Benjamin H. Bratton (born 1968) is an American Philosopher of Technology known for his work spanning social theory, computer science, design,

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

, and for his writing on the geopolitical implications of what he terms "planetary scale computation". He is Professor of Visual Arts at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

(UCSD) and author and editor of numerous books and essays

Early life

Bratton was born in

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

in 1968 and holds a PhD in the sociology of technology from the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

Career

Since 2009, he is Professor of Visual Arts at

. Since 2014, he has been Professor of Philosophy of Design at the

European Graduate School The European Graduate School (EGS) is a private graduate school that operates in two locations: Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and Valletta, Malta. History It was founded in 1994 in Saas-Fee, Switzerland by the Swiss scientist, artist, and therapist, Pao ...

Saas-Fee Saas-Fee () is the main village in the Saastal, or the Saas Valley, and is a municipality in the district of Visp in the canton of Valais in Switzerland. The village is situated on a high mountain plateau at 1,800 meters (5,900 feet), surrounded ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

. From 2019-22 he was visiting professor at

NYU Shanghai New York University Shanghai (NYU Shanghai) is China's first Sino-US research university and the third degree-granting campus of New York University (NYU). Jointly established by NYU and East China Normal University with the support of the city o ...

. Prior to teaching at UCSD, Bratton taught at the

Southern California Institute of Architecture Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is a private architecture school in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1972, SCI-Arc was initially regarded as both institutionally and artistically avant-garde and more adventurous than t ...

in Los Angeles from 2001 to 2010 and is now a distinguished visiting professor. He taught in the Department of Design Media Arts at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

(UCLA) from 2003 to 2008. He founded University of California, San Diego's Speculative Design undergraduate major. In 2016, he succeeded

Rem Koolhaas Remment Lucas Koolhaas (; born 17 November 1944) is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is often cited as a re ...

as program director of the

Strelka Institute Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design is a non-profit international educational project, founded in 2009 and located in Moscow. Strelka incorporates an education programme on urbanism and urban development aimed at professionals wit ...

, a Moscow-based

think tank A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmenta ...

and post-graduate program in architecture, media, and design. He directed two three-year programs, The New Normal and The Terraforming. At the outbreak of the

2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine On 24 February 2022, in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014. The invasion has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths on both sides. It has caused Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II. An ...

the institute indefinitely suspended all programs in protest. As of 2022, Bratton is the Director of a new research program on the speculative philosophy of computation called Antikythera, incubated by the

Berggruen Institute The Berggruen Institute is a Los Angeles-based think tank founded by Nicolas Berggruen. History In 2010, Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels sat down with a group of academics, business leaders, and political veterans in California to discus ...

with support from One Project.

Publications

The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World

In 2021,

Verso Books Verso Books (formerly New Left Books) is a left-wing publishing house based in London and New York City, founded in 1970 by the staff of ''New Left Review''. Renaming, new brand and logo Verso Books was originally known as New Left Books. The ...

published Bratton's book on the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

based on his essay "18 Lessons for Quarantine Urbanism". The book argues that the pandemic demonstrates on ongoing crisis of governance in the West, and that technological capacity to respond to planetary crises outstrips the social and cultural capacity for collective self-organization. The book discusses concepts of the epidemiological view of society, cultural controversies over masks, and points toward a positive biopolitics in sharp contrast with the work of

Giorgio Agamben Giorgio Agamben ( , ; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and '' homo sacer''. The concept of biopolitics ( ...

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

''The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty'' was published by

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

in late 2015. The book challenges traditional ideas of

sovereignty Sovereignty is the defining authority within individual consciousness, social construct, or territory. Sovereignty entails hierarchy within the state, as well as external autonomy for states. In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the perso ...

centered around the

nation-state A nation state is a political unit where the state and nation are congruent. It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant ethnic group. A nation, in the sense of a common ethnicity, may inc ...

and develops a theory of

geopolitics Geopolitics (from Greek γῆ ''gê'' "earth, land" and πολιτική ''politikḗ'' "politics") is the study of the effects of Earth's geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations. While geopolitics usually refers to ...

that accounts for sovereignty in terms of planetary-scale computation at various scales. Its two core arguments are that planetary-scale computation “distorts and deforms traditional Westphalian logics of

political geography Political geography is concerned with the study of both the spatially uneven outcomes of political processes and the ways in which political processes are themselves affected by spatial structures. Conventionally, for the purposes of analysis, po ...

” and creates new territories in its own image, and that different scales of computing technology can be understood as forming an “accidental megastructure” that resembles a multi-layer network architecture stack, what Bratton calls “The Stack.” The Stack is described as a platform. Bratton argues that platforms represent a technical and institutional model equivalent to states or markets but reducible to neither. Bratton refers to the book as “a design brief” suggesting that the layers of this structure are modular available to innovation and replacement.

Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution

His 2015 book ''Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution'' was published by

e-flux e-flux is a publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and e-mail service founded in 1998. The arts news digests, events, exhibitions, schools, journal, books, and art projects produced and/or disseminated by e-flux ...

Journal and Sternberg Press in 2015. It launched publicly at the 2016 edition of the

Transmediale Transmediale, stylised as transmediale is an annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, usually held over five days at the end of January and the beginning of February. Transmediale takes the form of a conference (sometimes called ...

festival in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

. In the description by Sternberg Press the book is " kaleidoscopic theory-fiction" which "links the utopian fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of security and control."

Essays

"On Geoscapes & Google Caliphate: Except #Mumbai" examines the correspondence of

political theology Political theology is a term which has been used in discussion of the ways in which theological concepts or ways of thinking relate to politics. The term ''political theology'' is often used to denote religious thought about political principled qu ...

and planetary computation as modes of political geography. His lecture "Surviving the Interface: the Envelopes, Membranes and Borders of Deep Cosmopolitics" considers the emergence of new forms of sovereignty derived from shared digital and urban infrastructures, and the challenges they pose to conventional understandings of architectural partitions and national borders. In his article, "iPhone City (v.2005)" Bratton was early to demonstrate the impact that cinematic user interfaces for mobile social media would have on urban design. His current work develops a political theory of planetary-scale

computation Computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that follows a well-defined model (e.g., an algorithm). Mechanical or electronic devices (or, historically, people) that perform computations are known as ''computers''. An es ...

and draws from disparate sources, from

Paul Virilio Paul Virilio (; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018) was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with divers ...

Michel Serres Michel Serres (; 1 September 1930 – 1 June 2019) was a French philosopher, theorist and writer. His works explore themes of science, time and death, and later incorporated prose. Life and career The son of a bargeman, Serres entered France's ...

, and

Carl Schmitt Carl Schmitt (; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. A conservative theorist, he is noted as a ...

, to

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical com ...

Google Earth Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and geog ...

, and IPv6. In 2017, Bratton completed ''The New Normal'' an ebook for Strelka Press, which outlines the radical effects that technology is having on our world and describes the emerging forms of city that we should now be designing for. The essay "Planetary Sapience" (2021) published in ''

Noema The word noema (plural: ''noemata'') derives from the Ancient Greek, Greek word νόημα meaning "mental object". The philosopher Edmund Husserl used ''noema'' as a technical term in phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology to stand for the ob ...

'' compares the violent evolution of natural intelligence with the emergence of synthetic intelligence and considers their interrelation in terms of an understanding of intelligence as part of geological history and planetary formation. He contrasts this with the popular notions of

Gaia In Greek mythology, Gaia (; from Ancient Greek , a poetical form of , 'land' or 'earth'),, , . also spelled Gaea , is the personification of the Earth and one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia is the ancestral mother—sometimes parthenog ...

and the

Noosphere The noosphere (alternate spelling noösphere) is a philosophical concept developed and popularized by the Russian-Ukrainian Soviet biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, and the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vernads ...

. "The Model is the Message" (2022) co-authored with Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a VP of Artificial Intelligence at

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

, examined recent controversies over large language models and the tendency to misattribute sentience to machines.

Personal life

Bratton lives in

La Jolla La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood within the city of San Diego, California, United States, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the 2010 census was 46,781. La Jolla is surrounded on ...

and has a son, Lucien, with writer Bruna Mori. He is the half-brother of Jamie Stewart of the band

Xiu Xiu Xiu Xiu ( ) is an American experimental band, formed in 2002 by singer-songwriter Jamie Stewart in San Jose, California. Currently, the line-up consists of Stewart (the only constant member since formation) and Angela Seo. The band's name co ...

References

External links

Bratton.info.
– Benjamin H. Bratton's personal website
Academia.edu
Bratton books and articles
D:GP The Center for Design and Geopolitics

Bratton's page at the Department of Visual Arts, UCSD

"Accidental Geopolitics"Interview
– Bratton speaking at The Guardian Activate Summit 2011 in New York (28 April 2011).
"The Program is Not on The Floor"
at Southern California Institute of Architecture (28 February 2011).

at University of Michigan (17 November 2010).
"Ambivalence and/or Utopia"
at University of Michigan Taubman School of Architecture (20 March 2010).
"Peak Oil Apophenia"
at Parsons/ The New School (12 March 2011).

reported by City of Sound (11 April 2009).
"On Geoscapes & Google Caliphate: Except #Mumbai" in Theory, Culture & Society
– SAGE Journals Online.
"The Digital Civil Society in a Multipolar World"
– Carnegie Moscow Center (18 October 2010). {{DEFAULTSORT:Bratton, Benjamin H. 1968 births Living people American sociologists UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture faculty University of California, Santa Barbara alumni Southern California Institute of Architecture faculty University of California, San Diego faculty Writers from Los Angeles Accelerationism