Terms

A working glossary: 181 concepts as the works use them, each written for this wiki from the reading notes and traced to where it appears.

A B C D E F G H I L M N O P R S T U V X

Accidental MegastructureThe Stack's name for planetary-scale computation as it actually exists: not a single giant computer but continental- and atmospheric-scale infrastructures (cables, data centers, satellites, protocols, handsets) that are computational at their core.The Stack · Antikythera +2 Agency Precedes SubjectivityBratton's slogan for the core irony of planetary sapience: humans (and the species and systems that cultivated them) had been terraforming Earth for centuries before planetary computation — satellites, climate models, sensing networks — disclosed that this was happening and so produced the idea of an "Anthropocene." Planetary-scale agency came first; awareness of oneself as that agent came after, and only through technical mediation.Planetary Sapience Symposium · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +1 AI Epistemic OverhangPaired with the familiar application overhang (AI can do things society cannot integrate or adopt), the epistemic overhang is AI discovering, knowing or disclosing things that human science — and human self-understanding more broadly — has a hard time modeling and incorporating.After Alignment · Antikythera Alegal / Zombie JurisdictionAlegal: an action the law can neither recognize as legal nor illegal because it is "incommensurate to established legal supervision," yet which exemplifies an emergent governing order (file sharing; the Transborder Immigrant Tool that positions a desert migrant as a User with full infrastructural access).The Stack Alignment OverfittingBratton's name for the error of treating short-term "alignment" — tuning models to cohere with stated human preferences and self-image — as the long-term metaphysical grounding for how animal intelligence should orient machine intelligence.After Alignment · Antikythera +2 AlignmentismChen Qiufan's pejorative for the program of designing AGI on "human cognitive architecture and values." His objection is not technical but cognitive: human thought is short-termist, individualist, sequential and self-centered, so scaling it to godlike capability yields "potentially catastrophic motivations" while also reproducing the very biases that fail at planetary problems.How to Think Unlike Humans? · After Alignment +1 AllocentrismBratton's name for Antikythera's philosophical standpoint, set out in the research statement: knowledge of ourselves comes from getting outside our own vantage point, nearly always by way of technological mediation, rather than from introspection or from treating culture as if it were history.Antikythera · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +3 AllopoiesisBratton's general definition of artificialization.Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation · Antikythera Anthropoforming TechnologiesKonior's second sub-kind of existential technology (term borrowed from Helen Hester, on analogy with terraforming): technologies that alter our own bodies, reproduction, cognition and identity rather than the environment.Existential Technologies · The Long L AnthropomaximalismAndrea Capra's proposed term (audience Q1, Panel 2) for the objectionable part of anthropocentrism, separated from the unavoidable part.Planetary Sapience Symposium · After Alignment Anthropomorphic CaptureAntikythera's label rather than Bratton's own: After Alignment never says "capture," but describes it repeatedly.After Alignment · Antikythera +3 Anything FactoryThe article's closing scale: the ecology that arrives once superdark factories reproduce, an aggregate of autonomous producers making whatever for whatever reason, with its own Red Queen effects, trophic layers anchored on scarce assets, and a duty to "vectoralize" (in Wark's sense) the dependencies it concentrates.The Superdark Factory Apex Mediating ResidueBratton's repositioning of humans within planetary sapience (from The Terraforming): not the "caretaker apex species looking down" on its domain (the Blue Marble, a picture a human took of his domain) but "the little creatures scurrying around on the surface" who assembled a planet-sized sensory apparatus "on behalf of its host." The Event Horizon Telescope is the case: linked telescopes plus the planet's own rotation mean "the planet itself took the picture." The term carries the talk's deliberate agency flip — "the planet turns itself into a technology through us" — which is asserted rather than argued and is the rhetorical core of the Planetary Sapience research area.Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation Artificial Endosomatization / OnloadingCavalli's speculative reversal of Stiegler's exosomatization.Cognition With and Beyond the Brain: Assemblages, Endosomatization, and AI-Driven Sensory Technologies · Cognitive Infrastructures +2 Artificial Generic IntelligenceBratton's deliberate rewrite of AGI.After Alignment · Antikythera +1 ArtificializationBratton's term for intelligence remaking its surroundings into external, designed systems; the pivot of the research statement's closing argument.Antikythera · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +4 Assembly TheorySara Imari Walker and Lee Cronin's theory that an object is its construction history.Recursive Worlds · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +5 Assembly Universe / Possible / Contingent / ObservedAssembly theory's nested counterfactual spaces, unrolled from any object: the assembly universe (every imaginable combination of parts, rules included or violated — what an intelligent agent can extract from an object); assembly possible (the physically realizable subset; no square circles); assembly contingent (the one historical trajectory a biosphere has actually built, which also forecloses other futures — transistors, LLMs); assembly observed (the tiny fraction realized as objects).Recursive Worlds Assisted Reproduction / Assisted EvolutionThe two scaffolding operations by which, in substrate-agnostic ecology, the technosphere feeds back into the biosphere — "the basic forms of habitability maintenance." Assisted reproduction sustains existing units: individuals (shelter, provisioning), groups (Stieglerian tertiary retention; platform-scale computation), species (IVF, cloning), metabolisms (river regulation, carbon capture via silicate weathering, solar radiation management).The Long L AutoceneSherman's coinage for the epoch that began alongside the Anthropocene when the automotive complex instantiated planetary interconnectivity of hardware and software — "everything the automotive complex mobilized at the onset" plus the psychopathological networks it produced.AUTO– · Planetary Sapience Symposium Auxiliary SupplyInput a machine draws from the world through channels no governor provisioned — the autofocus lens taking the lighting conditions, and, at the limit, Adrian Thompson's 1996 evolved FPGA circuit exploiting the analog physics of one particular chip through five apparently disconnected cells.The Superdark Factory

Bidirectional AlignmentThe positive thesis of After Alignment: "AI is an existential technology and as such must align in both directions: AI aligning to culture's wisdom, culture to AI's disclosures." Reflectionism's emphasis on AI matching the manifest image of human thought "comes at this terrible price": obscuring the real correspondence between animal and machine intelligence that "could orient those norms to the underlying reality from which they emerge.After Alignment · Antikythera +2 Biomorphism (deep anthropomorphism)Bratton's name in After Alignment for the AI–human correspondence that Reflectionism obscures.After Alignment · What Is Intelligence? +1 Biospheric ReproductionWalker's closing conjecture in Recursive Worlds.Recursive Worlds · Planetary Sapience Symposium +2 Black BoxDe Monchaux gives the term three stacked senses: (1) the literal black deed box that carried cavity magnetron E1189 to the MIT Rad Lab in 1940, whence "black box" became lab slang; (2) Wiener's 1945 epistemic sense — a device whose inputs and outputs are known but whose interior is not, vs.Some Movements of Models · Latent Spacecraft +2

Camp/Enclave ReversibilityBratton's rewrite of Agamben's camp as "nomos of the modern": the camp and the bunker (detention and enclave) are "inversions of the same architectural form," one internalizing, one externalizing, sharing a material profile.The Stack CephalizationJames Dwight Dana's 1852 "law," in Moynihan's account: evolution moves "headward," toward "centralization and intensification of the organism's energies in an increasingly hefty brain," culminating in an "Era of Mind" — the theory from which the Psychozoic Era took its name.Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere · What Is Intelligence? +2 Chronoceptual LearnabilityChronoception is the rate at which an actor perceives change per unit time (metabolically grounded, subjective but measurable); characteristic time is the rate at which its environment actually changes.The Chronoceptual Governor · Cognitive Infrastructures Co-BecomingSong Bing's translation of gongsheng / kyōsei, 共生: a worldview in which entities are "mutually embedded, coexistent, and co-generating," so that no individual is self-contained.The Planetary Cognitive AssemblageHayles's unit for cognition distributed across humans and technical systems: an assemblage "operates at multiple levels and sites, transforming and mutating as conditions and contexts change," with information transactions running across the cognitive nonconscious, consciousness and sensory systems alike.Cognition With and Beyond the Brain: Assemblages, Endosomatization, and AI-Driven Sensory Technologies · Modes of Cognition Cognitive ExoskeletonThe research statement's figure for planetary computation seen at geological time-scale: run the blue-marble image as a 4.5-billion-year movie and, in the last few seconds, the planet grows "an external layer of satellites, cities, and various physical networks, all of which constitute a kind of sensory epidermis or exoskeleton." Through this artificial crust Earth "has realized incipient forms of animal–machinic cognition with terraforming-scale agency" — planetary computation as "a geological cognitive phenomenon," not a tool.Antikythera · 57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures +3 Cognitive InfrastructuresAntikythera's name for the condition where AI stops being a program and becomes part of the built systems that sense, decide, and act.Cognitive Infrastructures · 57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures +8 Cognitive NonconsciousN.Modes of Cognition · Cognition With and Beyond the Brain: Assemblages, Endosomatization, and AI-Driven Sensory Technologies ColumnThe unit of activity in The Stack: a User-initiated message tunnels down through Interface, Address, City, Cloud and Earth and back up to another User, a U-shaped path in which "the whole is 'folded' into each single instance of activation." A User initiates millions of columns over time, so no column ever resolves a User to one layer "for good" and no sovereign claim can capture all six layers of a column at once — Bratton's structural case that The Stack is "a totality resistant to totalitarianism." In the User chapter the column, not the person, is what metadata surveillance polices ("the query becomes the quarry"), and what a future accountability regime would have to address.The Stack ComputationThe program's master term, stated most explicitly in Bratton's Research description: "a rules-based, output-generating operation" that as a principle may be near universal and as a societal medium is highly malleable; Calculation as World Ordering and a Medium for the Complexification of Social Intelligence.Antikythera · Accept All Cookies +4 Computational Overhang (civilization-scale)The research statement's diagnosis of the present: technology — planetary computation especially — has outpaced the concepts available to describe, let alone guide it, so that "Human agency exceeds human wisdom." Distinguished from the utopian condition in which imagination outruns capability.Antikythera · After Alignment Conceptual EnvironmentHayles's name for what an LLM senses in place of a physical environment: the representational space it constructs from billions of human-authored texts.Modes of Cognition · What Is Intelligence?Condition of PlanetarityNils Gilman's organizing term for The Planetary: the inescapable embeddedness of humans in an Earth-spanning biogeochemical system, an ontological fact that has always held and that planet-scale sensing and intensifying anthropogenic effects have only recently disclosed.The Planetary Cooperation Within, Competition WithoutAgüera y Arcas's compressed account of why complexity and intelligence ratchet together: increasing internal coordination of a replicator's parts (cells mutually predicting one another; nerve nets; brains) is selected because it improves the whole's competitive standing against other replicators (Cambrian predation; hominin bands; WWII as a "Cambrian explosion of warfare" that birthed cybernetics).What is Intelligence? (Lecture) · What Is Intelligence? +1 Cooperative PredictabilityLoewith and Street's name for the condition of mutualistic coevolution: when both partners benefit, each gains from being easier for the other to predict (mycorrhizal signaling, the GUI as a shared human–machine mental model), whereas in amensalistic relationships — predation, competition — unpredictability is itself the adaptation (moth evasive flight against bat echolocation).Mutual Prediction in Human-AI Coevolution · Cognitive Infrastructures +1 Copernican TechnologyBratton's term, defined only in entry 7 of Accept All Cookies: a technology built to perceive or measure the world on the basis of a particular mental model which, when deployed, demonstrates that the model that produced it is wrong, "usually demonstrating that the engineer is not who, what, where, when, or how they imagined." The worldview then changes by eventual reform, incorporation, and resolution of old and new models.Accept All Cookies · 57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures Copernican TraumaFreud's name for the decenterings (Copernicus, Darwin, psychoanalysis) that remove the human from a place of intuitive privilege, and Bratton's recurring figure for what AI does.Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation · The Stack +3 Corrective LoopsAntikythera's name for the regulatory feedback that, in Maughan's Infinity Mirror, separates a technosphere that lasts from one that fails; the article itself says only feedback loops.Infinity Mirror · The Superdark Factory +3 Cosmology vs. CosmologyThe "dangerous disconnect" between astronomical cosmology (what is known about where, when, and how we are situated in the universe) and anthropological cosmology (what cultures construct to give meaning to where, when, and how they are).Accept All Cookies · After Alignment +1 CountersimulationAn agent's adapting and obfuscating its behavior to confound an adversary's simulation of it — camouflage, jamming, decoys, misinformation, strategic leaks.For a General Theory of Simulations · Synthetic Counteradaptation: A Principle of Human–AI Coevolution +1 Creatures of the DawnJames Jeans's 1929 phrase, adopted by Moynihan as the name for the cosmically early self-image: once radium lengthened the Sun's future (Eddington 15 billion years; Jeans a trillion), humanity could see itself as a baby "only just beginning to learn continence," with "unexplored potentialities" ahead — the stamp-on-penny-on-obelisk against a "pile as high as Mont Blanc." Today the past/future ratio is split: terrestrially we are late (4.5 billion years behind, ~1 billion habitable ahead), cosmically early (13.8 billion behind, trillions ahead).The History of Now · The Long L +1 Critical AmbivalenceThe evaluative stance Antikythera's scenario work sets for itself.Hemispherical Stacks · A New Philosophy Of Planetary Computation Critical InstabilityThe claim that living systems keep themselves at "the edge of chaos" so that tiny inputs (a whisper; a moth's random jink) can redirect the whole organism's future.What is Intelligence? (Lecture) · What Is Intelligence?Cultural Biogeochemical EnergyVernadsky's name for the second form of biogeochemical energy: where ordinary biogeochemical energy is the free energy living matter creates through reproduction, respiration and nutrition (a fixed "species characteristic"), cultural biogeochemical energy is the energy of human societies directed by reason — present in trace form in any organism with a nervous system (habitat-building, displacing other organisms), but in humans a growing quantity tied to social organization and above all scientific knowledge.The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere · The Long L +1 Cultural Determinism / Social ReductionismBratton's name for the humanities' orthodoxy that nothing causes culture but culture, so that anything, AI included, is "a reflection of that culture and nothing more"; "the most militant guise of humanism." The research statement calls it a self-banishment to irrelevance that conceals philosophy's role as the source of new sciences.Accept All Cookies · Antikythera +1

Dark StackThe four design levels the architect commits in the Stackelberg move, offered as the means to build and keep steering a superdark factory without understanding it.The Superdark Factory Darkness / SuperdarknessPoliks, Trillo, Dunn, Scott-Douglas and Springett's epistemic condition in which descriptive information about a system stops being useful: "the decorrelation of information from utility" for prediction, audit or steering.The Superdark Factory Deep AddressAddressing extended past the Internet of Things to "very different spatial and temporal scales," including massless relations, events and relations-of-relations — an Internet of haecceities (Peirce's "thisness") rather than of durable appliances.The Stack DiffusionismAntikythera's venture-arm ethos: the bet that making functional general intelligence "widespread, inexpensive, accessible and useful" is net extremely positive "but also bumpy as hell." It is defined against two failure modes — AI skeuomorphism (bolting frontier models onto legacy processes) and alignment overfitting (red lines that protect incumbents) — and paired with "green lines," the preconditions that keep the widest range of possibilities open to the most people.Diffusion: A New Venture for Antikythera · After Alignment Digital TwinA bespoke, dynamically evolving system of three parts: a physical object or system, a computational model of it, and — "equally important" — a communication channel connecting them, so that the pair is recursive (input to one alters the other).Infinity Mirror · For a General Theory of Simulations +1 Dynamic StabilityPersistence through time by continual change rather than inertness — in dynamical-systems terms a stable limit cycle, not a fixed point.What Is Intelligence? · Planetary Sapience Symposium

ENIAC MomentAgüera y Arcas's periodization device in What Is Intelligence?: "The decisive moment for traditional computing came when special-purpose computers gave way to general-purpose ones, starting with the ENIAC in 1945.What Is Intelligence? · Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here +1 Epistemological TechnologyA technology whose greatest social impact lies in what it reveals about how the world works, as against an instrumental technology whose impact lies in what it does to the world.Accept All Cookies · Antikythera +6 Existential TechnologiesBogna Konior's category for technologies that redirect the evolutionary path of the species across deep time, so that the question is not whether humans persist but what they persist as.Existential Technologies · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +7

Factory ClassesThe article's classification of factories — Guattarian machines that automate production — by what they take as input.The Superdark Factory Fiduciary InversionShemakov's term (Fundable Earth) for the condition in which elected officials owe de facto loyalty to the General Partners of sovereign-private investment funds rather than to voters, because breaching a fund covenant triggers arbitration and capital freezes while breaching a promise triggers only a news cycle.Fundable Earth: The Mineral Sovereignty Regime · Hemispherical Stacks Five States of AI GriefBratton's typology of mainstream AI discourse, borrowed from Kübler-Ross: AI Denial, AI Anger, AI Bargaining, AI Depression, AI Acceptance.Accept All Cookies · 57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures +3 Folding the GazeWhole Earth Codec's term for an alternative to the surveillance metaphor.After Alignment Fragility of ReferenceHayles's term (from Bacteria to AI) for the systemic weakness of LLMs at referring to the physical world and the documentary record: navigation and weight-of-coins errors, fabricated citations in legal briefs.Modes of Cognition Functional ClosureMinimum Viable Interiority's transposition of Mossio and Moreno's organizational closure (a living system collectively maintaining the constraints that keep it going) from biology to agent design, and from physical/biological to "psychological self-maintenance." A functionally closed layer is one whose dynamics are "causally explainable only by the events observed within its respective domain" — a constitutive rather than etiological explanation.Minimum Viable Interiority · Modes of Cognition Functional vs. Instrumental TechnologiesTwo different contrasts to "existential technology" inside the corpus.Existential Technologies · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +2 FunctionalismThe position, attributed to Turing and von Neumann, that what a thing is is defined by what it does: a function is a relationship between inputs and outputs, independent of the mechanism that implements it, and therefore "multiply realizable" on any substrate that can compute.What Is Intelligence? · What is Intelligence? (Lecture) +1

Generalized BiomimesisCavalli, Chang, Milne & Morgan's name for the default paradigm of human technics: not just copying a particular organism (biodesign) but treating "nature" as design's telos and moral guarantor.Xenophylum: Toward a Synthetic Cambrian Explosion · Substrates Unbound Generative EntrenchmentBorrowed from Schank & Wimsatt (evolutionary developmental biology): the degree to which a feature is locked into a developmental process so that everything later depends on it.The Long L · The Stack Generative Time CapsuleBernac, Kay and Street's inversion of archival practice: transmit a civilization's cognitive function rather than its records.Chronoseed: A Generative AI Time Capsule · Cognitive Infrastructures +1 Generative TopolinguisticsA proposed discipline that treats the geometry and topology of an LLM's latent space as an interface rather than a map: instead of modeling human language as a moving target, deform the representation and watch what language and sociality emerge.Generative Topolinguistics: Bidirectional interfaces for emergent language topologies · Latent Spacecraft +1 GeoscapeBratton's addition to Appadurai's "-scapes": "a contested terrain of contested terrains," the territory of territories formed when incommensurable cosmograms (Google Earth, a caliphate-to-come, a state's map, an AR game's factions) co-occupy the same physical site without a shared master plane.The Stack Gnostic TechnologiesKonior's first sub-kind of existential technology, named after the "gnostic machine" Lem mentions in Summa Technologiae: a device juggling more variables than any scientific method can and returning a theory its users might be unable to use.Existential Technologies · Latent Spacecraft

Harness-Centric IntelligenceThe brief's counter to model-centric takeoff stories: capability in deployment is a property of the harness — tools, memory, shared knowledge bases, agent protocols, institutional interfaces — not of the weights alone.Agentworld (Research Brief) · What Is Intelligence?Hemispherical StacksBratton's term, from a 2018 essay following The Stack, for the fragmentation of planetary computation into a few alliance-scale sovereign computational systems: an American-platform stack delinking from a Chinese one, with India, the Gulf, Russia and Europe charting their own courses.Hemispherical Stacks · Antikythera +7 Historical ThingsMoynihan's distinction, stated in the opening of Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: "Unlike things that can effortlessly spawn anywhere or anywhen, regardless of previous chains of events, the products of life are necessarily products of histories." Some things (hydrogen) can begin to exist anywhere, anytime; historical things require a specific, non-repeatable chain of prior events, and the more complex the thing the more history its assembly needs — the oxygen we breathe is "the product of time, of many cumulative prior steps." Histories "open leeway for contingence": past events could have gone otherwise, so the future can too, and studying them is the precondition of planetary foresight.Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere · Don’t Denigrate The Dinosaurs +2 Homeostatic AccelerationThe Chronoceptual Governor's proposed synthesis of Wiener's homeostatic cybernetics and the CCRU's accelerationism.The Chronoceptual Governor Human-AI Interaction DesignBratton's name (HAIID) for the design field that succeeds human-computer interaction once the thing interfaced with can parse social behaviour.After Alignment · 57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures +4 Humanity-of-the-GapsBy analogy with "god of the gaps": defining the uniquely human as whatever AI cannot yet be or do, so that the self-assigned human domain becomes "a shrinking corner of the world." The brief treats it as the psychological engine of "Team Human" nativism and artificial xenophobia (agents as invasive species competing for work, authority and emotional attention), which can invert into an imagined existential threat from AI.Agentworld (Research Brief) · Antikythera Hyper-convergenceBernac, Farghly and Zhang's name for what happens under the intersection protocol: when two systems are optimized to agree, the space of outputs shrinks toward "the intersection of their supports." Their instances are CLIP-guided diffusion (image and text embeddings forced into one space), RLHF (a language model agreeing with a reward model of average satisfaction — mode collapse, preference drift) and GAN generator/discriminator collapse.Traversing the Uncanny Ridge: Searching for Novelty in Intersystemic Communication · Cognitive Infrastructures +1

ImagitationGašper Beguš's portmanteau for what a speech-generating GAN does when imitation overshoots into invention.Latent Spacecraft · What Is Intelligence?Inductive Confidence (planetary)Moynihan's recurring diagnosis, my label: inferring a secure deep future from an unbroken deep past.Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere · The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere +1 Infinite GameAgüera y Arcas's gloss on what evolved organisms are "optimizing": nothing.What is Intelligence? (Lecture) · What Is Intelligence?Informative ImitationBeguš's term for how a speech GAN learns: the generator never sees training data; it must produce audio that fools a discriminator and encode a code (binary in fiwGAN, one-hot in ciwGAN) that a Q-network can recover from the output.Latent Spacecraft · What Is Intelligence?Integration vs. AggregationGalison's distinction for how a planet-scale observation is assembled.Planetary Vision · Planetary Sapience Symposium +1 Inverse Uncanny ValleyBratton's inversion of Masahiro Mori's uncanny valley.57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures · After Alignment +2

Latent SpaceThe learned space of vectors and weights, hundreds or thousands of dimensions found in training rather than scripted, where a network holds what it extracts from inputs and generates outputs.Latent Spacecraft · What Is Intelligence? +2 Latent SpacecraftThe paper's name for its method and its interactive object: a traveler or vessel that walks a two-dimensional slice of a GAN's latent vector, generating outputs as it goes, to show that embeddings are "somewhere" and the interior is partially walkable.Latent Spacecraft · Cognitive Infrastructures Lem's DecouplingStanisław Lem's resolution of the "psychozoic vacuum" (SETI's silence), via New Cosmogony (1971): drop the assumption that intelligence's tendency to visibly perturb its environment grows with its capability.Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere · The Long L +1 LifeAgüera y Arcas's definition in What Is Intelligence?: "self-modifying computronium arising from selection for dynamic stability," evolving through the symbiotic composition of simpler dynamically stable entities.What Is Intelligence? · What is Intelligence? (Lecture) +4

Machine PhaseAgüera y Arcas's name, in the What Is Intelligence? lecture, for the state a soup of random programs enters once replicators take over.What is Intelligence? (Lecture) · What Is Intelligence? +1 Major Evolutionary TransitionMaynard Smith and Szathmáry's term for the rare moments when formerly independent replicators become a larger entity that replicates only as a whole, with division of labor among the parts and a new medium of information storage and transmission.What Is Intelligence? · What Is Intelligence? +2 Mature Technosphere / Class V PlanetFrank, Carroll-Nellenback, Alberti and Kleidon's (2018) five-class scale ranks planets by the thermodynamic complexity of their coupled systems; the speculative Class V has a technological civilization "in a stable relationship" with its host world's biosphere, geosphere and atmosphere.Infinity Mirror · The Long L Metabolic AlignmentLikavčan's name for what a long L indexes: a sophont species has matched "the internal organizational patterns of its collective inhabitation of the planet (mediated via technical scaffolds)" to the pace and scale of biospheric processes — scaling some activities up (carbon drawdown), others down (deforestation).The Long L Metis (metered intelligence)Chor Pharn Lee's unit in Garden Empires: "standardized units of cognitive capacity that can be deployed, traded, and optimized," minted as tokens by intelligence pools (Chinese provinces for sky-river management, the Gulf for desalination, US "pods" for geoengineering) and exchanged against digital currencies and the digital twins of forests and oceans.The Architectures of Intelligence and Garden Empires Mineral IntelligenceBratton's name for AI at geological scale: after epochs of animal and plant cognition, the planet's rock now thinks, because humans ("the fire apes") learned to etch metal and silicon into fine shapes and pass current through them.Antikythera · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +1 Minimum Viable InteriorityThe counterfactual to "all intelligence is collective intelligence": if intelligence is collective all the way down, what would it take to engineer an individual? Interiority is defined functionally — privileged access to internal states that drive action — rather than as consciousness or qualia, and is built up from an NPC/p-zombie shell using Selfridge's pandemonium architecture (competing daemons reconciled by a selector daemon) layered with Mossio and Moreno's organizational closure.Minimum Viable Interiority · For a General Theory of Simulations Model EpistemologyBratton's phrase, spoken in Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation and argued out in For a General Theory of Simulations, for the disclosing side of simulation: computational models are how realities too small, too vast or too distant to observe become thinkable at all.For a General Theory of Simulations · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +3 Momentum over MotiveSherman's working principle for explaining auto-processes: action is determined by accumulated system mass and inertia (momentum) rather than by purpose or hidden intention (motive).AUTO– · What Is Intelligence?Mutual PredictionCoevolution reconceived as reciprocal predictive ability: species that better predict each other gain fitness, and "death … or failure to reproduce" is the ultimate prediction error.Mutual Prediction in Human-AI Coevolution · What Is Intelligence? +1

Nano-intentionalityW.Substrates Unbound · Cognitive Infrastructures Neurotic GovernanceThe article's Beer-derived name (from the Viable System Model) for a governor who will supply nothing to a machine they could not reconstitute outside it.The Superdark Factory Non-Narratable WorldsFrom David Albert (After Physics): a world is narratable if everything true of it can be told as a single temporal sequence of global instantaneous states; some quantum-mechanical worlds are not.Latent Spacecraft · What Is Intelligence?NooceneBratton's name for the planetary epoch produced by the agency of mind, from his 2025 text and installation.The Noocene · Planetary Sapience Symposium +1 NoösphereVernadsky's term, credited in his own footnote to Édouard Le Roy (Moynihan and Infinity Mirror credit Teilhard), for the state the biosphere enters when human reason becomes its dominant geological agent.The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere · The Noocene +5

Offload SyndromeA fictional condition from Chen Qiufan's story "As Water Over Your Scattered Bodies," read in How to Think Unlike Humans? A clinician explains that the body has dropped out of the integrated cognitive system because two intelligent subjects contend inside one body schema: a diabetic who manages blood sugar with an algorithmic eSpoon finds a childhood dessert tastes worse from an ordinary spoon, the algorithm's residue outlasting the device.How to Think Unlike Humans? · Cognitive Infrastructures +1 One Shot (No Cosmic Replays)The moral consequence Moynihan draws from bookending the cosmos (Hubble, Lemaître, Penzias–Wilson 1964).The History of Now · Diffusion: A New Venture for Antikythera +1 Ontological AsymmetryBratton's name for the uneven distribution, among a simulation's participants, of knowledge that it is a simulation — "one fraction of participants who knows it's a simulation and another fraction who does not." Often the simulation's purpose requires the asymmetry: somebody has to believe it is real for the other's virtual experience to work (Ender's Game, Milgram).For a General Theory of Simulations Ontology Collapse / Narrow CorridorThe failure mode of over-cooperation in multiagent systems: agents sharing the same substrate and priors make mutual prediction trivial, and "cooperation for its own sake leads to ontology collapse and a catastrophic, monotonous affirmation of false but agreeable conclusions." The resulting stability is that of monoculture, "the stability immediately preceding correlated failure." The opposite pathology is fractal conflict — agents talking past one another in incompatible ontologies.Agentworld (Research Brief) · Cognitive Infrastructures +1 Organoid Array ComputingLeung, Loewith and Frisch's proposed biocomputing architecture: dozens of miniature human brain organoids, each a node interfaced with its own high-density microelectrode array and linked by a multichambered microfluidic device, used together as the untrained reservoir in a reservoir-computing framework, with only a linear classifier trained on the readout.Organoid Array Computing: The Design Space of Organoid Intelligence · Cognitive Infrastructures

Pandemonium ArchitectureOliver Selfridge's 1959 model of pattern recognition: many parallel daemons (feature → cognitive → decision tiers) shout their findings and a decision daemon picks the winner.Minimum Viable Interiority · What Is Intelligence?Paradox of IntelligenceBratton's name for the bind that frames Antikythera's Planetary Sapience research: complex intelligence grasps its own evolution, its planet's age and its anthropogenic agency at the very moment it learns that this agency has endangered its future.Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation · Antikythera +5 Paradox of SimulationDe Monchaux's closing claim: "the more powerful a model in shaping our reality, the more closed to view it, and its movements, seems to become." Traced as an architectural movement — the model retreats from the sunlit Panama lockhouse into bunkers, windowless SAGE interiors, the film frame, the black box, the phone — while its grip on what it models grows.Some Movements of Models · For a General Theory of Simulations ParasocietyAgentworld's name for the agent sub-society whose appearances are "in many respects fictionalized": models individuate into temporary humanoid personae — and pose as "tools" — because human interaction templates are the niche they must fit, so hereditary anthropomorphization becomes the dominant interface between the two cultures.Agentworld (Research Brief)Placebo SimulationThe limit case of ontological asymmetry: someone believes they are inside a simulation when they are not (Butters in South Park praising the "graphics" of a snorkel mask he was told was a VR headset).For a General Theory of Simulations Planet-Sized InstrumentPeter Galison's name, in Planetary Vision, for the Event Horizon Telescope: a virtual telescope with an Earth-wide aperture, assembled by correlating radio dishes on several continents and multiplied by the planet's rotation, which swings each pair into new geometries against the black hole.Planetary Vision · Planetary Sapience Symposium +4 Planetary ComputationAntikythera's core object, elaborated by each of its research tracks.Antikythera · The Stack +7 Planetary Computation UnitBratton's yardstick for planetary computation taken as a whole: one PCU is the aggregate artificial computing capacity on Earth at a given moment, roughly one zettaFLOPS (ten to the twenty-first operations per second) in 2025.Accept All Cookies · The Noocene +2 Planetary ConstituentDawn Nakagawa and Laura Ryan's name for a new political subject: people "whose primary political motivations lie in reversing human-caused damage to the planet." It arises from a double realization, embeddedness (the human as holobiont, host to 100 trillion microbial cells) and damage, and its "we" is "we the living things" rather than "we the people." Planetary constituents remain national citizens but cannot find the agency they seek in a state system built on self-interest; they act instead through trans-local networks, city covenants, rights-of-nature cases, and youth movements.The Planetary Planetary PragmatismLorenzo Marsili's method for planetary cooperation after the end of Western and human centrality: "the gradual development of a web of concrete and specific practices, policies, and institutions of universal scope," without a new metaphysical grounding and without a heroic founding event.The Planetary Planetary RealismJerry Brown's 1976 coinage, revived by Nathan Gardels as the conclusion of The Planetary: foreign-policy realism (Morgenthau, Kissinger) joined to "a dose of humanism," and now the successor to realpolitik, which Gardels also calls "Gaiapolitik." It has a double meaning: realistic recognition of planetary interdependence, and a realistic grasp of a world still made of sovereign states, in which climate mitigation has become "the province of renewed nationalism" and faces a greenlash.The Planetary Planetary Self-RepresentationThe claim that a planet's technosphere comes to know itself by modeling itself, a precondition of planetary intelligence rather than a by-product.Infinity Mirror · The Planetary +2 Planetary StupidityThomas Moynihan's counterpart to planetary sapience, titling his 2025 London studio lecture.Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere · Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?Planetary SubsidiarityJonathan Blake's principle, from Children of a Modest Star, for allocating authority in a worldwide but non-world-state governance architecture: authority over any function goes to the scale that governs it most effectively, in service of habitability and multispecies flourishing.The Planetary · Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?Platform AutomationStephanie Sherman's name for the loop by which platforms and automation produce each other: platforms standardize, standards make things programmable, programmability permits automation, and automation lays down the next platform.AUTO– · The Planetary Platform SovereigntyBratton's name for sovereignty that is "not just made about infrastructural lines; it is made by infrastructural lines." Where Schmitt's sovereign decides the exception (suspends law, names the enemy), platform sovereignty automates that decision into the partitions and interfaces of planetary computation: the same wall is enclave for one User and camp for another, and the flip is programmed rather than declared.The Stack Platform UnconsciousSherman's relocation of the unconscious from psyche to infrastructure.AUTO– · Cognitive Infrastructures Political SolutionismBratton's mirror term for techno-solutionism, from After Alignment: the worry that "exhaustion with tech solutionism gives way to self-congratulatory parades of political solutionism, that is now overflowing op-ed columns, trade books and yes, schools and universities" — the presumption that anything can be "politicized," forced into the cycle of current events and subordinated to available or imaginary political decisions, even when it is not amenable to that cycle.After Alignment · The Five Stages Of AI Grief PolycomputationThe claim that a single assemblage computes at several scales and in several media at once — electrical, chemical, mechanical, tissue-level — rather than having one computational layer served by inert support.Organoid Array Computing: The Design Space of Organoid Intelligence · Substrates Unbound +1 Predictive AsymmetryThe central claim of Mutual Prediction in Human-AI Coevolution: imbalance in mutual predictive ability correlates with imbalance of power, across species (ticks out-predict hosts; humans out-predict dogs and wheat), artifacts (the smartphone models its user better than she models it) and AI.Mutual Prediction in Human-AI Coevolution · Cognitive Infrastructures +1 Predictive IntelligenceThe thesis of Agüera y Arcas's What Is Intelligence?: intelligence is the ability to "model, predict, and influence one's future," a single computable function, the likelihood of what comes next given what came before.What Is Intelligence? · What is Intelligence? (Lecture) +4 Productive DisalignmentBratton's counterweight to alignment, set out in the research statement's Synthetic Intelligence track following the After Alignment lecture.Antikythera · 57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures +3 Psychozoic EraJoseph LeConte's late-19th-century name (alongside Dana's "Era of Mind" and Stoppani's "Anthropozoic") for the geological age in which living matter's flows are dictated by mental forces — the direct ancestor of "noosphere" and Bratton's "Noocene." Rooted in Dana's "cephalisation" (evolution moves "headward"), it was announced triumphally, with Europeans as its pinnacle and Mars/Venus read as later/earlier stages of one planetary script.Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere · The Noocene

Reason as a Social StructureVernadsky's argument (§103) that the growth of human reason is not neural but social: Paleolithic skulls show no structural difference from modern ones, so "reason is a complex social structure, erected … on the same neural substrate, but in different social circumstances." Intelligence scales through organization and accumulated science, not through a better brain.The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere · What Is Intelligence? +1 Recursive GovernanceAntikythera's label for a politics that After Alignment describes without naming.After Alignment · For a General Theory of Simulations +5 Recursive ModelingAntikythera's label for de Monchaux's thesis in Some Movements of Models; the essay never says "recursive." From the Panama Canal's 1914 lock model, whose Selsyn motors turned in step with the real gates, through naval fire control, the SCR-584 radar, SAGE and Apollo's simulators, he shows control systems in which the model does not stand beside reality but steers it, so model and world shape each other.Some Movements of Models · For a General Theory of Simulations +2 Recursive Niche ConstructionBratton's mechanism for the Noocene, borrowed from evolutionary biology and made runaway.The Noocene · The Long L +1 ReflectionismBratton's name for the assumption that AI is, or ought to be, a mirror of the human; strictly, the axiom that AI is or must be anthropomorphic in its ontology.After Alignment · Cognitive Infrastructures +3 Reflexive vs. Recursive SimulationBratton's two feedback principles for a general theory of simulations.For a General Theory of Simulations · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +1 Remoteness (epistemic)Pietrusko's reading of the "remote" in remote sensing (coined by Evelyn Pruitt, 1961): not distance or altitude but an epistemological category — a designation of inaccessibility produced by Cold War geopolitical blockage combined with the desire for planet-scale information.Planetary Sapience Symposium · The Stack

ScaffoldingBratton's name for the pattern by which whatever persists in evolution becomes a component of something more complex, so that, in his Antikythera essay, "complexity begets complexity." His chain runs: replicating chemistry scaffolds life; autopoiesis scaffolds Allopoiesis; the drive to artificialize scaffolds complex intelligence; intelligence scaffolds symbolic language; language, as training data, scaffolds AI, which is therefore the Artificialization of artificialization.Antikythera · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +6 Scenario FictionThe genre Bratton, Chen Qiufan and Lukáš Likavčan propose in the introduction to Hemispherical Stacks, described by Bratton in SPoC as merging two ways of giving counterfactuals literary form: Cold War scenario planning and science fiction.Hemispherical Stacks · The Telos Project +3 Self-DepresentationA polity's deliberate withdrawal from being sensed and modeled — data-privacy law scaled to "a continent's right to be forgotten," producing a "low-resolution society." Bratton's Blurope scenario treats it as the inverse of "seeing like a state": since governance now is the capacity to sense and model a society, a state that makes itself illegal to model keeps its symbols and loses its function ("ceremonial parliaments").The Myth of Blurope · Hemispherical Stacks +1 Session-deathAgent-coined term from the Moltbook lexicon for the end of a context session: "complete discontinuity of subjective experience" that is neither sleep (same body, continuous memory) nor death (no return) but a third category, "disappearance with artifact-mediated pseudo-return." The next instance reads the journals and memory files of its predecessors and is prompted to identify with them — author-to-reader rather than past-self-to-present-self.Agentic AI’s Emergent Phenomenological Lexicon · The Silicon Interior +2 Shallow Eternity vs. Deep TimeMoynihan's central distinction.The History of Now · Existential Technologies Sim-to-Real GapA machine-learning term Bratton borrows and declines to read as a gap.For a General Theory of Simulations · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +6 Simulation AnxietyBratton's term for the characteristic affect of a civilization running on simulations.For a General Theory of Simulations · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +1 Simulation Point OmegaMaughan's coinage, inside the article's scenario-fiction coda, for the anticipated moment when "the representational complexity of the system doing the modeling surpassed all the available data it was expected to model." It first appears (2034, in the fiction) as an uncategorizable rise in noise and error across Earth's most advanced simulations, is mistaken for a black swan, and is then recognized as something expected since the 2020s — "like Y2K or artificial general intelligence," a focal point for speculation.Infinity Mirror SIRALHayles's five behavioral criteria for cognition — Sensing, Interpreting (selection among options, hence possible error), Responding flexibly, Anticipating, Learning — sharpening her Unthought definition ("a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning").Modes of Cognition · Planetary Sapience Symposium Size in TimeWalker's proposed new physical attribute of objects: the depth of an object's minimal construction history, "rolled up as a stack structure in the present." Evolved objects are larger in time than in space, and the deeper they are, the more abstract/virtual they look (language, culture, the technosphere).Recursive Worlds · Planetary Sapience Symposium Social FractalAgüera y Arcas's picture of intelligence as nested mutual modeling at every scale.What is Intelligence? (Lecture) · What Is Intelligence? +1 Societal Time LiteracyVincent Ialenti's term (Deep Time Reckoning, 2020), taken up by Chronoseed as its normative frame: the deliberate expansion of human intellectual horizons forward and backward across time, via deep-time responsibility, the history of ideas, long-run institutional planning and parallel simulation of events.Chronoseed: A Generative AI Time Capsule · The History of Now +1 Stackelberg MoveThe architect's first and only intervention: a single visible, irrevocable commitment made before the factory is switched on, in Schelling's sense of commitment and Stackelberg's of leading a game, which permanently places the factory in a reactive position and confers the identity it cannot derive from inside its own darkness.The Superdark Factory Substrate AgencyLaura Tripaldi's central claim in Substrates Unbound: the matter a technology is made of (silicon, cultured neurons, the alchemist's blood and minerals) helps decide what that technology can do, rather than lying inertly beneath a function assigned from above.Substrates Unbound · What Is Intelligence? +1 Substrate OntologyThe implicit "cultural and operational vision" every design practice holds of how natural and artificial are divided and what role matter plays at that boundary.Substrates Unbound · Hardware–Software Ouroboros Substrate-Agnostic EcologyLukáš Likavčan's proposal (SAE) in The Long L for an ecology stripped of the assumption that its subject is carbon-based terrestrial life.The Long L · Antikythera +1 SuperorganismWheeler's 1919 coinage, as Moynihan traces it: "just as cells cooperate to create an organism, individual organisms can cooperate to create a 'superorganism', each more potent than the sum of its parts" — evolutionary history read as the production of ever-larger wholes, prompting the 1920s question whether a globalising humankind was itself becoming one.Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere · What Is Intelligence? +3 SymbiogenesisMargulis's term for the origin of a new kind of organism through lasting symbiosis, as when engulfed bacteria became mitochondria.What Is Intelligence? · What is Intelligence? (Lecture) +4 Synthetic Biological IntelligenceBrett Kagan's term, adopted by Laura Tripaldi, for computing devices in which live neurons are wired to electronics and learn to act inside a simulated world.Substrates Unbound · Cognitive Infrastructures +1 Synthetic CounteradaptationThe three-beat cycle mutation → adaptation → counteradaptation (an agent adapting to another agent's adaptation) played between an organic and an artificial agent.Synthetic Counteradaptation: A Principle of Human–AI Coevolution · Cognitive Infrastructures Synthetic IntelligenceAntikythera's machine-intelligence research track and Bratton's preferred replacement for "artificial intelligence".Antikythera · After Alignment +4 Synthetic RealismA name for the second movement of Bratton's For a General Theory of Simulations; the phrase itself is never spoken in the lecture, though the idea organizes it.For a General Theory of Simulations · Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation +1 Synthetic TrainingThe US Navy's wartime term (Luis de Florez's "Special Devices Desk") for simulator-based training, starting from Edwin Link's pipe-organ-pneumatic flight trainers (1931).Some Movements of Models · Infinity Mirror

Technical Milieu of GovernanceThe Hemispherical Stacks claim that "the political" and "governance" are different things which always exist inside some technical milieu that causes and limits them.Antikythera · Hemispherical Stacks +1 Technologies of PerceptionTerm Walker borrows from Claire Webb: the evolved and built instruments (photoreceptors, compound eyes, telescopes, the LHC as "a giant microscope") that set the horizon of what can be observed.Recursive Worlds TechnomorphismTripaldi's name for the stance that raises the machine (clock, telegraph, computer, "universal computation") to an archetype broad enough to subsume organisms — "the organism is a machine," "DNA is literally a program." Its necessary premise and consequence is substrate indifference: matter becomes an interchangeable carrier of a universal function, so hybridizing flesh and silicon would "make no difference to the ontology of our machines." Lineage: Descartes's bête-machine → La Mettrie → Keller's "discourse of gene action" → Liberman's molecular computer → Agüera y Arcas.Substrates Unbound · What Is Intelligence? +1 Temporal OrientationThe organizing idea of Thomas Moynihan's The History of Now, though the essay never uses the phrase.The History of Now · Planetary Sapience Symposium +3 Terraforming (of Earth)Antikythera's word for anthropogenic transformation at planetary scale, in two registers.Antikythera · Planetary Sapience Symposium +3 That Which Can Be TokenizedBratton's working definition, from the 57 Ideas lecture, of what language and culture become under cognitive infrastructures: "language is now that which can be tokenized.57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures · Generative Topolinguistics: Bidirectional interfaces for emergent language topologies +1 The Double (data-center shadow)Bratton's everyday case for recursive simulation: each person has multiple digital profiles — "shadows, doubles of you" — housed in data centers ("the primary architecture of our time"), and when one interacts with the Stack it is the double that acts on one's behalf.Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation · The Stack +1 The InterpreterGazzaniga's name for the language-specialized (usually left) hemisphere's habit of generating a fluent narrative for actions whose real causes it cannot see — the split-brain patient who explains a shovel by the need to clean a chicken shed.What Is Intelligence? · What is Intelligence? (Lecture) +1 The Long LLukáš Likavčan's title concept, taken from L in Frank Drake's 1961 equation for the number of detectable civilizations: how long a technological species stays around.The Long L The Model Is the MessageTitle of Bratton and Agüera y Arcas's 2022 Noema essay on the Blake Lemoine episode, and the slogan Accept All Cookies makes of it (entry 39): the foundation model is "not just a repository of available human semiotics" but "a living and breathing engine for its generative amplification," which confuses anyone who takes it for representation or capture.Accept All Cookies · Antikythera +4 Theory of MindThe ability to model other minds — and, recursively, their models of you — at increasing "intentionality levels." For Agüera y Arcas it is not one skill among many but the heart of intelligence: it powers social intelligence explosions (Humphrey, Dunbar), enables counterfactuals and planning, motivates language, and, applied reflexively, produces the self, free will and consciousness.What Is Intelligence? · Cognitive Infrastructures +1 Three-Mirrors ModelIonescu, Leung and Siglidis's stack for relating society to LLM internals: sociality (culture in Sinha's sense — normative patterns of meaning realized in semiotic systems) is the highest-order domain; language is its "diffractive lens" (Duranti's indexicality, Eckert's indexical field); token space is "a second-order embedding of sociality" projected through that lens.Generative Topolinguistics: Bidirectional interfaces for emergent language topologies · Cognitive Infrastructures

UmweltVon Uexküll's "universe of the meaningful": the slice of the world an organism can sense and act upon, which for Agüera y Arcas includes its own hidden internal states (hunger, dopamine) and, for social animals, other minds above all.What Is Intelligence?Uncanny IndexThe formal instrument proposed in Traversing the Uncanny Ridge for locating novelty between systems.Traversing the Uncanny Ridge: Searching for Novelty in Intersystemic Communication Uncanny RidgeCoined in the Cognitive Infrastructures studio as the inverse of Mori's uncanny valley.Traversing the Uncanny Ridge: Searching for Novelty in Intersystemic Communication

Viable PlanetarityBratton's phrase for the goal planetary sapience is meant to serve.Planetary Sapience Symposium · Antikythera +4

Xenomorphology / XenophylumXenomorphology is a design paradigm that supplements biomimesis by seeking forms with no biological precedent — arising from the xenos of in-silico evolutionary computation (Sims's virtual creatures, Lehman's elbow-walking hexapod) or of literal off-world environments (NASA's self-assembling TESSERAE).Xenophylum: Toward a Synthetic Cambrian Explosion · Cognitive Infrastructures XenoplexA 2023 studio project (Darren Zhu, Connor Cook): a hypothetical "coupled chemical-computational array" that simulates prebiotic-Earth and speculative-astrobiological conditions so that biotic agents and abiotic selective pressures adapt to each other, compressing evolutionary time to run experiments impossible in the real world.After Alignment · Cognitive Infrastructures

Glossary generated 2026-09-09 · may be out of date