The future of politics after the pandemic.
COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with sweeping social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned?
The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmasâclimate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and societyâall of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.
What People Are Saying
âIf youâve emerged from the past year disoriented, you may find it exactly the right time to read Brattonâs book. From quarantine urbanism, to 5G conspiracy theorists and technological refusal, to incisive philosophical analysis of mask-rejecting Karens and the Westâs shambolic response to covid writ large, Bratton is a ruthless guide to what has unfolded. But this book is soundly concerned with the future, through and beyond post-pandemic politics. Its pressing questionsâcan the world govern itself differently? how do we direct emergent technological capacities towards competent planetary governance?âwill continue to be more and more relevant as the ecological crises deepen. There will be manifold books on the âlessonsâ of the pandemic, but Bratton uniquely grasps what is at stake.â Holly Jean Buck, author of After Geoengineering
âBratton is one of our best global systems thinkers, adding to theory and philosophy a sophisticated understanding of infrastructures, design, AI, and governance: what this adds up to is a rare and valuable insight into civilization and its match, or mismatch, with Earthâs biosphere. In the wake of the Covid pandemic he has given us a swift and propulsive reorientation to the situation we find ourselves in, a species in a single biosphere, ruled by an ad hoc nation-state system. What can we do now to help sort things out and dodge the mass extinction event we are initiating? Read on and learn.â Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future
âA provocative skewering of dogmatic Western political culture, Brattonâs book is a crucial contribution to thinking through what planetary governance could and should look like post-pandemic.â Nick Srnicek, co-author of Inventing the Future
âThe pandemic has laid bare the frailties, failures, and fissures of the contemporary world. The Revenge of the Real offers a clarion call for organising ourselves differently. It is forceful, engaging, and thought provoking, and I expect it to prove immediately influential.â Helen Hester, author of Xenofeminism
âWhen anti-lockdown stances such as the one espoused by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, QAnonâs conspiracies, anti-vaxxer propaganda, and a return to an innocent relation between the humans and the planet are a match made in hell, the rise of crypto-fascism variants is the least of our concerns. We are indeed witnessing a fundamental erosion of the contemporary leftâs capacity to respond to planetary-scale emergencies. This inability to systematically think about and act upon the plights brought upon this planet is what Benjamin Bratton calls the lack of planetary competency. Brattonâs The Revenge of the Real is a sober yet enthusiastic analysis of how and why some strains of the left continue to be appropriated by individualistic libertarianism if not by crypto-fascism. Yet Brattonâs work is more than that, it sets a way out for the left by mapping the scale of planetary events and what it means to think and intervene at that scale.â Reza Negarestani, author of Intelligence and Spirit
âBrattonâs is an incisive intervention: at once polemic and productive. A counter to the self-imposed ineffectuality of certain strands of theory, The Revenge of the Real provides buoyant and zesty rebuttal to the suspicious mode in philosophizing, all whilst in search of more pragmatic alternatives.â Thomas Moynihan, author of X-Risk
âSharp as a tungsten needle, Bratton reveals the paradoxes of the pandemic at atomic resolution and etches a positive outline of how planetary biopolitics could be otherwise. Vital reading.â Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI
âEvery moment has a theorist native to its strangeness, a singular voice that can uniquely navigate its impossible truths and unfathomable realities. At the end of the end of the world it is Benjamin Brattonâs running commentary that cuts swathes, like a megastructure through mountains.â Liam Young, architect and filmmaker
â[Brattonâs] call for a global shift in priorities is galvanizing.â Publishers Weekly