The term “technosphere” refers to the sum total of all technology on Earth. Long-distance communication, transportation, and energy networks and rapidly expanding megacities are all parts of the technosphere.
It is, quite simply, a massive thing. According to one estimate, it weighs 30 trillion tons.
The technosphere has also grown significantly in the last 200 years. While humans have always modified their material world, the scale of their technological systems exploded with the global industrial revolution unfolding since the late 18th century.
And some aspects of the technosphere — for example, artificial intelligence — have the capacity to function autonomously.
But I also have come to believe that there is more to the story of the technosphere than its staggering size and terrifying potential to become out of control.
As an historian who specializes in the history of technology and the material world, I conceive of the technosphere as a multi-scalar phenomenon with an extremely long history.
Moreover, questions about its potential autonomy are less significant and pressing than its profound material unevenness, which explains why inequality is such a massive global problem.
There is no going back to a pre-technological age. We have always inhabited a technosphere.
Instead, studying the deep, multi-scalar, and unequal nature of the technosphere prepares us to think about current global challenges like climate change and artificial intelligence.
We have inhabited numerous different technospheres over the course of many millennia, some of which are more sustainable and equitable than today’s technosphere. These historical insights can perhaps guide us towards modifying the technosphere to find less damaging ways to inhabit planet Earth.
The Technosphere Exists at Multiple Scales
The technosphere spans the Earth and extends vertically, deep into mines and boreholes and upwards into what has been called the orbital technosphere, an expansion of human technology into Earth’s atmosphere.
But it also exists at smaller scales. The chair on which I sit and the computer on which I write are equally parts of the technosphere.
The technosphere, then, can be highly local. It can also be planetary. And these scales and layers can exist at once.
The technosphere also includes things that we might call natural.
The container scale is a vital, and often overlooked, part of the technosphere.
Humanly-modified land is actually part of the technosphere. The atmosphere in which our carbon emissions and other waste products silently accumulate is also part of the technosphere.
These are the largest layers of the technosphere: human-modified land and planetary sinks.
The technosphere does not simply stop at the edge of big cities and networks. Instead, the technosphere and the biosphere are mixed together.
A field, for example, is a living phenomenon. It is part of the biosphere. However, a technologically modified field is part of the technosphere. Ensuing landscapes and their crops form techno-natural landscapes.
The largest scale of the technosphere is the planetary sink. Human waste accumulates all over planet Earth. For example, carbon emissions and microplastics are diffused throughout the Earth’s biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere.
The technosphere does not recycle material in the way the biosphere does. Instead, waste accumulates, producing phenomena like climate change and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which are among the greatest existential threats humans face.
The Container Scale
The container scale is a vital, and often overlooked, part of the technosphere. This scale involves the physical creation of containers for storing food, grain, animals, energy, humans, fire, waste, and money.
Without these containers, the technosphere could not function.
Humans are not trapped within a single giant capsule, but instead inhabit an extraordinarily diverse range of containers.
Containment creates small pockets of tightly controlled atmospheres: dry granaries, cool dolia, hot kilns. We surround ourselves with containers; we live inside them; we move around in them; we store things in them; we drink from them; we sleep in them; we are laid to rest in them.
Contained fire and clothing helped humans colonize every continent.
Today, planet Earth is full of containers. I wake up inside a container and travel to work in another one. I can move from Columbus, Ohio, to Sydney, Australia through a series of containers without entering the outside world.
The Belgian philosopher Lieven de Cauter calls contemporary society a capsular civilization, meaning that millions of people living in wealthy countries move almost seamlessly between climate-controlled containers and spend increasingly limited amounts of time in any kind of external nature.
The Technosphere Emerged Over Many Thousands of Years
Fully understanding the technosphere involves engaging with deep time.
Humans did not evolve fully in the biosphere and then suddenly create a technosphere. Stone tools, bows and arrows, and contained fire are technologies that evolved with us.
Today, most of the Earth’s landscape has been deforested, ploughed, urbanized, concreted, bulldozed, or otherwise transformed by and for people.
There is no going back to a pre-technological age. We have always inhabited a technosphere.
Our evolution, and the co-evolution of the technosphere, is the product of an ongoing, unending process of materially engaging with — and modifying — the world. By creating an entirely new planetary sphere, we have become the most powerful and dangerous creatures on Earth.
For 99.85 percent of human history, stone tools were the most prominent — and often the only — technology on Earth.
By 300,000 years ago, tool use was obligatory. We could not survive without stone tools and fire, which gave us the capacity to kill animals and cook their meat, to cut down branches and chop fibers.
In “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human,” the anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that we actually evolved through eating cooked food. Cooked food explains several peculiar things about humans: our small mouths and teeth, our weak jaws, our short intestines, and our outsized brains.
Early iterations of the technosphere were more modest than today’s. There were tools, simple machines, settlements, trade connections, fires, burned land, and piles of waste. But the impact of this technosphere at a planetary scale was minimal.
However, some of the most transformational changes to the Earth began 12,000 years ago when we began farming. Today, most of the Earth’s landscape has been deforested, ploughed, urbanized, concreted, bulldozed, or otherwise transformed by and for people.
Containing has always articulated stark power relations. Often, containers are explicitly used by some people to control the movements and activities of others: think of prisons or other forms of camp.
Farming appeared in something like twenty-four separate geographical locations, and emerged over several thousand years.
Farming sustained levels of population which a hunter-gatherer lifestyle could never support. Agriculture was, in a sense, a trap from which humans could not fully escape. By creating a storable surplus, it also created the conditions of possibility of social stratification and inequality.
Tool-wielding humans splintered into classes — elite groups exploited the surplus and built bigger containers for themselves to live in, and then filled their containers with more stuff.
As a result, inequality — material, technological inequality — widened.
Power Was Enacted in the Technosphere Through Containers and Marking Territories
Thinking about humans as powerless in the face of a dominant and increasingly autonomous technosphere can be frightening.
For instance, what happens if artificial intelligence takes over the world as we know it? This does appear to be a real possibility, according to writers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.
But for almost all technological interactions, a far more basic and pressing reality is sheer inequality.
Take containers, for example. Humans are not trapped within a single giant capsule, but instead inhabit an extraordinarily diverse range of containers.
The human management of land is also a deeply political development that has benefited some individuals and classes at the expense of enormous numbers of others.
I live in a very comfortable four-bedroom detached house in a U.S. suburb. Some people inhabit mansions with more rooms and gadgets than my house. A select few live in opulent palaces. Many more, however, inhabit single-room huts in sprawling favelas or barrios.
And too many people have no home at all. They make do with tents and other makeshift shelters.
In other words, people are differently enabled according to the kind of house they live in. This extreme unevenness contrasts with the kinds of domestic architecture constructed by animals. Different species of wasp build different nests, to be sure, but all paper wasps build roughly the same kind of nest.
Containing has always articulated stark power relations. Often, containers are explicitly used by some people to control the movements and activities of others: think of prisons or other forms of camp.
Some containers create conditions of extreme cruelty: torture chambers, prisons, gas chambers.
Others, like feedlots, abattoirs, and CAFOs, have intensified human control over animals.
The human management of land is also a deeply political development that has benefited some individuals and classes at the expense of enormous numbers of others. For example, the enclosure process evident in early modern Britain saw many people lose their rights to common land, and many were cleared off the land altogether.
Not everyone has access to the same technological networks; indeed, such connective inequality is among the most basic ways in which asymmetries of power operate.
This was particularly apparent in Scotland and Ireland. The first plantations in Ireland were established in the 1550s, in a direct attempt to uproot an old order and replace it with a new Protestant landowning class. Such processes magnified and naturalized the difference between classes of people.
The loss of the English commons followed. Land became contained.
One estimate suggests that around 200,000 miles of hedges were planted in Britain between 1750 and 1850, which was as much as had been planted in the previous 500 years. Once again, this process was steered by ruling classes rather than occurring all by itself. Landowners benefitted and working men and women lost out.
This enclosure process was then replicated when the British colonized North America. William Cronon argued in “Changes in the Land” that British settlers thought they saw an unimproved nature, when instead they saw a very particular form of unenclosed landscape created by Indigenous populations.
The fence was a key material agent of transformation, and barbed wire was a critical 19th century innovation.
Today, there are over 1 million kilometers of fencing in the Western U.S. alone.
Native American land was thus modified by European, capitalist agriculture. The practices of abandoning land and moving on, for example, became substantially more difficult as increasing amounts of land were enclosed with fences and hedges.
As U.S. production of cotton soared in the early 19th century, Native Americans — Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws — were violently driven off their land in the South and forced westwards.
We have to open our eyes to the nonmodern, the small-scale, and the egalitarian, and to explore the lost possibilities of technospheres past.
These histories have consequences today. Not everyone has access to the same technological networks; indeed, such connective inequality is among the most basic ways in which asymmetries of power operate.
Native Americans remain the most underserved of American groups in terms of telephones, internet, and broadband, for example, and we can trace these inequalities back to the ways land was distributed by colonizers.
What Does the Technosphere Do?
The technosphere, then, is best viewed as a fabulously complicated, extremely old, many-layered material tissue through which extraordinary inequalities are produced and naturalized, rather than as a megamachine against which all humans are powerless.
This interpretation matters because our evolution as a species makes no sense without the technosphere. Our hands, brains, and intestines are a result of a co-evolutionary process — one involving, among other things, stone tools, fire, housing, containers, and fences. Our environment is the fantastically varied niche that humans have built for themselves.
The technosphere encompasses modified land and carbon emissions, internet cables and urban sprawl, pens and computers. It is currently characterized by extraordinary, avoidable inequality and reckless material consumption.
Other, future technospheres may be possible, merging our medical and informational advances with smaller-scale, less resource-intensive technologies like those used in the past. Perhaps we can take inspiration from past technospheres and find a way to share our technologies more evenly.
To do this, we have to open our eyes to the nonmodern, the small-scale, and the egalitarian, and to explore the lost possibilities of technospheres past. For example, we might find in ecological sanitation, organic energy sources, airships, and communal landownership potential tools to create a world characterized by less plastic and oil, more effective recycling systems, and fewer fences.
