--- title: "Is European AI A Lost Cause? Not Necessarily." description: "Benjamin Bratton's September 2025 Noema essay, published in debate with Francesca Bria's \"Reclaiming Europe's Digital Sovereignty,\" argues that Europe lacks the AI stack it says it wants because its intellectual culture has spent a decade talking itself out of building one." type: "reading-notes" authors: - "Benjamin Bratton" published: "2025-09-30" original_url: "https://www.noemamag.com/is-european-ai-a-lost-cause-not-necessarily/" canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-is-european-ai-a-lost-cause-not-necessarily" md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/media/noema-is-european-ai-a-lost-cause-not-necessarily" last_updated: "2026-08-23" site: "Antikythera Wiki" --- # Is European AI A Lost Cause? Not Necessarily. > Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below. - **Authors:** Benjamin Bratton - **Published:** 2025-09-30 - **Kind:** Essays, talks & interviews · Essay - **Venue:** Noema Magazine - **Original:** https://www.noemamag.com/is-european-ai-a-lost-cause-not-necessarily/ - **Length:** 5.9k words - **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-is-european-ai-a-lost-cause-not-necessarily - **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23 ## Summary [Benjamin Bratton](https://antikythera.wiki/people/benjamin-bratton)'s September 2025 Noema essay, published in debate with Francesca Bria's "Reclaiming Europe's Digital Sovereignty," argues that Europe lacks the AI stack it says it wants because its intellectual culture has spent a decade talking itself out of building one. The "Eurostack" proposals now circulating are modeled on the app-era stack of 2015 and hedged with so many ethical preconditions that stagnation is the likely result. Bratton reads this as a repeat of West Germany's anti-nuclear politics, whose consequences he tallies in coal deaths, emissions, Russian gas dependency, and the rise of the AfD. The essay is the argumentative counterpart to the Blurope scenario in Hemispherical Stacks: where that piece dramatizes a Europe that regulates itself into irrelevance, this one names the critics, presents the data, and proposes society-scale AI diffusion as the alternative. ## The argument Bratton begins from a contradiction. Europe invented much of modern computing and also produced its most elaborate critiques, and the critics now second-guess every practical step toward AI capacity. A groundswell against "regulate first, build later (maybe)" has appeared, but it will dissipate unless it wins in the realm of ideas. The Eurostack diagram Bria promotes borrows from The Stack but treats AI as a final layer bolted onto chips, networks, cloud, and software; Bratton says a stack built around hemispheres rather than nations will be built around AI, and that Bria's plan should have been executed fifteen years ago. It was not, he argues, because a Critique Industry monopolized academia and public discourse, and stakeholder working groups absorbed the oxygen while American and Chinese platforms filled the gaps. The Venice Biennale panel with Evgeny Morozov, Kate Crawford, and Marina Otero Verzier is the essay's central exhibit. Bratton reports being the only panelist who argued Europe should build an AI stack. Morozov wants European AI only on terms resembling Allende's unbuilt Cybersyn; Crawford's slogan that AI is "neither artificial nor intelligent" describes, on her own explanation, exactly what artificial and intelligent mean; Otero's one-word summary was "communism." The panel, he concludes, demonstrated why Europe has no Eurostack, though not as its organizers intended. Bratton then corrects the premise. Europe does have something: Mistral, and a decisive role in Linux, Python, ARM, Blender, Raspberry Pi, KDE, and Gnome. But this is a "messy pile," in [Nils Gilman](https://antikythera.wiki/people/nils-gilman)'s phrase, and its successes are anti-sovereign technologies that work for anyone anywhere, which exposes the incoherence of a sovereignty discourse that cannot say whether it means sovereignty for the user, the citizen, or the state. The result is regulation without much AI to regulate and greater dependence on foreign platforms. This is what Bratton calls backfiring. The historical core is nuclear power. West German protest at Wyhl, the Atomkraft Nein Danke sticker, The China Syndrome released twelve days before Three Mile Island, and the Bonn march of 120,000 produced a shutdown whose toll he quantifies against France: seven times the CO2 per kilowatt-hour, 25 percent of electricity from coal, roughly 5,500 excess coal deaths a year against France's 1,000, while radiation deaths from Three Mile Island and Fukushima total zero. He puts it as 1.25 Chernobyls per year. The indirect costs were Russian leverage over German energy and the stagnation that fed the AfD. The vocabulary of that movement, "technocratic," "extractive," "existential risk," "Promethean madness," is the vocabulary now used against AI. The remedy is diffusion. Europe should not build copycat models but make AI usable by everyone for what matters to them, and Bratton's evidence is deliberately anecdotal: a UC San Diego faculty committee that called AI a plagiarism machine until a seventy-year-old historian described four hours talking with it about Lucretius. Critics dismiss such moments as seduction; Bratton calls that awe-shaming. He ends by describing a transnational utility providing inexpensive general synthetic intelligence to whole populations, then doubts the panel shares that goal, since gatekeepers who invoke the Global South as a "rhetorical human shield" are defending the artificial scarcity of expert agency from which their own institutions benefit. ## Section by section ### Opening Bratton sets the essay against Bria's Eurostack proposal and states the thesis: a future stack is hemispherical and AI-native, and Europe must commit to its costs rather than rehearse its reservations. ### Merchants Of Torpor In Venice An account of the "Archipelago of Possible Futures" panel. The sharpest passages are on Crawford, whose definitions he says concede his point, and on her installation Calculating Empires, which he calls heraldry rather than diagram, arrows from phones to copper mines without analysis. ### The Actual (Sort-Of) Existing Eurostack Europe's real assets are open-source projects whose strength is that they serve no sovereign. Bratton argues that the "regulatory superpower" posture is a placeholder for capacity, and ends with the line that the EU has AI regulation but not much AI to regulate. ### How It Started The 1970s anti-nuclear movement, from Wyhl to Three Mile Island to the No Nukes concerts, is presented as the template for Europe's technopolitical reflexes; cooling-tower vapor became an icon of pollution despite being water. ### How It's Going The Germany-versus-France comparison, with figures on emissions, coal, and excess deaths, and the political chain from shutdown to Russian gas to stagnation to the AfD. Bratton's summary is that a well-meaning movement caused larger harms than it prevented. ### AI Nein Danke? The same terms now describe AI. Bratton reproduces a collage of "AI is…" characterizations from humanities scholars and diagnoses AI as a "fetishized bad object" for them. He names the genre Vibe Theory, non-falsifiable claims not meant for debate, and connects it to Walter Benjamin's aestheticization of politics, funded here by art-world speaking fees. ### Your Personal 'Oh Wow' Moment The UC San Diego committee story, a theater professor using Claude to notate dance scores, and 800 million weekly ChatGPT users as a population that cannot be gaslit. Personal experience of making something with AI changes opinions faster than argument. ### So What Now? Bratton addresses the objection that critique is what populism most threatens and replies that populism is cultural determinism in exaggerated form, so doubling down on culture's autonomy is no remedy. He ridicules absolute techno-interiority, a European phone with a Europe-only wall plug, as "Blood and Soil and Data," and notes an estimate that the AI Act could cut investment 20 percent. Europe may choose that premium but cannot be insulated from its consequences. ### What We All Want? The definition of a general-intelligence utility, the argument that its largest beneficiaries are those outside the "dozen cities and two dozen universities" where expert agency is concentrated, and the suspicion that the panelists' ends, not just their means, differ from his. ## Key concepts - **Hemispherical stack** — computational infrastructure organized by geopolitical hemisphere rather than by nation, and built around AI. See [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/hemispherical-stacks). - **Critique Industry** — the academic and media apparatus that, in Bratton's account, monetizes skepticism of technology and incentivizes paralysis. - **Backfiring** — a policy meant to prevent harm producing larger harms, exemplified by German nuclear shutdown and European AI regulation. - **Vibe Theory** — elite anxiety presented as resistance politics; non-falsifiable "AI is…" claims issued from media studies departments and op-ed pages. - **Diffusion** — society-scale adoption of AI as a utility, which Bratton prioritizes over building new models or infrastructure. See [Diffusionism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/diffusionism). - **Political solutionism** — the assumption that legislation can direct a technology whose evolution outruns political cycles. See [Political Solutionism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/political-solutionism). ## Connections - [The Myth of Blurope](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks/blurope) is the scenario-fiction version of this argument, published two months later in [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks); the essay supplies the data and the named antagonists the scenario leaves implicit. Agreement throughout. - [The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-stack) is the text Bria's Eurostack cites; Bratton says the 2015 diagram is a stack of the present, and this essay is partly a disavowal of his own model as a blueprint for AI. - [Diffusion: A New Venture for Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/substack/2025-09-25-diffusion-a-new-venture-for-antikythera) was published the same week and makes the diffusion-over-infrastructure priority programmatic. - [The Five Stages Of AI Grief](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-the-five-stages-of-ai-grief) contains the earlier versions of the Crawford critique, the "AI Lysenkoism" charge, and the term political solutionism; the grief typology is the psychological frame this essay applies to one polity. - [A New Philosophy Of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-a-new-philosophy-of-planetary-computation) gives the positive program, a philosophy that composes the world rather than deconstructs it, that this essay asks Europe to adopt. - [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) treats planetary computation as an accidental megastructure that philosophy should compose rather than critique; this essay assumes that view when it says the stack evolves whether or not Europe legislates it. - The essay is in direct tension with Bria's companion piece and with the Crawford and Morozov positions it quotes; none of those are in the corpus, so the debate is only represented from Bratton's side here. ## Terms used - [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/hemispherical-stacks)