---
title: "Allocentrism"
description: "Bratton'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."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/allocentrism"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/allocentrism"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Allocentrism

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/allocentrism), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Bratton'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. The term does two jobs. It positions the program against analytic philosophy's formalism, against continental hostility to computation as instrumental reason, and above all against the Heideggerian view that technology estranges us from Being; Bratton inverts this, calling each Copernican decentering "closeness to Being." It also demotes the human: Homo sapiens is "the medium, not the message" of an intensifying abstract intelligence. SPoC calls the same stance a technologically mediated "derangement and disenchantment" and makes the Event Horizon Telescope its exemplary instrument. It is the epistemic attitude behind Copernican Trauma and Epistemological Technology, and the opposite of Reflectionism.

## Appears in

- [Planetary Sapience Symposium](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience) (2025-11-21)
- [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene) (2025-11-21)
- [Accept All Cookies](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/accept-all-cookies) (2025-05-10)
- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) (2025-05-10)
- [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._