Gaianomics, or The Self-Designing Earth

“We are as gods and have to get good at it.” — Stewart Brand

The system that learns to see itself

We are deep into the age of cybernetics. It started with a set of subtle but persistent ideas that were gleaned as early as the 17th century — notably by Thomas Hobbes, André-Marie Ampère (the first to use the term “cybernétique”), Erasmus Darwin, Alexander Humboldt, Samuel Butler, among others — before being brought forcefully into the mainstream with the emergence of computers, telecommunications and systems theory. Thanks to thinkers like Herbert Simon, Peter Drucker, Donella Meadows, and Friedrich Hayek, the ideas of cybernetics rapidly crossed over into economics, ecology, management thought, and product design. In the last 20 years, the business success of systems-based approaches (“Lean Startup”, “Agile”, “Design Thinking”) has made many of these notions truly commonplace, at least in the business world — even though their origin is known to few, as the creators of those approaches often borrowed ideas unconsciously from the collective zeitgeist.

Through these multiple lenses, humanity slowly but surely began to form a coherent picture of the global system of which it is a part. We came to suspect that we are part of a self-regulating socio-technical-biological system that spans all existence on Earth (and its adjacencies): the Whole, AKA Lovelock’s Gaia, Humboldt’s Cosmos, Malone’s global supermind or Chardin’s noosphere. This supermind happens to have developed…