Technospheric Speculations: Materiality, Textuality and Impropriety

I initially encountered the term ‘technosphere’ through the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Technosphere Magazine project (2016-2019), and it has become an object of consideration in my own writing. The HKW editors position the technosphere as the driver, since at least the mid-twentieth century, of our progression into the Anthropocene epoch (Haus der Kulturen Der Welt, 2019). A shifting network of interconnected parts, it reflects our increasingly digitised ecology yet also increasingly determines it through feeding back into the thinking and acting of those organisms within it: ourselves. While the Technosphere Magazine project ranged expansively into non-human ecological terrains, the focus of this chapter proceeds through the technosphere’s inter- (and intra-, and supra-) human dimensions. I do not wish to reify the term ‘technosphere’ and, in so doing, slip into an agential techno-utopianism echoing those I will critique. At points in the text which follows I will write of the technosphere acting in certain ways and doing certain things, but it is important to periodically remind ourselves that this is not some abstract, conscious entity which acts upon us from an external position. Rather than labouring this point at each mention of technospheric action, logic or intention though, I place trust in the reader’s capacity to interpolate this: the technosphere is an accretion of human activities, histories, relations, circulations, technologies, systems of production and ascribing of value, societal structures, and more. It is a structure which frequently diminishes humans, but is constituted through ourselves and our collective practices, structures and technologies.