Sherman'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. Her inversion: humans thought they were designing a planet for humans but designed one for machines (machine space). The Autocene is "largely incomplete": its first phase is a wicked problem (carbon dependence, asphaltification, the delusion of the autonomous driver), but autonomous vehicles and urban computational platforms may let its later phase reorient from devices to environments. Pathology and remedy share one impulse.
Glossary generated 2026-09-09 · may be out of date