Gaia Wakes:
Earth’s Emergent Consciousness in an Age of Environmental Devastation
by Topher McDougal (Columbia University Press/Agenda Publishing)
The Spring of Futurism continues with Gaia Wakes, a book about how the world saves itself.
This book offers the Gaiacephalos hypothesis, which is that the Earth exists to create the Gaianous This is frustrating, first, because neologisms defining neologisms, second, because Gaia-Enceladus is already a thing, third, because you had ‘demiurge’ sitting right there as a much cooler term, and fourth, because I still cannot figure out a way to make a Gaianous Cube joke.
The hypothesis envisions the Earth today as the embryonic form of a global consciousness. The Gainous is not an objective, but a formal evolutionary stage, much like the move from single to multicellular life.
Like teleologically? No, because the author invokes a bespoke definition of ‘progress’ as advancing mutuality that naturally arises out of resource depletion arising out of entropy(?) and non-mutual behaviors. It is the Voltron model of evolution. Creatures work alone until they find themselves too weak to overcome the challenges of the environment that has arisen, so they start to collaborate, forming new organisms.
Like punctuated equilibrium? I guess, if it was also the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The world, due to what humans have done, is at a resource-depletion point on a global-scale. Humans are persistently unable to work on that scale, and repeatedly fail to include true prices for things, in part because they lack the capacity to do so. Luckily, humans have developed Artificial Intelligence, soon it is presumed to be general AI, and while humans cannot do this alone, they can do it with AI, approximating a new level of being.
Like the Singularity? No. I mean, yeah, but also no. This is not a synthesis; this is a super-organism. Enhanced humanity is a temporary measure. From the perspective of a global entity like Gaia, humans have unique ecological logic, but no more unique in function than any other species.
Oh, so not the Singularity, The Matrix. No, although the author veers towards creepy asterisks wondering whether a domesticated or even feral humanity would be bad for humans. Instead, while the damage to the planet is real if humans resist this, the real damage is more psycho-philosophical, in it functionally being a resistance to maturity, moving up the great chain of complexity, that all the cool sophonts are doing.
Like the Fermi Paradox? Yes. This is the solution. There are plenty of aliens, but it is Mogos all the way up.
The author is my sort of polymath. The scope of the discussion here is vast, to the point that some of my favorite chapters have no place in the book. He leans harder on Jared Diamond than anyone should, but otherwise his citation list is my favorite parts of my bookshelf.
There is a lot of thoughtful material here. In specific, I was prepared to hate the author’s core idea about the progression of evolution. I did not. Well, almost, but stick a pin in it. I think that the baggage from the language is heavy, but some of the ideas from it worth study, if they are not already, in various contexts.
The author was trained as an economist and it shows in the writing. In a good way. The analysis is grounded, and my notes on the reading have lots of crossing-out when the book anticipated a critique. Even if not always persuaded, that is good writing.
The brilliant core here is implied in the dual definition of gaiacephelos and gaianous. Leading with a great quote about how treating AI as abstract (the artificial) obscures the fact that it is not: a server needs power, an LLM needs IP to strip mine. Observing that the history of this sort of futurism falls into two sides of we can expect plenty or expect deprivation, the book wants to make for the synthesis where the two function together. There are always two things, the material conditions that allow a certain behavior and then the behavior itself.
You can already hear the protracted intake of air to set up the ‘however…,’ right?
While establishing sound facts and material conditions sets this book apart from more trash-destined takes, the book will ignore it when convenient. The book repeatedly acknowledges how much this is a problem, where the energy comes from and where the heat goes. But then we are back to the colonialism without tears model that More Everything Forever did such a great job exposing. The distinction here being that we are rending the sky in order to turn a parking lot into paradise.
I would take this vision of the future over the other, if only its resistance to infinite growth, but it still seems to be the same sort of hedge that the Green New Deal serves in The invention of Infinite Growth, where growth is finite, but conveniently so, just enough to fund the author’s dreams.
My hard “no” here is with the…I am tempted to refer to it as anthropocentric nature (as the Gaia Hypothesis at large gets accused of), but the national park-like vision of the future gets misanthropic. No, the real issue here is the End of History fallacy. The book treating eukaryotes and nation-states on par with one another is shocking. love eukaryotes. Some of my best friends are eukaryotes. Nation-states are fine. I live in one. But Westphalia was not that long ago and modern politics gives plenty of reasons to criticize the concept, nor is it as logistically functional to the progressive version of complexity.
It is the sort of thread that you can pull on and take out the whole house of Jenga blocks, because so much of the vision of the future here rests on the idea that the situation builds on top of the existing world, but other sorts of Futurism do not fit to make the gaianous happen.
It is good to read something where most of the time, it does not feel like someone trying to sell you a monorail and more like a measured and academic consideration of the situation. It is good to read something that treats the actual existential threats that the world faces as real and consequential. But for what it spares in creating evil it stands to pay out in perpetuating complacency in the sort of idealized next world.
My thanks to the author, Topher McDougal, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Columbia University Press/Agenda Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 