Workshop / Anxious to Share
Exploring Planetary Scale Design
With Sarah T Gold, Ola Möller, Carina Namih and Ben Vickers
The American conglomerate Alphabet acquires one company every week, investing itself in every sector imaginable. Planetary scale systems such as this, from the Kyoto Protocol and ISO standards to cloud computing, are growing vastly in size and number.
As algorithmic capitalism advances, these megastructures begin to own and control more layers within infrastructure “stacks,” which are largely invisible but link us all in global neural networks. But we only become aware of these oligopolies when something goes wrong. We only debate or discuss what they mean once they have already become monoliths. This workshop instead aims to anticipate: to explore, understand, and debate what planetary scale systems and organizations mean for our future.