Some Notes on the Design of "World Machines"

We offer the idea of world machines as a new archetype for systems that draw together computational powers to connect, sense and infer with a social agenda of cross-world collaboration. This archetype builds on existing socio-technical systems with global reach, to raise the profile of tools that maintain a collaborative agenda and resist a tendency towards networks as giant surveillance and marketing devices. We use the case study of designing a bio-acoustic observatory to consider key characteristics and challenges for this thought experiment.