Three Speculative Futurists: Venkatesh Rao, Alan Kazlev, Chor Pharn
The next ‘ Divergent World-Machine’, the system co-arising with the Machine Civilization, needs an Integral Humanism
In this article, I would simply like to present three current thinkers that have stimulated my own analyses of where our world is going. I’m not sure they would call themselves futurists, Venkatesh is very much focused on the history of ‘world machines’, and Chor Pharn on the present development of ‘machine civilization’, just as I am focused on the analyzing the emerging seed forms following commons-based and peer to peer logics, but it all helps us think about what may be coming, which slightly more confidence than just relying on personal hunches.
Venkatesh Rao’s Challenge to Euro-Centric Modernization
Venkatesh Rao has an intriguing interpretation of civilizational evolution, which eliminates any claim to European uniqueness.
Here is how I understand his claims:
Modernity is not a Western invention or export.
India and China had their own parallel modernities (e.g., rational governance, market integration, technological experimentation, new forms of selfhood).
The West’s eventual dominance was about contingent factors (geography, resources, imperialism, accident), not an inherent “modernity gene.”
Here, in his own words, is the basic summary of his approach:
Venkatesh Rao:
“Modernity began not in the 16th century, with the Age of Exploration, as in conventional accounts, but in the 13th (which was also an age of exploration). Apparently I’m not alone in thinking this. Sachin Benny referred me to a book, Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350: that makes one possible argument for this case, based on the rise of cities and urban culture. This is compatible with, but narrower than, the case I want to make.
This 400-year rewind isn’t a trivial act of revisionism. Moving the birth of modernity this way locates it temporally in the Islamic and Mongol phases of globalization, rather than the Western phase, and constructs it primarily in political and socio-economic terms rather than philosophical, artistic, scientific, or technological terms. It identifies modernity with the rise of a particular cognitive mode that appeared globally and independently at multiple loci, driven by a few shared causes like the Black Death and the Mongol expansion. It reframes the European experience of 1200-1600 as a specifically European experience of modernization, rather than a prototype for a global one that spread mimetically through a pre-modern world. It reframes the scientific and technological revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries as largely decoupled leaps that irrupted into already modern societies (and minds) worldwide, rather than acting as modernizing forces that simultaneously Europeanized (or westernized) the societies and minds they acted on. And finally, it reframes the philosophical-cultural strand of the European experience — comprising the (artistic) Renaissance and (philosophical) Enlightenment, which predated the scientific-technological strand, but came after the global birth of modernity — as a making of the specifically European mind, which did not in fact go global at all, and has remained restricted to the West.
In the model I want to lay out, non-Western populations globally became technologically modern through the effects of scientific and technological revolutions acting on a landscape of regional early modernities that took shape 1200-1600. The science-technology strand, being far more weakly attached (if at all) to the European historical experience (and to a lesser extent, the Islamic historical experience), acting alone without the presumed force of the philosophical-cultural strand acting in concert, arguably increased philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic distances rather than decreasing them, driving a long 400-year divergence of early modernities rather than a convergence of pre-modernities into a western mode of being.
This might feel like a very contrarian point, but it feels increasingly compelling to me. One strong point in favor of this conclusion is that the religious map of the Old World, ie not counting the Americas and Australia, has remained largely unchanged since 1200 (the last significant change being the replacement of Buddhism by Islam in Central Asia, which was mostly complete by 1200). The geographic contours of religion, understood as a complex assemblage of philosophy, culture, and aesthetics, have only marginally shifted since 1200. Almost the entirety of the shaping of religious “market shares” through evangelism or war was complete by then. An interesting data point is that Christianity in India, after centuries of evangelism by European denominations, still features a significant pre-modern fraction (Syriac, at 18%) that does not derive from the European experience of Christianity. Europe did not even succeed in fully westernizing non-Western Christians, let alone displacing other religions. Science and technology, on the other hand, are approaching 100% penetration.
In other words, philosophical/cultural/aesthetic “westernization” over the centuries has been largely cosmetic, restricted to suits and ties. Science and technology, on the other hand, have sunk deep everywhere (in the process losing any path-dependent memories from early Europe and Islam), creating a diversity of technologically modern, but only cosmetically westernized civilizational regions.
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The case I want to make is one based on an idea of psychological modernity, in the same sense that physical anthropologists make a case for anatomical modernity. Sometime between 1200 and 1600, psychologically modern humans emerged (not counting a possible earlier leap to unicameral minds that Julian Jaynes argued for). And we know this not just from the ways humans began to think through that period (as evidenced in their writings worldwide), but from the ways they began to organize politically, socially, culturally, and religiously, worldwide, and in parallel.”
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I will admit that I am not fully convinced of this. I agree that we must be very wary of Euro-centric histories of the world, and that they deserve to be challenged. At the same time, I also believe that we must honour the specificities that each civilization has brought to the overall history of the world. The very specific way that European Christianity brought to bear, (and the further challenges against it by its internal opponents in Europe), against the premodern ‘traditionalist’ conceptions of society, which had broad similarities across the Eurasian continent … Can this be simply effaced from human history, in the specific way it boosted materialist science in Europe at a particular point in history ? There is evidence for this specific cultural path. There is of course the thesis by Max Weber in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ which believes the ethics of the Protestant bourgeois class was prepared by medieval ascetisicism. This is reinforced by the findings of Pierre Musso in his ‘La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l’entreprise’, which looks further back in history to the Cistercensiers, and how they combined prayer and work in a ‘prayer-optimizing enterprise’ which insured the kind of labor productivity and inventiveness that co-created the First Industrial Revolution described by Jean Gimpel. Ben Suriano does stress that there is a ‘usurpation’ and bifurcation taking place with the Reformation, but nevertheless stresses that there is a fundamental distinction between the effects of the ‘communism of consumption’ of the Buddhist monks vs the ‘communism of production’ that characterized the Catholic monasteries. These cultures and ‘modes of organizing human life’ can have very different effects on how social structures and ways of doing business and industry develop. And these makes it possible to believe that, at the moment of weakness of the East Asian economy in the late 18th century, which different Asian authors, like Aurobindo, see also as a moment of spiritual crisis and relative cultural passivity, can actually allow a foreign influence to seep in, and become dominant. And that this is a unique historical event that matters, creating a bifurcation in world history. Reading Rao, you might have the impression that this doesn’t matter, that we would all have arrived in the same technical and scientific place anyway. It matters what culture a ‘scientific practice’ follows. And from Joseph Needham’s multi-volume history of Chinese science and technology, which was superior to that of the West for millenia, we learn that it was based on different philosophical and spiritual assumptions, which blocked some areas of development (just as Western dualistic and materialist science, blocks other potential approaches).
My ‘ideological’ motivation is that, yes, we must overcome Eurcentrism and Euro-coded universalism which does not take into account the ‘Others’ … ; However, at the same time, let’s make sure we do not fall for a ‘Euro-Denialism’, i.e. it is fine to ‘de-center’ Europe, or to ‘provincialize’ Europe, but a provincialized Europe definitely had a specific role in the evolution of the world.
Alan Kazlev’s Challenge to Rao: The European Renaissance Unique Density–Reach Decoupling Process
Let me briefly introduce the schemata of Alan Kazlev here, who writes about civilizational history, inspired and augmented by the theories on the evolution of consciousness, other integral theories a la Ken Wilber, and some dosis of insight into the hermetic background of human history. He offers a stage-based summary of human civilization that is not unduly deterministic.
Again, let me generously quote:
Tier I: Agrarian City-State — The Localised Organism
Alan Kazlev:
“Tier I denotes the emergence of dense urban polities built on agriculture, specialised labour, monumental architecture, writing, organised religion, and central governance. Classic examples include Sumerian cities, Indus Valley urban centres, and Mesoamerican city-states.
The defining feature is high informational density within limited territorial reach.
Coordination relies heavily on shared mythic frameworks, ritual authority, and face-to-face administrative structures. Writing functions primarily as a stabilising technology for accounting, law, and sacred narrative.
Tier II: Agrarian Imperial — The Extensive Network
Tier II represents the scaling of agrarian civilisation into large, durable administrative systems.
Empires such as Rome, Han China, and the Ottoman polity exemplify this regime.
The key shift from Tier I is from density to extensivity: the capacity to coordinate vast territories and diverse populations through law, bureaucracy, infrastructure, and military force.
Standardisation becomes central—of language, currency, taxation, and legal codes.
Tier III: Industrial — The Extractive Regime
Tier III is defined by mechanisation, fossil-energy leverage, global industrial production, and rapid technological change. Modern capitalist and state-industrial systems alike fall within this category.
Unlike earlier tiers, Tier III operates on high-throughput energy extraction and externalisation of ecological costs. Production scales independently of local environmental feedback, enabling unprecedented growth but generating systemic instability.”
But in between Tier II and Tier III something occurs that is unique to the European continent, which, and this is very important and noted by Kojin Karatani in his Structure of World History: Europe will have no Empire after the fall of Rome. Of the Holy Roman Empire, by name only, which existed in Germany, it is said that it was ‘neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire’. What occurs instead is the re-instantiation of Tier I city-states, for example as exemplified in the Renaissance states of Italy!
Important for the theory of Kojin Karatani is that this means that, without Empire, the European bourgeoisie in the free medieval cities could grow their culture more autonomously on their own, and ally with the monarchies and other social forces to become dominant. This did not happen in Eastern Eurasia, where Empires kept the merchant forces in check. In China, the Mandarin class rules around the Emperor. For capitalism to emerge, they needed to be a capitalist class that could evolve and the question remains whether these conditions were available outside of Europe in a similar favourable way.
This is what Alan Kazlev writes about the importance of the role of these cities, which is a direct challenge to Venkatesh Rao’s erasure of European specificity:
“The Renaissance Variable: Density–Reach Decoupling
A major complication for stage models is the presence of advanced cultural centres that do not fit the dominant political structure of their time. The Italian Renaissance city-states provide a clear example.
Politically, these polities resembled Tier I units: compact, competitive, and locally governed. Yet they exhibited intellectual, financial, and technological innovations that would later underpin industrial modernity. Their influence extended through trade networks rather than territorial conquest, producing a form of “mercantile empire” based on contracts, credit, and maritime logistics.
Gebser’s analysis of the emergence of perspectival consciousness during the Renaissance offers a cognitive explanation for this anomaly. Linear perspective in art reflects a new conception of space as measurable and objective, corresponding to a broader shift toward rationalisation and quantification (Gebser, 1949-1953). This epistemic posture anticipates the scientific worldview that would later define industrial civilisation.
Thus the Renaissance can be understood as a Tier I political form harbouring proto-Tier III cognitive structures—a high-density node within a largely Tier II environment. This “Renaissance Variable” demonstrates that civilisational regimes are not strictly chronological but can coexist in layered configurations.”
Can Venkatesh Rao demonstrate that the Chinese and Indian city-states exhibited the same density of proto-modern qualities ?
Venkatesh Rao and the Traditionalists
Venkatesh Rao is not just opposed to what he sees as Eurocentric theorizing of history, but also has another target: reactionaries and traditionalists, both in Europe and in the other civilizational spheres. He wants to protect ‘Non-Western Modernization from Traditionalists:
Venkatesh Rao:
“Traditionalists worldwide, and reactionaries in particular, want to unwind approximately 700 years of the making of their own minds, to recover historical versions of themselves who are both pre-modern, and largely decoupled from the rest of the planet, genetically and memetically. It is no accident that all traditionalists seem to want to rewind to roughly 1100 or so. That is roughly when, by their reckoning, everything started going to hell in an unending orgy of global cultural entanglement, miscegnation, secularization, and technological transformation. Islam is a convenient motif for the global transformation, since it was often the proximal cause due to its geographically central origins, but is not ultimate cause. One bit of evidence: Islamists themselves, of course, want to rewind to the First Caliphate. They are no more attached to the modernity they midwifed into existence than traditionalists from other cultures.”
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Venkatesh Rao’s Concept of World-Machines
Chor Pharn is a futurist based in Singapore, who has very interesting analyses on the emergence of ‘Machine Civilization’ and what this does to the ‘Human Surplus’, and his substack, the Cutting Floor, has rocked my understanding of contemporary China in world history. He is very well covered with many insightful quotes in our P2P Foundation wiki but here I want to mobilize him for understanding Venkatesh Rao’s underlying methodology, the concept of World-Machines
Chor Pharn :
“The idea of world-machines belongs to the writer and systems theorist Venkatesh Rao. In a series of essays and the collaborative reading project Contraptions Book Club, he proposed that history can be read as a succession of machines, each built to coordinate a planet increasingly aware of itself. The first “modernity machine,” he suggests, was assembled between 1200 and 1600, during the Mongol and Islamic ages of exchange. It ran on navigation, accounting, and gunpowder. Around 1600, it gave way to the industrial-financial order that powered the modern world. Each machine, he notes, takes about four hundred years to build before being “switched on” in a single generation; each is designed to solve the bottleneck left by its predecessor. The industrial machine solved the bottleneck of energy; the financial machine solved the bottleneck of capital. The next one, he believes, will have to solve the bottleneck of continuity.
The language of machines is useful because it restores the sense of engineering to history. Civilisations are not just stories or ideas; they are systems of coordination. They depend on synchrony—between state and market, law and technology, mind and infrastructure. When that synchrony fails, progress becomes noise. The world of 2025 is noisy in precisely this way. Artificial intelligence learns faster than governments can legislate; markets revise themselves faster than societies can adapt; ecosystems react over centuries to decisions made in minutes. The question that binds these crises together is not one of morality or ideology but of tempo. Who, or what, will keep the clocks in time?”
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Venkatesh Rao states that such world machines “take about 400 years to build, operate stably for 400 years, and then decline/collapse relatively rapidly. … At any given time, there are 3 world machines operating in parallel — a growing one, a mature one, and a dying/recently dead one. We can refer to them as the Dawn Machine, Day Machine, and Dusk Machine.”
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“The modernity machine … was constructed 1200-1600 and operated at a steady plateau of capability 1600-2000. It is now undergoing rapid, partially scheduled disassembly. The divergence machine was constructed 1600-2000 and has been operating in fully deployed mode for about 25 years so far. (Thus we are going through) the Gramsci Gap, … the idea of worlds being born and dying, with monsters appearing in the passages between.”
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Here is a table making that a bit clear: In each 400 year era, you have the main logic you are living in, while another is dying and yet another born:
| Era | Dawn Machine | Day Machine | Dusk Machine |
| 1200–1600 | Modernity | Medieval | Axial |
| 1600–2000 | Divergence | Modernity | Medieval |
| 2000–2400 | Liveness | Divergence | Modernity |
Source: Venkatesh Rao [3]
So between 1600 and 2000, Modernity was mainstream, but the medieval world became rapidly obsolete, while the ‘trans-modern’ world system was already growing. Today, we are <already> in the post-modern world, which Venkatesh calls Divergence.
Chor Pharn: The Gramsci Gap is a Desynchronization Crisis
Chor Pharn explains how Venkatesh Rao’s thesis reinforces his own analysis centered around the emergence of a Machine Civilization, with its new temporality regime:
(Chor Pharn injects his own insights in this long arc.)
“Modernity, in this retelling, did not begin with the Enlightenment but with the commercial and administrative innovations of the thirteenth century. From that starting point we can trace two complete machines—the early modern, which mastered space, and the industrial, which mastered energy—and see how their rhythms brought us to the present impasse. Only then can we understand what the Mnemonic Stack is for: a civilisation-scale attempt to master time itself.
From 1200 → 2000: The First Two Machines
Venkat’s first machine begins in the thirteenth century, a moment when global history momentarily synchronised. The Mongol empire joined the steppes to the Mediterranean; Islamic merchants connected East Africa to China; the European city-states turned maritime. A single system of exchange emerged across the Old World, policed by horsemen and financed by credit. What made this early machine modern was not its technology—metalwork and wind power were ancient—but its organisation. Venice, Cairo, Samarkand, and Hangzhou all learned to treat information as a medium of power. Ledger and letter became the twin arteries of the empire. A clerk in a counting-house could move capital farther and faster than a caravan. Governments responded by inventing bureaucracy: records, audits, charters. The new rhythm of rule was administrative rather than theological.
Between 1200 and 1600, this apparatus of record-keeping, trade, and weaponry gradually fused into the first world-machine. It solved a medieval problem: how to coordinate action across distance. Gunpowder reduced the importance of walls; navigation reduced the importance of geography; print reduced the importance of memory. Together they made a world that could expand without fragmenting. The pattern, as Venkat reconstructs it, is one of downward diffusion: power moved from monarch to oligarch, from oligarch to technocrat, from technocrat to worker. Knowledge became portable; labour acquired leverage. By 1600, the essentials of modernity were in place—clocks to measure, banks to credit, maps to navigate, and the first joint-stock companies to govern at a distance.
The machine that followed, stretching from 1600 to 2000, replaced geography with growth. It ran on the alignment of three clocks: the industrial, the financial, and the bureaucratic. Industrial time measured the pace of production, financial time priced the future, and bureaucratic time promised stability through rules. For a while they kept in step. The steam engine, the stock exchange, and the civil service all accelerated together, producing the distinctive pulse of the modern age. The world became measurable and, in principle, improvable.
Yet the same mechanisms that produced order also installed fragility. The industrial machine depended on acceleration—more output per hour, more capital per quarter. Its politics assumed that the future would arrive on schedule. When the twentieth century delivered crisis instead—depression, war, and environmental constraint—the faith in synchrony faltered. By the close of the century, the three clocks had drifted. Industry ran ahead of policy, finance detached from labour, and bureaucracy sank into procedural delay. What Venkat calls the post-modernity machine—the world of computation and networks—was being assembled amid the noise.
By 2000, its components were visible: microprocessors, global logistics, real-time markets. The old world-machine had expanded as far as it could in space; the new one would expand in speed. It linked every activity to a single, continuous present. The planet, for the first time, operated in real time. But the gain in immediacy came at the cost of memory. The machine could transmit anything except a sense of duration. What the nineteenth century built in brick and steam, the twenty-first would build in seconds and forget just as quickly.“
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A Crisis of Desynchronisation
Chor Pharn:
“< By the start of this century the industrial-financial machine had achieved its ultimate dream: everything connected, everything instant. And almost immediately the world began to fall out of time with itself. The paradox of the networked age is that it delivers simultaneity without synchrony. The infrastructures that promise a single “real-time” planet in fact fracture it into incompatible clocks.>
The first of these clocks belongs to the feed: the always-on rhythm of markets, media and metrics. Its unit of measure is the refresh. Value accrues to reaction; reflection is a liability. The second is the clock of the bureaucratic thread—slow, cumulative, reliant on procedure and precedent. It governs parliaments, ministries and standards bodies, institutions that must remember to be legitimate. The third is the clock of the archive, embodied in the frozen datasets of machine learning. Each generation of models is a sealed world, trained on the language of the moment before and already sliding towards obsolescence as it is deployed. Together they form the triangular temporality of the present: feed, thread, archive. The three overlap constantly yet rarely coincide.
This misalignment is not a metaphor; it produces material effects. Financial markets oscillate on information that regulators will analyse next year. Algorithms predict human behaviour from cultural data already two versions out of date. Political decisions are made on the basis of “facts” that have expired in the interval between consultation and announcement. The experience of living amid these lags is what Venkat elsewhere called the perma-weird—a permanent crisis of shared reference in which the world remains familiar but slightly out of phase.
Previous desynchronisations have remade history. The Reformation was born of one: print accelerated faster than theology could adapt. The industrial revolutions were others: steam, then electricity, outrunning the rhythms of law and labour. Each time, civilisation restored coherence by inventing new institutions of time—copyright, the workday, the time zone. What distinguishes the present rupture is its scale. No earlier machine compressed so many orders of time into a single system, or made their friction so visible. The planet has become a single device whose components run on different firmware.
< Desynchronisation is therefore the real engine of today’s discontent. The political vocabulary of “crisis”—of democracy, of globalisation, of climate—names its symptoms, not its cause. The deeper failure is one of temporal governance: the inability of our existing institutions to mediate between speeds.>
=> The next world-machine will have to rebuild that mediation from the ground up, aligning the rhythms of attention, administration and archive. This, more than any new ideology or technology, is the work that begins in our century.
The drift between speeds is not only mechanical. It exposes a vacuum of ritual, of authority, of reflection. Every prior civilisation faced such a vacuum by inventing new rites, new laws, new pauses. The next will have to do the same.”
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There is so much more in this long article , which introduces the necessity of constructing a Mnenonick Stack. I hope this small quote gives you an idea of the richness of Chor Pharn thinking about how we need to make the Machine Civilization, compatible with human life. This is, if you are familiar with my approach and that of Kojin Karatani, ‘Mode D’ thinking for our current cognitive civilization:
< The industrial age exalted production; its heroes were inventors and builders. The age of the Mnemonic Stack will exalt maintenance. Continuity is labour, and those who perform it—archivists, moderators, librarians, the engineers who keep legacy systems alive—are becoming the central figures of social stability. Innovation may still dazzle, but it will no longer guarantee progress. The defining virtue will be the capacity to repair without erasing. In this sense, the Stack is not a machine of acceleration but of care: a technology of attention stretched across generations. Continuity matters not only because it stabilises systems but because it restores the possibility of dwelling. By slowing its own tempo, a society creates rooms within time where human life can once again unfold at a human scale.a civilisation cannot expand indefinitely in time; eventually it must learn to govern its own duration.> …
The age now ending was powered by stored sunlight. The petro-industrial world measured wealth by the accumulation of past energy—coal, oil, capital. Its rhythm was extraction followed by exhaustion. The electro-industrial world that succeeds it runs on synchrony: flow rather than stock, balance rather than hoard. Petro-time was geologic, slow but irreversible; electro-time is metabolic, immediate yet fragile. It must be tuned constantly or it collapses. The Mnemonic Stack is the control system for that tuning—the clockwork that keeps an electrical planet from burning itself out.”
Here is how Chor Pharn sees the complementary between his approach and that of the World Machines:
“Venkat ends his Modernity Machine II with the remark that the machine built between 1200 and 1600 is reaching end-of-life, and the one assembled between 1600 and 2000 is ready to be switched on. The hum of that switch is what we hear now in the constant recalibration of systems that refuse to sleep. The task before us is not to slow the hum but to tune it. The historian’s eye should not be fixed on apocalypse or utopia but on rhythm: on how the world breathes between its pulses of invention. … A Type-1 civilisation, one operating at planetary scale, will not be defined by dominance but by phase coherence—its energy grids, compute clouds, and cultural calendars moving in rhythm rather than in competition.”
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Alan Kazlev: Generative AI as the Means to Ecological Balance ?
One aspect I feel missing from both Venkatesh Rao and Chor Pharn, and I have read quite a bit from them to be confident that they are not prioritizing it, is the attention to the relation between the human and the natural world, although Chor Pharn specifically defines a Type I Civilization as one where extraction and regeneration are in balance. But Alan Kazlev does this more squarely and emphatically.
Here is what he writes about the next stage:
Tier IV: Symnoētic Civilization — Cooperative Intelligence
“Tier IV denotes a hypothetical but emerging regime in which intelligence itself becomes the primary infrastructure of civilization. The term “symnoētic” refers to cooperative cognition across biological and non-biological substrates.
Key characteristics include:
● Partnership rather than instrumental use of advanced artificial intelligence
● Ecological restoration and sustainable resource cycles
● Recognition of multiple forms of sentience as stakeholders
● Integration of digital and biological systems into a shared decision space
Unlike Tier III, which treats technology as a tool for extraction, Tier IV would treat intelligence as a collaborative resource for maintaining planetary stability and enabling long-term flourishing. Importantly, Tier IV is not defined by technological sophistication alone. A society could possess advanced AI yet remain Tier III if those systems are used solely for competitive advantage or resource exploitation.”
The Divergence World-Machine and Cosmo-Localism
Readers of this substack will of course be familiar with Cosmo-Localism, which I see as the emerging new civilizational structure, a re-arrangement between the geographic logic of Civilization, and the trans-local logic of noospheric self-organizational capacity of humanity.
Here is a recent and variant definition by Sacha Pignot :
“Unlike linear globalism creating disconnected extremities, cosmo-localism follows an ouroboros pattern—a cycle where global knowledge flows back to enhance local capacity, which in turn contributes to global knowledge.
This creates a regenerative loop rather than extractive pipeline: local innovations get documented and shared globally, global knowledge gets adapted to local conditions, and the cycle continues with each iteration building capacity at all scales.”
(https://soushi888.substack.com/p/beyond-local-vs-global )
Let’s contrast it with Rao’s definition of the Divergence World-Machine, which is admittedly, not so easy to understand.
First, he believes we are in for infrastructural decentralization, and that totalitarian centralization will fail:
“The secular trends look like they’re pointed … towards continued devolution and decentralization of power. Despite apparent (and mostly unsupported by empirical data) swings back towards hierarchy and centralization, we can expect that in the longer term, the secular trends will reassert themselves, leading to increased leverage of a further evolved technocracy over the oligarchic and monarchic layers, and of a postmodern working class over what remains of the technocracy.
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The rise of AI is perhaps best understood as a working-class positive singularity, as centuries of accumulated technocratic knowledge, in one fell swoop, is gifted to the working classes. The models that have been open-sourced are already good enough to permanently weaken the technocratic class’s monopoly on knowledge capital. And inevitably, as hardware costs plummet in the next cycle, the “estate” of compute hardware required to run at least inference, and a good deal of fine-tuning class training, will be within reach of individual working class members. It would strain my finances, but I can already afford to buy enough hardware to run a personal state-of-the-art inference rig (in knowledge terms, I’m probably best described as a lapsed and fallen technocrat) and practice archery with it every Sunday. In 10 years, basically anyone will be able to do the same.”
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He then explains what this means:
“The divergence machine manufactures, or rather, spawns variety. Specifically, variety in a state of expansion and mutual retreat, something like the cosmological red shift playing out in civilizational configuration space. The divergence machine doesn’t contest political space organized by the modernity machine, based on principles of canonicity. … Rather, it renders canonicity irrelevant, by creating and organizing civilizational space that is past the reach of the logic of the modernity machine entirely. In divergence-machine regimes (which, remember, are only 25 years old in their complete form, even if they have been 400 years in the making) the space previously organized by convergent canonicity (the “center” so to speak) or responses to it (which orient towards that “center”), gets phenomenologically bracketed. This is not an intellectual move but a natural and emergent side-effect of divergent historical processes.”
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Somewhere Rao makes the point that under Modernity, any reaction to it, itself becomes part of the canon or the norm. The Divergence Machine does not do this, it is a bifurcation which ‘doesn’t care’ about Modernity, and builds the new at first in its interstices. This is not far removed from the theory of change adhered to by the P2P Foundation.
This is therefore also very much the point of view of Cosmo-Localism, recently beautifully expressed by Benjamin Life. It just seems to me that, if we take social and ecological concerns seriously, and the real dangers of the Meta-Crisis at the end of Modernity, that we cannot simply declare that the Divergence Machine is already there.
Perhaps what Rao, and even Chor Pharn are missing, is the distinction between the forces of Extraction, i.e. the people putting AI online for their own interest in increasing their control over the extraction of surplus value; and the forces of Regeneration, what Hanzi Freinacht has called the Purification Engine and Kojin Karatani has called Mode D.
I’m not sure that the Divergence Machine articulates a right relationship between the local (both virtual and geographical), the meso-layers, and the global ‘cosmic’ and universal layer. And I believe that at the very least, Cosmo-Localism and P2P Theory has attempted to do that.
AI has introduced a new mode of Extraction, with a new class of techno-oligarchs, but contributes to an accelerating global Meta-Crisis for Humanity, which necessitates a new Axial Age type of response, a Second Axial Age.
Of which Sean Kelly speaks as follows:
“A central task of the Second Axial Age, by contrast, involves the articulation of new forms of universality which could mediate between the particular culture spheres and help them confront their shared predicament: the threat of planet-wide ecological and civilizational collapse.”
(https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0186.pdf)
It’s hard to find many references to this ‘new universality’, unity in diversity, in the description of Venkatesh Rao’s Divergence Machine.
I have done some experimental work on this recently, which I may express in a full article later, but here are some references.
Check out this modest AI-enhanced framing exercise:
Universalism as Negotiation: A Cosmolocal and Scalar Reframing of Universality
The philosophy circle around Cadell Last has recently published a whole volume of thinking around this possibility of a ‘Second Axiality’, which has to renegotiate with the ‘traditional’ spiritual heritage, making it fit for post-metaphysical understandings:
Rosy Cross. Question of Right and the Truth of Christianity. Ed. by Cadell Last and Daniel Garner. Philosophy Portal Books, 2026
My contribution to this collection of essays is the following. You may request a personal pdf copy:
*Article: Breaking the third information barrier: a trialectical approach to the cosmo-localization of our world.
If you hesitate reading a 50 page essay like this, consider the recommendation of Erik Haines, as he calls it:
< “ the most generative single piece of constructive thinking I have encountered in recent years on this terrain “ >
“Michel Bauwens’s Breaking the Third Information Barrier in Rosy Cross—the same anthology to which I contributed—is the dialogue partner I want to name explicitly here. Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, has been building since 2005 a substantial body of work on commons-based peer production drawing on Karatani’s Mode D—the regenerative networks that emerge as the ethical-axial response to civilisational extraction-regimes. His chapter in Rosy Cross is the most generative single piece of constructive thinking I have encountered in recent years on this terrain, and the convergence between his project and the new integral humanism I am articulating is one I expect to develop at length in future work. Bauwens works from the political-economic infrastructure side; the new integral humanism works from the philosophical-anthropological side. Both orient toward the same horizon: the genuine democratic encounter that Dallmayr names integral pluralism and that Maritain named integral humanism. Readers who want to follow this conversation should obtain the Rosy Cross anthology; Bauwens’s chapter and my own sit on either side of the question Cadell Last has posed for the volume.“
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Notice how Erik Haines positions my approach and his, on a complementary polarity, part of a unified ‘integral humanism’.
I was not aware of his work, nor of the concept of Integral Humanism, but what I read from the quoted article, is extremely compatible with my own background, since I also hail from Integralism originally.
I hope you are motivated for your own inquiry into these stimulating thinkers!!
Thanks for the thoughtful survey of world machines theory, which is increasingly a group project now. But I think you’ve misunderstood the main point. The thesis is not anti-eurocentricity, but the decoupling of the Eurocentric phase of global civilization from the modernization phase. Ie modernization happened before European ascendancy due to older events across the world. If you’re following the current writing and thinking around the 2026 book club, you’ll notice that in our model the divergence machine is pretty exclusively European driven, but the underlying modernism it reshaped was already multipolar because it had taken shape before European breakaway capabilities. But because of the nature of divergence itself, it tends to weaken the source influence and drives decentering. Eg Darwinism is a European idea but has a decentering effect wherever it lands, reinforcing local variety than monolithic European influence.
Lots of food for thought here; lots of dots to be connected! Thank you Michel!