The Weekly Planet #4

We live in a moment where every attempt at planetary thinking reveals both possibility and paralysis. This week’s Daily Planets have been circling around a central tension: the collision between our belief-driven politics and the material realities of a planet that doesn’t care about our stories. From Intel’s chips to coyote killings and the healing hum of bees, we’re witnessing the breakdown of the very categories that organized the modern world—and perhaps, just perhaps, the emergence of something else.

Start with chips, those tiny crystallized bits of human cleverness that increasingly mediate our entire existence. Ben Thompson’s defense of the U.S. taking a 10% stake in Intel is atypical of this genre. The truth is brutal: Intel missed mobile, which meant it missed the volume that justifies the tens of billions needed for cutting-edge fabs. Now it needs external customers to make 14A viable, but no customer will commit to a foundry that might not exist. It’s a perfect catch-22 that only government ownership can resolve.

This isn’t about “nimble responses to rapidly changing technology,” as critics claim. Chip manufacturing is a decades-long endeavor where decisions made in 2007 about mobile phones determine whether you can build AI infrastructure in 2030. Taiwan and South Korea sit next door to China, and every advanced chip that powers our artificial futures passes through facilities within easy reach of Chinese missiles. The market can’t solve this because the market operates on quarterly timescales while chips operate on geological ones. Sometimes nationalization isn’t socialism; it’s realism acknowledging that some problems require thinking in decades, not earnings cycles.

Which brings us to polycrisis—or as Yuen Yuen Ang brilliantly reframes it, polytunity. The term polycrisis has become, as she notes, “the apocalyptic buzzword of the decade,” a way for elites to name their fears without challenging the systems that created them. It abstracts causes, making crises appear as natural convergences rather than systemic outcomes of extractive orders. Polytunity, by contrast, sees disruption as opportunity for transformation—not just of institutions but of paradigms themselves.

Ang’s critique of development economics is devastating. The field has been trapped in what she calls the industrial-colonial paradigm: treating societies as machines with buttons to push while assuming Western templates are universal endpoints. The recent Nobel prizes exemplify this—one for breaking poverty into “smaller, more manageable” problems via randomized controlled trials (as if any society escaped poverty through precisely measured nudges), another for claiming settler colonialism brought prosperity through “inclusive institutions” (conveniently forgetting the slavery and extraction part).

Against this, Ang proposes studying development as coevolutionary rather than linear. Development doesn’t begin with perfect institutions that enable growth or growth that enables institutions. It begins with “using what you have”—repurposing weak, wrong, or unorthodox means to build new markets, which then stimulate modern institutions. What works for start-up economies isn’t what works for advanced ones. China didn’t develop by importing Western best practices but by creatively adapting existing arrangements that looked backward by first-world standards.

This is where Albert O. Hirschman becomes newly relevant, as Daniel Drezner suggests. Hirschman rejected both the universalism of neoliberalism and the grand designs of Big Push development. He embraced unbalanced growth, believing bottlenecks would create pressure for reform. He advocated eclecticism, localism, and what he called “a propensity to self-subversion”—a recognition that every approach contains the seeds of its own failure.

But here’s Hirschman’s dark insight, more relevant now than ever: economic interdependence doesn’t always create peace; it can create vulnerability. His first book analyzed how Nazi Germany consciously created asymmetric dependence in Eastern Europe. Today, both China and the U.S. weaponize economic relationships, using market dominance to pressure smaller countries. The world that was supposed to be flattened by trade has instead become a topology of coercion where your prosperity depends on accepting someone else’s political demands.

Meanwhile, our actual cohabitants on this planet - the animals - reveal just how arbitrary our categories of value really are. Why do we pamper dogs while running coyote-killing derbies? Why do we cherish cats while poisoning dingoes? It’s almost the same animal, as ecologist Shelley Alexander notes—intelligent beings with personalities, memories, and family lives. Yet we treat them based on whether they fall inside or outside our circle of domesticity.

The disparity is staggering. In New York, you can get a license to kill unlimited coyotes for six months for $22. Project Coyote estimates 500,000 are killed annually in the U.S., mostly for fun. YouTube abounds with videos celebrating their deaths. Yet when a coyote in upstate New York found a dog’s toy and played with it—tossing it in the air, bucking around with joy—the internet was charmed. A wild animal behaving like a pet! As if the capacity for play somehow made it worthy of the empathy we automatically extend to golden retrievers.

In Australia, dingoes face similar persecution despite being apex predators whose presence promotes ecological richness. When ecologist Adam O’Neill stopped killing them at Evelyn Downs station, they formed stable packs, established territories, and stopped killing calves. “When they’re socially stable, they virtually disappear from sight,” he observed. Mutual respect emerged: the dingoes learned not to mess with humans and their property, while being allowed to keep breathing.

Conservation’s focus on populations rather than individuals is increasingly untenable. As cognitive science reveals the inner lives of animals, the ethical implications become ever more urgent. The current arrangement, where government wildlife agencies funded by hunting licenses treat animals as resources to harvest, represents what researchers call a democratic deficit. The public that supposedly owns wildlife isn’t represented in its management - just one interest group that profits from killing.

Jerry Brown and Stewart Brand’s conversation about planetary realism and Whole Earth thinking reveals both the promise and limits of trying to transcend these belief-driven conflicts. Brown articulates the fundamental problem: we’re not fact-based, we’re belief-based. “I look out today and see a lot of what I would call ignorant armies clashing by night.” China tells a story about historical humiliation; America tells one about democratic superiority. Both are powerful stories with no factual basis for their exclusivity claims.

Brand’s optimism—that COVID might teach us to think in planetary-scale terms, that science might triumph over story—seems almost quaint now. But his deeper insight remains: human civilization is trying to become like Earth itself, learning to be a persistent system. Cities, as both Brown and Brand note, have this quality—they persist while nations flicker around them. Cities are immediate, rooted in place and memory. States are abstractions, powerful but not intimate, not where life shows up.

And then there’s sound—the actual vibratory reality that connects all these stories. Bernie Krause’s concept of the “Great Animal Orchestra” reveals how every creature occupies a sonic niche in their ecology, from ultrasonic bat calls down through birdsong to the infrasonic hum of elephants. Bees buzz at frequencies that resonate with organic tissues to promote healing. Cat purrs strengthen bones. Dolphin pulses trigger endorphin production.

The orchestra of animals is what Jay Griffiths calls “an inveterate conscience,” reminding us that human sound alone is insufficient and unhealthy because it’s unnatural, unbalanced, out of harmony with the All. When human voices circulate lies that only humans matter, that we’re separate from nature, that our stories override material reality, animal voices provide the tonic, both musical and medicinal.

The sound of a pond’s insect chorus, as David Rothenberg discovered, floods us with wellness. It sounds complete and diverse, a perfect gathering that makes us feel whole. This is the deep truth COVID momentarily revealed when our machinery fell silent and people heard birdsong as if for the first time: we are incomplete without the other voices, the other lives, the other ways of being.

This week’s Daily Planets converge on a radical proposition: the categories that organized modernity—human/nature, developed/developing, domestic/wild, fact/belief—are breaking down. What’s emerging isn’t polytunity in Ang’s optimistic sense, for that word suggests too much agency, too much choice. It’s more like meandering evolution, where the planetary scale of our problems renders our conceptual apparatus obsolete. The chip wars reveal timescales beyond market logic. Climate change operates outside national boundaries. Animals refuse to stay in their assigned categories. Even our bodies vibrate to frequencies we didn’t know we needed.

We’re all in a sense like those Yellowstone wolves who step across invisible lines from protected to hunted space, except the lines are everywhere and constantly shifting. One moment you’re developing according to best practices; the next you’re trapped in someone else’s asymmetric dependence. One moment you’re a sovereign nation; the next you’re desperately dependent on chips made next door to your rival. One moment you’re separate from nature; the next a virus reminds you that you’re just another mammal in the mammalian cloud.

The question isn’t whether we’ll transcend these contradictions through some triumph of planetary consciousness. It’s whether we can muddle through with what Hirschman called “a propensity to self-subversion”—recognizing that every solution creates new problems, every development path creates new dependencies, every circle of care excludes someone or something worthy of care.

We’re all swayed by forces we barely comprehend - economic, ecological, evolutionary. The question is whether we’ll learn to hear the whole orchestra or keep insisting that only our part matters. As the Navajo singers know, healing means restoring harmony within and without.

Right now, we’re badly out of tune.