Crawling the Anthropcene and its Culture

The Salzburg Global Seminar had offered, during five days (20-25 February 2018), to four dozen people  – including the author of this post – to examine  the theme „The Shock of the New. Arts, Technology and Making Sense of the Future“ :  „What will our planet look like in 2050 or 2100? Who or what will control our lives? What will it mean to be human?“

These and other tough questions were the central focus of this session, bringing together artists, creative thinkers, innovative cultural practitioners and some „odd“ from around the world to re-imagine the nexus between the arts, technology and human futures. Some visions sprinkled at and after the meeting.

Among the open focus questions for the participants, not answered at the end of the seminar: What does it mean to be human in the Anthropocene?  Little ad-hoc answer, evidently. What’s the Anthropocene, going beyond what scientists could imagine as an engineered geosphere?  How much technological and cultural change comes on top of these hard changes of the Earth planetary dynamics? Is it „Earth in Human Hands“ as David Grinspoon describes it? Do we face a Gaia Bottleneck?

Before going big, too big – lets crawl the planet.  I offer here a link to a weekly crawl of the Internet. Anthropocene, culture and related matters the ‚robot‘ is asked to gather and bundle under the title „Terraformer’s Dépeches„.

Let’s see what is found ‚out there‘, before turning back to the question: „What does it mean to be human in the Anthropocene?“ A recent edition featured an interview with the French Scholar Bruno Latour „The Critical Zone of Science and Politics“.