Benjamin H. Bratton

Bratton studied at University of California, Davis and University of California, Santa Barbara. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is philosophy of technology, higher education institution and sociology. Employment is recorded with University of Buenos Aires, Southern California Institute of Architecture and University of California, Los Angeles.

• Name — Benjamin H. Bratton • Born — November 3, 1968 • Birthplace — Los Angeles, California • Notable Works — The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2015),

• Illustration — Benjamin Bratton in 2017 He is Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and author and editor of numerous books and essays. He has taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and was visiting professor at NYU Shanghai (2019–22). 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. He taught in the Department of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 2003 to 2008. He founded University of California, San Diego's Speculative Design undergraduate major. He holds a PhD in the sociology of technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. 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. He directed two three-year programs, The New Normal and The Terraforming. At the outbreak of the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine the institute indefinitely suspended all programs. 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. He is Visiting Faculty Researcher in the Paradigms of Intelligence Research group in Google Technology and Society.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty was published by MIT Press in late 2015. 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. 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". 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.

He argues that the Anthropocene should be understood as a kind of accidental terraforming and the long-term project at hand is more deliberate and comprehensive composition of Earth systems for the extension of complex life in the future. "To terraform Earth to ensure that Earth can support Earth-like life". With a view of biochemistry and planetary timescales, Bratton contrasts the terraforming to Environmental Humanities which, he argues, rely on social reductionist and cultural determinist views.

According to Bratton, the artificial is not contrasted to nature but rather than the evolution selects for forms of life adept at artificializing their environments for purposes of "energy, matter and information capture". He situates this in the dynamic between autopoiesis and allopoiesis. He argues that through artificialization, it is possible to better understand naturally evolved forms, for example, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence.

In an article Benjamin Bratton wrote for New York Times in 2015, "Outing AI" criticized overly anthropomorphic views of AI. "The Model is the Message", co-authored in 2022, with Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a VP of Artificial Intelligence at Google, examined recent controversies over large language models and the problems of recognizing sentience in machines. The essay inspired an edited volume of the same name published by New Centre for Research and Practice and &&&. The lecture film "After Alignment" argued that mainstream ideas of AI alignment are potentially misguided.

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.

In 2021, Verso Books published Bratton's book on the COVID-19 pandemic 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.

His 2015 book Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution was published by e-flux Journal and Sternberg Press in 2015. It launched publicly at the 2016 edition of the Transmediale festival in Berlin. 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".

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

Bratton was born in Los Angeles, California in 1968 and grew up in Santa Paula, a small agricultural town in Southern California. He 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.

• The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press, 2016. • Le Stack: Plateformes, logiciel et souveraineté, UGA Editions, 2016.. (French) • Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution. Pref. Keller Easterling, Sternberg Press, 2015.. • Plan De Choque Para Derrotar El Exceso Futuro, pref. Keller Easterling, trans. Federico Fdez. Giordano, Holobionte Ediciones, 2024.. (Spanish) • The Revenge of the Real. Verso, 2022.. • Die Realität schlägt zurück: Politik für eine postpandemische Welt. Translated by David Frühauf. Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlag, 2022 (Kindle Edition).. (German) • The Terraforming. Strelka Press, 2019.. • La Terraformation. Translated by Yves Citton and Aurélien Blanchard. Presses Du Reel, 2021..(French) • La terraformación. Translated by Toni Navarro. Caja Negra, 2021.. (Spanish) • Γεωδιαμόρφωση. Translated by Yannis Fragos. Topovoros Exarcheion Publications, 2023.. (Greek) • Teraformiranje. Translated by Marko Bauer, Založba Sophia, 2020.. (Slovenian) • The Terraforming. Translated by Varvara Babitskata. Strelka Press, 2020.. (Russian)

• Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of AI. (co-edited with Ana Greenspan and Bogna Konior) Urbanomic, 2023.. • The New Normal (co-edited with Nicolay Boyadjiev and Nick Axel) Strelka/Park 2020..

• "Logistics of Habitable Circulation". Introduction to Speed and Politics, by Paul Virilio. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2006.. • "The Black Stack". e-flux Journal, no. 53, March 2014. • "iPhone City". Architectural Design 85, no. 1, 2015: 102–107. • "Outing AI", New York Times, February 23, 2015. • "Outing Artificial Intelligence. Reckoning with Turing Tests" in Pasquinelli, Matteo: Alleys of Your Mind. Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas. Meson Press E.g. 2015, p. 69-80.. • "On Anthropolysis". e-flux Architecture: Superhumanity, January 2017. • "The City Wears Us: Notes on the Scope of Distributed Sensing and Sensation". Glass Bead. 2017 • "Planetary Sapience". Noema, June 17, 2021. • "Synthetic Garden: Another Model of AI" Atlas of Anomalous AI. Edited by Ben Vickers and Kenric McDowell, Ignota Books. 2021.. • Bratton, Benjamin, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas. "The Model Is the Message". Noema, July 12, 2022. • "On Hemispherical Stacks". Vertical Atlas. Edited by Leonardo Dellanoce, Amal Khalaf, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Nanjala Nyabola, Renée Roukens, Arthur Steiner and Mi You. pages 168–175, March 2022. • "The Stack at the Edge of Planetarity: Convergence, Divergence, and War". Vertical Atlas. Edited by Leonardo Dellanoce, Amal Khalaf, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Nanjala Nyabola, Renée Roukens, Arthur Steiner and Mi You. pages 270-278, March 2022. • "Not Right Now: On Immediacy and the Ironies of Life in a Hypermediated World". TANK Magazine, Issue 98. 2024. • "Stages of AI Grief". Noema. June 20, 2024.

He was employed by University of Buenos Aires, Southern California Institute of Architecture and University of California, Los Angeles.