Theory in the New Humanities- Incomputable Earth

Investigating the link between environmental breakdown and the increasing development of digital technologies, this is a vital intervention into what this means for our social, political, and planetary future. Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis challenges the dominant narrative that positions technological solutions as the primary response to ecological crisis. This open access collection argues that climate breakdown represents an irreducibly incomputable problem that cannot be resolved through algorithmic optimization or cybernetic planetary management. Radically interrogating the political epistemology underlying the Anthropocene hypothesis against the backdrop of new regimes of algorithmic classification and prediction, this volume addresses the crucial need to rethink the meaning and inter-relationality of “human,” “nature,” and “technology.” Drawing on feminist science studies, decolonial epistemologies, and historical materialist analysis, the contributors examine how computational frameworks transform Earth’s complex relationships into extractable data, perpetuating the very logics that created planetary crisis. Examining new forms of subjectivity and resistance, this timely volume provides both rigorous critique of technoscientific planetary governance and speculative horizons for collective response to climate breakdown—offering a blueprint for reclaiming abstraction from computational capture while centering radically transformed ways of knowing and being human. This book is available open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on It is funded by The Austrian Science Fund (FWF).