2021/10/18

The Problem with Benjamin Bratton’s Planetary-Scale Computation is the Deep Time of Facts, Researcher Says

“The problem with planetary-scale computation is with scale itself. It fails to reckon with what we might call the deep time of facts.”
Peter Polack, designer and UCLA PhD candidate, critiquing Benjamin Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real (2021). Rather than suffering from “impractical applications, ideological criticisms, and a lack of recursive models,” Polack argues that Bratton’s planetary-scale computation doesn’t account for the “historical heterogeneity of facts, their capacity to change unpredictably, and their variations across geographical and cultural contexts.”
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