Benjamin Bratton
Public Lecture
October 29, 2014

From NSA surveillance to Jihadist social media and the Sino-Google Wars, computation has become more than a type of machine, it is a global infrastructure that is changing not only how governments govern, but what government even is in the first place.

We need to take a step back and see a big picture that is different from what was predicted. A new kind of political geography is emerging before our eyes.

We should view smart grids, cloud computing, mobile software and smart cities, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing and robotics not as unrelated genres of computation but as forming a larger and coherent whole.

Together they constitute an accidental megastructure called The Stack.

This is not only a planetary-scale computing system, it is also a new architecture for how we divide up the world into sovereign spaces.
The Nation-State isn't going away but it is evolving into a Cloud platform, and perhaps vice versa. This poses extraordinary challenges for design and geopolitics. By seeing the whole we stand a better chance of designing a system we will want to inhabit.

In this talk, we'll map The Stack we have and sketch The Stack-to-come.

Speaker Bio: Benjamin H Bratton is a theorist whose work spans philosophy, art and design. He is associate professor of visual arts and director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. Starting in summer 2014, he is also professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is forthcoming from MIT Press. See www.bratton.info and, on twitter, @bratton.