A Contemporary View of the Planetary Oikos through the Prism of Technology and Management

Abstract

According to Aristotle, man is by nature a physei politikon zoon – a political creature and, simultaneously, zoon logon echon and zoon oikonomikon. Our interest in this paper is zoon oikonomikon and the related concept of oikos. We argue that today, in the epoch of the Anthropocene and the modern technology managing it, Aristotle’s idea of Oikos needs to be updated and transferred from the level of the local community of people to the global level of humanity living on planet Earth. We propose to apply Aristotle’s thesis – technology imitates nature, technology completes what nature has started, and technology produces new ones – to the concepts of habitat, Oikos and household management. Here, technology imitates nature in completing, completing the habitat created by nature for the species Homo sapiens, and at the same time, it also produces a new habitat in virtual space. Building on the results of the analysis of the essence of technology according to Heidegger, Stiegler, Ellul and others, we introduce the concept of the Planetary Oikos situated in a hybrid space. At the end of the paper, we discuss the possible future development of the Planetary Oikos concept depending on the further development of technology, especially artificial intelligence.

Keywords: oikos, planetary oikos, habitat, household management, technology, real space, virtual space, hybrid space