A paper on the global interconnection of augmented intelligence, cognitive capitalism, financialization and the Anthropocene for Fall Semester (Miami), unpublished.
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Abstract. A new planetary scale of computation demands a new planetary scale of politics. As the current debate on the Anthropocene points too, no political agency is possible without the recognition of a new cognitive perspective on the whole planet. The eye of modern perspective was born trough an equivalent paradigm shift, bringing innovative techniques of optical projection from the mathematicians of Baghdad to Florence. A further dimension of depth was so added to aesthetics, many crooked paintings were straightened and a new political vision of the collective space was inaugurated. Similarly, a further cognitive dimension has to be imported today from computation into political thought, in order to be able to ‘see’ and grasp the oceanic depth of the global datascape and to disclose the novel techno-complexity of the social space. Something similar happened already in cybernetics with the shift from the first order to the second order cybernetics, that is with the recognition of the meta-level of the observer observing a system of observers. Any century produces its own epistemic rift. The making of a global datascape is calling for a new epistemic eye.
German translation “Das Auge des Algorithmus: Kognitives Anthropozän und die Entstehung des Weltgehirns” out for Springerin magazine #4/October 2014. +PDF
