July 2026 · Speculative World
The Multispecies Home
A house where the humans are the loudest tenants, not the landlords.
Who maintains the metabolic order, across what durations, against what otherness.
What is it to think the planet? What forms of thought are adequate to the task?
One answer: Planetarity as philosophical engineering. Earlier this year, I spent many a month on a planetarity syllabus that culminated in habitability as the core concept of my inquiry into planetarity. Having taken a break, I want to revisit the term “philosophical engineering” with the intent of replacing it with a new term that not only encompasses philosophical engineering, but also methods from design and speculation, and the use of new cognitive technologies, i.e., AI as Augmented Intelligence.
That term is Epistry.
Aside: I have been playing with that term, with more or less the same meaning that I am using here, for over a decade now, with this essay in particular being quite close to my current usage. Epistry is philosophy for a synthetic age, where we don’t just study the world, but make it. Or to put it in computational terms:
Epistry is philosophy when it becomes executable.
In this new adventure of abstraction, we aren’t abstracting away from the world, but rather, abstracting into the world. That is how philosophy becomes executable. In my mind, Epistry is an Aristotelian + Nagarjunian mode of intellectual being. They are the second most important thinkers (after Plato for Aristotle, and the Buddha for Nagarjuna) in their respective intellectual tradition, but that’s a plus.
At the risk of being reductive, Aristotle inspires my head, while Nagarjuna touches my heart. Their fusion makes for a vibe, a mood, an atmosphere more than a theory or a doctrine that I hope the second-in-commands would approve and adopt if they were alive today. But A & N are distant gods, Mahadevatas, and it’s always good to have some local guides, the Ishtadevatas who bless our pilgrimage.
Here are a few nearby minds who continue to inspire me: (in no particular order): Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstader, Christopher Alexander, D’Arcy Thompson, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Francisco Varela, J.J. Gibson, Jakob von Uexkull....If I had to think of a concrete step I want to take that goes beyond these Ishtadevatas, it’s that the epistrator has to engage deeply with the process of technology creation, especially technology that serves as infrastructure for doing science.
Four instruments for the same argument: a field note reporting what already happened, an institutional prototype specifying what could run it, a draft protocol writing the clause, a speculative world showing the argument already won. Each note below says in its own frontmatter which one it is.
The case made directly: against Chakrabarty, against Blake and Gilman, against the idea that sovereignty is where politics has to start.
Earlier this year, a four-month syllabus — Governance, Time, Space, Habitability — was the wandering that led here. Sixteen books, four questions, and the running notes below are marginalia against them: an excerpt, and a comment on what it does or doesn't survive once habitability displaces sovereignty as the thing being asked about.
| Book | Author | Month |
|---|---|---|
| The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty | Benjamin H. Bratton | Governance |
| Children of a Modest Star | Jonathan S. Blake & Nils Gilman | Governance |
| The Planetary (ed.) — not on Google Books; Berggruen library instead | Nils Gilman, ed. | Governance |
| The Climate of History in a Planetary Age | Dipesh Chakrabarty | Time |
| Timefulness | Marcia Bjornerud | Time |
| A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History | Manuel DeLanda | Time |
| Death of a Discipline | Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak | Space |
| Facing Gaia | Bruno Latour | Space |
| Hyperobjects | Timothy Morton | Space |
| Worlds Without End | Chris Impey | Space |
| The Little Book of Exoplanets | Joshua N. Winn | Space |
| How to Build a Habitable Planet | Charles H. Langmuir & Wally Broecker | Habitability |
| A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans | Jakob von Uexküll | Habitability |
| A Pattern Language | Christopher Alexander | Habitability |
| A City on Mars | Kelly & Zach Weinersmith | Habitability |
| The Goldilocks Enigma | Paul Davies | Habitability |
Canvases from the vault.