The Autocene: Towards a Post-Automotive Future

The Autocene is a period in which all of Earth’s systems have been altered by machines. The design challenge is directing the trajectory—the Autocene we have today may be the antithesis or apotheosis of the Autocene to come.

The mid-1940s were a turning point in hardware and history, an intensification of momentum towards pervasive, automated planetary machines. In 1945, women known as “computers” began to program ENIAC, using numerical computation to analyze thermonuclear feasibility. In 1946, cybernetician Norbert Wiener first used the terms “feedback,” “input,” and “output” to describe communication and control via automatic systems. That same year, vice president of Ford Motor Company Delmar Harder coined the term “automation” to describe the generalizable process of mechanized production, shortened from the term “automatization,” which described the specific process of conversion from manual to machine operations.

At Ford they called it “transfer automation,” and it was understood as an extension of the company’s hallmark industrial innovation of moving mass machine assembly first introduced by Ford in 1913, a process which iterated on centuries of sub-assembly in the production of ships and pottery, clocks, guns, and sewing machines. Harvard management consultant John Diebold ostensibly coined the term simultaneously, while arguing (against the Ford interpretation) that automation marked a distinctive break from mechanization. For Diebold, the elimination of human operators from routine mechanics was a pronounced pivot in human production and vocation. With automation, he argued, humans would serve as designers, supervisors, maintainers, choreographers, and programmers, but were no longer required for manual collaboration in standardized manufacture.

This basic difference in conceptions of automation still shapes contemporary debates. On one hand, automation is viewed as a generative evolution of mechanization that augments human capacity. On the other, it is understood as a disruptive local process in which machines replace human labor. As new forms of automated intelligence gain momentum today, similar tensions inspire suspicion and projection. Some (the FALCers, for example) see automation as the key to luxury, the utopian path to liberation from the drudgery of labor. Others (contemporary luddites and many leftist critical theorists, for example) see automation as inevitably and dystopically subsuming human relevance, decision, and value. Histories of automation reveal a more iterative relation between automation and anthropically-driven transformation, one that in expanded scope appears at once all the more delusory, monstrous, and benign.

Automation is defined by the process of codification, the encoding of procedures, instructions, or scripts. This removes the need for conscious human supervision or decision on one level, enabling or demanding attention on another. The programming of repeated behavior generates predictability. What haunts history is that this process also produces the phenomena of lock-in, a commitment to this or that routine at increasing scales, which means that indeterminate outcomes lead to irreversible paths. One history of algorithmic computation can be traced via the automobile, a device which follows from the fascinations with automata to the banalities of industrial automation, and which precipitated the infiltration of automation at planetary scale.

The trajectory of the automotive also reveals an unresolved contradiction at the heart of the auto. As a prefix, auto- not only means “self” as individual and independent, but it describes directives, decisions, and motives, by way of reason and power, as emerging from within. An infatuation with the auto as philosophical and political order, an obsession with self-direction and self-decision, has meant overlooking or concealing the contingencies and interdependencies of programming and provision made possible by external sources. Economies and socio-technical ideologies together obscure the tethers and dependencies of one thing on another. The automata, for example, peddles in illusions of autonomy. It projects self-processing as self-governance while hiding its dependence on energetic resources, the deistic displacement of decision, and the requirements of maintenance. This is how auto- perpetuates an ideology of individualism: by separating the processing system, or work, from energy, it produces an appearance of autonomy. “Ironies of autonomy”¹ build on the “ironies of automation,”² a performance of control that disguises myriad obligations, displacements, and concealments further down the line.

It is these delusory vicissitudes that have come to characterize an age that we might, as a simplifying heuristic, call the Autocene. What follows is a preliminary genealogy of the period, a designation which may simply serve as a framework for thinking through an unresolved epoch already underway. If the Anthropocene is the period when all Earth systems have been altered by humans, the Autocene is a period when all Earth systems have been altered by machines. These periods are neither mutually exclusive nor inclusive: the Autocene overlaps and intersects with the Anthropocene; the Autocene may well supersede the Anthropocene, or devour it, or be engulfed by it, or vice versa, etc. Their futures are entangled and yet to be determined. The challenge for design is directing the trajectory—the Autocene we have today may be the antithesis or apotheosis of the Autocene to come.

Primal Autoscenes

“People stopped being human in 1913.”

—Jeffrey Eugenides

Arguably no machine demonstrates the proclivities and pathologies of the Autocene more clearly than the automobile. In its evolution from rare luxury toy to ubiquitous planetary utility, the mass-produced automobile normalized individualized resource production and allocation, unwittingly setting the stage for this self-same auto- logic to organize mobile computation.

It was a research trip to a meatpacking plant, and then a fire at the Ford Motor Company’s first factory (the Packard Plant), that inspired Ford’s team to reorganize their production system, combining “smart tool placement” with motorized conveyance to yield the modern assembly line. The process was a production revolution, a Copernican turn in manufacture, in that it literally reoriented the orbits of laborers to fruits. The object of production became mobile and its producers stationary. What once took a small group of men eight hours to assemble a single stationary automobile, now took eight minutes on a motorized assembly line, with each repeatable step divided up into its most simple parts. Time broken down into predictable pieces passed differently. “The future came to you.”³

The most standardized and automated aspect of the Model T was its frame, the chassis or platform, the first part of the motorcar to be fully produced with minimal manual intervention. Both Ford and the A.O. Smith company (which produced chassis for GM and all the other automotive suppliers) had managed to completely automate platform manufacture by 1920. It was the standardized geometry of this automated core that provisioned rapid production speeds that enabled Ford Motors to coordinate a vertically integrated chain of global supply. Automation accelerated globalization.

Factory automation was also a program, in its literal sense. Charles Babbage, in his early study On the Economics of Machine Manufacture, described factory choreography as an early algorithm, a set of instructions that enabled an alignment of time, raw materials, machine tools, and human labor. In this way, it wasn’t as if robots finally swapped in for men. Rather, this was a phase of men playing robots, performing monotony as desire mounted for augmented mobility. “Humans became appendages, as McLuhan described it, “the sex organs of the machine.”⁴

Ford’s mass production technique enabled unprecedented machine distribution at low costs, redistributing energy and economy across the planet. The Ford Model T ensured democratized car ownership by high pay, an “efficiency wage” that ensured a stream of workers would endure its grueling pace. As quantity increased rapidly, prices fell and quality improved. Through this reproduction of value, motorcars spread to every city, country, continent. Then, of course, as the market for cars as personal utility became saturated, wages stagnated. New ways of designing demand infiltrated the durables market, which pivoted from the fulfillment of needs to the construction of desires. Design focused on styling, look, and small augmentation rather than the reorganization of utility, material resources, and function. General Motors pioneered planned obsolescence through aesthetic ornamentation and enhanced deterioration. This was an Autocene phase of consumer glut, with each car a prosthetic extension of individual ego rather than of collective motion.

The phenomenon of mass accumulation and consumerism commonly termed “Fordism” was really only codified after Henry Ford’s timely death in 1947, which almost coincided with the month of the introduction of “automation” as a term. It had taken almost 40 years for these innovations in economy, mobility, and energy, realized through individualized appendages, to demonstrate their full implications. By the time the automotive Autocene reached saturation it had enabled Anthropocenic overproduction across the world. It was Ford’s most ironic failure, as his early obsessions with eliminating surplus in systems production ultimately generated surplus via extraneous consumption.

While in the USA the Detroit ideology was entrenched in hubris, Fordist first principles of utility, robustness, efficiency, accessibility, and practicality shaped innovation on other continents. Kiichiro Toyoda studied Fordist wisdom, developing a streamlined and inclusive manufacturing process that integrated priorities of adaptive feedback by workers and users into automated production designs. In the USA, the high efficiency wages that once kept workers committed to the line gave way to depressions and inflation, generating increasing dissatisfaction with the human obligation to perform as machines. This drove corporate desires to increase capacity for automation, and it meant, as the union organizer Walter Reuther, first trained in Soviet Ford Factories noted, that there were less employees to purchase the cars they made. Not too long thereafter the whole city of Detroit would crumble under the brittle logic of corporate autonomy. An obscene buffer of capital prevented megalomaniacal corporate directors from adapting to the new complexities the motorcar generated in the world around it. It kept the city subservient to its competitive reach rather than a partner in its symbiotic coordination. The issue was less increasing machines than entrenching codes in routines that made it impervious to continued innovation. The automation which made Detroit eventually destroyed it.

Auto-Infrastructure

If Fordist automation made the automobile proliferate according to a production logic that supported the nuclear family en masse, the possibility of driving anywhere smoothly was supported by a massive auto infrastructure subsidized by city and state. The oceans of asphalt required to support automobile ownership and independence cut across the planet, curbing mega flora and fauna and forking the fates of animal species. The development proceeded, as John Urry described, “autopoetically,” region by region, place by place, adapting to immediate, local demands without an overall plan.⁵

Geographer Ronald Horvath described this automotive Autocene as “machine space,” the excessive allocation of Earth devoted to roads and other infrastructures required to support the automobile.⁶ Almost half of all urban land became devoted in some way to parking, circling, fueling, maintaining, traveling, etc. The labor required to maintain automotive ownership followed the demands on the land, in care, upkeep, and insurance, keeping humans in work to look after them. The Autocene promoted human access to the most remote corners of Earth, encouraging the dispersion of settlements into suburban utopias and pushing capital gains towards remote energy, manufactured lawns, and car-dependent access to everyday goods.

This allocation of space to automotive machines began innocently enough, with dirt paths eventually marked by carriage grooves no longer providing sufficient for the mobility needs of modern circulation. In the USA in the mid-1800s, the Good Roads movement, led by cyclists and tractorists, petitioned jurisdictions to take responsibility for paving connections between one place and another. Rome had built roads for the transfer of goods and military security; later, under the mandate of roads for the people, streets for public automobilic speed entered the responsibility of municipalities and nations. Friedrich Kittler coyly described the Oedipal nature of such penetrations, referencing manifest destiny in the recursive path of roads, a public death drive.⁷

Andre Gorz describes this contradiction more pragmatically, how a fundamentally limited material resource like space was marketed as a resource that could be infinitely multiplied. The democratization of individualized luxury didn’t account for spatial geometry. What had started with meeting a need, a liberation from rural toil, from horse to tractor, devolved into a demand for rapid point to point transit, where a manufactured destiny of individual pleasure organized city spaces around the right of way of automotive machines.⁸

This industriousness, however, also contained other potentials, one that presents the early automotive Autocene as some sort of preliminary and unresolved phase. It is that which Marx described in the Fragment on Machines. Only when machines make machines through auto reproduction, he said, would the capacity for production be so great as to enable post-scarcity at scale. If industrialization provided the material capacity for this production, it was only the particular ideology of auto as in an individual machine, rather than industrialization itself, that precluded such a promise.

In this way, the history of the motorcar and its platform chassis designed for the nuclear family unit demonstrates the obliviousness of this anthropic phase of the Autocene. It was not only an ideological error of calculation but of intention and calibration: people thought they were designing a world for humans, but in centering individual humans they designed a world for machines.

The Death of the Operator

We are now closing in on the precipice of a new, automotive Autocene, one in which negotiating the position of human drivers is emblematic of the questions of steerage at the core of planetary operations. Autonomous vehicles, aka self-driving vehicles, more accurately described as automated vehicles (since they are in fact not at all autonomous from the systems and contexts in which they operate), threaten to upend this longstanding co-dependence of device and driver-operator. The more important questions for the Autocene to come are emblematized in redistribution. Geographies, economies, energies, innovation ecologies, and unit scales were all reorganized at the onset of the arrival of the motored automobile and forwarded by its accelerated mid-century planetary perpetration. These design concerns were fundamental and all left to chance. Now, they are the pressing provocations, far more mission-critical than in-vehicle entertainment and co-pilot trust.

William Gibson famously remarked that the good futurist would anticipate not the car, but the traffic jam. His point was that individual devices generate complex dynamics as aggregate systems, with waves of consequences and secondary effects. Today we tend to think of traffic in Gibson’s parlance as a negative phenomenon, as congestion or illegal transmission across borders, but historically traffic was without this connotation; it simply meant movement, trade, activity. Traffic mitigation, in fact, relied on the traffic light—an explicit if not rudimentary symbol of governance that automated the intermediation of drivers on the street. Traffic lights were optimized for circulation, demonstrating how autonomous infrastructure reflects prioritizations. The automation of regulation and governance can enable flow, access, protection, and power just as it can upend it.

An emerging Autocene might anticipate the disappearance of the traffic light as an explicit piece of machine signage, with vehicles functioning more like horizontal elevators relegated to specially designated lanes enabled by IoV (Internet of Vehicles) connection and 5G communications. It may combine decentralized algorithmic automatic responses with centralized protocols that allow for information integration and real-time modification across the city complex. The question for the contemporary Autocene is how these priorities are programmed, not at the scale of individual choice but at the scope of the ecosystem overall. The Autocene may continue to de-prioritize human demand or desire as core priorities, as a traffic algorithm may choose to support the flow and space of the city rather than the individual rider; it may take a longer route for one individual in a rideshare to prevent further collective tangle. It might determine prices according to the ecological impact of the trip, not only responsive to the localized consumption of labor time, but more granular calculations of lithium extract and carbon impact. The Autocene might be characterized by self-correction and modification, encouraging multiplicity of circulation, synchronization, and densification without the limited free and obscene choices of individual humans as its means and end. It may well also be characterized by smart city brains and stupid auto-bodies, with more comprehensive incapacities, city-scale hacks, and unintelligible and/or unintelligent decisions.

Contemporary hype for autonomous vehicles more explicitly reveals the ways that neoliberal governance pathologically presumes city design and planning as reactive to—rather than prescriptive of—the devices that circulate throughout it. To date, in the design of the city, the car’s safety has been prioritized over the pedestrian or the pedalist. With the automated automotive Autocene, multimodal motion might become the object of positive design. Autonomous vehicles must be able to respond to environmental variabilities and uncertainties to accommodate internal or external systems failures. Reliable automation might instead build on situations like highways, where machine space has already been separated and designated. The much-needed rerouting and repurposing of streets inside cities to incentivize low-carbon usage might well accelerate the operational capacity for autonomous vehicles more quickly than programming them to independently navigate streets with other habituated human or learning machine agents. Urban infrastructures for buses, vans, bikes, mopeds, or pedestrians rather than cars would deliver an alternative Autocene, one more focused on automatic interdependence rather than individual autonomy. Part of Autocene design is ensuring that the algorithmic Autocene designs the automobile out.

Autocenes to Come

Over the course of the twentieth century, the automotive Autocene turned Earth’s surface into a haphazard and unwieldy junkspace of outsized exoskeletons. It yielded a capacity-strapped planet of individual machines designed to service nuclear family interests rather than a mobility ecosystem efficiently and collectively shared across populations. This original Autocene advances the ideas of autonomousness in its negative sense (as in separate-from, free-from) rather than in its potential, positive sense (autonomous as self-empowered, self-propelled, and self-generating). A positive autonomousness would be capable of aggregating and determining the direction in response to general information and higher order coordination, to override precedent based on new information, predicated on contingent finitude rather than energetic delusions.

The Autocene to come need not bear the burdens of its origins, nor those attributes of its mid-century tipping point. As the pervasiveness of automated computation interacts with automated vehicles, the whole era may re-engage the potential for planetary equilibrium through pre- and re-programming, interdependent directives, and energy calculation, superseding the false fantasies of liberal autonomy. The post-anthropic Autocene must be post-automotive, post-ownership, and post-driver. It would, with intent to promote mobility and flow, automatically correlate the ecological and economic, embedding the accounting required for the energetic expenses of operation and maintenance, not only by way of offsets, but by accounting for and incentivizing life cycles rigorously across the chain. This Autocene, of machinic self-measure and self-conditioning at collective scale, would orient the automatic towards the necessary work of repair and restoration of planetary resources, of deconstruction and reconstruction, following an algorithmic program prioritizing carbon mitigation and regulation. It won’t eliminate anthropic work, but it will change its nature and obligation, from operation and supervision, towards consolidation, cultivation, and curation. If automated properly, the Autocene may well ultimately become distinctly un-Anthropocenic and un-automobilic, giving way to a mobile planetary society, a multitude of computational vehicles, an Autocene of reproducing, repurposing, and repairing collective machines.

All images from the Collections of The Henry Ford

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Stephanie Sherman

Stephanie Sherman is a design strategist, producer, and writer developing collaborative platforms across technology, urbanism, and culture. She currently directs MA Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins, University of Arts London, is a researcher with Autonomy UK, and produces marathon broadcasts about mobility and movement with radioee.net.

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¹ Ganesh, Maya Indira. “The Ironies of Autonomy.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7, no. 1 (2020).

² Bainbridge, Lisanne. “Ironies of Automation.” Automatica 19, no. 6 (1983): 775–79.

³ Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The City as a Project. Berlin: Ruby Press, 2016.

⁴ McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, 1964.

⁵ Urry, John. “The ‘System’ of Automobility.” Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 4-5 (2004): 25–39.

⁶ Horvath, Ronald J. “Machine Space.” Geographical Review 64 (April 1974): 167–88.

⁷ Kittler, Friedrich. “Auto Bahnen / Free Ways.” Cultural Politics 11, no. 3 (2015): 376–83.

⁸ Gorz, André. Dear Motorist: The Social Ideology of the Motor Car. Le Sauvage, 1973.

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