Turbo change: Accelerating technological disruption, planetary geopolitics, and architectonic metaphors

Abstract

The global spread of a machine-based civilization based on accelerating scientific discovery and technological innovation has increased the rate, magnitude, complexity, novelty, and disruptiveness of change in human affairs, visible in violence, environment and information domains. Human capacity to forecast, assess and explain remains limited, and institutional capacities to adjust are inadequate. IR theory has not focused enough attention on analyzing human-material interactions. Some practical insight may be gained from renewed and broadened historical materialism, or neoclassical geopolitics, examining fit and misfit between material forces and social practices, structures and identities. Architectonic metaphors such as global village and spaceship Earth are deficient, and an alternative of a global debris mat on a narrowing river-of-no-return better captures the overall planetary situation.