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Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology Volume 21, Issues 2–3 (2017)

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Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology Volume 21, Issues 2–3 (2017) Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology Volume 21, Issues 2–3 (2017) Special Issue on the Anthropocene Guest Editors Pieter Lemmens, Vincent Blok, and Jochem Zwier Contents Guest Editors’ Introduction: Toward a Terrestrial Turn in Philosophy of Technology Pieter Lemmens, Vincent Blok, and Jochem Zwier ......................................114 Earthing Technology: Towards an Eco-centric Concept of Biomimetic Technologies in the Anthropocene Vincent Blok .................................................................................................................127 The Parliament of Things and the Anthropocene: How to Listen to ‘Quasi-Objects’ Massimiliano Simons ...............................................................................................150 From the Nadir of Negativity towards the Cusp of Reconciliation: A Dialectical (Hegelian-Teilhardian) Assessment of the Anthropocenic Challenge H. A. E. (Hub) Zwart..................................................................................................175 The Question Concerning Geo-Engineering Byron Williston ...........................................................................................................199 Saving Earth: Encountering Heidegger’s Philosophy of Technology in the Anthropocene Jochem Zwier and Vincent Blok ...........................................................................222 The Technocene or Technology as (Neo)Environment Agostino Cera ..............................................................................................................243 Langdon Winner ........................................................................................................282 Rebranding the Anthropocene: A Rectification of Names How to Differentiate a Macintosh from a Mongoose: Technological and Political Agency in the Age of the Anthropocene Arianne Conty .............................................................................................................295 On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene Yuk Hui ...........................................................................................................................319 Techno-Optimism and Rational Superstition Alexander Wilson .......................................................................................................342 Beyond Adaptation and Anthropomorphism: Technology in Simondon Danika Drury-Melnyk ..............................................................................................363 What Is Called Caring? Beyond the Anthropocene Bernard Stiegler .........................................................................................................386 Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology ISSN: 1091-8264 21:2–3 (2017): 114–126 DOI: 10.5840/techne2017212/363 Toward a Terrestrial Turn in Philosophy of Technology Guest Editors’ Introduction Pieter Lemmens, Vincent Blok, and Jochem Zwier The Future of Philosophy of Technology The initial spark that ultimately led to this special issue on “Philosophy of Tech- nology in the Age of the Anthropocene” was the attendance by two of the guest editors, in July 2013 at the 18th Biennial International Conference of the Society for the Philosophy of Technology in Lisbon, of a plenary lecture by Langdon Win- ner on the future of philosophy of technology. In this timely and prescient lecture, entitled “A Future for Philosophy of Technology—Yes, But On Which Planet?,” Winner delivered a kind of stocktaking of the contemporary state of philosophy of technology and presented two areas in which rapid developments are taking place currently that call for more profound critical engagement by philosophers of technology (Winner 2013). The first area, quite familiar and in fact the theme of this conference, was that of digital information networks and the information society, which arguably possess huge democratizing and citizen-empowering potential but can equally be employed by big info-corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple to disempower and enslave citizens and reinstall feudal relationships on a high-tech level. Pieter Lemmens, Faculty of Science, Institute for Science in Society, Department of Philosophy and Science Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9010, 6500 GL Nijmegen, the Netherlands; [email protected]. Vincent Blok, Management Studies Group and Philosophy Group, Wageningen Uni- versity, Hollandseweg 1, 6706 KN Wageningen, the Netherlands; www.vincentblok.nl; [email protected]. Jochem Zwier, Faculty of Science, Institute for Science in Society, Department of Philosophy and Science Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9010, 6500 GL Nijmegen, the Netherlands; [email protected]. Toward a Terrestrial Turn in Philosophy of Technology 115 The second area, just as urgent but much less familiar terrain for the philoso- phy of technology did not pertain to specific developments in technology itself but to the destructive side effects of technological progress upon the planetary ecosystem on which all technological development and all human existence as such ultimately depends. Considering the topics that most philosophers of tech- nology are engaged with at the moment, it may be argued that the threat posed to this ultimate condition of possibility of our technological societies—a threat that has so far gone by the name of ‘global ecological crisis’ but is currently being reconsidered and reconceptualized as the ‘Anthropocene’—is the glaring blind spot of contemporary philosophy of technology, its ‘unthought’ if we may use a term of Heidegger in a somewhat different register. Much of today’s philosophy of technology, Winner observed, still quietly assumes that the fundamental underlying conditions that enabled the rise and con- tinuation of our industrial societies can be taken for granted. Yet these conditions, on the one hand a steady supply of cheap fossil fuels and on the other a stable global climate favorable to human civilization, are rapidly receding. This will in all probability severely disrupt humanity’s current technological endeavor, affect- ing its basic patterns and putting under stress all our civilization’s institutions, practices, social structures and beliefs. As it actually seems to be the case that philosophy of technology is still ‘utterly unprepared’ for the challenges this future predicament poses, we have taken the initiative, with this special issue of Techné, to challenge philosophers of technology to reflect on the implications for their discipline of this new and wholly unprecedented situation. The Anthropocene as a New Planetary Condition This new situation, as it becomes clearer every day, is nothing less than that of an entirely new and unexpected planetary condition. According to Earth System scientists, the Earth as a whole is caught in a fundamental rupture and is moving into a new state. It is leaving the relatively stable and benign state that is known as the Holocene, the geological period of the last 11,700 or so years which is now retrospectively perceived as a rather unique period, the rare ‘long summer’ (Fagan 2004, Dumanoski 2009) that allowed for the rise and flourishing of civilizations based on agriculture and later industrialization, and is entering a much more in- stable and unpredictable state now which has been termed the Anthropocene, as famously suggested at the turn of the century by the Nobel prize–winning Dutch atmospheric chemist and climate scientist Paul Crutzen (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, Crutzen 2002). The Anthropocene is basically characterized by (1) the fact 116 Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology that the human (anthropos) has gained geological agency and has by now become the most important geological factor on the planet, trumping all the natural factors, and (2) that as a result the Earth System is responding by shifting into a new state space that will be accompanied by huge changes in the Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere, global warming and the collapse of vital ecosystems being two of the most pregnant and pressing issues (Barnosky et al. 2012). As the Australian author Clive Hamilton writes in his book Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene, what is changing with the Anthropo- cene is the very “being-nature” of the Earth itself (Hamilton 2017, 7), which has “ontological meaning” and therefore “invites us to think about the Earth in a new way, an Earth in which it is possible for humankind to participate directly in its evolution by influencing the constantly changing processes that constitute it” (ibid., 21). This means that we have to fundamentally change our relation to what was once called ‘nature’ and is now disclosed as a tiny film of negentropic activity covering a planetary body, the so-called biosphere, our ultimate and one and only yet seriously endangered life support system, for the continued existence of which we will have to become increasingly responsible ourselves. Philosophi- cally, the Anthropocenic condition necessitates a renewed ontological questioning of nature—nature as Earth—and technology (also technology as Earth) in their increasing entanglement (Blok 2016b). It may be considered obvious that the Anthropocene has resulted first of all from the process of industrialization that started in the late eighteenth century with the invention of the steam engine and the onset of industrial capitalism, and has gained real momentum with what is called ‘The Great Acceleration’ among Earth
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