Benjamin H. Bratton

Benjamin H. Bratton
Born	November 3, 1968 (1968-11-03) (age 52) Los Angeles, California
Education	University of California, Santa Barbara (PhD)
Notable works	The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2015)
Website
www.bratton.info

Benjamin H. Bratton (born 1968) is an American sociologist, architectural and design theorist, known for philosophical and applied research and for his writing on the geopolitical implications of what he terms "planetary scale computation".^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][excessive citations]}

He is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and author of numerous books and essays on philosophy of technology, art and architecture, political theory, and computer science.^{[citation needed][when?]}

Early life[]

Bratton was born in Los Angeles, California in 1968^[9] and holds a PhD. in the Sociology of Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.^{[citation needed]}

Career[]

Benjamin Bratton in 2017

Prior to teaching at UCSD, Bratton taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles from 2001–2010 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 2003–2008.^{[citation needed]}

He founded University of California, San Diego's Speculative Design undergraduate major.^[11]

Since 2014, he has been Professor of Philosophy of Design at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. 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.^[12]

Publications[]

Among his most recent work, his article "On Geoscapes & Google Caliphate: Except #Mumbai" examines the correspondence of political theology and planetary computation as modes of political geography.^[13]

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.^[14]

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.^[15]

His 2015 book Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution was published by e-flux Journal and Sternberg Press in 2015.^[16] It launched publicly at the 2016 edition of the Transmediale festival in Berlin.^[17] 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."^[18]

Later in 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty was published by MIT Press. 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.^[19] 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.”^[20][21] 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.^[22]

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.^[23]

Personal life[]

Bratton lives in La Jolla, California and has a son, Lucien, with writer Bruna Mori. He is the half-brother of Jamie Stewart of the band Xiu Xiu.^[24]

References[]

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Benjamin H. Bratton.

• 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).
• "Surviving the Interface" (full transcript)
• video 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).
• Bratton Speaking at Postopolis!LA 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).