Global Public Life The Petrified Anthropocene Cristia ´n Simonetti Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Abstract The Anthropocene is seen by many scholars across the sciences and the humanities as a tool for political action. Yet the validation process for this term appears to be extremely conservative. According to geologists’ leading efforts to formalize the term, signals need to petrify in stratigraphic sequences in order to become candi- dates to mark the start of the Anthropocene. I argue that this emphasis results from a fossilized view of becoming, where time is seen as a punctuated accumulation of solid surfaces that are accessible only in retrospect. I show that this petrified view of change relates to a tendency to divorce earth and sky, which currently divides the practices of humanities scholars and geologists, as well as those of earth system scientists and stratigraphers collaborating on the formalization of the Anthropocene. Challenging this tendency, I conclude, requires opening up earth’s history to the more-than-solid flows of environmental change. Keywords Anthropocene, earth history, earth system science, geology, stratigraphy, technofossils Introduction The image in Figure 1 of an object included in a major exhibition on the Anthropocene – the term proposed to suggest that the earth has entered a new epoch, dominated by humanity’s environmental impact at a planet- ary scale – neatly captures the tension this article wishes to address. The exhibition, held throughout most of 2015 and part of 2016 at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, included a specially arranged Anthropocene Cabinet of Curiosities (see Mittman et al., 2018). The object, titled ‘Extinct Device’ and created by the historian Jared Farmer, is a fossilised BlackBerry Curve 8300. Introduced in 2007, only one year before efforts to formally define the Anthropocene got under way, the Curve 8300 has practically gone extinct in less than Theory, Culture & Society 0(0) 1–22 ! The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0263276419872814 journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs Corresponding author: Cristia ´n Simonetti. Email: csimonetti@uc.cl Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/