Benjamin Bratton

“The Earth has very recently evolved a smart exoskeleton,” posits Benjamin Bratton in an essay about what he terms “planetary sapience.” The existence of this exoskeleton — an orbiting web of satellites monitoring and internetworking every corner of this planet, a weave of undersea and underground cables transmitting data across continents at two-thirds the speed of light, and an uncountable mass of computing devices communicating across those networks — is indisputable. The more pressing question, however, is what we ought to do with it.

Bratton, as Director of the Antikythera program at Berggruen Institute, aims to answer that question. The advent of planetary sapience — the ability to understand our planet and compute its workings at scales far larger and smaller than the human — is not merely a scientific or technological advance but a “philosophical event.” It is a moment, Bratton argues, that demands we expand the frames we use to understand who and what we are. 

About Benjamin Bratton

As Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design at University of California, San Diego, Director of Antikythera, an cross-disciplinary think tank researching the philosophy of computation supported by Berggruen Institute, and Visiting Faculty Researcher in Google's Paradigms of Intelligence group, Bratton stands at a unique intersection point between the worlds of academia, design, and technology. In his prior books, like 02015’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty and 02019’s The Terraforming, he explored the intentional and inadvertent ways humanity has reshaped the planet around it through the creation of complex technological infrastructure.  

Why This Talk Matters Now

The interconnected global crises of the past decade — from the pandemic and its accompanying economic disturbances to our ongoing reckoning with artificial intelligence to the ever-advancing reality of climate change — are all rooted in what Bratton identifies as our technological capacity to understand the world. What Bratton further proposes is that we must also use that same capacity to address those crises — to pair the inadvertent and perhaps damaging terraforming that humanity has conducted over the past centuries with a more intentional, thoughtful mode of planetary computation and governance.

The key to Bratton’s work is the concept of the planetary — distinct from the “international,” “global,” or “worldwide.” In his context, the planetary refers not just to the scope or scale of our intelligence and capacity to effect change, but to a deeper root. He sees human culture itself as an “emergent phenomenon of an ancient and deep biogeochemical flux” — not merely resident to the Earth but an outcropping from it. Our planet has evolved us, and we have in turn evolved a stack of technologies that can help us understand and govern that very same planet that produced us.  

The Long View

The idea of the planetary has many roots, but one key moment in its history was the release of the first photos of the Earth from space. The outward flowering of culture and philosophy inspired by those photos in the late 01960s — from the dawn of the environmental movement to the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog to Martin Heidegger’s reaction of shock and uprooting — reflects a point of inflection for our capacity as a species to think about the big here and the long now. 

Where to go next

• Read Bratton’s introduction to Antikythera and what it means to develop a “new speculative philosophy of computation.”
• In collaboration with MIT Press, Antikythera is launching a new journal, with the first issue expected in Spring 02025.
• In conversation with Nils Gilman in Noema, Bratton discusses how Antikythera’s work is tied to the “futures before us that must be conceived and built.”
• In an essay in Noema, Bratton explores Planetary Sapience further, placing it in the setting of a historical moment that “feels long but may be fleeting.”
• Watch Bratton’s 02023 talk on Synthetic Intelligence in the context of the planetary model of computation.