CONCEPT
Planetarity
Spivak's alternative to globalization — the earth understood not as a system available for management but as an alterity that exceeds every framework through which we try to comprehend it.
Planetarity, developed most fully in Spivak's Death of a Discipline (2003), is the concept she proposed against globalization's managed abstractions. The globe, in Spivak's distinction, is on our computers — rotatable, zoomable, measurable, modelable. Its features are data points, its populations demographic categories, its problems optimization challenges. No one lives on the globe. People live on the planet. The planet is the earth as it exceeds our representations — the irreducible complexity that persists after every model has been built, every dataset assembled, every algorithm trained. Planetarity invites a different relationship between knower and known: the globe invites mastery; the planet demands humility. The globe can be captured in a model; the planet exceeds every model.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction operates at the philosophical level as a refusal of totalization. Globalization presents itself as the integration of the earth into a single economic and informational system, and the presentation is partly accurate — capital flows, data flows, and supply chains do