Benjamin Bratton on Planetary Computation’s Next Phase

Summary#

This essay, adapted from the new material in the tenth-anniversary edition of The Stack, is Bratton's own account of what has happened to his model of planetary computation since 2016. He names two transformations: a multiplication, in which one nominally global Stack has split into rival Hemispherical Stacks, and a replacement, in which layers built for classical computing are being rebuilt for AI. He then walks the six layers, Earth through User, and closes by predicting that what "your parents called 'the Internet'" will become cognitive infrastructures. It is the author's statement of which parts of the 2016 book have held and which need replacing, written for readers who have not read it.

The argument#

Bratton opens with Donald Trump, newly elected in November 2016, saying that "The Whole Age of Computer" has made it so that "nobody knows exactly what's going on," and takes the line as verified by the circumstances of its utterance. The Stack was written between 2011 and 2014, when Google had only just left China and the Obama administration still expected connectivity to dissolve autocracies. It offered a "total" figure of planetary-scale computation against a humanities culture devoted to local contexts and social constructivism. Bratton insists the model was never a map but "a heuristic framework," a scaffold for pattern recognition. Because a Stack is modular, whatever occupies a layer is meant to be swapped out while the whole holds, and he says the same of the theory.

Multiplication follows from a claim in the book: as hardware and software absorb functions of the state, governance (if not politics) migrates into technical systems and away from legislatures. From this Bratton draws a stronger statement than the book made. The multipolarisation of geopolitics and of planetary computation do not merely track one another; "they are the same thing." To build a Stack is to build a society, which is why states now compete for foundational Stack capacities. Replacement is the arrival of AI as practical infrastructure rather than proof of concept; he expects the replacement of fifty years of layers to be "comprehensive." The layer walk is the evidence for both claims.

Section by section#

The two transformations#

The framing paragraphs restate the book's core notion, governance infused into technical operations, then name its consequence: Bratton says he coined "Hemispherical Stacks" for the split into a China Stack, a US Stack, an India Stack, an EU Stack. The AI shift is "perhaps even more important." The line "The AI Stack will exist in a different world from ours" is the essay's strongest claim, asserted here and left to the layer sections to support.

Earth#

Earth is the substrate, minerals and electricity, and also an object of analysis: Bratton repeats his view that mature climate science is an epistemological achievement of supercomputing. What has changed is that Sino-American competition over minerals has reached the front pages and that the AI Stack has platforms buying as much electricity as they can. He notes, without endorsing it, that this may finally supply the incentive for next-generation nuclear power, "a development that would carry numerous historical ironies."

Cloud#

The book's thesis that platforms take on Westphalian state functions while states become cloud-based is, he says, "far less speculative" now. The evidence is encapsulation: service withdrawals, app bans, platforms' deeper ties to their host state, all traced to a shift in the relation between data and sovereignty. He leaves a tension standing: AI is now a primary domain of state security, yet it also lets enterprises, from individuals to corporations, operate more independently.

City#

Bratton declines to say cities have become smarter, only more thoroughly structured by the Stack. The phone, "still referred to as a phone," organises urban navigation, and QR-code landscapes produce a touchless, anonymous urban society "for better or worse." At larger scale, humans are sorted into residential areas while food, energy and material production are cordoned into uninhabited exclusion zones, which he says depends on the synchronisation the City layer provides.

Address#

The Address layer's decade belongs to "avant-garde accounting": blockchains and tokens that produce, verify and often extinguish value, all resting on the ability to assign an address to a discrete entity and register it for audit. The general point is the book's: the structure of addressability determines what becomes data. The AI corollary is that the next decade will be about producing new data about the world for training, not only training on data that already exists.

Interface#

The Interface is where the User peers into the Stack and the Stack peers back, through a "glowing glass rectangle" Bratton calls a "Turing-complete endosomatic organ." Consumer VR and AR generate programmable illusions while astronomy and genomics use simulation to reach reality; Toy Worlds, where AI agents train before entering the world, sit between. The key move is that an agent is not only an Interface but a semiautonomous User, so agentic AI blurs the two layers "perhaps forever."

User#

Bratton repeats the book's definition: the User is not a needs-having human but any agent that sends purposeful signals through the Interface, "animal, vegetable, or mineral." The change is in quantity and kind. He judges it "all but certain" that human-level minds will be outnumbered by nonhuman ones, and notes that we sometimes sit inside other Users: a passenger in a driverless car is embedded in a User doing open-world navigation. The resulting anomie feeds backlash subcultures, a Copernican trauma "that will take years to mourn."

The next decade#

The closing paragraphs name the successor: cognitive infrastructures that generate intelligence and "participate in society accordingly." The decade will hinge on six questions, one per layer, ending with who and what counts as a User. The last line quotes "everything's computer!" from an unnamed man; read against the opening, this implies the same speaker as the 2016 remark.

Key concepts#

• Multiplication and replacement — the essay's two decadal transformations: the splitting of one Stack into hemispheric rivals, and the rebuilding of every layer for AI rather than classical computing.
• Hemispherical Stacks — Bratton's term for that fragmentation; here identical with the multipolarisation of geopolitics, not parallel to it.
• AI Stack — the Stack "built by and for AI" that will exist "in a different world from ours"; the replacement's end state.
• Cognitive infrastructures — the successor to "the Internet": infrastructure that is itself generative of intelligence.
• User — any agent, human or not, that manipulates the Interface to send purposeful signals through the layers; with agentic AI, a position humans may occupy from inside another User.
• Copernican trauma — the decentring pain of being outnumbered and enclosed by nonhuman Users, which the essay says drives reactionary backlash.

Connections#

The essay condenses The Stack and revises it. The "heuristic framework" restates the Preface's model that is "general and comprehensive, but not complete or fixed." The Cloud section compresses the Cloud Polis argument and the First Sino-Google War into today's Sino-American split; the Earth section updates the smart-grid Ouroboros of section 20 with AI's electricity demand; the User section rests on section 67's animal, AI and machine Users and on "Inventing Users" in The Stack to Come. "Hemispherical Stacks," "cognitive infrastructures," the agentic collapse of Interface into User, and "everything's computer" do not appear in the 2016 text; they are the anniversary material. An Update on The Stack is an earlier checkpoint of the same kind.

Hemispherical Stacks is the full argument for the multiplication claim and agrees with it entirely. Antikythera supplies both the Hemispherical Stacks section and the "Everything's Computer!" heading, and its description of the original Stack as a warm-up for cognitive infrastructure is the essay's closing claim in program form; Cognitive Infrastructures develops it, and Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation shares the premise that technology now outruns the language for describing it. The Address section's call to produce new data for training agrees with After Alignment and its Whole Earth Codec; the Toy Worlds of the Interface section are the subject of For a General Theory of Simulations and its sim-to-real gap. The User forecast and the backlash it expects are argued at length in Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion and The Five Stages Of AI Grief; the essay agrees with both but, unlike the Science essay, offers no proposal for governing mixed human-AI societies.