Energy

Vanina Saracino 

Related terms: environmental data, plant, petro-feminism, post-extractivism, regeneration, solarpunk, symbiosis

Energy is an expansive force. It is both atomic and stellar, intimate and infrastructural, metaphor and matter, myth and measure. It exceeds chronology while remaining entangled with historical regimes of knowledge and power. It is everything. At once a physical quantity (measurable and quantifiable), a philosophical conundrum (elusive and deeply relational), and a cultural metaphor, energy is understood not only in mechanistic terms rooted in nineteenth-century thermodynamics as a force that produces work, but also through ecological, feminist, Indigenous, and posthuman perspectives that reframe it as reciprocal, metabolic, and more-than-human.

And yet, as a key concept in science and politics, energy only emerged in the nineteenth century, at the apex of the Industrial Revolution, when it became widely defined as ‘the capacity to do work’. Energy evolved into an object of modern politics at the forefront of the Western ethos to “put the world to work” (Daggett 2019, 3) for an unquestioned and growing profit. This dominant understanding of energy, rooted in classical mechanics and shaped by a Eurocentric, patriarchal epistemology, had great influence on the foundation of modern and political thought, and therefore on the paths taken in matters of society, economy, and environment.

The so-called ‘advancement of civilization’ and the evolution of culture have been considered directly proportional to the amount of energy a society could harness and control (White 1943). This equation (more energy = more advancement) has become the trope of modernity, naturalizing the industrial global order as if it were a “cosmic truth” (Daggett 2019), following a trajectory that rarely paused to ask for whom, at what cost, and through whose bodies growth – in the form of energy accumulation – would be achieved. In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev extended this logic across cosmic time, imagining a scale of civilizations classified by their capacity to capture ever-larger energy amounts: first from their home planet, then from their sun, and eventually from the entire galaxy (by this measure, we linger now at the threshold of a Type I civilization). Humans of the future would employ stars as vast energy reserves, encasing them through hypothetical megastructures such as the Dyson Sphere, which would, in principle, require dismantling entire planets to mine the needed materials to wrap an extractive infrastructure around a sun. Perhaps not surprisingly, Sam Altman (Founder and CEO of OpenAI) invoked precisely the use of the Dyson Sphere when recently asked whether the full-scale development of artificial generative intelligence (AGI) could unfold within a sustainable energy model (Altman 2024, 00:05:45-00:06:26).

This scalar delirium of energy accumulation and extractive disintegration is today both Promethean fantasy and fate. It resonates strongly as the ambition to transition from fossil fuels to renewables collides with AGI’s “obscene energy demands” (Kolbert 2024) and with the vague or hyperspeculative solutions mentioned by its developers. Most of us employ AI tools by now, either intentionally or not, as they become progressively embedded in everyday software, and are often even imposed through deceptive design patterns against sustainability (Beignon et al. 2025). The exponential growth projected for AGI relies on the extraction of an amount of resources that remains a corporate secret, and whose material solutions lean now on speculative imaginings – such as the vague “mythoreligious fantasy” that AGI will solve the problem of energy scarcity by itself (Davis and Stoneman 2024). Some tech ideologists even push this logic further, asserting that not only the accumulation, but the consumption of energy per se is the ultimate ‘will of the universe’, implying that accelerating this process would provide direct support to evolution. AGI’s main purpose would thus be “to burn through tons of energy, thus increasing entropy and accelerating heat death. Burning becomes an end in itself” (Steyerl 2025, 55-57).

The equation endures across time: more energy, more culture, more growth. Yet this formulation rarely interrogates the means by which such energy is amassed, nor does it account for the deep asymmetries – of class, race, gender – upon which these accumulations are historically built. Even less does it reckon with the radically anthropocentric logic that treats the planet as a passive substrate, its metabolic flows, interspecies entanglements, and more-than-human relations rendered expendable. Even without reaching the speculative extreme of a Dyson Sphere, we are already witnessing the quick widening of the ‘metabolic rift’ (Foster 1999; Foster et al. 2011), wherein capitalist production severs human societies from the ecological systems that sustain them.

The way we use energy is also, conversely, the way energy uses us. It shapes who we are, who we become, and what we become with. As Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén observe, “one who utilizes a particular energy starts to resemble that kind of energy: we do not use oil as much as oil uses us. Industrial civilizations do not burn oil; oil burns them” (Salminen and Vadén 2015, 58). This reversal is critical: the exploitation of energy is never unilateral, but reciprocal. Energy leaves traces in bodies, landscapes, and relations. It transforms planetary metabolism. Yet, large-scale capitalist energy projects overlook considering the Earth as a living organism – one animated by complex metabolic processes, by flows of energy exchanged (quasi-)symbiotically among beings, with the sun as the source. A century ago, biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky articulated such a vision by proposing a distinctive notion of planetary metabolism. He defined the ‘biosphere’ as the region of the Earth transformed by life and shaped by the circulation of matter and energy, ultimately powered by solar radiation (Vernadsky 1998). He went further to envision a kind of solar socialist future in which technological development could enable humans to become ‘autotrophic’ – capable of synthesizing their own nutrients from inorganic matter and sunlight, as plants do – thus radically transforming the human metabolism and reducing dependence on traditional food chains (Vernadsky 2013). Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan extended this speculative trajectory by imagining not a technological intervention, but a path for transformation unfolding across deep time: they envisioned a Homo photosyntheticus, evolved through endosymbiosis with photosynthetic organisms and able to process sunlight into nutrition. This idea draws inspiration from existing evolutionary pathways that brought some animal species to become able to photosynthesize, such as Elysia chlorotica, a leaf-like sea slug that can harness sunlight through stolen chloroplasts (Saracino 2020). This human of the future would be interplanetary, translucent, and porous, letting in as much light as possible through its skin. It would likely tend to lose its mouth, become largely sedentary, and survive by sunbathing on galactic shores (Margulis and Sagan 1997, 254).

What I find most compelling about this imagination of energy futures (at present no less speculative than Altman’s messianic invocation of the Dyson Sphere or of tech-evangelists’ call for an ‘effective accelerationism’) is the set of values it embodies, and the kind of world it envisions. Not a world driven by energivore greed, planetary demolition, systemic inequality, or the exploitation of people and resources for the benefit of a few, but a horizontal mutation of the body toward photosynthetic capacity, cultivated through endosymbiosis with other beings, leading to mutual biological benefit, becoming-with the energy of the sun. This speculative horizon reframes energy beyond the ‘capacity to do work’, understanding it as a matter of molecular and universal metabolism, as a relational exchange operating within an expanded notion of kinship (Haraway 2016). One definition need not negate the other, but the nuances matter because they reveal the underlying value systems and shape the material practices through which we engage with energy. As I’ve argued elsewhere (Saracino 2025), the fact that a hypothetical photosynthetic human is imagined in Earth System Sciences and in SF literature as a sedentary being is not incidental: it gestures toward a post-capitalist orientation, opposing values of ceaseless productivity, speed, and competition. Photosynthesis becomes a quiet rebellion, a form of metabolic resistance.

The notion of harnessing or consuming less energy remains politically untenable, and the simultaneous rise of fossil fuel and renewable energy consumption points to a deeper refusal to rethink the terms of life itself (Daggett 2019, 2). So long as energy remains tethered to the logics of capitalist accumulation, it will continue to reproduce – and intensify – the very conditions that have long rendered life unlivable for many. What is urgently needed today are not only new infrastructures of sustainability, but new conceptions of energy that can reconfigure our political, ecological, and cultural imaginaries. Emerging in response to this need, the field of energy humanities explores how new epistemologies of energy can support the crucial task of reimagining modernity (Syeman and Boyer 2017) beyond the dominant narrative of progress as extractive energy accumulation at any cost. The field takes as its core premise the understanding that energy systems are not merely technical or environmental, but also deeply social and cultural, and must therefore be examined through methods that can account for meaning, narrative, representation, and power. At the same time, developments in modern physics – particularly the quantum turn – have prompted a radical rethinking of energy in the philosophical realm, challenging ontological certainties and inherited definitions. New materialism(s), a philosophical lineage aligned with posthuman and post-anthropocentric thinking, foreground the vibrant, relational, and impermanent nature of all matter, attending to energy’s dynamic flows and entangled agencies to propose a reframing of human experience not as positioned above or outside material processes, but as deeply embedded within the energetic and affective networks that constitute the more-than-human world (Bennett 2010; Coole & Frost 2010).

Across these discourses, energy is reimagined not as a commodity to be extracted, but as a world-shaping force: diffuse, expansive, irreducible to fuel, function, or work. It is naturecultural by definition (Haraway 2016; Daggett 2019, 5): a matter of deep entanglement where nature and culture appear as inseparable manifestations of one another. There is great potential in overcoming the current ‘energy impasse’ and the energivore ethos that dominates our present, by embracing alternative epistemologies of energy – rooted in feminism, decolonization, post-capitalism, and Indigenous worldviews – that resist the extractivist, white, male, Western project of energetic accumulation and conquest (Wilson 2018). These alternative frameworks invite us to look at energy through the lens of planetary metabolism and reciprocity, to think evolution endosymbiotically, as a story of energy that is shared, rather than predated in competitive scarcity. They may even ask us to revisit our origin stories from the perspective of reciprocity, care, and sustenance, rather than conquest and productivity. As noted by Ursula Le Guin, if the way we source and use energy is an indicator of culture, it may be worth considering that the first cultural device invented was most probably a container: an object that held and carried the food that our hands and stomach could not carry for later and for others, that transported energy as nutrition to dispense it to the community – to attend to collective metabolic needs with the simple act of holding space for shared survival. Before we crafted machines to do the work, infrastructures, and weapons, and with or before even a basic tool was invented to force the energy outward, “we made the tool that brings energy home” (Le Guin 1989, 167).

References

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