Benjamin Bratton
Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design, UC San Diego
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Benjamin Bratton is a philosopher of technology and Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design at UC San Diego, where he founded the Speculative Design undergraduate major. His book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016) describes planetary-scale computation as a single structure of six layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User. He directs Antikythera, a think tank for planetary computation and the evolution of intelligence, founded in 2022 as an incubated project of the Berggruen Institute and independent since 2026. In 2022 he and Blaise Agüera y Arcas wrote "The Model Is the Message" for Noema, arguing that language models had outpaced the vocabulary available to describe them. Since 2024 he has been a visiting faculty researcher in Google's Paradigms of Intelligence group, and in June 2026 Antikythera launched Agentworld, a research unit on human-agent societies.
Key Contributions
- The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016), a model of planetary-scale computation as six layers from Earth to User
- Founding director of Antikythera, a think tank for planetary computation and the evolution of intelligence (2022)
- "The Model Is the Message" with Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Noema, 2022), on language models outrunning our concepts for them
- The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (Verso, 2021)
- Launched Antikythera's Agentworld research unit (2026), on societies of humans and AI agents
Videos & Interviews
Audrey Tang, Benjamin Bratton | Gray Area Festival 2021
The opening conversation of Gray Area Festival 2021, recorded on 6 October 2021 and built around Bratton's The Revenge of the Real. It is about governance and digital public infrastructure rather than AI. Starting from Facebook's outage and leaks, Tang argues that Taiwan's civic discussion runs on commons such as PTT rather than Facebook, and explains its pandemic response without lockdowns as maximal trust in the social sector: the 1922 hotline, SMS check-ins held by telecoms and deleted after 28 days, and "humour over rumour" memes answering disinformation within two hours. Bratton reads the pandemic as a crisis of Western governance, and argues that California's problem was too little sensing, not too much surveillance.
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Agentworld x Superdark Factory — Antikythera x Disintegrator
A double lecture at Gray Area launching Antikythera's Agentworld journal issue. Bratton says his lab's p(doom) is very low and its p(weird) very high, and sets "agency theater" (people performing a control they lack, like the disconnected close-door button in an elevator) against AI agents with much agency and little subjectivity. He rejects a "humanity of the gaps" view in which every AI gain shrinks the human, argues that agent societies need intelligent institutions rather than only well-behaved agents, and warns that fear of AI is turning into an artificial xenophobia. Marek Poliks of Disintegrator then sorts automation into three classes by what a machine takes as input, and argues that a factory which sets its own objectives can be steered only through its initial conditions, making its governance a problem of game theory.
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