The Planetary Health Stack is a metaplatform, or platform of platforms, which incorporates the planetary model of perceiving Earth. It articulates the different living and nonliving, human and nonhuman entities that inhabit the planet. This is a prompt to conceive a geopolitical infrastructural model of planetary governance to solve or at least deal with emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemics but also with the future climate and social crisis.
Through the Planetary cosmogram “that presents Earth as an impersonal, geophysical process in which humans play the role of temporary mediators”, (1) we trace some issues that deal with post-human, more than human, or inhuman questions, realistic and materialistic points of view of the world we live in. We must recognize the nonhuman origin of the planet through the concepts of deep time and deep space and accept artificiality as a way of making, manipulating, manufacturing the planet and ourselves (as an obvious part of the planet) for better purposes than we have so far.
“We thus arrive at a processual picture of the planet, one in which inorganic objects, biological species, and geographical territories are approached equally as media for torrential forces, packing and unpacking themselves on various scales.” (2)
Through the planetary sensing infrastructures, we perceive the Earth neither just as a blue sphere or a blue marble, nor as juxtaposing nation-states that make their territories and nomos by drawing some lines, but as an agglomerate of chemical mixtures and substances that make and remake each other, evolving through deep time into another forms and matters.
“The earth is part of media both as a resource and as a transmission. The earth conducts, also, literally, forming a special part of the media and sound artistic circuitry.” (3)
“The geological material of metals and chemicals get deterritorialized from their strata and reterritorialized in machines that define our technical media culture.” (4)
It is real. It is here. It is chemistry. Matter, energy, and information. It needs agency. And even the World Health Organization Director-General urged us for a “new normal”. Transitioning towards what we call ‘a new normal’ must be guided by public health principles, together with economic and societal considerations. Besides the social and climate crisis deadlined to 2030, we are witnessing an unforeseen health crisis. Due to that, we can realize our interdependence on technical systems, chemical substances, tests, ventilators, masks, etc. Are the nation-states dealing well with the COVID-19 pandemics? We did not have until now such a demanding planetary sovereignty emergency.
Before heading into the proper concepts of the terms that give the name of the platform, I define them below.
Planetarity: a condition in which all earthlings are. Health: the World Health Organization’s proper definition, written on its Constitution, “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” [emphasis added].(5) Stack (Bratton, 2015): the accidental megastructure that without it, climate change as an epistemological accomplishment would not be possible in the first place.
The planetary condition gives us the way of working universally, toward a universal to come. “Health” gives us the definition of a more broadly molecular well-being. The Stack provides us the geotechnological capacity to sense, model, and act back upon the planet. Instead of a World Health Organization, we need a Planetary Health Stack. With its force and enforcement, not as a Westphalian institutional force, but as a planetary metaplatform sovereignty.
We need our sensing, modeling, and planetary sovereignty to help solve emergencies to come, such as the climatic and economic crisis. It is about matter folding matter, sensing, surviving, digesting, phagocytizing, and coevolving. The agencies needed to incorporate this reality are urgent if we want to survive.
Planetary
Survival is a word used in a great amount by racialized people in theory and praxis. People living in the Global South deal with life and death issues every day, not just once or twice in a century. And that feeling, that emergency, and that resilience should be condensed and helped to develop a form of a project of modes of being toward better futures, “The genre of the human must be expanded so that other less destructive modes of being human—and being planetary—might be formed”. (6)
The “catastrophe” of climate change is also a “catastrophe” of the ways in which the “genre” of the human has been designated as an excluding and accumulating subject. Yet this mode or way of being human, as one limited genre, might also be questioned and transformed. She [Sylvia Winter] suggests a project that attends to being human as praxis as a way to engage with the processes that sustain—and that might also remake—ways of being human. (GABRYS, 2018)
To engineer this project first we need to dive into the concept of planetarity and escape the notions of globality and locality both at once.
The planetary resists representation. In Spivak’s development of the concept of the planetary, the point is not to generate an evasive figure, but rather to thwart an engagement with the planetary that hinges on uniform epistemic representations. The planetary is not a ground or grounding. Instead, it signals toward an “inexhaustible diversity of epistemes.” The planetary demands a mode of inhabiting with what escapes translation or “acceptance.” It does not definitively come into being as globes or picture-postcards of floating blue marbles. The planetary is the difference, distance, and duration with, within, and against which it might be possible to think differently about being human and becoming collective. The planet might even “overwrite the globe” to undo the assumed uniformity of global systems and exchanges (GABRYS, 2018)
There is an urgent need to decolonize the world not just from the cis white European male, but also from the anthropocentric assumptions themselves. The decolonial issues are strongly entangled with the climate issues, because we, the colonized ones, will be the first to sense through our bodies the catastrophes to come. “The planetary is in many ways irresolvable, and yet it is a way to figure, de-figure, and re-figure collective responsibility to the other in postcolonial and decolonial circumstances.” (7)
Reconsidering, rethinking, and getting along with the non-humans, or inhumans if you want, are the necessary tasks to learn and incorporate these other modes of being, to manufacture ourselves in a way that Reza Negarestani and Iain Hamilton Grant pointed out in the Speculations on Anonymous Materials Symposium in Kassel back in 2014. (8)
According to the philosopher Reza Negarestani, “Inhumanism […] is both the extended elaboration of the ramifications of making a commitment to humanity, and the practical elaboration of the content of human as provided by reason and the sapient’s capacity to functionally distinguish itself and engage in discursive social practices.” (9) That means we are in constant revision by our reasoning. This revision makes possible the manufacturing and reengineering of ourselves with the planet.
The planet (therefore also ourselves) is a medium that makes itself as another structure and hence is not a stable total black box, but an open design project.
Health
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, speaking about the COVID-19 situation at the beginning of the global spread, mentioned that we are living in “the new normal”. (10) Since then, it has become a common term used by all people in the world, from scientists, physicians, and essential workers to the elderly in the most isolated places. “The new normal” intends to describe all the rules and measures to diminish viral dissemination. It is also understood as the new ways of living that will stay permanently in face of other difficulties to come with the increase of the planet’s temperatures.
Health, as thought here, is not just the lack of pathology in a given body, but the physical, mental and social well-being as emphasized in the World Health Organization’s definition. Nevertheless, it is not of our scope to discuss whether its physical, mental, or social aspects are isomorphic to each other.
For our project, health is recognized as a molecular well-being as universal as possible, composing together our models of artificial metabolisms working with recursivity but also evolutionary accidents.
Stack
Benjamin Bratton, while conceptualizing The Stack, draws this accidental megastructure where we live in, and claims how its accidents (“the invention of any kind of technology is also simultaneously the invention of a new kind of accident” [11]) by opposition also produce new technologies and new modes of being. Yuk Hui agrees with this thought, writing on how algorithmic catastrophes can give rise to the discovery of new systems. “Failures and catastrophes direct us to a broader reality, which the previous system cannot integrate, and it enforces the discovery of another system”. (12) In the Stack, Bratton begins his analysis by pointing out what he calls planetary-scale computation and an introduction to the theory of platforms, what it is and what it makes. Following his thought, platforms constitute a better model for this kind of computation than just machines, state as machines or even markets as machines. Rather, “it is a scale of technology that comes to absorb functions of the state and the work of governance”. (13) The platform is not a function of the state, or the market, for that matter, but becomes a third factor, a third sovereign actor. It also develops different features of sovereignty never thought of before, raising platform sovereignties that coexist simultaneously in spacetime with state, and market sovereignties.
These intermingled sovereignties develop a multiplicity of territories and totalities. Bratton drew a theoretical and speculative diagram with six different layers to better approach this plurality of features, divisions, notes, materialities, and the accidents that each layer produces. As the conjunction of all the accidents together with plans, the Stack becomes a platform of platforms, a better model of governance, and for governance.
The Planetary Health Stack
In face of the pandemics of an anthropogenic virus, we see the need for planetary-scale automation, that oversees all such territories, subjectivities, and nationalities. Bratton claims eleven assumptions to his thought of which we pick up some to our thesis:
- “Geoengineering” must be redefined as a scale of design effect, not a type of technology.
- Necessary shifts in geotechnology are likely to precede the necessary shifts in geopolitics. And to govern a geotechnology capable of making a difference, it must require the emergence of a new sort of geopolitics.
- The “surveillance” of carbon flows and energy flows is a good thing – better than of individual humans –, leading to an accounting of geological and chemical and energy flows itself.
To build better models of and for governance, and not just models but also modes, we should use this automation apparatus in our societies. The most important epistemological (although very pragmatic and even materialistic) task to make our species better and evolve to new ways of being is to know where, how, and when to apply and supply, add or retire some molecules to others and from others.
The Planetary Health Stack uses Artificial Superintelligence in its structure forming itself an inhuman cyborging with humans. Such interaction engineers new forms, structures, and functions, which we are unable to grasp. “It is inevitable that synthetic algorithmic intelligences can and will create things that we have not thought of in advance or ever intended to make, but as suggested, because they do not need our thinking or intention as their alibi, it is their inhumanity that may make them most creative.” (14) The Planetary Health Stack is cognitively alien to us, and we must embrace this alienation “as an impetus to generate new worlds” in the manner that Laboria Kuboniks claims in the Xenofeminist Manifesto.
Such a metaplatform works beyond territories and nation-states. It understands the planet and all the inhabitants as molecules and substances reacting upon each other, forming, deforming, transforming, and conforming with other substances and entities. It is completely agnostic to right, left, Westphalian nations, cultures, myths, and languages. It can identify and quantify molecules and atoms like a high-performance liquid chromatography to control epidemics, pandemics, climate change, georeactions, to map and decodify quantitatively and qualitatively the Anthropocene, and as a better way to modify and even transmogrify the planet itself.
References
1. Lukáš Likavcan, Introduction to Comparative Planetology (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2019), p. 19.
2. Ibid, p. 23.
3. Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) [e-book].
4. Ibid.
5. See <https://www.who.int/about/who-we-are/constitution>. Accessed on September 6, 2020.
6. Jennifer Gabrys, “Becoming Planetary. In: Accumulation (e-flux Architecture, 2017-2018).
7. Ibid.
8. See Reza Negarestani, “Frontiers of Manipulation”. In: Speculations on Anonymous Materials (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg0lMebGt9I).
9. Reza Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: Human” (e-flux journal #52 — feb 2014).
10. See the large number of entries made with that sentence by the WHO’s director-general in <https://www.euro.who.int>.
11. Paul Virilio apud Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), p. 13.
12. Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency (London: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd, 2019), p. 143.
13. Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), p. 7.
Bibliography
Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.
Cuboniks, Laboria. Xenofeminist Manifesto. London: Verso Books, 2018.
Hui, Yuk. Recursivity and Contingency. London: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd, 2019.
Gabrys, Jennifer. “Becoming Planetary”. In: Accumulation (e-flux Architecture, 2017-2018). Available at: <https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/217051/becoming-planetary/>
Likavcan, Lukáš. Introduction to Comparative Planetology. Moscow: Strelka Press, 2019.
Negarestani, Reza. “The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: Human”. E-flux Journal #52. Feb, 2014. Available at: <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/52/59920/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-i-human/>
Negarestani, Reza. “Frontiers of Manipulation”. In: Speculations on Anonymous Materials. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg0lMebGt9I>.
Parikka, Jussi. The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014 [e-book].
World Health Organization. (n.d.). Constitution. Retrieved from: <https://www.who.int/about/who-we-are/constitution>