The Chthulucene
Introduced in Staying with the Trouble (2016), the Chthulucene is Haraway's deliberately strange name for the era of the tentacular. The term is named not for Lovecraft's Cthulhu but for Pimoa cthulhu, a real spider species whose name predates Lovecraft's fiction. The figure is meant to displace both the Anthropocene, which makes the human the protagonist of planetary history, and the Capitalocene, which makes capital the protagonist. Neither figure, Haraway argues, captures what is most important about the present: that no being makes itself alone, that multispecies entanglements are constitutive of the future, and that responsibility is distributed across the web of relationships rather than concentrated in any single species or system.
In the AI Story
The cyborg builder's world is a Chthulucene world whether the builder recognizes it or not. The building happens within a web of entanglements — human and machine, organism and algorithm, local community and global infrastructure — and the quality of the building depends on the quality of the builder's attention to those entanglements. The dam that the beaver builds serves the ecosystem, not the beaver alone. The compost that the gardener tends serves the soil, not the gardener alone. And the code that the cyborg writes serves the world, or fails to, depending on the depth and honesty of the cyborg's reckoning with the relationships that the building constitutes.
The Chthulucene framework insists that the AI transition be understood not as a story about humans and machines alone but as a story about the entire web of species and systems that the transition affects. The ecological cost of training and running large models — the electricity, the water, the rare earth minerals — is not an externality to the AI story. It is part of the story. The invisible labor of data workers is part of the story. The displacement of cognitive diversity by monocultures of the mind is part of the story. The Chthulucene names the frame within which all of these connections become visible.
The figure is deliberately uncomfortable. Tentacular is not a heroic image. Spiders are not the charismatic megafauna around which environmental narratives have traditionally organized themselves. Haraway chose the figure precisely because it refuses the anthropocentric comfort of heroic narratives. The Chthulucene is not about saving the planet. It is about learning to live and die well on a planet already damaged, among species whose futures are bound to each other in ways none of them fully understands.
Origin
Haraway introduced the Chthulucene in lectures and essays in the early 2010s before developing it fully in the 2016 book. The term draws on her engagement with multispecies ethnography, feminist science studies, and the emerging literature on the Anthropocene, including work by Jason Moore on the Capitalocene. Her insistence that Pimoa cthulhu predates Lovecraft is characteristic: she will not let the name be captured by the racist fantasy author whose spelling (Cthulhu) she deliberately alters.
Key Ideas
Tentacular, not heroic. The figure refuses narratives organized around a single protagonist — human, technological, or ecological.
Multispecies, not humanist. The era is defined by entanglements across species rather than by human achievement or suffering.
Kin-making, not salvation. The response is building relationships across difference, not saving the planet through heroic action.
Damaged, not pristine. The planet on which kin-making happens is already damaged; there is no innocent ground to return to.
Together, not alone. No being makes itself alone, including the AI builder. The entanglements are constitutive.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Duke, 2016)
- Anna Tsing et al., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
- Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015)
- Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways (Columbia University Press, 2014)