Decomposing the Technosphere
In preparation for the relaunch of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio in January 2025, I am publishing a series of dispatches revisiting the histories, theories, and proposals explored in our earlier gatherings. Each installment seeks to clarify and expand upon key concepts that emerged, offering a foundation for the conversations to come.
This dispatch explores the intertwined forces of raciality, imperial extraction, and ecological ruin in the Anthropocene.
Building on The Desertion of Empire, which theorized the refusal of imperial domination, and The Analytics of Raciality, which examined racialized hierarchies in demography, geography, and history, Decomposing the Technosphere confronts the planetary ecocide wrought by Empire’s techno-political machinery.
Through the lens of Transformative Ecological Knowledge (TEK), this dispatch envisions practices that resist the Imperial technosphere’s encroachments and nurture relational, regenerative, and more-than-human worlds.
The Rise of the Technosphere
Empire’s power relies on exploiting a dual fracture: the division between humanity and nature, and the division between so-called inferior and superior races. These fractures uphold its hierarchies, enabling planetary-scale extraction and perpetuating ecological devastation. The technosphere—the artificial, human-dominated subsystem of Earth—not only arises from these fractures but also accelerates their deepening, embedding Empire’s logic of domination into the planet’s very systems.
Built on violence and dispossession, the technosphere subordinates Mother Earth’s lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere to its extractive machinery. It perpetrates and perpetuates ecocide on a planetary scale while deepening racialized inequalities. Its expansion has required the systematic suppression of Transformative Ecological Knowledge (TEK)—relational, adaptive practices that sustained more-than-human worlds for millennia.
Rooted in mutuality and regeneration, TEK embodies a legacy of ecological care and balance. Empire dismissed these practices as “primitive,” displacing and destroying them while selectively extracting their insights for imperial gain. This calculated erasure paved the way for the Anthropocene, a geologic epoch defined by cascading ecological crises, all driven by Empire’s unrelenting techno-political machinery.
“Victims of the famines in India at the turn of the 19th century.” (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)
The Late Victorian Holocausts
The Catastrophe of TEK’s Destruction
The Late Victorian Holocausts stand as a grim testament to the catastrophic consequences of erasing TEK. Between 1870 and 1914, three waves of drought and famine—exacerbated by the El Niño Southern Oscillation—claimed the lives of over 30 million people across tropical Africa, Asia, and South America. These deaths were not inevitable outcomes of climatic conditions but the result of colonial policies that systematically dismantled Indigenous systems of ecological resilience and reoriented resources to serve imperial greed.
In India, British colonial authorities commodified and emptied communal grain storage systems, which had historically buffered communities against famine. They redirected local food supplies to imperial markets, prioritizing exports over survival, and imposed monocultural cash crops that degraded soil and undermined agricultural diversity. Railroads, heralded as symbols of progress, facilitated the extraction of wealth rather than the equitable distribution of sustenance. Millions starved along these tracks, as grain flowed out of famine-stricken regions to fuel imperial profits. As Mike Davis highlights in Late Victorian Holocausts, “Millions died, not outside the ‘modern world system,’ but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.”
The systemic violence of these policies resonates with Friedrich Engels’s observation in The Condition of the Working Class in England:
“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds […] in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.”
The ethnocidal erasure of TEK epitomizes this “disguised, malicious murder.” Practices of communal resource sharing, conservation, and redistribution—rooted in generations of relational ecological wisdom—were violently suppressed and replaced with imperial systems of extraction. Stripped of these adaptive practices, colonized populations were rendered defenseless against environmental crises, their survival contingent on exploitative colonial infrastructures that prioritized profit over human life.
The Late Victorian Holocausts reveal the dual logic of Empire: racialized exploitation and ecological devastation. By dismantling TEK, colonial powers intensified vulnerability to famine and ecological collapse, enabling the violent incorporation of colonized regions into the technosphere of imperial racial capitalism. Engels’s words underscore the nature of this violence, which, though sanitized by legal and systemic structures, remains murder nonetheless. Its legacy persists in the ongoing fragility imposed upon communities stripped of their ecological autonomy—a fragility that continues to echo in our age of escalating climate crises and dispossession.
“Famine propelled by conflict and climate change threatens millions in Somalia” (via PBS News Hour)
The Late Davosian Holocausts
Ethnocide in the Neocolonial Present
The destruction of TEK persists today in what can be called the Late Davosian Holocausts—a series of crises shaped by climate catastrophe, extractivist development, and the white savior industrial complex. These crises, much like the Late Victorian Holocausts, are not natural inevitabilities but systemic outcomes of exploitation and mismanagement.
Since 2000, climate-driven disasters have claimed millions of lives globally through malnutrition, floods, disease, and extreme heat. By mid-century, projections estimate hundreds of thousands of additional deaths annually, escalating to tens of millions by the century’s end. The continued burning of fossil fuels alone, through air pollution, is expected to prematurely claim over 100 million lives if current trends persist and bring the planet from 1.5 degrees of warming up to two degrees. These staggering figures reveal not only the direct impact of climate change but also the compounding effects of systemic neglect, exploitation, and the relentless prioritization of extraction over life.
Development aid, often framed as a solution, entrenches dependency and perpetuates extraction. Under the guise of relief, it reinforces systems of managed depletion, stabilizing crises to maintain global hierarchies while eroding local autonomy. The white savior industrial complex further suppresses TEK, displacing communal resilience with systems that prioritize markets over care. This logic mirrors the colonial infrastructures of the past, channeling resources toward imperial centers while leaving vulnerable communities to bear the brunt of environmental and social collapse.
The Late Davosian Holocausts exemplify the violence of Empire’s logic: a slow erosion of life through extractive systems that prioritize profit over well-being. Addressing this ongoing ethnocide demands more than technical solutions. It requires the decomposition of the technosphere: dismantling the structures of extraction, honoring TEK, and embracing a regenerative ethic rooted in care, confluence, and rhythm. Only then can the fractures of Empire begin to heal, and life move toward a future beyond its destructive reach.
Maroon Infrastructures as TEK
To desert Empire is to reclaim and (re-)create TEK. Maroon infrastructures, rooted in the fugitive practices of Maroons and Indigenous peoples, serve as dynamic frameworks for resisting domination and nurturing regeneration. These infrastructures transform what Empire deems “inhospitable,” “impassable,” and “unruly” natures into allies. In our time of escalating climate catastrophes, extractivist development, and the managed depletions perpetuated by the white savior industrial complex, these unruly and inhospitable forces are no longer distant abstractions; they are central to rethinking how we live, resist, and repair. As the Earth liberates itself from Empire’s confines through storms, floods, and fires, it invites us to align with its disruptive power and seek new ways of flourishing.
Recognition
Empire dismisses unruly natures—forests, swamps, floods, pests—as obstacles to progress or threats to order. Maroon infrastructures invert this logic, recognizing these forces as critical allies. Just as fugitive communities once sought refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp, embracing what colonizers called “unmanageable” wilderness, today’s Maroon infrastructures ally with the disruptive agency of nature. In Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, Anyanwu’s town, hidden in plain sight amidst the forest, exemplifies this ethos: “They were in the middle of her town, surrounded by villages. No European would have recognized a town, however, since most of the time there were no dwellings in sight. […] The villages of the towns were well organized, often long-established, but they were more a part of the land they occupied, less of an intrusion upon it.” Maroon infrastructures strive to inhabit the world as part of its flows, rather than as an imposition upon them.
Recollection
Reclaiming TEK is not a return to the past but a transformation of ancestral practices to meet the demands of the present. Communal grain storage, polycultural farming, and regenerative land use once shielded communities from environmental crises. Maroon infrastructures recollect these practices, adapting them for modern struggles against extractive economies and ecological collapse. These efforts do not merely sustain life; they challenge Empire’s false dichotomies between humanity and nature, teaching us to live as participants in more-than-human systems of care.
Resistance
Empire’s infrastructures—railroads, dams, pipelines, and planetary modelling and monitoring systems—are designed to extract, fragment, and control. Maroon infrastructures disrupt this logic, transforming tools of domination into instruments of resistance and subversion. Railroads built to transport wealth from the periphery to the imperial core can instead convey climate refugees and carry goods and information that sustain fugitive communities. Digital technologies, reclaimed from surveillance capitalism, can serve as tools for anonymity, mutual aid, and confluence. Resistance within Maroon infrastructures is not reactive but creative, building the systems necessary for life beyond Empire.
Repair
As Empire’s extractive violence devastates ecosystems and communities, repair emerges as both an ethical imperative and a revolutionary act. Maroon infrastructures prioritize repair not as a return to an idealized past but as a practice of (re-)creation—an ongoing process of forming new, reciprocal relationships with human and non-human worlds. This approach aligns with the art of yobitsugi or “joint-calling,” a practice of repair that gathers fragments from different wholes to create something entirely new. Here, repair is not about restoring a previous state but embracing the openness of reassembly, accepting that what is mended remains fragile, susceptible to future fractures, yet worthy of care nevertheless. The resilience lies in the act of repair itself, not in the permanence of the product.
Maroon infrastructures embody this ethos of creolizing repair. They revive degraded soils from monoculture farming, redirect watersheds altered for industrial use, and rebuild social bonds fractured by colonialism and capitalism. These acts are less about preservation and more about transformation, forging connections that sustain life while welcoming the inevitability of change.
As Derek Walcott wrote of Antillean art: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.” Maroon infrastructures reflect this love in their restoration of fragmented histories and ecologies, creating new wholes from disparate, ill-fitting pieces. Through these acts of repair, they cultivate conditions for resilience and regeneration, embracing life’s fragility while nurturing its infinite capacity to begin again.
The Anatomy of Maroon Infrastructures
Maroon infrastructures are pathways to desert Empire and nurture an Entangled World. Grounded in TEK and the fugitive practices of Maroons and Indigenous peoples, they decompose the technosphere and foster planetary flourishing. Maroon infrastructures enable recognition, recollection, resistance, and repair, rejecting Empire’s rigid hierarchies and extractive boundaries. They also cultivate demographic indeterminacy, geographic non-locality, and historiographic non-eventuality, weaving these principles into the foundations of regeneration.
Administrative Statements: Methods and Measures
Empire governs through metrics that impose control and extraction. It divides populations into “useful” and “wasteful,” ecologies into “productive” and “unproductive,” stabilizing its hierarchies through the language of measurement. Census systems reinforce rigid racial categories to allocate resources unequally, while agricultural surveys are biased towards plantation monocultures, reducing otherwise cultivated lands to either “wastelands” or reserves.
Maroon infrastructures dismantle these frameworks and construct measures rooted in demographic indeterminacy. These measures value relationships and confluences over fixed classifications. Instead of rigid racial or ecological categories, fugitive plans focus on shared responsibilities and overlapping roles that sustain collective well-being.
For example, a fugitive measure might assess the extent and intensity of confluences rather than enforce exclusionary categories. Agroforestry practices that blend cultivated and wild landscapes illustrate this ethic, creating ecosystems that resist Empire’s false dichotomies. These plans foster confluences, aligning methods with the rhythms of life and rejecting domination..
Technical Implements: Tools and Techniques
Colonial tools—surveying instruments, extraction machinery, and monoculture technologies—enforce rigid boundaries and domination over landscapes. Empire’s implements carve ecosystems into exploitable units, suppressing their natural dynamics.
Maroon infrastructures de-/re-construct these implements, transforming them into tools of connection and adaptability. Guided by demographic indeterminacy and geographic non-locality, Maroon tools hybridize identities and dissolve territorial fixity, fostering dynamic and confluential relations. Countersurveillance, for example, repurposes mapping technologies to support ecological migrations and human movement in ways that evade surveillance and control. Agroecological techniques like companion planting and seed-sharing networks create overlaps between cultivated and wild areas, fostering adaptive systems that sustain life.
Maroon tools collaborate with the land, embracing its rhythms and dynamics. They reject Empire’s obsession with control, prioritizing care, (re-)creation, and resilience in their design and use.
Built Environments: Places and Pathways
Colonial infrastructures fragment and dominate landscapes. Dams displace communities while redirecting rivers for extraction; railways funnel resources to imperial centers; urban grids enforce rigid separations between human and non-human life. These built environments impose static boundaries, reinforcing Empire’s control.
Maroon infrastructures dissolve these divisions, creating environments that embody geographic non-locality and foster mobility, refuge, and regeneration. These spaces adapt to ecological and social shifts, offering sanctuary to both human and non-human life.
For example, a contested wetland might become a shared sanctuary, where displaced communities and migratory species find refuge. Informal pathways—used by foraging animals and climate migrants—can be transformed into connective corridors that sustain movement and collaboration.
Where Empire enforces separation—different places for different people and different purposes—Maroon infrastructures embrace entangled uses. They transform fragmented landscapes into dynamic confluences, enabling life to thrive through connection and adaptability.
Dramatic Elements: Actors and Factors
Empire deploys engineers, bureaucrats, and soldiers as agents of control, wielding tools like data surveillance and disaster relief to enforce its binary logic of progress and backwardness. These agents impose rigid order, casting nature as blind chaos or untamed wilderness to be subdued.
Maroon infrastructures center actors who embody historiographic non-eventuality, rejecting the linear narrative of progress. Healers, storytellers, and growers emerge as entangled agents of transformation, shaping practices that reflect relational temporalities. Rather than suppressing natural forces, they engage with them as collaborators.
For Maroons, events that Empire labels as “natural disasters”—storms, droughts, and floods—often serve as opportunities for escape and renewal. Colonizers view these disruptions as setbacks to progress and catastrophes to control, but Maroon infrastructures see them as potential catalysts for co-adaptation and resilience.
For instance, a wildfire may regenerate soils and clear pathways for new growth, enabling both human and ecological recovery. These dramatic elements reframe upheaval as possibility, aligning human action with the rhythms of a dynamic, more-than-human world.
Unruly Futures
Maroon infrastructures guide us toward an Entangled World by weaving demographic indeterminacy, geographic non-locality, and historiographic non-eventuality into every aspect of life. They dismantle Empire’s rigid hierarchies, transforming tools of domination into instruments of care, (re-)creating static environments as adaptive sanctuaries, and replacing agents of control with collaborators in resilience and renewal.
In our age of escalating climate crises and extractive destruction, Maroon infrastructures ally with the Earth’s unruliness. They embrace storms, floods, and fires as collaborators that defy containment, transforming rupture into resurgence and insurgency. When rivers overflow imperial boundaries or wildfires reclaim monocultured fields, they clear pathways for regeneration and liberation. Our task is not to rebuild Empire’s extractive systems but to join in the Earth’s resurgence and insurgency, crafting infrastructures that nurture life amidst upheaval.
In Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, Anyanwu’s community exemplifies how humans can exist as “more a part of the land [they] occupy, less of an intrusion upon it.” Maroon infrastructures extend this vision, aligning with unruly and inhospitable natures to affirm a future beyond Empire’s control—a future rooted in care, confluence, and conviviality for all beings.
The Anthropocene demands not mitigation within Empire’s frameworks but a profound transformation—a radical (re-)creating of relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. Transformative Ecological Knowledge (TEK) offers a guide for this (re-)creating. TEK is not a relic but a living, adaptive force, capable of fostering systems that thrive on mutuality and regeneration.
By reclaiming TEK and building Maroon infrastructures, we can decompose the technosphere and dismantle the fractures that sustain Empire. In deserting its logic of domination, we move toward an Entangled World—one where relationality, reciprocity, and care replace extraction and control.
