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The Stack: Design and Geopolitics in the Age of Planetary-Scale Computing

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Wednesday, November 19, 2014
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Benjamin Bratton/University of California, San Diego

THE STACK: DESIGN AND GEOPOLITICS IN THE AGE OF PLANETARY-SCALE COMPUTINGFrom 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 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. In this talk, we'll map The Stack we have and sketch The Stack-to-come.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. He is also professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. His book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is forthcoming. See bratton.info. TED Talk:http://youtu.be/Yo.

Type: LECTURE/TALK and STUDENT
Contact: Sam Kigar