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 maintains the metabolic order that keeps a place livable, across what durations, and in the face of what otherness? This site treats those three questions as one question: what displaces sovereignty as the thing politics has to answer to first.
Habitability is not a background condition. It is achieved, and it can be lost. If that is true, it is the kind of thing a constitution could be built on — not just a goal a government adopts once the more important business of sovereignty is settled.
Essays make the case directly, against named interlocutors. Everything else — Field Notes, Institutional Prototypes, Draft Protocols, Speculative Worlds — builds toward a world where the case has already been won, without saying so outright.
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.
nothing drawn yet