Re-designing World-making and mobilities in the Techno-Anthropocene

The challenges facing global ecologies and lifeforms (human and non-human) are cascading at present. There are various intersecting forms of crisis, from biodiversity over climate change to massive refugee patterns, inequities, and pandemics. Even though there is only ‘one world’ in the sense of one globe with ‘no outside’, living species have probably never found themselves in more segregated ecologies within the Earth’s ‘critical zone’ before. From new ‘geo-social classes’ over stranded migrant populations to voluntary isolation by the super-rich, planetary co-existence seem in peril. And yet, it is all intertwined, albeit in complex and multi-scalar ways. In this paper the mobilities of matter, humans, goods, and information will be understood on the background of the techno-Anthropocene. This is then seen as the designed, mediatized, technologically framed artificial ontologies of planetary existence. The contemporary global condition is thus defined by the ‘made’, designed, artificial, and technological to an extend that may qualify the diagnosis of the Anthropocene with the prefix ‘techno’. Acts of ‘world making’ and mobilities design renders new lines of demarcation between those who move and those who do not, as well as between those who move on a voluntary basis versus those living lives of forced mobility. The paper addresses the ways in which we might re-think and re-design such troubled materialities of world-making and mobilities seeing ‘mobility justice’ and planetary co-existence as key goals. This means to engage in a critical-creative reimagining of scales, territories, mobilities, and inviting to techno-utopian and democratized visions of different futures.