Incomputable Earth
Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:19th Feb '26
£85.00
This title is due to be published on 19th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Investigating the link between environmental breakdown and the increasing development of digital technologies, this is a vital intervention into what this means for our social, political, and planetary future.
Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis challenges the dominant narrative that positions technological solutions as the primary response to ecological crisis.
This open access collection argues that climate breakdown represents an irreducibly incomputable problem that cannot be resolved through algorithmic optimization or cybernetic planetary management. Radically interrogating the political epistemology underlying the Anthropocene hypothesis against the backdrop of new regimes of algorithmic classification and prediction, this volume addresses the crucial need to rethink the meaning and inter-relationality of “human,” “nature,” and “technology.” Drawing on feminist science studies, decolonial epistemologies, and historical materialist analysis, the contributors examine how computational frameworks transform Earth’s complex relationships into extractable data, perpetuating the very logics that created planetary crisis.
Examining new forms of subjectivity and resistance, this timely volume provides both rigorous critique of technoscientific planetary governance and speculative horizons for collective response to climate breakdown—offering a blueprint for reclaiming abstraction from computational capture while centering radically transformed ways of knowing and being human.
This book is available open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com It is funded by The Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
A blazing intervention into the Anthropocene’s mono-epistemic trap. This electrifying collection dismantles the cybernetic fantasies of planetary control, exposing their roots in capital’s real abstractions that reduce life to computable units. * Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015) *
By unearthing the entangled histories of computation, colonialism, and ecological crisis, this volume opens space for plural, radical imaginaries beyond extractivism. This is a necessary call for action related to ecological and epistemic justice: Decolonise digital futures! * Federico Demaria, co-editor of Degrowth (2014) and Pluriverse (2019) Lecturer in Economics, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain *
What is the shape of of the Anthropocene? As authors in this compelling collection argue, it is nothing like a grid, nothing like a material motherboard, but is rather something like shape-shifting incompleteness theorem, with materiality overrunning attempts at full epistemological capture. * Stefan Helmreich, Professor of Cultural Anthopology, MIT, USA *
A powerful mix of indignant perspectives unite in a profound critique of the transformation of the world into an abstract machine. There are many gems of undisciplined brilliance. * - Alf Hornborg, author of The Magic Technology: The Machine as a Transformation of Slavery (2022) *
A crucial set of essays for further theorization of the colonial Anthropocene as an extractive and digital project that produces epistemological and material violence as planetary. This is a vital intervention towards undoing and unthinking how territory can be sustained, returned and regenerated through technological solutions that only push us deeper into the abyss of capitalism’s destructive capacities. * Macarena Gómez-Barris, Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor Chair, Modern Culture and Media Faculty, Brown Arts Institute *
This extraordinary collection is an invaluable resource for those of us working to articulate the legacies and limits of computation as a technopolitics of command and control. * Lucy Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007) *
ISBN: 9781350264977
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
512 pages