---
title: "Planetary Computation"
description: "Antikythera's core object, elaborated by each of its research tracks."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planetary-computation"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/planetary-computation"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Planetary Computation

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

Antikythera's core object, elaborated by each of its research tracks. Bratton introduced "planetary-scale computation" in The Stack (2016) as an accidental megastructure: grids, clouds, urban software, addressing and sensing taken as one layered whole that distorts Westphalian geography and operates as governance rather than its object. The research statement keeps that infrastructural sense and foregrounds a second: the same apparatus discloses planetary conditions otherwise unthinkable, so climate change and the Anthropocene count as its epistemological accomplishments. Run the blue-marble image as a 4.5-billion-year film and Earth grows a crust of satellites and networks: a "geological cognitive phenomenon," not a tool. SPoC and The Planetary make the second sense decisive, an epistemological technology whose instrumental purpose follows from what it reveals, the Event Horizon Telescope showing what it is for. The term thus migrates from political geography toward cosmology. Relates to Accidental Megastructure, Hemispherical Stacks and Planetary Computation Unit.

## 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)
- [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks) (2025-11-21)
- [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) (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)
- [The Planetary](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-planetary) (2024-11-10)
- [A New Philosophy Of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-a-new-philosophy-of-planetary-computation) (2022-10-05)
- [The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-stack) (2016-02-19)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._