The notion of the technosphere also contains a moral dimension: it seems to assign human society great responsibility over life in the biosphere at large. Simone Schleper

The co-evolutionary perspective motivates me to negotiate “becoming” as a new normal. It seems obvious that, for example, the world is in a constant state of flux. However, so many of the logics and thought-habits I have learned about want stable, changeless things: from Euclid’s geometric forms, for instance, to the way a museum is organized to capture and preserve stable objects that, by way of their inclusion in the museum collection, no longer become but rather are. Caroline Picard

It seems impossible to grasp the technosphere as an entirely coherent concept. Of course, one can grasp at it, but I at least continually get the sense that I am only grasping a very small portion of an amorphous and always receding/expanding material, a bit like trying to grab the heel of a shadow. Caroline Picard

Co-evolution allows for the understanding that everything one observes on the Earth’s surface today is the survivor of a generational process (involving differential rates of reproduction) and has ultimately been shaped by the requirements and logics placed upon it by that process. Functionalities have to be viewed in that light as well. Daniel Falb

How does the technosphere transcend traditional nature/culture boundaries? First, in that it seems possible to apply transdisciplinary concepts across these domains (co-evolution, niche construction, regulatory networks, etc.). Second, from a historical perspective, as the entire terrestrial biosphere becomes a global single “niche” for the human species, and as the technosphere is the key element in the collective conduct of this species, the technosphere also becomes a key element of the biosphere at large. For better or for worse, the technosphere becomes the key regulator (presently: key deregulator) of the terrestrial biosphere. Daniel Falb

Looking at animal intelligence it appears that the results of individual learning tend to remain locked into the generation that acquires them; in some hominids, one observes early instances of cultural evolution, which, however, never really reaches the level of an open-ended accumulative process. Thus, the key element that enabled the emergence of the technosphere seems to be the communicative capabilities that allowed cultural evolution to become open-ended in the first place (although even that involved tens of thousands of years of not much more than marginal stone-tool refinement). This assumption is perhaps supported by the circumstance that the decisive steps in the cultural evolution of the media of cultural evolution—language, writing, education, print, internet, etc.—are frequently accompanied by reaching new levels of overall accumulative activity. Daniel Falb

When we look at the numbers today, it seems that the economic logic built into the technosphere is that of growth in terms of material and energy usage. The technosphere is currently operating in an unsustainable way, consuming at an ever-increasing speed the material basis for its functioning. Thus the most important question about the future of the technosphere is: Will it be able to reach a stable state in which the waste and pollution it produces are recycled by its metabolism or will it continue its operation until it collapses? Until now, there is hardly any evidence that the transition to a stable state is occurring. But whatever the future is, the technosphere will drastically change. Finn Müller-Hansen

The technosphere concept as proposed by Peter Haff depicts the technosphere as a quasi-autonomous physical subsystem of the Earth system that operates according to its own laws. Instead of transcending the boundary between nature and culture, it seems to naturalize domains of human activity, such as energy usage, which traditionally have been considered as belonging to the cultural sphere. However, a new interpretation of the concept in the context of the Anthropocene discourse could explore and finally transcend these boundaries. For this to occur, we need transdisciplinary research efforts and programs that bridge the divide between the social and natural sciences. Such a transdisciplinary approach needs to take the reflexivity of humans, and thus the influence of its own theorizing on the future of the technosphere, into account.

In order to transcend the boundary between nature and culture, we have to reconsider our understanding of scientific knowledge. This is not without risk, because it can easily lead to the relativization of profound insights that are fundamental for today’s modern societies. However, it has the potential to mobilize new agencies that are urgently needed to ensure a sustainable future. Finn Müller-Hansen

One can think of the technosphere as the beehive of human societies, as the increasingly artificial “niche,” which is both the effect and the cause of an increasingly complex and interrelated network of human relations (material, historical, political, social, etc.) at a global level. Davide Scarso

Suppose we are able—and apparently we are—to define a certain set of “rules,” a quantitative “loop diagram,” for a certain kind of social phenomenon. If I, absolutely with “good intentions,” apply these “rules” to steer social change, am I fostering change, or imposing norms of social change, thus maybe cutting off other paths of social becoming? … In what sense would an “engineered society” be better, freer, happier; more “functional”? … If a solid and effective set of social engineering tools is developed, will “society” just keep going, as before? Or does the very fact of having attained this sort of social “self-consciousness” impact on social life itself? Davide Scarso

The concept of the technosphere recognizes assemblages of inorganic, organic, and social actors, which traditionally have been compartmentalized into separate silos of the social and biophysical. The concept appreciates the artificiality of concepts such as external “nature” and “culture,” while appreciating the pseudo-autonomy of the constructed and transformed Earth. Some scholars have claimed that the Western concept of nature developed alongside a linear, positivist model inspired by realist painting, economic rationalism, commodification, and institutional control (e.g. see Escobar 1999). Meanwhile, culture often took a form that was both transcendental and limited to language and aesthetics. Culture was solely human and nature was everything else. With the technosphere, technology becomes, as Bruno Latour said, “society made durable” (1990). It can be seen to exert an agency that defies the expectations of its creators, while maintaining the material characteristics of its natural ancestry (e.g. in the complex relations of asbestos, the market, and demolition; see Gregson et al. 2010). In the technosphere, we realize that the boundaries between organic and artificial, brain and machine, controlled and evolving are all blurred and sliced through. But, in so doing, it might also suggest that there are new ways of engaging with these systems and the ideas we have about them. Cyrus Hester

The Japanese historian of ideographically written languages Shirakawa Shizuka explains that prior to an alphabet ancient forms of writing based on pictorial images were born as “carriers of words.” In this type of linguistic paradigm, writing reflected logos; a pictograph represented the appearance of existence. Thus, this system of writing, such as the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph and Japanese and Chinese pictograph, embodied the visual and, mostly, the material existence of the world (Shizuka 1994). In other words, to use the language was to embody the world. Although language is a mode of knowledge transfer commonly used by humans, the creation and evolution of language was not based on ideas in the human mind alone. The system of knowledge transfer set out by ideographically written language has co-evolved with the immediate environment and the experience it has shaped and been shaped by. Shizuka explains that what caused alphabets to be invented was precisely “foreign” encounters among various races with different systems of words; ideas and forms of writing were borrowed (Shizuka 1994). This is also when knowledge began to be transferred beyond immediate physical environments on a “global” scale, where a knowledge-transfer system gradually became autonomous and beyond the control of “leaders.” To adapt to this translingual migration, the integration of words, writing, and material environments, which at one time was intrinsic to ideographical language, slowly became separated.

When translating words between these two different systems of languages, what the transnational historian Lydia Liu calls the “meaning-value” of a word can evolve through its transformation into the language of a completely different paradigm. This evolution occurs not only through adaptation of a notion from an already existing system of one language into that of another, but also in relation to the sociopolitical concerns of each translator who may variously create different terms for the single foreign notion. The newly introduced term could be (mis)interpreted by other users of the words, evolving until it finds its own entry in a dictionary, even affecting individual users’ way of thinking, and potentially influencing the ways in which one perceives and reacts to the world. Here, in the technosphere of knowledge transfer, the genes (or original meaning) of certain linguistic terms are forced to co-evolve with their users, translators, environment, and sociopolitical landscape, with and potentially beyond their original parameters, without acquiring a clear definition as new linguistic terms from their very outset. Eiko Honda

In order to understand the technosphere, there is a need for theoretical modeling of evolution, because what is considered an idea or a cultural technique is not the result of pure data. Theories of evolution are as necessary as theories of history. Data is not information, and information needs a structure that does not come from data itself. Miriam Wiesel

The extended evolution approach visualizes the dynamic development of the tremendous diversity in cultural and natural systems. Although these systems can be perceived as isolated (or distinctly connected), they are, at the same time, collectively prerequisite for the emergence of the technosphere in general. Distant techniques share similar structures and structural developments. Exponential complexity arises where evolutionary processes are connected in feedback cycles at potentially self-accelerating exchange rates. Identification of network nodes as critical sublimation points may permit system comprehension. Maximilian Lau

It seems as though the deep interconnectedness of our relationship to the technosphere will be essential to our imagination of the future, in both shaping and living within it.
We could look at future transformations of the technosphere as a vista of “strange” terrains, constructed by observing, recording, fictionalizing, and imagining objects and spaces that exist at the interface between the human and nonhuman, nature and culture, perception and production. And we might begin to understand and perhaps even anticipate how intersecting patterns between them are made visible. But could this be more uncomfortable than we imagine? Rohini Devasher

Before we consider how we might guide our transformation of the technosphere, an equally important question is why we should transform such an abstract space. This is not to argue against the efficacy of such a concept in organizing human behavior, nor is it to argue against the existence of such a sphere. Rather, it is to question what it is to organize cognitive and social energy socially around such abstract universals. Marc Herbst

A main feature of past transformations—both the so-called Neolithic as well as the Industrial Revolution—is that they were taking place unintentionally and unguided by a human master plan. To design the next change urged by anthropogenically induced global warming is a completely different challenge: a “Great Transformation,” as the Scientific Advisory Council of the German Government on Global Change puts it. But there is no subject for this project as there has been no subject for such profound change in the past. Axel Schmidt

The concept of the technosphere is deeply rooted in the project of modern naturalistic ontology with its nature/culture dichotomy. Without its specific and unique mode of relationship, technology would not have made such a career. The growing together of single technologies has led to a network of such vast extent that Peter Haff dismisses man from his traditional role as Promethean ruler of technics. Haff suggests a shift from an anthropocentric point of view and passes agency over to the technosphere itself. The new post-heroic role of man is nothing but a “human component” of the technosphere. It is the “proliferation of technology across the globe” that “defines the technosphere.” Here, too, the traditional nature/culture boundaries become more and more blurred. Axel Schmidt

Concerning the technosphere, a co-evolutionary perspective redefines the mainstream interpretation: humanity is not “dominating nature” by means of technology, but technology can be studied as a new regime of what was called nature, i.e. the Earth. The technosphere could be seen as the territory by which internalization and externalization processes take place. The other important aspect underlined by the co-evolutionary perspective is contingence: modernity has been evolving with a particular structure of knowledge that is historically situated and is only one possibility among others. This structure of knowledge has allowed the technosphere to develop as if there were a huge tank of resources (and authority): nature. This structure is dominated by faith in both market and capital as the optima of well-being and wealth distribution. But these structures can be changed by using different ways to encode experience or to re-encode it as different histories are made. Pierre de Jouvancourt

There has never been a clear nature/culture boundary except for that within modern epistemology (Descola 2005), and, at the top of that, moderns produced a proliferation of hybrid beings that never were exclusively cultural or natural (Latour 1999). A consequence of this was that the Anthropocene and the emergence of the technosphere made us—heirs of the moderns—realize that the boundary was only epistemological. Moreover, we realized that human beings were being modified or ruined in a way that was contradictory to the aesthetic of nature and the attachments we had with the world (Serres 1992). Saying “nature is dead” is a way to celebrate or to deplore this situation. Pierre de Jouvancourt