#benjaminbratton

[iljaschamle-blog]

What is the new normal? Something has shifted, it seems. We are making new worlds faster than we can keep track of them, and the pace is unlikely to slow. If our technologies have advanced beyond our ability to conceptualize their implications, such gaps can be perilous. In response, one impulse is to pull the emergency brake and to try put all the genies back in all the bottles. This is ill-advised (and hopeless). Better instead to invest in emergence, in contingency: to map the new normal for what it is, and to shape it toward what it should be.

[sciencetechsoc]

Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

Week 14

Benjamin Bratton in his book proposes a model which is geographically designed according to the current circumstances of global computation. He defines the stack as ‘a portrait of the system we have but perhaps do not recognize, and an antecedent of a future territory’. He uses this as a concept to understand present geopolitics.

The stack is the highly differentiated global computing structure. it generates its own accidents and it generates its own forms of sovereignty because that is the machine which functions like a state.

Our usual understanding of geopolitics has to change because we've got this infrastructure in place and it is an accidental infrastructure. Nobody prepared for it;  it was unpredictable, undetermined, and unprecedented . Its taking on a certain shape and form and there is governance, it's an infrastructure in which the state form is struggling against alternative forms of sovereignty. An example of such an accidental structures is "Baidu". China banned Google which led to the formation of an alternate search engine called Baidu, a parallel structure added to the mega structure of the stack.

Usually when we think about the internet we think about it as this free and open space which is uncontrolled but for governance we think about actual governments. The idea that is emerging over here is that the stack is a non-anthropocenic infrastructure which is governable and that there is this battle underway to determine how it's going to be governed. This battle in some places is being fought between nation states but in other places like between the vectoralist class and the hacker class. Benjamin Bratton is writing this book because he's talking about the stack to come. He talks about how the planetary computing infrastructure that has been developed which is in place, it's an accidental infrastructure but in any case its usually influential and it has to be dismantled and replaced by another structure- a structure in which we've got more possibilities of cosmopolitan forms of governance and justice as well as awareness of the planet and its limits. The current infrastructure that is in place is following a trajectory of growth and development that is very corrosive for what we regard as the natural world and the environment.

Bratton is trying to explain how the planetary computing infrastructure is challenging the state form.  The computing system allows us to completely subvert the idea of nation states; it distorts the Westphalian idea and breaks the system or the mould of existing forms of sovereignty. The future in this sense, is open.

[smak7]

Benjamin H. Bratton's work spans Philosophy, Art, Design and Computer Science

[tropical-futures]

On Speculative Design

“Speculative Design (SD) understands itself as progressive alternative perspective to mainstream Design culture (and as an alternative to other alternatives as well).1 It knows that “Design” is not some magic way of thinking (involving stick-up notes, sharpies and colored beanbags) that just makes things better by “building trust,” “understanding the customer” or “getting a seat at the table” or similar. Design is also the means by which pathological relationships to material culture are made more efficient and more delightful, and we are worse for it. Some may even conclude that the job of Design in the 21st century is to undo (much of) the Design of 20th. It may also be to re-claim and re-launch other frustrated Modern impulses that were dry-docked by century’s end, not only designing things —widgets, withdrawn objects, manifest subjectivities, formal forms, etc.— but also designing the relations between them: systems, supply-chains, encounters, obligations, accounting protocols, and so on.” - Benjamin Bratton http://dismagazine.com/discussion/81971/on-speculative-design-benjamin-h-bratton/