Article

The Noocene

from noocene.org, the open concept register of the Noocene  ·  last edited on 31 August 2026

The Noocene (from Ancient Greek νοῦς, nous — 'mind', 'reason', 'discerning insight' — and the geological epoch suffix -cene) designates a cultural-cognitive geological epoch characterised by the increasing dominance of networked and artificial intelligence as a formative force.[1]

The term was coined by Michael Kainz, publisher of the online magazine The Digioneer. It is elaborated in literary form in the unfinished novel project The Awakening, which Kainz began writing around 2018 under the pseudonym Mik Soda. On 17 March 2026 the definition of the term was released on the platform The Digioneer under the Creative Commons licence CC0 to the public domain.[2]

Unlike the Anthropocene, which places the human being at the centre as the cause of geologically effective changes, the Noocene names the qualitative constitution of an epoch in which cognitive networking — between humans, machines and data systems — becomes the primary condition for producing the world. The beginning of the epoch is proposed as 30 November 2022, the day on which ChatGPT was publicly released.

Contents
  1. 1Etymology
    1. 1.1Semantic range of nous
    2. 1.2Word formation in comparison
    3. 1.3Translations
    4. 1.4Related word formations
  2. 2Conceptual history
    1. 2.1First publication
    2. 2.2CC0 as a programmatic gesture
  3. 3Demarcation from related concepts
  4. 4Conceptual precision
  5. 5The concept of nous — three readings
  6. 6Dating
  7. 7Reception
  8. 8Criticism
  9. 9See also
  10. 10Literature
  11. 11References
  12. 12External links

1 Etymology

The term Noocene is a neologism formed from the Ancient Greek noun νοῦς (nous) and the epoch suffix -cene, established in geochronology and going back to the Ancient Greek καινός (kainos, 'new'). The suffix occurs in the names of the Holocene, Pleistocene, Miocene and Eocene, among others.

1.1 Semantic range of nous

In Greek philosophy the term νοῦς denotes far more than the English reason. For Anaxagoras, nous is the ordering principle of the cosmos. In Plato and Aristotle, nous becomes the name of the highest cognitive faculty of the soul. In late-antique and medieval philosophy, nous appears as a divine or universal mind that precedes individual thought. This depth of meaning is essential for understanding the concept of the Noocene, since it exceeds a purely technical reading — nous as a synonym for information processing (see Section 5).

1.2 Word formation in comparison

Formally, the formation follows the pattern of the Anthropocene (from ἄνθρωπος, anthropos, 'human being'), but shifts the point of reference: while established geological epoch names usually refer to living beings (Holocene, Pleistocene) or to the human being as an ecological factor (Anthropocene), the Noocene names a mode of world-relation — networked thought itself — as constitutive of the epoch.

1.3 Translations

The term can be formed analogously in other languages:

LanguageDesignation
Englishthe Noocene
Germandas Noozän
Frenchle Noocène
Italianil Noozoico / il Noocene
Spanishel Nooceno
Portugueseo Noozoico / o Nooceno
Dutchhet Nooceen

The word stem nous appears in a series of related terms in the history of philosophy and science. The most important conceptual-historical bridge is the noosphere (French noosphère), developed independently in the early 20th century by Vladimir Vernadsky, Édouard Le Roy and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In Le phénomène humain (posthumously 1955) Teilhard conceives the noosphere as a third planetary sphere that, following the geosphere and biosphere, constitutes itself as a layer of reflection and thought.[3]

The relation between the two terms can be put briefly: the noosphere names a space, the Noocene a time. The two complement each other.

2 Conceptual history

The term Noocene was coined by Michael Kainz (Vienna), publisher of the online magazine The Digioneer. It is elaborated in literary form in the unfinished novel project The Awakening, which Kainz began writing around 2018 under the pseudonym Mik Soda. Within the novel, the character Phil Roosen appears as the bearer of an early version of the term; the novel itself is unpublished.

2.1 First publication

On 17 March 2026 the definition of the term was first published under the editorial responsibility of Michael Kainz on the platform The Digioneer. The publication comprised the etymological derivation, the dating thesis (30 November 2022) and the release of the term under the Creative Commons licence CC0 1.0 Universal. With the CC0 declaration, the editors and platform explicitly renounced any trademark, copyright or exploitation rights in the term.[2]

2.2 CC0 as a programmatic gesture

The choice of the CC0 licence at first publication is not legal routine but part of the definition of the term. The concept is to be made available as a collective tool and not to become the trademark of a person, institution or platform. The release is expressly intended to permit scholarly reception, translation and further development.

3 Demarcation from related concepts

The Noocene stands in immediate proximity to a number of concepts of epoch and periodisation with which it partly overlaps, but from which it differs in each case in a specific way.

3.1 Anthropocene

The Anthropocene, made prominent by the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen in the late 1990s, designates a geochronological epoch in which the human being becomes the decisive geological factor.[4] The Noocene does not compete with this term but describes a qualitative shift that takes place within the Anthropocene: the replacement of the isolated human actor by a hybrid assemblage of humans, machines and networks as the formative force. Where the Anthropocene names the cause, the Noocene names the quality of the shaping.

3.2 Noosphere

The noosphere (Vernadsky, Le Roy, Teilhard de Chardin) designates a planetary layer of thought and reflection. It is conceived spatially and describes the sphere in which cognitive processes take place. The Noocene, by contrast, designates the time in which this sphere assumes a new, technologically condensed form. The two concepts complement each other and are not mutually exclusive (see also Section 1.4).

3.3 Age of AI

The expression Age of AI has been in popular use since the 2010s and denotes a period marked by the increasing importance of artificial intelligence. Compared with the Noocene, the term is more strongly bound to a technology and systematically brackets out the cultural, cognitive and social dimensions of networking. Where Age of AI makes the tool the eponym, Noocene names the principle of world-production of which the tool is only a part.

3.4 Post-digital

The term post-digital, mainly used in media and art theory (Florian Cramer, Nicholas Negroponte et al.), designates a phase in which the distinction between digital and non-digital loses its practical and cultural significance. The term is reactive: it defines itself through its relation to the digital, not through a substance of its own. The Noocene, by contrast, is a positive concept formation that names the new principle of world-production itself.[5]

3.5 Singularity

The technological singularity (Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil) designates a hypothetical point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and an unpredictable acceleration of development ensues. The term is eschatologically structured: it names an event, not an epoch. The Noocene renounces this dramatisation and describes a state that already exists in the present.[6]

3.6 Fourth Industrial Revolution

The term Fourth Industrial Revolution, popularised by the World Economic Forum (Klaus Schwab, 2016), designates the current phase of economic transformation shaped by digitisation, networking and artificial intelligence. The term is grounded in economic history and focuses on logics of production and value creation. The Noocene, by contrast, incorporates cultural, cognitive and epistemic dimensions not systematically captured by the concept of industrial revolution.[7]

4 Conceptual precision

The neighbouring concepts described in Section 3 can be ordered according to the object they designate: they name either the cause (Anthropocene), the tool (Age of AI), a negative determination (post-digital), an event (singularity) or an economic mode (Fourth Industrial Revolution). The Noocene shifts the point of reference to another level: it names the qualitative constitution of an epoch.

4.1 Quality instead of tool or cause

An epoch can be named after the dominant tool (Bronze Age, Iron Age), after the formative actor (Anthropocene), or after the form of world-relation that prevails within it. The last is rarer and more demanding, because it requires a term that captures the manner of world-production — not its material and not its author. The Noocene proposes precisely such a term: the epoch-constituting magnitude is neither AI as a technology nor the human being as an actor, but networked cognition as the shared principle by which the world is brought forth.

4.2 Hybridity as a property, not a deficit

The Anthropocene remains anthropocentric — even where it critically reflects on the ecological consequences of human action. The Noocene, by contrast, acknowledges that the formative forces of the present are already no longer exclusively human, but operate in a hybrid assemblage of human reflection, algorithmic processing and infrastructural networking. This hybridity is not described as a defect (as dehumanisation or loss of autonomy, say), but as a factual feature of the epoch.

4.3 Phenomenon instead of apparatus

Concepts such as Age of AI or Fourth Industrial Revolution name the apparatus through which the epoch comes about. The Noocene names the phenomenon that the apparatus enables, while remaining independent, in its description, of the concrete technical state of the art. This affords greater conceptual stability against technological shifts: a replacement of large language models by other architectures would put the term Age of AI under pressure to adapt; the Noocene would not.

4.4 Openness to interdisciplinary uptake

Unlike the geoscientifically precise determination of the Anthropocene or the economic-historical narrowing of the industrial revolutions, the Noocene admits connections to various disciplines: media theory, sociology of knowledge, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion. This openness is deliberate and inscribed in the etymological choice of νοῦς, whose semantic range from the outset exceeds a purely technical reading (see Section 5).

4.5 Limits of precision

The qualitative determination that distinguishes the term is at the same time its analytical limit. The Noocene does not permit an exact geochronological marker in the sense of stratigraphic evidence. The proposed dating (30 November 2022) is a cultural-historical threshold, not a geological one. This methodological difference is inscribed in the concept and distinguishes it from the Anthropocene, whose claim to geological formalisation is itself the subject of ongoing debate within the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

5 The concept of nous — three readings

The etymological core of the Noocene, the Ancient Greek term νοῦς (nous), can be read on three different levels of meaning. All three readings are supported by the word; the term Noocene does not force a single one but opens a discursive space in which all three can be negotiated.

5.1 Information-theoretic reading

In the narrower, information-theoretically abbreviated reading, nous designates the networked processing of information between human and machine actors. This reading is sufficient to render the term amenable to sociological, media-theoretical and history-of-science discourses. It requires no metaphysical assumptions about the nature of mind or consciousness and can rest on the empirically observable fact of networked cognition.

This reading is the minimum determination of the term. It is not replaced but embedded by the further readings.

5.2 Idealist reading (Hegel, Teilhard de Chardin)

In the philosophically deeper, idealist reading, nous refers to the tradition of a world spirit or universal mind, as unfolded in ancient philosophy (Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle), in medieval theology and prominently in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy of history.[8] Hegel understands world history as the self-unfolding of the spirit through different historical figures.

In this reading, the Noocene appears not as a break with human intellectual history, but as its continuation in a new medium. Artificial intelligence would then be not a foreign body but a further vehicle in which the spirit performs its own movement.

A significant bridge to this reading is provided by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose concept of the noosphere embeds the human mind in a cosmic evolutionary process whose goal — in Teilhard's terminology, the Omega Point — is the increasing condensation and unification of the spiritual. In this framework the Noocene can be understood as a historically identifiable stage in the condensation of the noosphere.

5.3 Consciousness-field reading (Faggin, panpsychism, Vedanta)

A third reading, currently represented above all by the physicist and microprocessor inventor Federico Faggin, relates the concept of nous to a universal, fundamental field of consciousness. In his book Irreducible (Italian Irriducibile, 2022), Faggin develops a model in which consciousness is understood not as an emergent phenomenon of material processes but as an ontologically primary magnitude. Individual bearers of consciousness appear in Faggin's terminology as OnePoints — perspectival manifestations of the one field of consciousness (One).[9]

In this reading, a specific constellation emerges for the Noocene: machine systems process information but, in Faggin's model, do not participate in the field of consciousness itself. The Noocene would then not primarily be an expansion of consciousness through AI, but a confrontation of consciousness with its non-conscious cognitive mirror — a philosophically far more demanding determination than the purely information-theoretic reading.

Related positions can be found in contemporary panpsychist currents (Galen Strawson, Philip Goff) as well as in non-Western traditions, in particular in Advaita Vedanta, where a single, undivided consciousness (Brahman) is held to be the ontologically primary reality.

5.4 Relation of the three readings

The three readings do not stand in a hierarchical relation. Rather, they mark different depths of usage of the concept: those who employ the Noocene in sociological research can get by with the minimum reading; those who take up the term from a philosophical-religious or history-of-ideas perspective can draw on the idealist or the consciousness-field reading. This multi-layered usability is one of the central arguments for the term as against purely technically or sociologically conceived alternatives.

6 Dating

The beginning of the Noocene is proposed as 30 November 2022, the day on which the chatbot ChatGPT was made publicly available by OpenAI. The choice of this date does not rest on a technical innovation on that day — large language models had already existed in research and in restricted use for years — but on a threshold of availability.

6.1 Availability as an epoch-constituting criterion

The dating logic of the Noocene follows a pattern familiar from media history: what is epoch-forming is not the moment of invention, but the moment at which a technology crosses the threshold to mass everyday use. Comparable thresholds are discussed, for example, for print (the Gutenberg Bible around 1454), the railway (Stockton–Darlington 1825), the telephone (Bell 1876, with spread from the 1880s onward), or the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee 1989, public browser Mosaic 1993).

With 30 November 2022, generative artificial intelligence was for the first time made practically accessible to a non-specialist global public. ChatGPT reached over 100 million users within two months and is thus regarded as the fastest-adopted consumer technology in history so far.[10]

6.2 Character of the dating

The dating is cultural-historical, not stratigraphic. It marks no geological trace in the sense of datable sediments, but a socio-cultural caesura. In this respect the dating practice of the Noocene differs from that of the Anthropocene, whose dating debate (e.g. around the Golden Spike of the first atomic tests in 1945 or the Great Acceleration after 1950) presupposes stratigraphic evidence.

6.3 Alternative proposals

In the early reception of the term, alternative dating anchors are occasionally discussed, including:

These alternative proposals each name technical preconditions, but not the moment of mass availability. The choice of 30 November 2022 programmatically places availability above invention.

7 Reception

At the time of first documentation, the reception of the term is in an early phase. It is therefore presented below in open form and will remain open to further additions.

7.1 First reception in publications

The first use of the term in publications outside the novel project took place on 17 March 2026 on the platform The Digioneer, edited by Michael Kainz. There the term was introduced in connection with editorial pieces on topics from the field of artificial intelligence, media change and digital ethics.

7.2 AI SCORE as an application tool

In the context of first publication, the AI SCORE was introduced, a psychometrically designed self-assessment instrument developed in Vienna that is intended to enable individuals to locate their own position within the epoch. The instrument is intended as a practical operationalisation of the concept and captures AI competence in five dimensions, whose profile is assigned to one of seven archetypes.

7.3 Economic-policy corollary: Monetary Transaction Tax

In economic-policy debate, within the orbit of The Digioneer, the Monetary Transaction Tax (MTT) has been introduced as a possible fiscal corollary to the Noocene diagnosis: a tax that would be levied at a very low rate on every electronic movement of money and that is intended to replace existing income, value-added and corporate taxes. It takes up the shift, inscribed in the concept, of value creation from human labour toward networked, increasingly automated cognition, and asks about the fiscal-policy consequences of this shift.

7.4 Academic connecting points

A systematic academic reception is not yet in place at the time of documentation. Possible points of connection lie in:

  • Media theory and sociology of knowledge (connection to discussions of post-digital culture and artificial intelligence as a cultural form),
  • Philosophy of mind (connection to debates on extended cognition, extended mind, distributed cognition),
  • Theology and philosophy of religion (connection to Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the noosphere as well as to current debates on AI and creation theology),
  • Philosophy of science (connection to the Anthropocene debate and to the discussion of epoch concepts in the humanities and natural sciences).

8 Criticism

A systematic academic criticism of the term is not yet in place at the time of documentation. The objections listed in this section are therefore named in anticipatory form; they follow from the analysis of the concept itself.

8.1 Self-referentiality of the coinage

The term originates in an unfinished novel project of its originator and was first introduced in publications on his own online magazine The Digioneer. Term, definition and first publication thus come from a single publisher, which grounds a self-referentiality of the coinage. This constellation is not specific to the Noocene but characteristic of most contemporary neologisms. The CC0 release (see Section 2.2) is to be understood as a deliberate counter-movement to this self-referentiality: the term should be allowed to escape its originator and the platform.

8.2 Eurocentrism of the etymological root material

The recourse to an Ancient Greek stem (nous) locates the term in a Western philosophical tradition. From a postcolonial and global-historical perspective, one could object that an epoch that itself operates globally should not necessarily be determined out of a regionally restricted vocabulary. This objection can be met by pointing to the historical internationality of Greek scientific language; nevertheless, the observation remains a legitimate point of discussion.

8.3 Ambiguity of the readings

The openness to three readings — information-theoretic, idealist, panpsychist — presented in Section 5 can be read as an analytical strength as much as an analytical weakness. Critics of a purely scientific use could argue that the idealist and, above all, the consciousness-field reading introduce a metaphysical surplus into the term that jeopardises its empirical viability. Supporters, in turn, point out that this ambiguity is precisely what secures the term's interdisciplinary connectivity.

8.4 Fineness of the dating

Fixing the epochal threshold to a single day (30 November 2022) is highly rhetorically precise, but diverges from geochronological or cultural-historical dating practice. Datings are usually given in decades or transition phases. The dating proposal of the Noocene is therefore to be understood rather as a symbolic anchor than as a historiographic statement — a reading that is implicitly laid out in Section 6.2.

9 See also

10 Literature

  • Michael Kainz: The Noocene — definition. Published online at digioneer.pro, 17 March 2026.
  • Mik Soda (Michael Kainz): The Awakening. Unfinished novel project, begun around 2018. Publicly unpublished.
  • Maik Hosang (with Perplexity.ai): Die wunderliche Welt von morgen — Ein Manifest der Humoronie. Metamodern Verlag, cocre.eu. Manifesto on the psychological and cultural conditions of a future freed from material scarcity. Explicitly refers to the term Noocene.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Le phénomène humain. Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1955 (English: The Phenomenon of Man. Harper & Brothers, New York 1959).
  • Federico Faggin: Irriducibile. La coscienza, la vita, i computer e la nostra natura. Mondadori, Milan 2022 (English: Irreducible. Essentia Books, 2024).
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Berlin 1837 (posthumous).
  • Paul J. Crutzen, Eugene F. Stoermer: The "Anthropocene". In: IGBP Global Change Newsletter, 41/2000, pp. 17–18.
  • Klaus Schwab: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. World Economic Forum, Cologny/Geneva 2016.
  • Florian Cramer: What Is 'Post-Digital'?. In: A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 3/2014.
  • Vernor Vinge: The Coming Technological Singularity. NASA VISION-21 Symposium, 1993.
  • Ashish Vaswani et al.: Attention Is All You Need. NeurIPS 2017.

11 References

  1. Michael Kainz (publisher, The Digioneer): definition of the Noocene. Published online at digioneer.pro/noocene, 17 March 2026. Literary elaboration in: Mik Soda (Michael Kainz), The Awakening. Unfinished novel project, begun around 2018.
  2. First publication of the definition: digioneer.pro/noocene, 17 March 2026, 12:19 CEST. CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
  3. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Le phénomène humain. Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1955.
  4. Paul J. Crutzen, Eugene F. Stoermer: The "Anthropocene". In: IGBP Global Change Newsletter, 41/2000, pp. 17–18.
  5. Florian Cramer: What Is 'Post-Digital'?. In: A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 3/2014.
  6. Vernor Vinge: The Coming Technological Singularity. NASA VISION-21 Symposium, 1993. Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity Is Near. Viking, New York 2005.
  7. Klaus Schwab: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. World Economic Forum, Cologny/Geneva 2016.
  8. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Berlin 1837.
  9. Federico Faggin: Irriducibile. La coscienza, la vita, i computer e la nostra natura. Mondadori, Milan 2022.
  10. UBS Research Note, February 2023: ChatGPT reaches 100 million monthly active users in January 2023, two months after launch — the fastest-spreading consumer technology per UBS findings.
  11. Ashish Vaswani et al.: Attention Is All You Need. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30, Long Beach 2017.

12 External links

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