite. This is a new unresolvable dimension of our human condition.

The planetary breaks our notions of causality. How could a skeptic be convinced that global warming is real? When did it start? How can we prove it? The planetary is too big for our simple notions of causality. You can’t point at the planetary directly. The climate cannot be reduced to a number; global warming is only revealed through aggregate statistics, computational models, and big data. The planetary defies cause-and-effect and makes trial-and-error impossible. How do you run a trial on the entire climate? 

Even worse, every planetary response is a lagging one—it’s already here, its impact already begun, its causality obscured in an infinite chain of actions, reactions, and counter-reactions.  We discover micro-plastics when they show up in our blood stream. We notice the ozone by the hole we created in it. We realize glaciers are melting when sea-levels start rising, decades after the process first started

The planetary distorts our sense of time. We wonder with a sense of dread if a climate catastrophe is already inevitable—if something in our past triggered a future that is beyond our present to mediate. Never before have we been forced to contend with so many different timelines simultaneously, as if geological time merged with historical time to define our experiential time. We must consider the long-term impacts of our actions at timescales far beyond those of our own lifetime. The effects of a few centuries of fossil fuels will be felt by our planet for millennia.

The planetary expands our sense of place. Our geographic responsibility expands beyond our home, our local community, and our nation to now include the world as a whole. Meanwhile, microbes, plants, and animals respond to the planetary with zero regard for our own arbitrary borders. Trying to mitigate planetary disruptions in one place will unleash unintended consequences on another. Each planetary problem will have different impacts on different places, making it even more challenging to unite as a single voice.

The planetary confronts us with our radical interdependence. The planetary shifts our biological status from atop nature’s hierarchy into a radical interdependence with all of Earth’s life forms. We now know that microbes are the majority form of life on this planet, and that each of us is made up of equal parts human cells, bacteria, and viruses. Our gut alone harbors up to 100 trillion bacteria. Covid showed us that microbes are happy to use us for their own projects of globalization.

This interdependence must be the foundation of our ethical concerns, shifting our collective responsibility towards the welfare of entire ecosystems. Non-human life must be properly valued as essential to planetary health. Yet our current OS has few means for this life to participate in our political projects.

The planetary destabilizes our foundations. Pandemics show how our human plans can so easily be disrupted. Wildfires, water rights, and heat waves turn politics of human rights into politics of survival. The weather is no longer the stable background structuring the rhythm of our lives. Natural disasters have always been exceptions against cycles of normalcy; today we wonder if disasters are the new normalcy. Governance becomes overwhelmed by an expansion of concerns it is not equipped to meet. Coordination becomes even more challenging when we can longer depend on the foundations we assumed were stable. 

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Nothing in our history has prepared us for the planetary.² It’s as if all of the hard won coordination tricks we’ve mastered through evolutionary trial-and-error no longer apply. Just as we’ve started to confront our new challenges at the global level, we’ve found ourselves thrust into the final level of coordination challenge, with no new coordination tricks up our sleeve.

The planetary is the final boss mode of coordination, and we’re in it.

Welcome to our new normal

The idea of the planetary was born in ecology and made salient by global warming. But the dynamics that define the planetary are not limited to climate change. They will define more and more of the major challenges we face, including problems outside of ecology. 

All of our advanced technologies like AI, cognitive augmentation, and genetic engineering are also creating challenges on a planetary scale. Much like global warming, they will demand a single human voice while amplifying our political differences. They will have vast ecological consequences, both intentional and not. They will defy our traditional notions of time, space, and causality. 

In fact, my contention is that the planetary is fundamentally a technological phenomenon. Technology has created such an intimate relationship between the globe and the planet that technology and ecology have become two sides of the same planetary face. 

Global warming makes this clear. Technology first initiated it, then revealed it, and now completely dictates any potential responses we may have to it. Projects like reforestation or wilderness preservation depend on technology continuing to make our productive lands even more productive. We’re in a race to make clean energy cheap enough to make economic self-interest our only coordination strategy. Even the most radical de-growth agenda would utterly depend on technology. After all, minimizing technology requires technology to coordinate policies, enforce reductions, and confirm impacts. 

This turns human-induced climate change from an exception into a portent, the first instance of a new class of planetary problems entangling ecology with technology. Even if global warming was resolved tomorrow, at some point a future ice age will certainly reoccur, due to nothing more than natural geophysical forces. Does anyone think we will stand idly by why nature blithely converts 50% of the northern hemisphere into glaciers? No. We will fashion ourselves as climate custodians in service to all of the Earth’s life forms threatened by ice, and geo-engineer our way back to the balmy climate of the holocene.

Likewise, technology is becoming more entangled with ecology. We’ve already wired the globe many times over and will continue to do so, turning Earth itself into the ultimate connected device that contains all connected devices. Our most advanced technologies— server farms, robotics, semiconductor fabrication—are transforming increasingly more energy, water, and natural resources into their preferred environments, ones that are inorganic, cold, and sterile—environments utterly hostile to life itself.

We increasingly pursue technologies that engage directly with the planet and it’s life. We genetically sterilize mosquitoes, we mine deep into the Earth’s crust to unlock geothermal heat, we engineer pathogens for science. We barely pretend to understand the intended consequences of actions like these, much less the unintended ones. What will the microplastics of the future be?

Beyond the ecological entanglement, the challenges of advanced technologies will also require us to somehow resolve our our differences to act as one voice. Genetic engineering and cognitive augmentation could create distinctions between winners and losers great enough to define different species. How will it work to have a Chinese AI, a European AI, and an American AI, if an exponential take-off invariably can lead to only one winner? These are challenges we can only navigate as one species.

More of our problems are reaching a planetary scale, regardless of where they land on the spectrum between technology and ecology. There is no escaping our new “planetary age”. Welcome to our new normal.

Our planetary OS

How do we feel about our current OS rising to the challenge of the planetary age?

Do we really think we’re just an upgrade away? That all it will take is a minor patch to increase our capacity to coordinate? Or should we expect something fundamentally different? 

Two examples from recent articles can help clarify the dilemma.

First, consider the nation-state. This article effectively argues that nation-states alone cannot effectively manage the complexities of the planetary age. As we’ve seen, they aren’t big enough to unite as a single voice. But they also aren’t small enough to handle the impacts that will be unique to every locality. In terms of climate response, Minnesota may have more in common with Moscow than it does with Miami.

Secondly, most suggestions for global coordination seem to be minor upgrades to our current OS. Yet you can see these suggestions strain against reality. Consider this article from an AI founder and international expert advocating for global AI governance. It includes caveats like the following (emphasis mine):

AI governance must also be as impermeable as possible. […] a single breakout algorithm could cause untold damage. […] it must be watertight everywhere […] A single loophole, weak link, or rogue defector will open the door to widespread leakage, bad actors, or a regulatory race to the bottom. 

In addition to covering the entire globe, AI governance must cover the entire supply chain[...], every node of the AI value chain, from AI chip production to data collection, model training to end use, and across the entire stack of technologies used in a given application.

Quick, name any system that could ever be characterized as “watertight” or that could comprehensively cover an entire anything. These proposals amount to little more than “do a much better version of what we do now, but with zero margin for error”. And then, perhaps, hoping for the best.

This is what it sounds like to push an OS beyond its breaking point. It’s attempting to solve problems our current features were never designed for. I’m not suggesting there isn’t valuable thinking here, but any viable planetary response must start with recognizing the mismatch between the caliber of problems and our capacity to solve them.

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Of course it’s trivial to diagnose all the issues with our current OS. It’s something else entirely to propose a viable alternative. 

So what would a viable OS—one that can reconcile planetary problems with human flourishing—even look like?  Can we even imagine it? 

If you look at recent science fiction, you might think that it’s not even possible. A common complaint is that SciFi has become increasingly dystopian in recent decades. Another common observation is that SciFi plots seem to take place in the present day or in the far-future, but rarely in the near-future.³ It’s as if the near-future is avoided because it’s too hard to imagine. We can’t see our current OS surviving much longer, yet we can’t imagine a future OS capable of addressing our planetary predicament. 

What does that say about our odds of implementing a future that our greatest SciFi minds can’t even image? Is there something that explains this?

A grim possibility is that perhaps our imagination is running up against the limits of our future reality. This would be a point in favor of the “great filter” explanation for the Fermi Paradox. The reason that we see zero other signs of life in our near-infinite universe is because advanced technology acts as a “filter” that no civilization can move beyond. And maybe that also explains the gap in our science fiction: we can’t imagine what isn’t possible. Yikes. 

The better answer is to understand that historical determinism is a fallacy, and that none of this should be taken as some kind of destiny. We have no way of predicting where the growth of knowledge will take us, and how the space of solutions might open up accordingly. Imaginative thinkers are working on adding to our knowledge of the planetary as we speak, and new ideas are beginning to form.⁴

We should appreciate the challenge of our planetary predicament, and use it as inspiration to devote more of our talent and resources towards improving the one skill that is the hallmark of our species and critical to our future: our capacity to coordinate. 

Whatever our next OS looks like, it will need to unlock powers of coordination that we have very few precedents for. Yet any chance we have to flourish in this new planetary age will depend on it.

We better get to work.

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This is the second article in a series exploring coordination and technology. The first article explored our coordination paradox.

1. This is analogous to Turing Complete, the computer science notion of universal computability. Any computational machine that is Turing Complete is capable of computing anything which is computable. So any collective that is Ostrom Complete is capable of solving any problem which is solvable, regardless of the coordination challenges. For example, is your family Ostrom Complete? My kids definitely aren’t! Of course, it replaces Turing with Elinor Ostrom (the queen of coordination).

2. Well, perhaps the atomic bomb? It doesn’t feel quite analogous. After WWII, the coordination challenges were isolated to two Cold War superpowers.

3. As in a few decades or centuries from now.

4. I've found Dipesh Chakrabarty, Benjamin Bratton, and Timothy Morton particularly insightful in thinking about the planetary.