Benjamin Bratton
A Philosophy of Planetary Computation
We find ourselves in a pre-paradigmatic moment in which our technology has outpaced our theories of what to do with it.
The task of philosophy today is to catch up.
In his Long Now Talk, Philosopher of Technology Benjamin Bratton took us on a whirlwind philosophical journey into the concept of Planetary Computation — a journey that began in classical Greece with the story of the Antikythera mechanism, the analog computer that gave his think-tank Antikythera its name. But his inquiry stretched far beyond antiquity — back to the very origins of biological life itself and forward to a present and future where we must increasingly grapple with artificial life and intelligence on a planetary scale in time and space.
How might complex planetary intelligence thrive over the long now? To Bratton, that intelligence is a “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 preconditions for long-term adaptiveness, Bratton argues, will need to be artificially realized, and we won’t be able to control what happens as a result of bringing them into existence. This, Bratton says, is the Copernican trauma of our time.
In concluding his remarks, Bratton turns to James Lovelock, the pioneering environmental scientist who first proposed the Gaia Hypothesis. Referencing Lovelock’s final book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (02019), Bratton notes that for both Lovelock and himself the potential coming of post-human intelligence was not cause for “grief.” Instead, the frame of the planetary makes it so that finding ourselves in a grander story where “the evolution of intelligence does not peak with one terraforming species of nomadic primates,” is, to Bratton, “the happiest news possible.”
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primer
“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.
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 on Antikythera and what it means to develop a “new speculative philosophy of computation.”
- In collaboration with MIT Press, Antikythera is launching a new journal.
- 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.