The Current Phase of Human Evolution
Humans are defined by their relationships with four kinds of self-made technologies: the systems through which they know things, the tools that they use, the worlds that they imagine, and the arcologies in which they live, work, and play.
As they learned to make each of these kinds of technologies, humans learned how to re-make both themselves and their habitats. In the process, they transformed themselves into a new kind of entity: no longer mere biological beings or members of social groups but constructs of their own engineering. They became techno-human.
Techno-humans are ambitious and highly skilled engineers of machines and societies. Throughout their history, they have fashioned ever larger communities and arcologies to inhabit, re-making themselves along the way with new ideas, new skills, new sciences, new devices, new kinds of food, new ways to reproduce, even new bodies.
Ultimately, it isn’t really surprising that they learned to become engineers of vast, even planetary-scale techno-human systems — energy, food, water, transportation, manufacturing, buildings, information, finance — literal architects of global futures. Once again they rebuilt the world around themselves, this time on every scale from the molecular basis of life to the life systems of the planet, all the while remaking themselves to fit their new environments.
The upshot of all this making is neither so much the Anthropocene, primordial nature despoiled by humans acting out their biological mastery, nor the Capitalocene, materiality destroying itself via market failures, resource exploitation, and over-consumption.
Rather, it is the Borg cube–something more like what some are beginning to call the Technocene–an arcology of planetary-scale, techno-human systems and their inhabitants, designed to serve and organize the collective techno-human imagination and enterprise, almost but not quite unaware of its social and ecological footprints.
As techno-humans, our responsibility today is simple: first, to learn to understand and govern ourselves, as techno-humans; and, then, to use our newfound powers to figure out how to re-make the Borg cube arcology into a place and a community that can be sustained and is also worth sustaining.
Techno-Humans and Their Habitats 