Questioning the Anthropocene: A Critical Assessment of the Age of Humankind
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The Anthropocene denotes the Earth’s entry into the age of humankind. A growing chorus of expert opinion now claims the fate of “the Earth system” lies squarely in human hands. Acknowledging the scale of human agency and its impact upon environmental processes, this article questions the largely unthought assumptions that facilitate the view that our species constitutes the determining factor regarding the planet’s fate. The central premise examined here underpins the technological worldview, the perception of reality that fuels the project of mastering nature. This reading of reality posits that nature is conquerable. Its guiding assumption is that the judicious application of increasingly sophisticated forms of technological know-how can yield a world reworked in ways that have reality conform fully to our designs for it. Using Jean Baudrillard’s thoughts on technology as inspiration and guide, the technological imaginary—inspired by dreams of an “integral reality”—is exposed as founded on a profound misreading of the nature of the real. An alternative reading of reality is proffered that holds that the world is not constituted in a way that permits its perfectibility. This counterinterpretation suggests that we ought to reinterpret humanism in a way that acknowledges the limits of the enterprise to remake reality in humanity’s own image. Relinquishing the self-imposed demand to realize the future we wish for, it is concluded, is the surest way to regain the equilibrium we have lost with our entry into the Anthropocene.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it