Future-Crafting: The Non-humanity of Planetary Computation,or How to Live with Digital Uncertainty

The age of planetary computation Planetary computation.

An epochal shift rewires humanity by impacting on our capacity to feel, to perceive, to sense and to think. Far from being a mere matter of speed of communication, this change has to do with the creation of new interlocking ecologies where information is sensed and the cognitive, perceptual and affective spheres mutate. Sensation prevails over signification. Data becomes us. Mediation shifts to immediation. This is the Fourth Revolution, when the digital-online world spills into and merges with the analogue-offline world. In this onlife experience data is the new currency, code is synchronized to the human and the infosphere becomes synonymous with reality.1 The proliferation of smart algorithmic environments evolving in real time, the colonization of daily life by social networks, the tsunami of data, the unstoppable googlification of knowledge together create new ecologies of cohabitation and co-evolution of the human with the non-humanity of planetary computation. Given this scenario, two questions emerge as urgent. What is the impact of the ongoing informatization of bodies, artefacts and environments on the whole of human cognition, affectivity and perceptual faculties? What kind of narratives, images and fictions are needed to make sense of the ecologies we now inhabit, which are populated by agents on a continuum between the human and the non-human, data flows, codes, algorithms, and strange entanglements of silicon and carbon?