Planetary-scale computation and the ground of nature

(or: who does this accidental mega-structure thinks it is, anyway?)

“The purpose of philosophy is to

rationalize mysticism.”

A.N. Whitehead

1.

Benjamin Bratton is an influential American sociologist and theorist of design and architecture who first attracted attention with his 2015 book “The Stack” and the concept of planetary-scale computation. He has taught at several institutions and was, since 2016, program director for the Strelka Institute, a Moscow-based think-thank (which recently interrupted its operations in response to the war in Ukraine). Bratton describes the “Stack” as an “accidental megastructure” formed of several functional and operative layers, culminating in the contemporary global network of logistics, oil depletion and satellites which has transformed the Earth into a largely anthropogenic structure, bringing along the geological epoch of the Anthropocene.

He divides this Stack in six main layers (Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User), and attempts to describe with that lasagna-like model the complex interlocking of mineral, biological and social strata as they are materially applied by the implementation of digital platforms. This image of the Stack comes from computing but also from geology, and it is powerfully pushed to is limits by Bratton throughout his book in an extended attempt to describe the contingent piling up of circuits of recurrent causality that have gradually formed our contemporary world, and recently disturbed the old power lines of political sovereignty.

This focus of the accidental aspect of technical emergence largely comes from Paul Virilio’s vision of technology, and his insightful notion of every kind of technical invention creating its own kind of accident. It is one of the best features of Bratton’s thought, but he does not remain exacly faithful to this vision of radical contingency, as we shall see.

I admire the intricacies of the Stack model, as least in its aesthetic merits. As a media theory researcher, it strikes me as an attractive toolkit for describing the collective emergence of contemporary socio-technical ecology, and many of its finer points do seem to be largely sensible (if not necessarily politically promising) stepping-stones. At the very least, his work is inspiring in its deft attempt to tackle so many different geopolitical problems in one single theoretical swoop. But the full picture may be missing a few layers, in order to give us a more useful political blueprint. Not only are the geological and biological layers under-represented, even if ostensibly included in the general scheme, but, and perhaps more importantly, older collective cycles of social entrainment should be more fully integrated in the political diagram, as well, in order for it to really mean a vision that could be considered operational.

I can also understand the seductive appeal of his sci-fi-sounding description of the global process of computation as “a terraforming of the host planet” (there are bits in which Bratton reads almost like early Nick Land, which I surprisingly mean as a compliment).

Bratton rightly points out that, if our current climate crisis an effect of this messy man-made megastructure, the very possibility of calculating and modeling that crisis with scientific instruments is also one of its many technical consequences. Earth itself is already a sort of stack, with its several layers of mineral and biological formations locked in complex interaction, but only through recent technical developments have we been able to achieve the sort of planetary-scale computation that involves satellite deployments and the mining of rare minerals, enabling the modelling of changing weather systems and the rate of cosmic expansion alike.

For Bratton, acknowledging that brute fact should lead us directly to fully embrace our global anthropogenic power, channeling it in a more rational, and less destructive, ecological direction. In short, we should turn this accidental monster of a civilization into a more deliberate, less wasteful and self-destructive, platform for collective self-design.

I appreciate the point, as well as some of Bratton’s other arguments in this general direction. Our precise scientific knowledge about environmental destruction does come from many of the instrumental networks that have brought this destruction in the first place, and this is a contradiction that needs to be faced head-on. But I also believe there are some important limits to his vision which are worth discussing (and that might point to a larger blind spot in contemporary tech criticism).

2.

“Platforms that organize existing systems and information tend to achieve generative entrenchment more quickly than those that seek to introduce new systems from scratch.”

Benjamin Bratton

As slick as “The Stack” is (and it is pretty slick), at times it would seem that we are reading a Buckminster Fuller 2.0 ( maybe 3.0), with some Carl Schmitt thrown in for good measure. Bratton’s vision is certainly not that of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but maybe he is less distant from their childish visions of cosmic colonization and chauvinistic apoteosis than he would probably like to admit. In particular, Bratton’s somewhat simplistic opposition between the natural and the artificial invokes discussion, as well as his embrace of secular disenchantment and AI-assisted data governance as the banner under which a planetary consciousness should be conjured.

In a more recent text in Noema magazine (“Planetary Sapience”), Bratton proposes that, in order to achieve this radical reformulation of global social-technical agency, we should not revive ideas of nature, but rather reclaim the artificial (not as fake, but as designed). But this opposition seems false, at least as stated. Gilbert Simondon would say that the artificial is always a specific stimulation of nature (‘le naturel suscité’). Every man-made artifact is exactly as natural as something supposed to be organic, a container is just as natural as a beehive.

That is what authors like Bruno Latour or Donna Haraway have been pointing out in their criticism of the nature-culture distinction for decades. Not in order to erase the difference between a piece of plastic and a leaf, which is obviously still useful, but to point out the extent to which our own collective agency is necessarily entangled with and inextricable from the existence of many other beings. Our own entrails are made out of what is most alien to us, as the symbiogenesis of Margulis has made more than clear. Not only through the microbiome of our guts, but also at a cellular and genetic level.

Bratton is certainly right to point out that the response to the climate crisis will need to be equally anthropogenic, but the criticism levelled against anthropocentrism is that anthropogenic agency has always been a part and parcel of a larger ecology which modernity has failed to adequately acknowledge, thus far, both in philosophical and in political terms. It is no longer enough to say, with Gregory Bateson, that the unit of survival is organism plus environment. The organism is but an individuated slice of a co-emergent and always collective environment.

Bratton is ostensibly aware of all of this, repeatedly pointing out how indifferent the Earth-system is to humans, understanding his arguments to be part of the larger and ongoing modern project of erasing the privileged position of our species in relation to the rest of the Earth and the Cosmos. But as much as he discusses the mineral layer of our media eco-systems, as much as he talks of the Earth as being already a sort of stack through its own accidental piling of strata, his doubling-down on most of the bets made by European rational modernity as a redemptive one-size-fits-all response to the planetary crisis seem to me to indicate a severe blindspot which still defines a lot of the contemporary political sensibilityaround technology.

Maybe we need a fuller and wider stratigraphy of human and inhuman cycles, and their inner relations, in our general accounts of socio-technical emergence, one that accounts for the many larger natural and social choreographies which still entrain our cultures to their very core. Bratton does not seem very interested in interacting with a lot of the work that is already being done in that sense (in anthropology and science studies, in media theory and feminist theory). At times, he seems actively dismissive of some of it.

There is another recent attempt at providing a planetary stratigraphy of social relations that seems much more promising to this reader. Bronislaw Szerszynski and Nigel Clark’s “Planetary Social Thought” (2020) not only pays much more attention to the importance of other ways of living and thinking, besides the modern, but it also seems to be predicated on a far more realistic appraisal of actual technological possibilities. They place their bets for a viable infrastructural future on “multiplicitous capacities for grubby-fingered repair, impromptu innovation, widely distributed experimentation and ‘promiscuous’ sharing”, and not on “automated delegation”, like Bratton mostly seems to do.

I can imagine that when Bratton chooses the artificial over the natural Bratton is probably writing against a sort of nostalgic, somewhat new-agey stance that understands the natural to be pure and the artificial to be human and evil. Surely this naive position exists, as we are reminded by the many who have opposed the vaccine against COVID because of vague notions about “vibrations” or genetics. But I don’t see this position as having any meaningful presence in theoretical discussion, not with any real relevance (besides the misguided cries of biopolitical tyranny, of course). Even if some of the weaker links of the so-called New Materialism chain may have their flaky moments, spreading agency everywhere like so much fairy dust, the same cannot be said of so many recent attempts of enlarging our critical understanding of nature and science. As it is written, Bratton simply flips the authenticity coin, choosing the artificial over natural,instead of deploying an understanding of nature that truly embraces the potentiality of the artificial.

Gilbert Simondon reminds us that there is humanity in the technical object, but for him that meant that the technical object is always, to some extent, open towards indeterminaçy. The natural condition of technology is not a limit upon artificiliaty, but rather the àpeiron (or boundlessness) of energy and structure that lurks beneath actual devices.

Besides Simondon and some of his readers, the work of authors as diverse as Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers have all been producing political critiques of our accounts of nature that also engage passionately with the scientific method and its tradition (Stengers was trained as a chemist, Haraway as a biologist). These careful critical constructions seem to present us with far more nuanced and fertile notions of nature and of artificiality than Bratton Bratton’s univocal embrace of secular disenchantment could ever hope to produce.

Understanding our artificiality as being opposed to nature, like Bratton does, is to insist on the desire for our domain to be an exclusion from the chains of natural necessity, instead of accepting our cultural conditions as always emerging from the energetic and structural constraints of nature. When we truly accept that humanity’s technical expansion does not happen in a domain excluded from the natural ground it becomes easier to accept and understand that everything we do is natural, no matter how brutal or complex the intervention, no matter how outlandish the inscription.

In another direction, the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz invites us to think of culture and nature in a relation of emergence, a figure that rises out of a ground (a scheme that Bratton also uses a lot, but with different ends). Biological norms exist as statistical limits set upon a wide margin of historical mutation just like technical standards emerge through the gradual convergence of global flows of production. Beneath the tresholds of stability in both types of series, there is always an abyss of contamination and mutation, promiscuity and variation, both in biology and in technology. There is no single manual for life just there is no single technical flowchart of possibilities, what we have are technical tendencies (as André Leroi-Gourhan would say), affordances of the structural and energetic limits of the Earth-system, and all the partial historical crystallizations of those tendencies.

In the aforementioned text, Bratton also proposes that, in the future, we might be able to decide that our history was a worthwhile condition, in some ultimate register, in order to achieve this planetary intelligence that he is attempting to help conjure. To be fair, he proposes this in a hopeful way, as a sort of call-to-arms to construct a better future that would make this the case. But this is just Hegel sneaking back into the back-door of his accidental megastructure, is it not? Poor Virilio should be twisting in his grave. When we finally get our cosmic colonization that sci-fi promised us, with a global government and eco-friendly energy systems, then that whole unfortunate modern affair about subjugating the whole world and its peoples, destroying these spaces repeatedly throughout the centuries, all of those old quarrels will just seem so silly and inconsequential! When Planetary Daddy finally comes, that is.

For that to happen, and for humanity to survive, Bratton believes that we need a “decisive graduation from our primordial habits”. Maybe so, maybe so. But I for one am more anxious and hopeful about the graduation from the modern myth of individual self-sufficiency and absolute triumph over geistlos Nature than I than I am about graduating from spirits and Gods.

I wonder what exactly in the recent past has encouraged Bratton to bet in the viability of a global movement inspired by secular disenchantment? The Trump election and Q Anon? The Facebook-assisted genocide in Myanmar? France, the great mother of modern Enlightenment, unable to get a significant portion of their citizens vaccinated during a global health crisis?

I certainly do not claim to know what new social formations may rise in the next decade or so. What I do know with relative certainty is that rational disenchantment will not get us to any kind of planetary consciousness, not one with any kind of political and popular leverage, not without first finding succesful ways of transforming the deep-seated spiritual ruts of our old mythologies into new collective grooves, through experimentation with new forms of social organization.

In a practical sense, modern technology and the global synchrony of capital have already made religions largely superfluous. Even if they are still present in most of the word, they do not really run the whole show, surely. As Simondon might say, religions rule the background, but not the foreground, of collective life. All systems of belief are secondary to the legally enforceable system of global credit. But they are still there, and they still organize, even if at a previous layer of choreographic description, much of the collective global imagination and the dynamics of political affect. The question does not seem to be what new spring of secular modern values will finally come to take over the world in a shockwave of sudden rational recognition, but what kind of metamorphic transformations can old spiritual traditions and their choreographic chains undercome under radically new media formations. The religions that still govern the world have historically emerged alongside the technology of the book, the written word coupled with the Imperial power of the state. There is no telling, yet, of the gods that might, in due time, emerge from silicon.

3.

One of the interesting features of the Stack as described by Bratton is the way it overrides the current borders and jurisdictions, overlaying a grid of reversible form and function on top of the old lines and collapsing old distinctions and parameters along the way. Bratton’s description of these vertiginious assemblages of matter (that “physicalize the virtual” as they “virtualize phsyical forces”) can be almost breathtaking, at times, and it is certainly one of the most crafty attempts at handling the extensive logistical complexity of digital platforms in contemporary critical prose. But he does abuse that chiasmus of the virtual and the physical as a little toy, almost a shibboleth of sorts. It is sometimes hard to understand what he actually means by all this supposed reversibility and changes of figure and ground (another conceptual image that he resorts to at all times, sometimes with great effect, but often confusingly), when so many of the most enduring and essential social assymetries of this world are as stable and irreversible as it gets.

I can venture the guess that perhaps Bratton overplays the current flippy-floppyness of social interractions through the multi-layered grid so that his promising vision of planetary governance might seem more feasible (I mean this as an unconscious strategy, of course, not a deliberate ruse).

He may be right in calling for a general sapience that would be a genuine mixture of synthetic intelligence and natural intelligence, or at least right in the general direction toward which he is pointing in that regard (which does not mean his account of A.I. is in itself all that inspiring or insightful; unlike, say, Matteo Pasquinelli’s). But perhaps it would be more promising to philosophically stake that bet not simply on the power of man-made technical abstraction, but also in a deep acknowledgement of the systems and processes of mentality that precede and entrain us.

European modernity was created as a supposedly self-sufficent bubble that violently exported entropy for the rest of the world just as it created the truly universal tools of the scientific method, one of the most important achievements of our species thus far, and one which we certainly cannot do without from now on. On that fundamental contradiction still lies a lot of our current social and geopolitical esquizophrenia, built as it is on top of a decomposing colonial corpse.

To say it again, because it always bear repeating: the modern diagram of emancipation from the shackles of natural necessity through organized experimentation, essential for any collective human future, was partially born as an arrogant alienation from the effects that their technical networks of production had on the natural world and the rest of its peoples. And that is still how it is mostly implemented in the day-to-day of capitalist reproduction, even though the value of ecology has gone up in several markets (and as much as the buyers and sellers of carbon credit may try to convince us they can price their way out of destruction)..

There is no way to re-activate the utopic dimension of science and secular agency without first dealing with the heavy and shady history of modern instrumental reason, without first acknowledging that science was, and still is, built on top of a massive destruction of life-forms that is still on-going and rippling through different domains and layers of the Earth. Bratton seems to pay lip-service to the actual size of the human in the cosmos and the planet, just as he repeats, at another level, the same modern arrogance that has partly brought us to this mess in the first place.

I single him out not because I believe his work to be particularly naive or blind to these questions, not at all. I single him out because I believe he comes very close to embracing many of these points, but then falls short of actually including them in his political and socio-technical vision. Which is what makes reading his work so engaging but ultimately disappointing. Frustratingly ideological but still an interesting platform to discuss and to disagree with, as Geert Lovink has suggested.

4.

“In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.”

Donella Meadows

In a recent interview from the same magazine, Achille Mbembe calls for another kind of planetary consciousness, one that:

“includes all creation: all the people of the world; the creations or works of humanity; the mass of things we have invented; animals, plants, microbes, minerals; and mixed bodies (which is what we all are). In other words, the whole physical universe, all of reality, including (since I’m drawing from the African pre-colonial archive) spiritual and biological energies consistent with the definition of the living world.”

I think that is a much more promising, vision, specially in a pragmatic sense. The last few years have made it very clear that things will possibly get much worse before they get any better (if they ever get any better, that is). And we need to prepare for that. We also need to be humble enough in our speculative thinking to at least admit that most people do not seem to share the values of secular enlightnment, and show no sign of suddenly adopting them with enthusiasm in the near-future. New alliances and hybrid formations between political and spiritual movements need to emerge, and they need to emerge as soon as possible.

Nature is the birth of things, as Giambattista Vico would say, it is generation itself. Our mistake in achieving modernity through the destruction of the earth was not that of Prometheus, of stealing the fire of the Gods. The fire of the Gods is there to be stolen, there is no need to go back to any ‘natural’ state exactly because there is no pre-set code of natural or unnatural configurations, neither in life nor in technics. What would that even mean? Technology is an extension of the natural fire of modulation and transformation that has been organizing itself as living beings in this planet for bilions of years. It should belong to everyone, in its allagmatic openness, in its universal operability, but it first needs to be completely re-assembled from the ground up in order to become truly common for the first time (as Gilbert Simondon tried to tell us, in his own peculiar way).

The lights of modern instrumental arrogance are the very forces that blind us right now in this neon rush to get this over with, to accelerate this self-destructive drive through completion. They are the self-same spotlights that call upon the vampires of capital to extract value for the few out of every exchange of the many. We will certainly need to use reason and the powers of abstraction to get out of this mess. But by itself, reason will not save us. It its fartoo puny a god.

References:

Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack (MIT Press, 2016)

________. “ Planetary Sapience”. Noema, 2021.

Simondon, Gilbert. Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques. (Aubier, 2012)

Mbembe, Achille. “How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness”. Interview by Nils Gilman and Jonathan Blake. Noema Magazine, 2022.