Brownbag Seminar by Prof. Orit Halpern: "The Planetary Test-bed: Notes to a Theory of Technospheric Governance" on March 2nd @African Centre for Cities in Capetown

Prof Orit Halpern will present her upcoming article  that develops the concept of “technospheric governance” to analyze how contemporary AI platforms for climate modeling, military operations, urban planning, and logistics constitute an emerging episteme with significant implications for democratic politics. Drawing on case studies of digital twinning initiatives—including the European Union’s Destination Earth, NVIDIA’s Earth-2, and Palantir’s enterprise platforms—the article traces four interrelated transformations.

• An epistemic shift from causal, explanatory models to non-causal “generative” inference reorganizes what counts as knowledge and who qualifies as expert.
• A temporal displacement inverts the traditional sequence of deliberation and deployment, with technologies assessed through continuous “learning” rather than prior democratic debate.
• The infrastructuralization of experiment inaugurates new economies of hyperproduction that are transforming platform economies.
• The planetary-scale experimentation produces not unified global governance but fragmented data spaces serving competing political-economic blocs.

By situating these developments within a genealogy extending from Cold War systems modeling to contemporary AI infrastructures, the article argues that experimentation itself has become infrastructuralized, demanding urgent attention to the politics of technological testing.

DATE | Monday, 02 March 2026

TIME | 13H00 – 14H00

VENUE | Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, UCT Upper Campus.

Please RSVP to 

Orit Halpern is a historian of science and media studies scholar working on histories that bridge computing, design, and politics. Her most recent book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press December 2023) is titled the Smartness Mandate. It examines how we have come to believe that digital computing and artificial intelligence is essential to human survival, and how “smart” technologies and ideologies are remaking planetary governance and futures. She is also the director of the Digital Cultures Research Group and  co-director of The Schaufler Lab;  two groups bridging the arts, environmental sciences, media, and the social sciences in the interest of re-imagining technological futures.