Benjamin H. Bratton is an American sociologist, architectural and design theorist, known for a mix of philosophical and aesthetic research, organizational planning and strategy, and for his writing on the cultural implications of computing and globalization. He is currently Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics think-tank at Calit2, The California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology.
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. 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 " 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. 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. 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." 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 ofgeopolitics 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.
