“There’s nothing weaker than a global system that becomes a single unit. […] the form of contemporary society, […] can be called doubly worldwide: occupying all the Earth, solid as a block through its tightly woven interrelations, it has nothing left in reserve, no external place of withdrawal or recourse on which to pitch its tent. Society knows, moreover, how to construct and use technologies whose spatial, temporal, and energetic dimensions are on the scale of worldwide phenomena. Our collective power is therefore reaching the limits of our global habitat. We’re beginning to resemble the Earth.”

– Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, 199011Michel Serres, Le Contrat Naturel. Paris: Éditions François Bourin, 1990; tr. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson, The Natural Contract. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995, p. 41.

Like a globe or other planetary body, this monumental orb was one in a series of satellites launched by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the early to mid-1960s, during the peak of the Cold War, to facilitate global telecommunications. More specifically, this rigidized balloon, named Echo II, was sent into low-level atmospheric orbit to relay signals between distant points on Earth. Other satellites affiliated with the Echo, Telstar, and similar programs likewise supported the transmission of fax images, telephone calls, television images, and feeds, etc., thereby refiguring and consolidating the world—rendering it more “solid [. . .] through its tightly woven interrelations.” Many key thinkers at the time celebrated the increased connectivity ushered in by the expansion of communication networks and electronic media, not to mention commercial airline travel. Marshall McLuhan, for instance, famously characterized this reordered world as a new “global village,” wherein breaking news was instantaneously available across the planet’s reach. Others, however, took a more negative view, lamenting the growing impossibility of potential detachment, or autonomy, in a society increasingly enveloped by various circuitry. As a historical artifact, this technological sphere reminds us that the world proceeds by way of precise developments, and it would do us well to remember the past, in its peculiar complexity, as we navigate the present. As an apparatus—and one, like so many others, which emerged from a military‒geopolitical context—Echo II prefigured and enabled our world today, wherein the global economy operates with unprecedented power and swiftness. We might, in fact, think of the shipping container—as it plies the world’s oceans aboard sublime-scaled barges, carrying endless goods according to endless financial transactions—as some sort of correlate or derivative, especially if we take seriously filmmakers Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s claim in The Forgotten Space22Allen Sekula and Noel Burch, The Forgotten Space: A Film Essay Seeking to Understand the Contemporary Maritime World in Relation to the Symbolic Legacy of the Sea. New York: Doc.Eye in co-production with Wildart Film, 2010. that it is the fundamental hardware, or architecture, of our day. As a form, it embodies the idea of the world as a single unit—unified by technology, by globalized capitalism, by environmental crisis, and so on. And, more pertinent for Anthropocene discussions, of the human as world and the world as human. That we have largely remade the world in our own image is clear: land is increasingly homogenized by corporate, genetically modified agriculture; urbanization expands in a fashion some describe as “planetary,” or without outside; biodiversity is plummeting, with those species domesticated or oddly adaptable to human-centered environs (e.g. coyotes, seagulls, cockroaches, certain bacteria) among the few to expand in numbers, like we ourselves. For many of us, there is a sense of entanglement in something so big and accelerated that it seems impossible to identify its edges or ways of extracting ourselves, of finding external places on which to “pitch our tent,” to again borrow Serres’ analogy. The word “Anthropocene,” of course, is meant to capture some of this. Yet, we should also be wary of this concept, including the wildfire pace with which it is being adopted. For broad, planetary frames—like the satellite view from above—have a tendency to subsume particularities into totalities, with the risk of naturalizing, or depoliticizing, states of affairs along the way. The geological dimension of the Anthropocene term only exacerbates this. As the environmental justice scholar Nicholas Brown once meaningfully posed to me, echoing many others’ concerns: What human inequities and violences are smoothed over when we think in terms of deep, rather than historical, time? There is a particular opacity to anthropogenic climate change, one of the defining phenomena of our purported Anthropocene condition, a way in which representation itself is thrown newly into crisis in its midst. Pictures of polar bears atop icebergs, industrial smokestacks, the vast stretches of the Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada, and other devastated landscapes—all these remain, somehow, too linked to a literal, illustrative mode, unable to convey the multiplicity, relationality, and indeed opacity, of it all. One of the key questions we might ask ourselves is how to see and think, relentlessly, the geological and ecological together with the social, economic, political, and ethical, while keeping issues of power and justice always center stage. How to resist images of wholeness in favor of fractured, or stratified, viewpoints that foreground difference?