The regression Davis mentions refers to a willingness to trade the comfort of ideal “ solutions ” for the work of fundamental transformation, but perhaps given the precariousness of the situation, having learned to entertain the utopian impulse with imaginative schemes may prove an extremely practical capability to possess. This also relates to what Heidegger once called our “ confrontation with planetary technology ” (an encounter that he never managed to actually make and which most Heideggerians manage to endlessly defer, or “ differ” ). <sup>15</sup> That encounter should be motivated by an invested interest in several “ planetary technologies ” working at various scales of matter, and based on, in many respects, what cheap supercomputing, broadband networking, and isomorphic data management methodologies make possible to research and application. These include — but are no means limited to — geology (e.g., geochemistry, geophysics, oceanography, glaciology), earth sciences (e.g., focusing on the atmosphere, lithospere, biosphere, hydrosphere), as well as the various programs of biotechnology (e.g., bioinformatics, synthetic biology, cell therapy), of nanotechnology (e.g., materials, machines, medicines), of economics (e.g., modeling price, output cycles, disincentivized externalities), of neuroscience (e.g., behavioral, cognitive, clinical), and of astronomy (e.g., astrobiology, extragalactic imaging, cosmology). In that all of these are methodologically and even epistemologically informed by computer science (e.g., algorithmic modeling, macrosensors and microsensors, data structure optimization, information theory, data visualization, cryptography, networked collaboration), then all of these planetary technologies are also planetary computational technologies. The question of planetary-scale computing addressed by this book is therefore not only a topic for us to understand; it also names our mechanisms of inquiry. I would insist on the inclusion as well of art, design, philosophy, film and literature (especially their science fiction genres) — or at least my own preferred conception of them — which themselves may or may not be computational. These are our key technologies for conceiving the inevitable ambiguities of planetary-scale computational computation and its potential vectors up and out, but they don ’ t work well when they are asked to resolve ambiguity instead of conspiring with it and cultivating its efficacy. The geodesign that I have in mind would draw on all of these in varying measures for its subject matter, for its means, for what it may be called on to know, but it would also provide a platform for these disciplines ’ rotations from ways of knowing toward ways of making. It may do this because there is no local, only global, to invert Bruno Latour ’ s well-known and unfortunate maxim. <sup>16</sup> To pull intelligently on one thread is to tug on the whole at once, a whole that has come together in one particular way at one particular moment in the form of a thread and someone to pull it. <sup>17</sup> This not a wish for renewed human mastery or transcendence. It is rather a call for the difficult, even traumatic work of disenchantment and demystification and toward a geopolitics based on what our species knows that it knows about our limited position and on how we might recompose ourselves accordingly.
The Stack to Come
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