Cognitive Scaffold

Preparing your thinking workspace

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MENTAL MODEL · M5599

Chthulucene

Chthulucene
CulturemediumMythology
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Updated 2026-08-08

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INTRODUCTION

English translation pending.

CORE DEFINITION

Coined by Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble as an alternative to the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. It emphasizes multispecies entanglement and the practice of making kin with nonhuman actors such as fungi, microbes, machines, and artificial intelligence, replacing human stewardship with situated coexistence. The core claim is that agency is distributed across species and things, so responses to ecological crisis must be collaborative. The qualification is that the concept does not absolve humans of responsibility, and Haraway explicitly rejects romanticizing chaos.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

- Use Actor Inventory: List the nonhuman agents in your system and what they are actually doing. - Use Stewardship Swap: Replace the aim of managing nature with the aim of negotiating a shared habitat. - Use Kinship Design: Build alliances with nonhuman actors instead of treating them as inert tools or threats.

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

Human-centered framing treats nonhuman entities as resources or background, which hides their real causal contributions and produces responses that fail when those entities act. Recognizing microbes, algorithms, and ecologies as agents changes what counts as a solution, because outcomes emerge from interaction rather than human intention alone. Shifting from steward to participant makes the human role one among many, which tends to produce more durable arrangements in systems no single actor controls.

MINIMUM ACTION

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Source support: Explicit

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    en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_HarawayZH · Explicit
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