The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-pandemic World

by Benjamin H. Bratton

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 dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all 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.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Technology, Cultural, Architecture

176 pages, Hardcover

First published June 29, 2021

About the author

Benjamin H. Bratton is a theorist whose work spans philosophy, computer science, and design. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. He is also Visiting Professor of Critical Studies at SCI-Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture) and Professor of Digital Design at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Reviews

[John Pistelli · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the first of August, liberal journalist, Vox co-founder, and influential policy wonk Matthew Yglesias Tweeted the following: "Absent politics my policy would be you either get jabbed voluntarily within the next X weeks and get $50 or else you get jabbed later while someone holds you down and you get $0." Even advocates of widespread vaccine business mandates found this fantasy of forced penetration unseemly, yet its like isn't without precedent in Yglesias's work. In a blog post from early 2002, he waved away fears of Middle Eastern backlash to the looming Iraq War: "Why would the Muslims of the world even try to take us on? Maybe they're just that crazy—I personally don't think so—but if they all want to kill us, then we'll just have to kill them all."

Confronting these genocidal remarks, it's difficult to remember, after a media- and state-driven panic passes and reasoned deliberation resumes, what it actually felt like to live in the eye of the moral hurricane. Readers under a certain age won't remember the atmosphere in the years immediately after 9/11—and many readers of a certain age might like to forget. The Bush administration claimed an expansive mandate to wage what it called Global War on Terror (and what some of its apologists styled World War IV), first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, with a further implication that at least the rest of the "axis of evil" (Iran, North Korea) would have to be taken out and that previously proscribed "defensive" methods like torture of prisoners, indefinite extrajudicial confinement, and routine surveillance of citizens (e.g., their library records) would have to be introduced.

Skepticism about this military adventurism and abrogation of civil liberties would often be met with passionate moral and sentimental rhetoric disputing the citizen's right even to ask questions at all in a time of unprecedented crisis. Do you deny the threat of terrorism? Do you want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud? Do you want it to happen again? What if it was someone you loved? How can you disrespect the memory of the victims of 9/11? Are you an appeaser, an America-hater, a conspiracy theorist? Because the enemy was analogized to the Nazis—the 9/11 hijackers were labeled "Islamofascists" while Saddam Hussein and the leaders of Iran were likened to Hitler himself—it was not uncommon, even where it made little sense, for critics of the War on Terror to be accused of anti-Semitism and "America First" isolationism, with many commentators comparing Democrats who questioned Bush's authority to Neville Chamberlain or the Vichy government. That Yglesias displays the same violent knee-jerk reaction in the present crisis as he did in the earlier one, though, suggests something more than the continuity of his character from youth to middle age.

One intellectual who forcefully questioned the War on Terror was Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. I am no expert in his recondite work, which draws on studies of ancient Roman law and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, but I did read some of his texts in graduate school in the mid-2000s, when demoralized academic leftists found solace in his theoretical challenge to the new war powers claimed by Bush and allied powers. Agamben applied to the War on Terror the concepts of biopolitics—or government sovereignty over the bodies of its citizens, residents, and enemies—and the state of exception—during which governments declare an emergency to abridge or eliminate civil liberties—both of which Agamben saw culminating in the Third Reich and operative during the early and middle 2000s. For Agamben, as for theorists like Adorno and Arendt, the Nazi camps, in their brutal rationalization of marked bodies, offered not so much an exception to business as usual, but rather the paradigm of modern governmental power. Agamben updated these theses for the pandemic era beginning early in 2020, with a series of controversial articles viewing this new state of emergency as yet another state of exception—an excuse for unprecedented exercises of biopolitical sovereignty over the populace. This time, Agamben's former academic champions rebuked and disavowed the thinker; I too demurred at what I took to be his inflammatory rhetoric at the height of the suffering in his native Italy.

Now, though, a year and a half later, when rhetoric like Yglesias's is common among the educated upper classes who endured the least economic hardship or exposure to illness during the lockdowns and mandates; when dissent within the scientific community about how to proceed is expunged from the public sphere in favor of ever-shifting recommendations carrying at every discrete moment an imprimatur of indubitable truth; and when citizens' questions about the necessity or wisdom or even the pragmatic temporal limit of onerous measures for dealing with a likely endemic and preponderantly non-fatal illness are met with wildly emotive accusations and bizarrely inapplicable analogies ("If you'll put your toddlers in a car seat for a short drive, why won't you allow their entire early education to take place in a mask? Or do you want to slaughter the vulnerable, you Trump-loving Nazi?" etc.)—then I believe Agamben deserves another hearing.

The academic left will not help us now, however. They've lost their appetite for querying state and corporate power, and no wonder, given the barely-extant condition of the professoriate. Among the tenurati left standing, though, are the heirs to a scientistic turn that began in the late '90s and included thinkers as temperamentally diverse as Eve Kosofsky Sedgick, Bruno Latour, and Franco Moretti. The academic humanities today is likelier to assist the state's biopolitical endeavors than to call them into question. A typical production of the contemporary humanities is Benjamin Bratton's The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World. Animated by an ill-mannered polemic against Agamben and related thinkers (Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Ivan Illich) who, as representatives of philosophy, "failed the pandemic," Bratton mocks what he sees as the paranoia about governance instilled by "Boomer Theory"—a characteristic Twitter-level insult—and instead calls for "positive biopolitics."

According to Bratton, the pandemic, with the objectifying "epidemiological view" it's trained us to take of humanity, has taught us that we must stop thinking of ourselves as individuals with rich inner lives vulnerable to trespass by power and learn instead to live as objects in a biome, as "a medium through which the physical world signifies itself" with all its virions and bacteria, which must be modeled and managed by scientific intelligence for the total health of the whole. It's worth recalling that the English literary critic John Carey, no abstruse Continental theorist, describes in his 1992 classic The Intellectuals and the Masses how an epidemiological view of society, based on Pasteur's discovery of bacteria, inspired the Nazi regime's social modeling, a development also notably discussed alongside other examples by Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor. Yglesias's coercive and genocidal rhetoric above lends credence to this view—and to Agamben's warning of the murderous potential latent in biopolitics per se. Bratton further contrasts his favored form of government with the populist performances of leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro:

[T]his epidemiological mode shifts the final authority from the declaration of the sovereign to the expert administration of life and death, now credentialized by a quite different and more secular authority.

Much as we all enjoy another round of Trump-bashing, I'm sure, this thesis strikes through the offensive person of Trump to delegitimize popular sovereignty itself in favor of experts authorized to rule not by public consent but by extra-democratic institutional credentials. Bratton dismisses Bush- and Obama-era anxiety about "surveillance" as naive, insisting that "surveillance is not the right word"; he prefers "sensing" and pleads with us to forego a "pre-Darwinian" or Romantic or Christian concept of the sacred human person and instead give ourselves up as legible organisms to the "sensing layer" of state and corporate authority—from contact-tracing apps to medical diagnostics—so that it, as the embodiment of sovereign human "sapience," may more salubriously order our lives: "In addition to the right to reasonable privacy there is also a right and responsibility to be counted."

Finally, this desired biopolitical state he conceives as global rather than national and derides attempts to contain contagion by sealing borders as implicitly racist. As he further explains, these ideas require a maturer politics than what prevails today on the left; he rebukes, for example, the anarchism of CHAZ and other experiments during the Black Lives Matter "social explosion" of 2020 as "more planless emergence," fruitless as ever. In the chapter titled "The Problem Is Individuation Itself," he casually derides "the sentimental language of 'ethics,'" two phrases that may not inspire confidence in all readers. He likewise understands masks as welcome anti-individualist symbols about which only benighted "Karen"—he analyzes this meme-figure at length—could complain. He displaces the individual with

a view of politics shifting from law to biology, from voice to organism. For example, the various national and regional Green New Deals all imply a shift in the role of what governance sees, knows, does, and is for. Instead of just reflecting the general will or popular voice, the function of governance is now also the direct management of ecosystems, understood as inclusive of human society.

Given Bratton's eagle eye for similarities between left-anarchism and right-populism, he seems ironically insensible to his theory's echoes of the neoreactionary movement, with its biological conception of humanity and contempt for democratic "voice."

Bratton says little about who will effect our transition to positive biopolitics, since as a leftist he's unhappy with the likes of Trump or Biden, Johnson or Macron, doing it. Where the new personnel of our global government will come from, he cannot say. Yet he scolds readers who have any fears about extant corporate and government powers as "conspiracy theorists":

I am no apologist for monopolist digital monoculture and have spent the better part of a decade formulating alternative models to it, but one cannot avoid being slightly queasy when the press and the academy, for example, reflexively demonize “Bill Gates,” “Google,” and the more overtly Jewish “Zuckerberg” and “Sergey Brin” as part of a New World Order–type incursion into the physical and mental purity of nations and peoples.

Yet, as he offers no "real" alternative despite his book's title, he gives no real evidence that he's not an apologist for the status quo in the guise of a utopian futurist. Bill Gates, for example, is not only not overtly Jewish but not Jewish at all; he descends instead from this country's "founding stock" and moreover should give any sentient—let alone sapient—leftist plenty of grounds for critique:

The Gates Foundation talks about health but facilitates the roll-out of a toxic form of agriculture whose agrochemicals cause immense damage. It talks of alleviating poverty and malnutrition and tackling food insecurity but it bolsters an inherently unjust global food regime which is responsible for perpetuating food insecurity, population displacement, land dispossession, privatisation of the commons and neoliberal policies that remove support from the vulnerable and marginalised, while providing lavish subsidies to corporations.

Yet Bratton spares Gates and his ilk (other suspicious—and non-Jewish!—mavens like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, more beloved on the right than the left, come to mind) because who else will staff and service positive biopolitics's sense and control layers? Where is Bratton's theory of social and political change?

Instead of developing so crucial an element of his philosophy, he trains his fire instead on the "Boomer Theorist," of whom Agamben (not strictly a Boomer) is exemplary. During the War on Terror, Agamben was correct to challenge a then-lockstep and panic-driven moral consensus about the need for exceptional state and private coercion—but this gives the thinker no credit with Bratton, who knows as a matter of scientific rationality that Agamben must be wrong this time. Instead of arguing against him, he belittles him as equivalent to Trumpist populism in his suspicion of scientific rationality and his pre-Darwinian "magical thinking":

If you were to imagine Alex Jones not as a Texas good ol’ boy, but rather as a Heideggerian seminary student, you would have a sense of how Agamben approached the requests for public comment on the COVID-19 pandemic.

I too hesitate at Agamben's theories, in general and in particular. Is the Nazi concentration camp the paradigm of modern governance or is this an exaggeration? Much as I want to suspect the latter, the famous injunction "never again" seems to require the vigilance urged by the former. Likewise, Agamben surely goes too far when he refers to the pandemic as an "invention"—yet a mainstream source as unimpeachable as The Washington Post has begun to report on the possible American role in dangerous experimentation that might have left to our present predicament, which at least puts the "conspiracy theorist" in a slightly more forgiving light.

When Agamben complains of "facial cancellation" and "social distance" as abolishing the political, as destroying the very possibility of democratic convocation and deliberation, I believe one would have to be totally stunned by mediated panic not at least to consider the argument, especially since it's doubtful this disease will ever leave us (another War on Terror echo: #zerocovid policies as a reprise of Bush speechwriter and current Biden supporter David Frum's ambitious war-cry for "an end to evil"). Bratton, by contrast, judges these concerns trivial; he disparages Agamben's nostalgia for human visage and touch as merely "ritual," a word presumably chosen to connote to the scientific intellect the irrational gestures of ignorant faith or perhaps, in a more aptly "diagnostic" register, the helpless tics of a person with OCD. There is an eliminationist New Atheism belligerence to this polemic, one for which no metaphysical conception of humanity, not even the responsively modern spirituality of the Romantics, can co-exist—except disastrously—with 21st-century life.

Bratton's crude ad hominem attack on the maverick priest Ivan Illich, who presciently analyzed widespread iatrogenesis (doctor-caused illness or injury) even before it became America's third leading cause of death, brings his book its emotional climax, or lack thereof:

Agamben recently wrote a glowingly appreciative introduction to the work of Ivan Illich, an anarchist priest known for his extreme condemnations of “modern medicine,” implying that it literally invents diseases so that it can capture people to cure. In a cruel irony, Illich died from a horribly disfiguring facial tumor that he refused to have treated as doctors suggested.

For some, Illich’s unnecessary suffering only added to his “saintly” bona fides. The author of his obituary in the Guardian could barely prevent their stimulation from spilling onto the page: “His charisma, brilliance and spirituality were clear to anyone who encountered him; these qualities sustained him in a heroic level of activity over the last ten years in the context of terrible suffering caused by a disfiguring cancer. Following the thesis of Medical Nemesis, he administered his own medication against the advice of doctors, who proposed a largely sedative treatment which would have rendered his work impossible.

What gives Bratton the imperious right to judge how a man with an apparently incurable illness chooses to treat himself? Death and suffering are inevitable, Illich often argued, and his choice of painful lucidity over analgesic insensibility for his remaining years is one any writer might make. What other private medical decisions will Bratton mock and deride? I'm only surprised we weren't given another round of "Foucault in the bathhouse" imagery. But Bratton's obscene lapse in decorum here is not incidental; it demonstrates the rot at the heart of his project and the similar ethical decay in our ongoing state of emergency. He dispatches as nonsense the two definitions of life Agamben borrows from Greek philosophy:

Bios is a life “qualified” by political agency and participation, self-composition of the good life, citizenship, and individual articulation, whereas zoe is “bare life” defined by the animalian status of an organism without reason, without character, and, ultimately, without divinity.

But it requires only experience, not a faith in or a theory of divinity, to grasp the difference between mere subsistence and a life worth living—experience of a loved one's deathbed decisions will demonstrate the concept neatly, if painfully. When Bratton strips humanity to an insectoid system mysteriously infused with consciously reflexive "sapience" (no less metaphysical a concept in the end than any of Agamben's), he withdraws this experiential distinction, as do governments and their corporate collaborators when they declare a limitless state of emergency legitimating almost any intrusion into our minds and bodies.

Philosophy fails not when it reminds us of these dilemmas, but when it urges us to forget them and prostrate ourselves instead before the idols of the age—idols all the more insulting to the intellect when they pose as transparent, neutral, scientific, and non-negotiable moral truths to which no reasonable person, neither the non-consenting medical subject nor the slaughtered Muslim, could possibly object.

[Nat Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very dense 160 pages to say the least. While offering a lot of valuable ideas concerning positive biopolitics, Bratton leans too heavily into a style of language that borderlines on arrogance and makes this a much more difficult read than it could be. There’s a valley of difference between dumbing things down to an overly simplistic extent and making them comprehensible, and this could use quite a bit more of the latter. Considering the repeatedly stressed importance of these ideas - and specifically philosophical epidemiology- the way they are presented can be ironically alienating.

[Alys · Rating 1 out of 5]

A polemical theoretical work attempting to consolidate and radicalise the technocratic authoritarian tailist mentality that took hold amongst the left through the pandemic and spin it towards a positive political project. Somewhat useful as a conspectus of the bullshit to come (his effort to doublethink his way to an identity of luxury and austerity seems like quite a viable candidate to become a motif of a certain kind of leftist as they desperately fall behind green austerity in the hopes of saving the planet).

If you already agree with this kind of politics, likely to be quite an enjoyable read as it hits out at all the right figures (there's even a discussion of the 'Karen' meme in there). If not, the argumentation is likely to feel unimpressive. Bratton's argument is directed against a series of strawmen of his own fashioning; every position taken on is dealt with only in its most naive variant.

This is particularly egregious when it comes to the topic of Foucault's biopolitics, which Bratton reduces to nothing more than a romantic preoccupation with individual autonomy against state and society, which are treated essentially equivalents. The picture of the relationship of politics and society is essentially that of the iconic cover of Hobbes 'Leviathan' in a remarkably unproblematised sense: governmental apparatuses are nothing more than society's sensory apparatus, and biopolitical critique nothing more than a demand that we all go blind for the sake of some silly romantic individualism. It sounds superficially compelling, but it all falls apart once you allow for any serious antagonisms in your political picture (e.g. that the state is the instrument that manages and enforces the dispossession and exploitation of the proletariat).

Foucault's actual point is not that we should reject everything that impedes some uninhibited ideally sovereign individuality, but that apparatuses are political entities in their own right, filled up with people whose interests are nonidentical with that of society, that produce their own internal logics and motives and their own will-to-power, and are therefore non neutral and require critical investigation and a cautious suspicion towards their intellectual discourses and concrete operations. Not the skin of the Leviathan through which society touches its world, but institutions, systems in their own right, whose reproduction make obscure and potentially problematic demands on the society that supports them and upon which they act. None of that exists for Bratton's argument, however, which does little more than kick the same straw individualist about for 200 pages or so.

The major positive contribution of the text is Bratton's idea of "the epidemiological view of society", which is Bratton's attempt to hang a holistic collectivist political metaphysics on a narrow reductionist discipline dealing with a restricted set of technical questions regarding the spread of pathogens in populations. It's unconvincing and ultimately has very little to do with the actual discipline of epidemiology. The same argument could be made of macroeconomics, which also models the dynamics of large aggregates and systems rather than individual units, but that would be far less likely to fly under anyone's bullshit radar.

[Steve Llano · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was exactly the thrill ride I needed after wading through the muck of political takes on pandemics, populism, epidemiology, and automation the last year and a half. Bratton manages to construct, out of the same sloggy material I did not want to step in anymore, a wonderful blueprint for writing, thinking, and articulating post-pandemic life for the next decade.

The book begins with a premise too simple to really be acceptable. It took me a while - maybe 40 pages - to finally get it. The core argument of Bratton's post pandemic politics is to construct a positive, social justice and humanistic biopolitics as a response to negative biopolitics. The advantage here is that instead of throwing away all the good by decrying "surveillance" or "authority" or "global order" in totality, we can make partial critiques on these articulations of power in the terms of how well they address human needs.

Humans, for Bratton, are much more biological than spiritual. This again is not a binary, but a wonderful blending of what are often two oppositional tropes in books about governance, Foucault, and power. Bratton goes to great lengths to show that humanity - even individualism - is a joint. It's a hang between besties of the biological form and the intellectual feel of the being. With this as the basis, Bratton works out the need for layers of touch, layers of care, abstraction, and modeling that without a complex understanding of power would be dismissed as a thin excuse for a social control regime. In the end, Bratton wants to consider governance a global stack of data - theorized as an archive rather than a specific collection modeled for gain (think Facebook) - that can care for the individual by abstracting them as a biological body in a situation and delivering just care.

The impetus for this reimagining is the idea that we have come out of COVID and lockdown into the ultimate dream of neoliberalism - all aspects of society have been dissolved, except for police power. We need new ways of imagining resistance that are not based solely on immediate care without superstructures or distant organizations or what we will be left with is a governmental organization founded by and within the logic of police control.

This is a refreshing read on biopolitics. I really like what's being suggested. It's incomplete and feels like an invitation to us to take up one of the chapters and "flesh it out," bad pun intended. Positive biopolitics in service of humanity rather than institutional, rudderless incompetence is what needs to be further theorized. Bratton says best what his goal is in this book explicity: "Read Foucault better. The blueprint as been delivered; let's get to writing our way to a better global governance of living and feeling human beings.

[Katy · Rating 4 out of 5]

really enjoyed the bits on data and modelling in here, and some really interesting points on privacy that i'll be chewing on further - significantly weakened by the section on the may 2020 protests and autonomous zones, where intellectual critique veered into superior-feeling criticism. otherwise very enjoyable

[Ruben J. D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An aggressive, intelligent and determined book. Not a pamphlet, but a strongly opinionated contribution to a debate that is only just beginning, although at times too driven and disorganized. Bratton needs no references, no inner structure, little "reader guidance" and communicative clarity. Instead, the agony of the sage or the despair of the knowledgeable can be glimpsed behind and between the lines: If only the others understood, another world would be possible. The impact and reaction to Covid are to Bratton, evidence of utter failure to use available technologies. Perhaps surprisingly, Bratton is not a proponent of lockdowns, which he deems to be an old means of disease fighting. Modern, data driven societal sensing could do the job. On that, the jury is out, although historical hypotheticals are difficult to analyze even with purely scientific methods. Certainly, Bratton seems to have overestimated the ability of "Asian technocratic nations" to deal with Covid19 and its many variants. There are many forcefully critical reviews available on this site, especially the one by Pistelli. Thus, I will limit review on a few philosophical observation and a short justification why "four stars" are an adequate rating of a book that may rightfully judged to imply a partially totalitarian thinking.

First: Bratton makes some extremely interesting and nuanced observation on parts of the pandemic response that have been almost entirely forgotten by now, especially the big global "homecoming", where citizenship came to the fore as that which still counts in crisis. It is your state that cares for you, or nobody. The author also rightly highlights the indubitably volatile and incomprehensible behaviour by many heads of state. Second: Bratton launches powerful arguments against right-wing populism and left-wing idealism (proving to be somewhat of an adherent of the "horse shoe theory" popular in Germany by claiming that in fact, there is little difference between extreme right and left). Both, to uphold either personalized dynamics of power or ideal narratives and paradigms, are well capable of either distorting or entirely ignoring reality. But, as the staunch realist claims, reality will make itself known and have its revenge. One cannot think a virus away and simply wish an infection not to happen. Reality has a certain hardiness to it, an unrelenting presence, yielding only to instrumental manipulation. In that, Bratton is right, although it is only a certain kind of reality that fits this description.

Third, the book has another enemy, this time a view that left-wing and neo-liberalism shared: an over-emphasis of the individual. While for the neo-liberal, it is the economic reasoning and (almost unquestionable) rationality of the individual's decision that society needs to respect and protect, the left-wing liberal holds individual perception, perspective and narration to be crucial (or almost sacred). Both, says Bratton, are wrong ("The problem is individuation itself"). He is certainly not the first to advance such claims, and his arguments are not the clearest. It seems to me that Bratton makes both a principled and a consequentialist case: (1) The criticized view of society is based on a wrong way of seeing (a "misapprehension"), as it fails to recognize the interconnected, ecological nature of planetary-scale society (echoing Luhmann here: "Weltgesellschaft") and (2) with this view, it is impossible to combat future global challenges, such as pandemics and climate change. Both cases have merit, and Brattons emphasis of the inherent contradictions in techno-liberalism that aims to combine planetary data-gathering and eradication of borders with almost total individualistic hedonism is certainly worthy of further thought and consideration. There is clever criticism and creative analysis of contemporary phenomena (such as automation, touchlessness, essentialism of industries etc.) in this book, culminating in the highly interesting idea of the archive as a new data-gathering paradigm (i.e. data-gathering focussed on faithful reproduction for as-of-now unknown future aims and strategies of analysis instead of solely on commerce and individualism, for having all private pictures or likes of everyone available does nothing to solve climate change). And yes, it is possible to imagine masks and contract-tracing as good, as means of showing solidarity, as a social necessity, as Bratton wants us to. A globally connected, mutually caring and more de-individualised world does not seem impossible. Building global governance on smart modeling and experimental lawmaking does not seem to be a terrible or inherently totalitarian idea.

The man who stands accused of extremist tendencies instead is Giorgio Agamben, against whom Bratton mounts a powerful and polemic attack. Agamben's criticism of the pandemic and its scientists, of scientification and the allegedly anti-spiritual, anti-human attitude of measures taken against the spread of the virus is, for Bratton, evidence of total failure, of a "hostility to reality" and a medieval philosophy unable to guarantee or even support planet-wide survival of the species. A preference of the symbolic of the real cannot convince. But while Agamben certainly over-reacted in his publications and perhaps mis-identified the sources and reasons of state-action, it also seems too easy to just take reality into account with the tools we have and just solve our problems. One cause for skepticism is that the modeling that Bratton hopes for is clearly not without fault. And this is not just a sensing issue (i. e., of insufficient testing), it is also of assumptions taken for granted without enough critical thought (see the apt, but clearly politically motivated description by Sunak here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/t...). To experience time and time again the failure of predictions leading to rushed policymaking could have implied the need for more self-limitation. We cannot know and thus must find means to deal with uncertainty. That in this difficult situation, most states and individuals were so quick to put security (and not freedom) first appears logical, but also deeply unsettling, as the fatalists may have been right: Liberal democracy is a model for good times only. For it is based on a conception of rights as "trump cards", meaning that they should have a hardiness or resistance to them against everything that is possible. Of that resistance little was visible in the past years. For a second edition, one would wish for Bratton to dwell on these issues more.

There is another, more profound problem in the book: While the liberals may have lost or suppressed knowledge of global interconnectedness, Bratton also seems to have lost something: A sense of contigency. Because the social world is a product of human design (or should I say: is will and representation), it is subject to continuous change. Its makeup is never final, there is no single belief system or argument that can offer reasons so powerful every opposition or criticism to it becomes preposterous, moot, a waste of time. That means although there may be simple, basic reality that can just be taken into account, this reality does not offer obvious, unambiguous solutions. Consequently, this book cannot be more than a first serve, one of many in the game of thoughts we all should keep playing. In it, it is crucial to write and think without fear, but also not to forget the field or the equipment. Think about or in spite of, not against reality. This means the virus will stay, and we need to keep caring for ourselves and each other, need to be on the lookout for better solutions and cleverer policies. The world will keep throwing in new balls and redrawing the lines on the pitch. The rules will change, the game must stay. Think on!

[Leif · Rating 2 out of 5]

The kind of book that makes you want to shake its author by the shoulders and ask them why they choose to appear the way they do! Too arrogant to cite his sources or provide evidence for his assertions, Bratton settles instead for a technocratic brand of heckling the reader until they accept his positions. Funnily enough, I went into the volume agreeing with many of Bratton's basic positions - but the style and some of the dominant conceits are just overwhelmingly soured by his attitudinal problems. I really wish I'd have skipped this one in the recent Verso offerings. It's not worth the time, to say nothing of the purchase price.

[Florin Flueras · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ignorance of the real. Scientism based justifications for the fast approaching techno-tyranny / technofascism.

[Andrew Carr · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've deliberately avoided most of the efforts to write about the COVID 19 pandemic. It was either too depressing (for work focused on the human cost) or too early (for work focused on the social implications). Bratton's book doesn't quite escape its mid-pandemic moment of conception, but it's a thoughtful and bold attempt to explore the implications of the pandemic for politics and philosophy.

Bratton's argument is two-fold. First, he argues that COVID has revealed the need for a radically different 'positive biopolitics', operating at a planetary level, in order to address both the pandemic and its future cases (or equivalent challenges such as climate change). In the face of such 'real' events, he argues we need far better efforts to understand, track and respond to the threats than we are currently able. He is quite explicit that this would mean government(s) with power to compel, surveil and if need be, compel, in order to protect the organism of society.

Second, Bratton realises that the biggest challenge to his argument is not the nutters on the right screaming 'PLANDEMIC!', but the academic left. Vast elements of the academy, especially those in the baby (boomer) generation, have imbibed a distorted form of Foucault that sees all power as illegitimate and unethical and all social structures as the illicit constructions of the powerful. As such, 'biopolitics', where we take the health of the species as an essential political concern, can only and ever be seen as a totalitarian movement (a claim far too many reputable scholars made about government plans for lockdowns and vaccines). The unhappy result has been a performative form of politics which is also a deeply conservative movement. Like other conservative movements of previous eras, this group considers itself smarter and more moral than its adversaries, and seeks to defend a comfortable position in the social hierarchy by misquoting sacred texts. 'Read your Foucault properly' Bratton pleads, though I suspect he knows its a lost cause for the time being.

'The Revenge of the Real' is a provocation of a book that still bears its birthmarks. Bratton sees western society as having fundamentally failed the test of COVID-19, while he praises the achievements of China. I'm not sure either claim is quite right. Across the world, the supposedly isolated individuals of western societies largely adhered to unprecedented lockdowns, in order to save their grandparents. Meanwhile, the economic, social and political systems, while clearly strained immensely, bent but did not break (arguably no worse than any other major crisis over the last half-century). And the China story was always one with an asterisk - how real were its figures, and how long could it stay closed to the world.

Personally, I can't endorse the substance of Bratton's views, even if i'm sympathetic in principle. This is partly because he doesn't really do enough to substantiate what that substance is. The book is as much an effort to clear space for his political argument, as an effort at the political argument. Bratton's biopolitics also seems to require a rather herculean, if not Utopian conception of the role of models to help us interpret society. Models have their uses, especially when it comes to some parts of society, but as any good modeler will tell you, 'every model is wrong'. So it's a question of how many models, how used, how evolved, and what you want to achieve which shape the ultimate value of models.

I am sympathetic however, because as a historian I see the trajectory towards global governance in both mindset and structure as moving in the direction Bratton urges, and generally to the benefit of humanity. As a utilitarian, I also have no problem with some of the requirements for imposition he seeks, even if I can't and won't endorse his broader attacks on individualism. And finally, as someone who values strategy, the essential question is always a diagnostic 'what is really going on here'. Bratton wields the 'realness' of the coronavirus like a baseball bat against his adversaries, but it is nice to see someone trying to actually grapple with an indifferent universe, when too many believe that absent coercive power we could construct any form of reality we wish.

Personally, I suspect we are victims of our success when it comes to COVID. The world did just enough to ensure society didn't break. Those expecting or hoping for a radical change will be disappointed, those who saw it all as an overblown effort at social control will feel vindicated, and those who dutifully sacrificed from nurses to healthy 19yr-olds who spent lost prime years of life, will never be thanked or recognised properly. But at some point we will need to think clearly about how we might do better next time, but we probably can't quite get a good perspective on what we've been through just yet.

[Jim Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense, difficult read but an important one, this work by Californian-based sociologist and design professor Benjamin Bratton examines the redundancy of traditional geopolitical notions of sovereignty in a post-pandemic world and advances a new model of planetary governance resting on ‘biopolitics’.

It makes intuitive sense. We have been taught to see ourselves as autonomous, self-directed subjects but the pandemic, climate change and the destruction of bio-diversity are shattering our illusions and revealing, even if many of us refuse to see it, our interdependence and inter-connectedness.

Bratton sees the rise of insane conspiracy theories (‘COVID is spread by 5G Towers’) as symptomatic of the fact that people cannot deal with the realisation that we are part of a biological whole and that the institutions we set up based on the idea that we are separate within our arbitrary borders are no longer fit for purpose.

As to the remedy, Bratton argues that the mainstreaming of an epidemiological view of society should lead to a post-pandemic biopolitics in which distinctions between technology, politics and economics will be increasingly less clear and “perhaps less relevant”. This politics would forego nationalism on behalf of a planetary-scale mobilisation and cooperation.

“The composition of post-pandemic biopolitics entails, then, not just the reorganisation of institutions to fill the void left by the current anarchy of international geopolitics but, by definition, that we reconcile and remake ourselves,” Bratton writes.

The big unanswered question is how this will happen. The right-wing populist wave that has gripped western democracy since the global financial crisis reflects an increasing refusal by populations to engage with reality at all. On the left, there is also a distributing libertarian trend, as Bratton sees it, of distrusting technological solutions beyond all reason.

I agree with his prognosis and his suggested solution. But I’m not at all hopeful.

[Lethe · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lost a lot of respect for Bratton for pushing something like this out, and am disappointed in everyone who put their recommendation on the back of this.
there is literally a "facts dont care about your feelings" line in there (tho not verbatim,) which seeks to discredit all philosophical currents that do not see "reason" as the highest form of access to reality and blames them for the "culture war".
the chapter on anarchism is the worst thing i have ever read - anarchist theory is called "retarded," as they should not be protesting governance, but the absence of it (according to bratton there is currently no established order) and partakers are identified as "karens in black hoodies" + likened to fascists and anti-maskers.
some pages before that he reminisces that "a very different kind of “social Darwinism,” based on symbiosis as much as competition, and a recognition that rationality is animalian, is needed and will need to be invented and put to work."; that a wide range of literature on the symbiotic nature of evolution exists in philosophy and political theory is apparently unknown to him.
the book is just "what if we had technocratic top-down governance with very advanced (not-)surveillance technology, an no, im not gonna analyse why but instead am gonna rant about anyone opposing it" and "basically everyone besides me is stupid, im surely the first one to see the human as not one rigid, autonomous entity but as intertwined in a network".
and no, im not one of the "individualist neoliberals" who can't cope with the erosion of agency and identity, quite the contrary.

this wasnt even the fun kind of bad, it's just sad and im almost ashamed of having bought it out of previous positive encounters with brattons writing aswell as recommendations by helen hester, nick srnicek and reza negarestani.

[Dan Sarkozi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unapologetically bias and repetitive.

This book is a sophisticated argument for a totalitarian world.

The narrator comes across as well educated and emotive throughout.

Thus, I found the title slightly mis-leading as the book only discusses one extreme paradigm of politics.

"How COVID Proved the Need for Global Totalitarianism" would have been a more apt title. This title would have prevented me from purchasing it as I personally enjoy looking at multiple sides of an argument.

[John Mihelic · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like the Verso Book Club, which is where I got this from. They send out books every month and it forces me to read more than I normally would and outside of my normal interests.

This book was an interesting short little thing, arguing in my reading for a large conception of the social – against the atomized person and thinking of us all as part of a system. I think it works but my main critique is that it exits in a weird middle ground. Part of me wanted to see it expanded. Then there’s another part that wanted it tightened up. For example, there’s a whole chapter against Giorgio Agamben. When I was reading it, I was like “Why is there a whole chapter about this guy I’ve never heard about?”. And it seems like the whole issue was on me, since reading this book I have seen at least a dozen references to Agamben. Again, thanks to the Verso Book club for expanding my theoretical horizons.

[Chase · Rating 1 out of 5]

Benjamin Bratton's polemic The Revenge of the Real is utter pish. Bratton demonstrates little understanding of critical theory (via Foucault, Agamben and Mbembe) and sets out an embarrassingly flimsy account of the failures of the COVID-19 pandemic response in America. His principle claim is that a lack of unified technoscience led to uneven responses to the pandemic. If only countries would give up their GDPR policies, then the COVID-19 pandemic would have played out differently in the Global North. Bratton is especially critical of politics mired in undemocratic politics (perhaps a moment of saving grace for his account). In the same breath, he dictates the need for a technocratic solution (the "real") that pisses on philosophy generally, and autonomy specifically, arguing against the need for bioethics during a pandemic and for streamlined responses by force.

I found myself thinking critically about if/whether a technopolitical solution might have enabled a more generative response to the pandemic because little attention was given to the actual material conditions that Bratton imagines might have made the COVID-19 response better. Indeed, it seems that the polemic is entirely abstract: in short, creating a martyr of Agamben by dedicating the second half of the short book to unmethodical critique with no theoretical or material solutions.

I caution the reader who picks up this book. The central argument operates via technofascism (again, without clear reason or force). Hence the intended politics for the post-pandemic world is merely control (couched in the liberatory idea of techno-optimism and -determinism). Go warily, dear reader.

[Rick Harrington · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bratton has become far too familiar to me. I'm not certain about it, but I believe that he mostly engages inside groups that agree with him. I agree with him to a great extent. My problem is that I don't think he's quite engaging with "the real" himself. I don't think that it's realistic to think that humans will hop off our enthusiasms, or even our delusional fantasies, to get it together to fix things before they fix us.

I don't know which of us is the Chicken Little here, but I think I might have more faith in cosmic processes which exceed what we can ever rationally know. Surely, the sort of intelligence - ratiocination - that humans represent is not sufficient to make things good for all time. Our intelligence has subserved our enthusiasms, and our technologies do as well. In other words, we disagree on order of operation, all the way back to what consciousness is.

The problem is not how to repair our predations against our very home, now that we've overrun the planet. The problem is to find ways to be enthusiastic about living in better balance. To me, that seems a more manageable problem. Can it be more fun to sail than to jet-ski? Driving sure ain't no fun anymore.

Ratiocination didn't beget humanity. Evolution is much messier and more complicated than anything we could ever dream up. But it does move in the direction of love's expression. I mean, if there's any difference between the quick and the dead, it's that.

I know that it would seem as though we're saying the same thing, but front and center for me is that prying cold dead hands from steering wheel or handlebar seems violent and therefore a move in the wrong direction. Bratton seems to want a bigger wheel. Create it and some crazed tyrant will take it!

The social will always be far more important than the technological. We need to learn to be less mad at each other.

By some attributions, Bratton is listed first as a sociologist. Those I've pressed his Big White Book on (The Stack) complain of his "social sciency" linguistic contortions. Somewhere along the way toward correcting our current misconstruings of sense, he ends up still sounding like a scold on his way to becoming a technocrat. He seems to want to tell me - us - what I/we need to do. Or else.

For me, virtual reality is as escapist as imagining escape to Mars, and no way toward solution. Gamification robs our enthusiasms for the sake of the Ponzi scheme of "free." But at least they're ways of trying things out without actual harm.

Bratton is right on about the still better uses for technology, but it has become quite clear that even in the face of overwhelming and reliable signals from all our sensors, people will still prefer to land in the hospital rather than to take a vaccine.

It's not about their individual freedom. It's about caring for your fellow man.

I want a restorative world-view more than I want still more celebration of what we've proven so good at, which seems to be to thrive anywhere and at all costs. I would focus more on the human capability to love. Which might be to suggest that some of those people driving oversized pickup trucks and sporting objectionable flags may also be devout Christians. It seems to be misinformation turns some of them nasty. Christians profess a belief in love, don't they?

We need to talk to one-another more than we need to play dueling reason. Ratiocination always leads to rationalization after the fact. Our decisions are mostly already made before we have time to think about them. Disaster is no time to try to turn that around the other way. It just makes people mad, and we'll be dead and gone already, individually or collectively, by the time anything gets decided.

I indulged my fantasies for a minute yesterday, then I walked back out of the Harley dealer, simply because I didn't want to deal with all those new bells and whistles. I already knew that riding is in my past. What I didn't know is that riding died before I did. Such a thrill! Still, I wish the older bikes weren't so damned dirty.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obviamente el principal problema de este libro es lo atado que quedó a la pandemia. Si podés separarte un poquito de esos argumentos, Bratton nunca fue tan claro ni tan punzante en su análisis sobre la condición contemporánea. Sus consideraciones sobre la posibilidad de una biopolítica positiva son tan polémicas como bien argumentadas: no se queda sólo en el bardo a Agamben, sino que efectivamente propone algo.

[Christine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Style is off putting and some of information is out dated. I wanted more specifics and less general sweeping statements in the beginning as well. Still worth reading.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly superb book, filled with some staggering insights and genuinely mind blowing points, although judging by the quality of the reviews on this website it, alas, is still miles ahead of the mentally subnormal anarchist rejects swimming about in the pool of leftism, incapable of letting go of their coddled postmodernist delusions or preening, infantile anti statism.

This book is a dangerous one. In fact, that's what gives it it's power, you feel at times almost violated by the sheer audacity of his vision, the boldness from which he states it, and sheer balls to openly transgress so many taboos in political thought, especially the ones that have become most fashionable amongst the brain-drain collective that is modern leftism.

Agamben gets a rightful bollocking for his absurd biopower nonsense, his open lapse from his faintly cute Homo Sacer drivel to out and out conspiracy theorising. It is no surprise that this is where the postmodernists end up in their insane crusades against truth, knowledge, and even the concept of rationality itself. Indeed, Bratton is remorseless against those he despises, correctly identifying crank frauds like Agamben as little more than a regurgitated medieval theologian, against the progress made in the fields of science since the Enlightenment, and reverting back to a kind of pastoral, anti-rationalist vision of spiritually refined pure fairies untainted by the awfulness of modernity, with all the mechanisms of beaurcratic control it entails. It is a fantasy, not to mention, as a quick look at the where these ideas stem from (primarily Nietzsche, Heidegger and a reverse reading of Schmidt) a reactionary fantasy. Against the secular modernising spirit of the Enlightenment, that Marx was particularly indebted too and rightly saw the worker's movement as the legitimate heir too, radicalising it and overcoming its own contradictions, instead the recent trend of academic leftism has been a wholesale wallowing in the primitive dribblings of the counter-enlightenment, from Freudian psychobabble to out and out anti-scientific Heideggerian mysticism, to a kind of soft peddling of alt-Hegel figures such as Spinoza to desperately give their contrived form of obscuration quietism some academic legitimacy. It is clear, not only from this, but from Andreas Malm's equally brilliant and blistering The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, that the postmodernist brain cancer is now at an end. Bruno Latour, another discipline of the St. Foucault, is another such creature pathologically incapable of dealing with the world as we live in today, his brand of anti-science relativism and anti-realism failing miserably when confronted with the demonstrable, overwhelming scientific objectivity of phenomena like climate change and pandemics, flailing into the most absurd and insane constructivism (such as proclaiming it impossible for Egyptian pharaohs to die of tuberculosis due to the fact it wasn't even discovered then, a kind of insane idealism that privileges discourse as often the sole creator of reality, the field from which all struggle takes place in). Epistemic fallacies, as the late, great Roy Bhaskar noted, is the only way postmodernists can deal with science, a brute reduction of its objective knowledge to the subjective conditions from which it arises, a unique form of stupidity. Coupled with this, as well as Zamora and Mitchell Dean's brilliant The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution on dissecting Foucault's useful idiocy to the neoliberal project, we now have a comprehensive demolition of Foucault and his work forever, and hopefully we can put his corpse in a led lined tomb, drop it to the bottom of the ocean and allow this bizarre bit of neo-Nietzschean intellectual nihilism to be forgotten forever, rather than propping up his corpse and continuing to treat him as some kind of revered, albeit it somewhat decomposing, pope, as he is in the Humanities departments. Foucault's biopower is garbage from the start. Basing himself as he did on Nietzsche's writings, Foucault could only abstract power to the level of some kind of spiritual essence, a 'will to power' which seems to existence regardless of any social circumstances. Foucault's vision of power is one so broad and totalitarian as to render the term meaningless, a schizophrenic's view of power with at one stroke mystifies its origins (by seemingly making it some fact of any power system in principle), and also robs us of any means to actually confront it, making its power so omnipresent as to render all struggle against it, by definition, meaningless (and, in Foucault's eyes, also complicit with biopower, as any resistance to power is simply another way power continues), leading only to spasmodic micro-resistances based on the self-actualising on some inner essence, the very kind of self-help gibberish neoliberalism so loves. It clearly is no longer a paradigm of any worth of value. Foucault's approach to power included everything from the obvious sites of power (the border patrol, the cop baton) but even to things that are beneficial to humanity, such as the welfare service or the hospital, implicitly showing his anti-Marxist, anti-Socialist credentials. Far from a defect, this biopower approach, and its simply inability to understand a historically materialist approach to history or reality, and its easy cohabitation with fascists, reactionaries, spiritual mystics and other varieties of lunatic, is in fact an in-built flaw on this philosophy from the start.

What Bratton says effectively, in unsparing terms, is that the left needs to get it's shit together. We are living in the age of raw materialism, every day. Again,Malm is key to this, showing that the kind of historical grand narratives banished to the wilderness by the pomo high priests is now the only key way to understanding the warming condition we are in, complete with all the notions of objective truth, standards of analysis and, not to mention, systems of justice and morals to deal with the consequences of it that had all been simply waffled away with the flick of a deconstructivist hand as "totalising" or "eurocentric" or some other pious bullshit. Bratton, along with Malm, Leigh Phillips, Holly Jean Buck and Kim Stanley Robinson, can be considered part of a left that is fighting firmly for the scientific legacy, for the positives of technology. Anarchist delusions that afflicted the left during the horizontalist spectacles of 2011-12 are now firmly discredited. Having failed to achieve anything even in the limited areas they were fighting in, they are now hopelessly inadequate to dealing with the kinds of tasks we will be facing. We will need a scientific apparatus capable of responding quickly, efficiently and brutally to threats the second they arrive, maybe even before hand. We will need a massive expanded state structure, incorporating all the data and technological mechanisms we have and integrating them in a super bureaucracy (as Rozworski and Phillips have shown, the kinds of computer power inherent in even a smartphone means the dreams of central planners a century ago are now infinitely more possible, and something akin to national Project Cybersyn are now within out grasp). The unity of the Hayekian reactionary and the Foucauldian sceptic in their distain for systems of objective knowledge and rationalised planning (a link astutely analyised by William Davies) are now over. The Soviet Union, once seen as a creaking relic incapable of keeping track of modernity, may now be seen as ahead of its time in its commitment to rational scientific planning. Granola munching anarchist 68-rejects sitting in tiny communes waving their hands about in the air is clearly not going to be able to deliver mass vaccination. Mutual aid societies are sweet, but they represent the destruction of the welfare state and social democracy, not its continuation. They are purely negative phenomena and should not be celebrated. COVID is not going away, as the new Omicron variant shows. We will probably have to have reboostered vaccinations every single year for decades. Safety measures, limits to gathering and mask wearing will probably have to become the norm. Bratton can be seen as a kind of first warning system, getting us ready to intellectually and mentally readjust our mentality for the oncoming storms.

As Bratton also rightly notes, coming with the return of the real comes the death knell for populist insanity, and with it, a broader politics of emotive hysteria as the currency of politics. Politics on all sides has been obsessed with generating cults of spontaneous feeling and affect as the sole barometer to judge some kind of organic purity, however confected. Leaders pride themselves on feeling "more in touch" with this nebulous "people", as if they were some kind of political child groomer. The left, in particular, has become obsessed with what Preston H. Smith II has called "the pageantry of protest", vague, formless masses of people screaming, chanting and wailing for unidentifiable and ridiculous demands ("defund the police" springs to mind) devoid of any social formation, political organisation or class basis (ER being perhaps the most risible example yet). Adolph Reed Jr. has been brilliant at skewering this tendency, to engage in a constant conflation of mobilisation with organisation, as Jane F. McAlevey puts it, to prop up certain figure heads as "true" representations of said group (always defined in the language of breathless purity, a supposed untainted radical essence of some sorts), and then the subsequent moralistic denunciations of people as "selling out" or being "coopted", turning politics in melodrama. The politics of personal hysteria, apparent in the insane mob of clown nazis that tried to launch a fascist coup in Washington, or even the cringe inducing spectacle of university students trying to get x speaker or y talker banned because of z group's hurt feelings (convinced, as students often are, that their ossified, neoliberalised, pampered little academic bubble is the key sight of socials struggle, and turning bizzaro right wing cranks into matyrs of free speech the highest priority of organising), contributes to an overall cultural of irrationality, and inability to deal with reality. This has disastrous consequences, as it means precisely the insane lunatics of Qanon, Hinduvata fascists, or Jordan Peterson Jungian incels, are able to drive the conversation to such pits of reactionary drivel, the left having no clear language to even understand it, let alone refute it. Populism has clearly been a disaster in every case, and the left's pathetic attempts to replicate it (Melancon, Syrizia, Podemos) are testaments to the dead end politics it represents. Entirely based on cults of personality, with a fetish for language, stories and discourse as the means for power (not class, as Mouffe and Laclau wanted it to be) and floating on a whole ocean of emotional hysteria and personal demagoguery as their base of support, a crisis of systemic, systematic, infrastructural, global proportions such as COVID-19, incapable of being easily shoved into an 'enemy-friend distinction', makes their politics collapse, descending into conspiracy theories, scapegoating and denial. The left identitarian strand of politics is equally incapable of dealing with this, conflating as it does "individuality with subjectivity, subjectivity with identity, and identity with agency..." 9p61), as Bratton brilliantly notes.

The book is hard. At times he was so blaze about the dangers of mass surveillance it actually made me winch. I do think he is far, far too enthusiastic at just how neutral AI technologies actually are, at it seems to me their unique danger is precisely in their predictive power, not just their responsive power. Face recognition software in particular can only seem to me a weapon, not a tool, as technology of the past was, and reading even a page of Adam Greenfield's Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life is likely to pour cool water over any optimism you have about the up and coming cyber paradise. A problem with much of the modern tech loving left involves making ludicrous overstatements of new technology's impact (often based on uncritical regurgitation of silicon valley tech-feudalists propaganda), proclaiming it inevitable and outside class dynamics, making absurdly naïve expectations that this will lead to some kind of new communism immanent in it (a kind of technological fatalism that is as dangerous as it as stupid) and then a pathetic conclusion to a new form of anti-capitalist society to emerge from it, often simply by presuming that putting the word "post" in front of "capitalism" counts as an idea, not a statement of what you're against. Supposing the benevolence of tech billionaires will bring us to communism, the FALC enthusiasts expect an almost total obliterated semi-employed working class to passively allow the extermination of the labour movement under the promised utopia of being able to eat crisps all day and watch Netflix with their new UBI. It is frankly, a horrifying vision. Bratton does not engage in this kind of nonsense, and indeed, his points about automation in particular are refreshingly different, pointing out how it is a part and parcel of labour, and addition to work, not its usurpation. But he sometimes talks about human beings or societies in ways akin to a well functioning android. It can be distinctly unnerving in just how cold he is towards the world (arguably, for good reason, we are dealing in a world in which the incapacity to accurately control the data of societies can lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands). Still, Bratton is not particularly interested in the dynamics of how we get there, what organisations would do it, or who the agents that could usher in his gloriously provocative concept of "positive biopolitics". That is the book's fault. Along with the writing style, which has some horrible moments of being just strings of technological and scientific terminology bound together and ended with a punctuation mark, it's main fault is that it really should have been longer. I would love an expanded edition, complete with intricate diagrams, footnotes, references and extended discussions.

This hardly matters though when the book is so damn good, written so well, contains such piercing, BS-free explanations, fantastic insights and fantastic denunciations of so much of the insanity that passes for the left these days. It is an urgent must read.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a lot of great ideas in this book but underlying it all is a flippant condescension that makes me think I'd be rolling my eyes I had to speak to the author in person. While I understand he's outlining some future possibilities, there seems to be a lack of awareness in the chaos and irrationality of human behavior. He often points out what the rational approach to a situation would be but since we're talking about the genuine panic people had about the pandemic, it is a bit out of touch to assume people, including our governments, would act rationally.
Also, yes, it would make the most sense for world governments to coordinate over how to handle a pandemic but...has he noticed the wide range of belief systems across the world? There's nothing in the book of how an entire world of belief systems could come together with an approach that respects all different belief systems.
His contempt and dismissal of the social upheavals of the summer of 2020 left out any sense of the huge awakening and shift that took place in thought, even if it WAS overdue (we know). He sort of puts people in piles as anarchists if they were on the side of Defund the Police, and barely grazes at what its central meaning is really about, which, incidentally, I think is similar to the plan he outlines towards the end of a different government structure and purpose.

[Francis Kilkenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Benjamin Bratton’s ‘Revenge of the Real’ is a relatively short polemic putting forth the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic and other “real” events, such as climate change, cut through society’s various political and philosophical fantasies (whether left or right) and have the potential drive significant societal change if we can learn the lessons of these events and deliberately construct new ways of being. In particular, Bratton advocates for a “positive biopolitics” that defines various types of surveillance, such as public health data, and modeling as a sensory layer of global governance. He contrasts this strongly with ideas of individual sovereignty, which frustrate this sensory layer and lead less effective models and governance that is weak in the face of the “real.”

First, the positive. I agree with Bratton that the pandemic and climate change are revealing deep weaknesses in various national governments and societies, as well as global civilization as a whole. It is a fact that viruses spread, sicken and kill via biological processes and in complete disregard of what any given group believes about that virus. Climate is also one of these “real” events. The inability to deal with these kinds of challenges *will* lead to significant societal and ecological consequences. Bratton points out that we could be more deliberate in constructing solutions at the proper scale. That this deliberate construction is necessarily globalist in governance and would bring great societal change. In that vein, Bratton elevates the concept of the “sensory layer.” Essentially, how society senses itself through data and modeling. I agree that sensory systems *of some kind* and of *sufficient power* are necessary in dealing with the “real.” Bratton identifies some interesting perspectives on these sensory systems that could lead to further reading.

However, while I think Bratton’s ideas are worth engaging with, the way he goes about delivering his perspective is overly reliant on straw men. He is also spends a significant portion of the book roasting Giorgio Agamben. He justifies this by saying that Agamben is representative of current philosophical outlooks. Even if this were true, which I doubt, I’m not sure if this is worth the space. While Bratton’s ideas are interesting, this way of engaging feels disingenuous.

All in all, this is still worth the read.

[Attasit Sittidumrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

มันส์มาก ผู้เขียนเริ่มจาก reflection ในเรื่องการจัดการปัญหา pandemic เคสโควิด ก่อนจะยกระดับไปสู่ข้อถกเถียงทางทฤษฎีในประเด็นเรื่องชีวการเมือง โดยเฉพาะการวิพากษ์จิออร์จิโอ อกัมเบนและปรัชญาชีวการเมืองที่นำไปสู่ท่าทีเชิงปฏิเสธต่อการจัดการของรัฐบาลในการกักกันและควบคุมการแพร่ระบาดของเชื้อไวรัสโควิด ซึ่งผู้เขียนได้ไต่สวนและเจาะเข้าไปในระบบปรัชญาของอกัมเบนก่อนจะชี้ให้เห็นว่ารากฐานเบื้องหลังปรัชญาชีวการเมืองคือทัศนะที่หวาดระแวงเทคโนโลยีและความก้าวหน้าทางวิทยาศาสตร์ซึ่งดำรงอยู่ในปรัชญาของไฮเด็กเกอร์มาก่อน พูดง่ายๆก็คือท่าทีทางการเมืองอันแข็งกร้าวของอกัมเบนในเรื่อง pandemic (ทั้งการบอกว่าข่าวการแพร่ระบาดของโควิดเป็น fake new ของรัฐเพื่อมุ่งควบคุมพลเมือง หรือการต่อต้านวัคซีนต่างๆ) มาจากฐานคิดทางปรัชญาแบบชีวการเมืองซึ่งอยู่ภายใต้อิทธิพลของไฮเด็กเกอร์ซึ่งปฏิเสธเทคโนโลยีและความก้าวหน้าต่างๆ

สิ่งที่ผู้เขียนเสนอ เพื่อโต้แย้งกับอกัมเบน จึงเป็นเรื่องของการกลับมาคิดถึงปรัชญาชีวการเมืองในอีกรูปแบบหนึ่งที่ไม่ได้อยู่ภายใต้อิทธิพลของไฮเด็กเกอร์ หรือก็คือการกลับมาค้นหากรอบคิดเพื่อสร้างสิ่งที่เป็น positive biopolitical framework โดยผู้เขียนเสนอให้ใช้วิธีคิดเรื่อง epidemological view of society ซึ่งมองว่าชีวิตของมนุษย์แต่ละคน ไม่ใช่ชีวิตที่แยกขาดจากกัน แต่เป็นชีวิตที่ต่างดำรงอยู่และพึ่งพิงร่วมกับผู้อื่นบนเครือข่ายประชากรซึ่งเชื่อมต่อกันเสมอ ชีวิตของแต่ละคนจึงเป็นชีวิตทีดำรงอยู่ร่วมกับชีวิตของประชากร สัตว์และสิ่งของต่างๆ การเปลี่ยนแปลงของชีวิตและสิ่งต่างๆ จึงย่อมส่งผลต่อชีวิตของเราเองอยากหลีกเลี่ยงไม่ได้ ดังนั้นรูปแบบการปกครองและควบคุมทางสังคม จึงต้องอยู่บนฐานของการเชื่อมโยงข้อมูลเข้าหากันอย่างเป็นระบบ รอบด้าน รัดกุม ไม่มีสิ่งที่เรียกว่าชีวิตส่วนตัวที่แยกขาดจากคนอื่น เพราะชีวิตส่วนตัวของแต่ละคนจะเป็นไปได้ก็ต่อเมื่อเครือข่ายประชากรสามารถดูแลรักษาซึ่งกันและกันอย่างสม่ำเสมอ ในแง่นี้ ไวรัสจึงไม่ใช่ข้าศึกที่ต้องระมัดระวังและกำราบ แต่คือด่านหรือสภาพแวดล้อมที่เชื่อมโยงและคอยขับเคลื่อน ยกระดับงเครือข่ายความสัมพันธ์ที่ทุกๆชีวิตจะต้องเรียนรู้เพื่อโอบรับและปรับตัวไปด้วยอย่างยืดหยุ่น

สนุกดี จริงๆประเด็นหลายๆอย่างยังไม่เคลียร์ ซึ่ง to be fair ผู้เขียนก็บอกว่าหลายๆเรื่องยังไม่ได้ตกผลึกพอ แต่แค่นี้ก็ถือว่า thought provoking มาก โดยเฉพาะความพยายามในการปลดปล่อยชีวการเมืองออกจากกรอบเชิงวิพากษ์ภายใต้อิทธิพลแบบปฏิกิริยาของอกัมเบน (แม้โดยส่วนตัวเองจะไม่ค่อยซื้อข้อเสนอนี้ของผู้เขียนเท่าไหร่)

[Gabrielle R. · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️
(FR)
Sans mentir, j’aurais pu ne pas terminer ce livre, mais c’est contre un de mes principes 🤷🏻‍♀️!

Benjamin Bratton est directeur du Center for Design and Geopolitics de l’Université de Californie, à San Diego. Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic est un essai sur les leçons apprises lors de la pandémie de Covid19 (ou à apprendre) afin de faire face aux problèmes géopolitiques qui suivront.

Le livre n'est peut-être pas aussi accessible au grand public qu’il pourrait l'être.

Quelques phrases sont intéressantes dont celle-ci : « Control does not equal oppression; read your Foucault better. Control is also means of protection from, composition of, from giving, structure making, enforcement of, and the freedom not to die early and pointlessly(P146)».

Ce livre a sa raison d’être sans être un coup de coeur. On est probablement tous bien épuisé d’entendre parler de la pandémie, mais évitons de la laisser tomber dans l’oubli sans en tirer certaines leçons. C’est selon moi l’essence de ce livre.

(EN)
Without lying, I could not have finished this book, but it is against one of my principles!

Benjamin Bratton is director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic is an essay on the lessons learned during the Covid19 pandemic (or to be learned) in order to face the geopolitical issues that will follow.

The book may not be as accessible to the general public as it could be.

A few sentences are interesting, including this one: “Control does not equal oppression; read your Foucault better. Control is also a means of protection against, composition of, giving, structuring, application of, and the freedom not to die prematurely and unnecessarily (P146)”.

This book has its purpose without being a favorite. We are probably all exhausted from hearing about the pandemic, but let's avoid letting it sink into oblivion without learning a few lessons. That, to me, is the essence of this book.

[Kayli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many of the arguments posed in this did not age well, and I would say are frankly naive in envisioning a positive biopolitics to emerge (coming from my position as a Long COVID researcher watching the world abandon millions in favour of the 'return to normal' amidst the *ongoing* pandemic. Where is the solidarity? Instead there is an acceptance of mass reinfection, death, and disability). 2 stars mostly because I loved the hilarious writing in the chapter detailing Agamben's spiral; I think Bratton actually had fun writing that. Would not recommend this unless you possess prior knowledge of biopolitics literature and writers (me, but only because I'm writing a Thesis).

[Robbie Herbst · Rating 3 out of 5]

a valuable contribution to post-pandemic thinking, but it could have benefited from waiting a year or four before being out in the world. some chapters, especially 'touchlessness' and the conclusion have NOT aged well. post pandemic politics were anti-social and anti-realist precisely because of lockdowns and social distancing. masking became just as emotional and anti-rational as not-masking was in 2020. I think Doppelganger gets it better. I like the sections about epidemiological thinking and automation.

[Sarah Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit dry but highly intelligent read. It gave me some new perspectives on the pandemic and I felt that I could use some of the points made in this book to use in daily conversation/ talk around the virtual water cooler. It also helps to read a book that succinctly grasps the implications of this pandemic and imagine a future where we now know the soft spots in our societal structure and can grasp what can/should change for the next one.

[John Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bratton's volume is a quick read and a bit of a sit down and grow up for an approach to a biopolitics of surveillance in which society observes and protects itself. A few chapters dedicated to setting Agamben aside, and potentially swaths of post structuralist thought, as Bratton considers how necessary sensing is even as pressure increases mid pandemic. This is worth the read.

[Jonah Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book that examines the emerging and necessary politics of a post-Covid future. Changed some of my basic opinions about big data, surveillance, and improved my understanding of the crazy shifting politics we’ve lived through in the past 20 months

[Ciaran Raymer · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm certain the author makes a few profound points in the book, unfortunately these are so lost in a messy tangle of unnecessary jargon that they become inaccessible for common folk.
A decent future for this writer in academia, not so much in science writing

[Laroy Viviane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Les limites conceptuelles, principalement analytiques de la crise du COVID. Pour l’auteur, la pensée contemporaine n’est pas suffisante sur les notions de collectif et de vie, de définition de l’humain.

[April Dickinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

The ideas in this book are fine, great even. But the language was so pretentious. And I guess I’m just more interested in how we get to a post-pandemic utopia than just what it should look like.