Apex Mediating Residue

Bratton'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.