Whoever speaks of the technosphere usually means the totality of all technical artefacts: satellites, servers, fibre-optic cables, smartphones. For Gwendolin Kirchhoff the technosphere is the key concept for describing the autonomisation of technical infrastructure over against the living as a civilisational pathology. A planetary layer of infrastructure, similar to the biosphere or atmosphere, only humanmade. So earth scientists and engineers understand the term. But that is not what is meant here. The technosphere as Jochen Kirchhoff (1944–2025) diagnoses it describes no domain of objects. It describes a movement of migration: the metaphysical need of the human being for transcendence has left its old place and taken up a new one.
#The formula
Jochen Kirchhoff brought the connection to a concise formula: the theosphere has become the technosphere. The theosphere — the space in which the human being located the divine, the holy, transcendence — has emptied successively in the European modern era. The churches emptied, the rituals lost their binding force, cosmology was mechanised. What did not disappear was the need. The human being needs transcendence. They need the feeling that something greater exists, reaching beyond death. This is no weakness and no illusion, but an anthropological constant.
When the theosphere emptied, this need migrated. It sought a new carrier and found it: in technology. Since then, technology is to deliver what faith once promised. The lame walk — prostheses and exoskeletons. The blind see — neural implants. The dead rise — digital avatars and cryonics. Eternal life — Longevity Escape Velocity. The transformation of creation — computronium, a fictive material that turns all matter into computational substrate. The structures are the same. The carrier has changed.
#Not analogy but structural description
It would be a misunderstanding to see in this a mere metaphor: technology as new religion. The diagnosis goes deeper. The technosphere does not arise because someone declares technology to be God, but because the psychic structures — fear of death, longing for transcendence, demand for order — are real and really seek an object. They find it in science fiction renamed as technology forecast. Ray Kurzweil promises the singularity for 2045, and people believe in it — not in the sense of “considering it likely”, but as one believes in a salvation history: it structures hope, investments, self-image.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff pointed out in conversation with Joscha Bach the Promethean core of this project: it is a Promethean impulse that began with the Enlightenment, the idea of rebuilding life and rebuilding consciousness (cf. Everlast AI Debate, 2026). Behind the technical promise stands a need for control and a striving for dominance. And the ethical limit that protects the living is felt by the Promethean impulse as mere obstacle.
#The hostility to nature that repeats
Oswald Spengler observed in Man and Technics (1931) a basic attitude that does not recognise itself: hostility toward the real. The body is mortal, full of defects. Nature is inadequate. The correct reaction within the technosphere is therefore not respect but replacement. Transhumanism continues the eugenic idea of improving the species by new means (cf. Jochen Kirchhoff, KI und Transhumanismus als Bedrohung des Lebendigen, 2023). Abstract rationality is isolated and declared the standard of the whole. Embodiment and the relation to nature are lost.
Jochen Kirchhoff radicalised this diagnosis: the crash onto the concrete ceiling of pure exteriority is the mark of the epoch (cf. Kirchhoff, Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle, 2006). If you regard the human being only as an outer being, they perish, because they then become object. The ontological levelling that culminates in transhumanism operates on a basic rule: if the functions of consciousness can be simulated, the simulation counts as identical with the original. Between simulation and original there is no longer any difference. Soul and individuality are eliminated.
Precisely here lies the point of the technosphere diagnosis: not the individual technology is the problem. Neither prostheses nor medications nor means of communication are meant when Kirchhoff speaks of the technosphere. What is meant is the unconscious displacement in which technology takes over the role of transcendence — and thereby carries along the hostility to nature of the religious tradition, without its honesty of confessing itself as faith.
#Awareness before use
Gwendolin Kirchhoff drew from this diagnosis a practical consequence: a constructive use of technology is only possible once we have become conscious of this technology — conscious of what we are dealing with here, of what spirit it is the child (cf. Die Abschaffung des Menschen, Manova, 2024). From there a conscious and living relation must be found: what can be integrated into the human community? What not? This distinction can be made by no one who does not recognise as such the need they direct at technology. If you take the technosphere for a neutral infrastructure, you are most fully delivered over to it.
The counter-position is not hostility to technology. It is natural philosophy: the insight that nature is not dead matter but living spirit. Schelling formulated in 1797: nature should be the visible spirit, the spirit the invisible nature (cf. Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 1797). Whoever has seen this once needs no computronium planet. For what you seek of transcendence has never lost its place. It was only forgotten.
The technosphere diagnosis is thus no cultural pessimism. It is a reminder: the need for transcendence is real. The address it directs itself to is wrong. The megamachine organises the wrong addressing, the Promethean impulse drives it forward, and the pathogenesis diagnosis names the structure of illness that hides itself within progress.