[talks]

Accidental Geopolitics

[05.2011]

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Accidental Geopolitics

Benjamin H. Bratton
Lecture at The Guardian Activate Summit
New York
April 28, 2011




    My name is Benjamin Bratton am director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at Calit2, the UC's flagship institute for basic research in telecom and IT. DGP is, in essence, the Institute's think-tank and our brief is to think the impact of planetary-scale computation (cyberinfrastructure at the continental scale, ubiquitous computing urban scale, and ambient interfaces at the perceptual scale) on how we build, how we communicate, dwell, and govern a post-natural world that is as fabricated as it is found.
    That said for us the most important and difficult design problem is not a technological problem per se, an engineering problem, a computer science problem. What we need to design is a geopolitical architecture that can 1.) properly map and account for the reality of the world we live in and 2.) which allows us to deliberately, effectively and perhaps democratically design and govern that world, both its green ecologies of atmospheres and genetic diversity and what Paul Virilio calls its gray ecologies of server farms and forests of fiber.


 
   For this it is important to keep another Virilio axiom in mind, “every new technological invention is in turn the invention of a new kind of accident.” the invention of the car is the invention of the car accident. the history of technology is for him a museum of accidents.  Of all the accidents brought by the emergence of planetary scale computation, the disruption of geopolitics, the delaminations of geography and jurisdictions are particularly critical.
    Modern logic presumes that disruption precedes progress. Consultancies sell disruption, especially disruptive design and IT, as a service. But progress and disruption have no necessary relation: very advanced technology and very archaic social and political forms are not only not incompatible, in fact their exact pairing may well define the neo-Medieval period known as the 21st century. And it will unless we find a robust alternative that is both fearless in how it is willing re-imagine political geography and the role of truly pervasive computing to organize alternative globalizations.  the design of computation is not the most vexing issue. Rather it is the redesign of us. Our smart phones are neither the problem nor the solution. We are the problem, and we may or may not be the solution. We articulate this challenge this way: we need to define a robust cosmopolitanism for the era of planetary computation and post-humanism.
    In many ways the ultimate implications of the Copernican revolution, the radical de-centering, has yet to have its full impact on political science. There is a homology between geocentric cosmologies and the division of jurisdictions into little adjacent sections that are somehow supposed to envelope sovereignty and govern all the flows that perforate them. The Treaty of Westphalia codified this diagram of states separated by lines on a two dimensional plane  and Kant universalized the arrangement, giving it its foundational ethics. He defined cosmopolitanism, the polity of those who share the surface of the Earth's crust as their locale, as a federation of these national monads.  But the system  is overrun with exceptions, from byzantine international bodies,to a proliferation of enclaves and exclaves, non-contiguous states, diasporic nationalisms, of free trade and SEZ, to atavistic religious geographies to  informational globalizations.


  
 So if we were to redefine citizenship for a cloud computing era, what would it look like? One way that citizenship was defined in the Roman Empire was Civis Romanus Sum, which means that the city itself was the grantee of the right to address and be addressed by the political territory of common infrastructure. Now, at a moment when, as we now, we are now a majority urban species, does this still hold? Not as citizen of any one city, but let's imagine, as citizen of a global aggregate urban condition. Citizen of the city that striates Earth; a city not just of buildings and roads, but also of smart grids that connect economies, energy sources, information interfaces into dense, fast data archipelagos. Is this aggregate physical/energy/virtual city that is enveloping the planet then the condition, the legitimacy, from which another, more liquid, universal suffrage can be derived and designed?. A composite city, a hypercity, based on rights of mobility,a democracy of energy and electrons, and on data sovereignty, which interwoven, define this vast homeland?
    This entails an inevitable distortion and deformation of westphalian geographic diagram. one that overwhelms and augments and produces new territories; not some international federation or super-state, something more bottom-up, a more diagonal and layered geography.
    The google china conflict may well be the opening crack in very different kind of war over who or what governs civil society, less between the USA and China than between one logic of territorial control that sees the internet as an extension of the body of the state, or at least under the state in the big stack, and another which sees the it as a vital  quasi-autonomous (if privately controlled and profited) trans-territorial civil society which produces, defends and demands rights on its on. But this is not about the declining State withering away ,but to the contrary it's redefinition in relation to network geographies that it can neither contain nor be contained by.
    What are the national rights of mobile subjects in a cloud society? Can I be bound to the data laws of my passport country matter where I go? Can my cloud follow me, and I it? Can it be my primary sovereign territory? Should it? Or, should individual servers fly the flag of a certain state and organize data according to those laws, even if the server may be across the world, or should, like civis romans sum, the particular data laws of a particular site construct and contain the laws of flow on one particular spot? All of these options are extraordinarily counterintuitive. But what else? What even if the server farms are outside of territorial waters altogether? Like Google's patented offshore data centers which for sensible green reasons would also put the global cloud, the information third of that composite physical/data/energy city outside of regular territorial control. It’s not a matter of hypothesizing that planetary computation will bring the accident of alien political geography, it already has. The design problem is what then? Well... do we want?
    We need a Copernican shift in our political geography that understands these dynamics as simultaneously, and interchangeably futuristic and archaic, technocratic and theologic. The modern diagram is attacked from front and rear. At the same time that we consider financial archipelagos that would game the speed of light by locating offshore sites that optimize the movement of pulses between trading centers--Here the incremental value of a commodity is determined literally by its location in the earth’s light cone!) we also see Lashkar e-taiba attacking Mumbai with Google Earth maps, satellite phones, stolen sim cards. The critical insight is not that Jihad could fit into the map of the Google Earth, but rather that Google Earth could and can fit into the geography of Jihad.  In recent weeks in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, etc. we see something very different than Mumbai, and there he point is not whether or not social media plays a role in the absolutely heroic Arab Awakening, but that its triumphs are deeply ambiguous. It surely has made mobilization possible, but mobilization toward what, and in what relation to the violence of the surveillance state? Further we should not be satisfied with any analysis that predicts the eventual emergence of a western style civil society from this. Why? Because we should aim higher than that, because they are aiming higher than that. Any emergency is also an emergence. We mustn’t arrogantly propose that we are their their future,. A new democratic genres in ting  Arab world may be the future of the West, that :s our stakes in the outcome. On the other hand we can just as easily  envision a cloud based neo-medievalism, in the west and the east. Visigoths with iPads. Barbarian theological microstates with thriving biotech and nanotech industries. Just like San Diego, perhaps. Supercomputing does not inoculate us from feudalism, from superstition, but it can, perhaps, provide for its opposite: a futurism without guarantees, only plasticity.
    And so the accidents keep piling up. The jurisdictions more interwoven. The cosmopolitanism more plural, more contradictory, more composite and polyscalar. If Virilio’s axiom is true, that any new technology is also a new accident, then the opposite holds. that any new accident is also a new technology.

Tags: branding

Published: 05.03.2011

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