Constellating three documents that mark a story of changing hopes for a better future, historian Julia Adeney Thomas advocates to recognize the immaterial power of ideas that gave birth to the Anthropocene.

Historian of industrial chemistry Benjamin Steiniger describes the technological metabolism that is forging a connection between fossil materiality and humankind.

The arrival of the Anthropocene coincides with the era of political demands for “universal freedom,” as defined by Western philosophers. But whose freedom is this?

The year 1948 serves as an aperture through which we can rethink the history of the now; the decisive moment when the heap of fragments left by the fury of two world wars began to reassemble into new forms of technological, scientific, and cultural order that inform our contemporary situation.

Combustion engines, dynamite fishing, and the violent reshaping of terrestrial and marine landscapes: philosopher and chemist Jens Soentgen considers explosions a key principle of modernity.

Many tropes of Western modernity uphold a binary between race and technology—the former as hyper-organic and primitive, the latter inorganic and hyper-rational.

Is a different technosphere possible? Exploring this concept from the perpsective of the Aerocene: a nascent, collaborative, speculative vision of the future.