Benjamin H. Bratton | |
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Born | November 3, 1968 55) Los Angeles, California | (age
Education | University of California, Santa Barbara (PhD) |
Notable works | The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2015), The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (2021) |
Website | |
www |
Benjamin H. Bratton (born 1968) is an American Philosopher of Technology known for his work spanning social theory, computer science, design, artificial intelligence, and for his writing on the geopolitical implications of what he terms "planetary scale computation". [1] [2]
He is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) [3] and author and editor of numerous books and essays [4] He is Director of Antikythera, a private research program studying the future of planetary computation. [5]
Bratton was born in Los Angeles, California in 1968 [6] and holds a PhD in the sociology of technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. [7]
Since 2009, he is Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego. Since 2014, he has been Professor of Philosophy of Design at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. [8] From 2019-22 he was visiting professor at NYU Shanghai. [9] Prior to teaching at UCSD, Bratton taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles from 2001 to 2010 and is now a distinguished visiting professor. [10] He taught in the Department of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 2003 to 2008. [11] He founded University of California, San Diego's Speculative Design undergraduate major. [12]
In 2016, he succeeded Rem Koolhaas as program director of the Strelka Institute, a Moscow-based think tank and post-graduate program in architecture, media, and design. [13] He directed two three-year programs, The New Normal [14] and The Terraforming. [15] At the outbreak of the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine the institute indefinitely suspended all programs in protest. [16]
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 with support from One Project. [5] [17]
In 2021, Verso Books published Bratton's book on the COVID-19 pandemic based on his essay "18 Lessons for Quarantine Urbanism". [18] [19] 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. [20] 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. [21]
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty was published by MIT Press in late 2015. [22] The book challenges traditional ideas of sovereignty centered around the nation-state and develops a theory of geopolitics that accounts for sovereignty in terms of planetary-scale computation at various scales. [23] Its two core arguments are that planetary-scale computation “distorts and deforms traditional Westphalian logics of political geography” 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.” [24] [25] 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. [26]
His 2015 book Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution was published by e-flux Journal and Sternberg Press in 2015. [27] It launched publicly at the 2016 edition of the Transmediale festival in Berlin. [28] 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." [29]
"On Geoscapes & Google Caliphate: Except #Mumbai" examines the correspondence of political theology and planetary computation as modes of political geography. [30]
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. [31]
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 and draws from disparate sources, from Paul Virilio, Michel Serres, and Carl Schmitt, to Alan Turing, Google Earth, and IPv6. [32]
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. [33]
The essay "Planetary Sapience" (2021) published in Noema 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 and the Noosphere. [34]
"The Model is the Message" (2022) co-authored with Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a VP of Artificial Intelligence at Google, examined recent controversies over large language models and the tendency to misattribute sentience to machines. [35]
Bratton lives in La Jolla, California and has a son, Lucien, with writer Bruna Mori. He was adopted at an early age, and is the half-brother of Jamie Stewart of the band Xiu Xiu. [36]
Terraforming or terraformation ("Earth-shaping") is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make it habitable for humans to live on.
The Antikythera mechanism is an Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery, described as the oldest known example of an analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. It could also be used to track the four-year cycle of athletic games similar to an Olympiad, the cycle of the ancient Olympic Games.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography is the center for oceanography and Earth science based at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). SDSC is located at the UCSD campus' Eleanor Roosevelt College east end, immediately north the Hopkins Parking Structure.
This is an alphabetical list of articles pertaining specifically to software engineering.
Geisel Library is the main library building of the University of California, San Diego. It is named in honor of Audrey and Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as children's author Dr. Seuss. The building's distinctive architecture, described as occupying "a fascinating nexus between brutalism and futurism", has resulted in its being featured in the UC San Diego logo and becoming the most recognizable building on campus.
Beatriz Colomina is an architecture historian, theorist and curator. She is the founding director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture and director of graduate studies in the School of Architecture.
Casey Edwin Barker Reas, also known as C. E. B. Reas or Casey Reas, is an American artist whose conceptual, procedural and minimal artworks explore ideas through the contemporary lens of software. Reas is perhaps best known for having created, with Ben Fry, the Processing programming language.
Nicolas Berggruen is a US-based billionaire investor and philanthropist. Born in Paris, France, he is a dual German and American citizen. He is the founder and president of Berggruen Holdings, a private investment company and the co-founder and chairman of the Berggruen Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank that works to address global governance issues. In 2014, through the Institute, Berggruen launched Noema Magazine, formerly the WorldPost, a digital and print publication dedicated to exploring global issues.
Stack may refer to:
Eric Baković is an American linguist who is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego with a specialization in phonology. He is also affiliated with the Center for Research on Language (CRL), the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science, Computational Social Science, and Latin American Studies. He earned his BA in 1993 in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and completed his PhD under the supervision of Alan Prince at Rutgers in 2000.
The Berggruen Institute is a Los Angeles-based think tank founded by Nicolas Berggruen.
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 with a higher education, a public summer programme, the Strelka Press publishing house, and KB Strelka, the consulting arm of the Institute. Strelka has been listed among the top-100 best architecture schools in 2014, according to Domus magazine.
Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute. He previously served as editor-in-chief of The WorldPost, a partnership with The Washington Post, as well as editor-in-chief of Global Viewpoint Network and Nobel Laureates Plus, both services of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media). From 1985 to 2014 he also was editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, the journal of social and political thought published by Blackwell/Oxford.
Sascha Pohflepp was a German artist, designer, and writer whose work focused on the role of technology’s influence on the environment, often collaborating with scientists and other artists to explore this theme.
Tiziana Terranova is an Italian theorist and activist whose work focuses on the effects of information technology on society through concepts such as digital labor and commons. Terranova has published the monograph Network Culture. Politics for the Information Age, as well as a more extensive number of essays and speeches, and appeared as a keynote speaker in several conferences. She lectures on the digital media cultures and politics in the Department of Human and Social Sciences, at the University of Naples, 'L'Orientale'.
Jim Agler is a mathematician who is an emeritus professor at the University of California, San Diego. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2016, for "contributions to operator theory and the theory of analytic functions of several complex variables".
Lisa Welp is a biogeochemist who utilizes stable isotopes to understand how water and carbon dioxide are exchanged between the land and atmosphere. She is a professor at Purdue University in the department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences.
K. Wayne Yang is a professor and scholar of community organizing, critical pedagogy, and Indigenous and decolonizing studies. He is a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego and Provost of John Muir College. He writes about decolonization and everyday epic organizing, often with his frequent collaborator, Eve Tuck. Currently, they are convening The Land Relationships Super Collective, editing the book series, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education, and editing the journal, Critical Ethnic Studies. He is interested in the complex role of cities in global affairs: cities as sites of settler colonialism, as stages for empire, as places of resettlement and gentrification, and as always-already on Indigenous lands.
"The stack" is a term used in science and technology studies, the philosophy of technology and media studies to describe the multiple interconnected layers that computation depends on at a planetary scale. The term was introduced by Benjamin H. Bratton in a 2014 essay and expanded upon in his 2016 book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, and has been adapted, critiqued and expanded upon by numerous other scholars.