Benjamin H. Bratton 
(born 1968) is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics think-tank at Calit2, The California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. He is an American sociologist, architectural and design theorist, known for a mix of philosophical and aesthetic research, organizational planning and strategy, and for his writing on the cultural implications of computing and globalization.
In The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016. 503 pages) Bratton outlines a new theory for the age of global computation and algorithmic governance. He proposes that different genres of planetary scale computation -smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation- can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure that is both a computational infrastructure and a new governing architecture. The book plots an expansive interdisciplinary design brief for The Stack-to-Come. See thestack.org Table of Contents
articles from / with / about him
The Black Stack (e-flux) March 2014
The Stack and the Post-human User : an Interview with Benjamin Bratton (Garden of Machines) Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, 29 February 2015
The Cloud, the State, and the Stack (metahaven) in Conversation with Benjamin Bratton
video reviews
Benjamin Bratton lecturing about the Stack (WIRED) Bruce Sterling, 05.01.16
benjamin bratton and the stack (Dave Evans) talk review
book reviews
Digital Materiality: New Materialism (telekommunisten) Baruch Gottlieb, 25.07.2016
The Map Is The Territory (ACM Interactions) David Fore, 03.08.2016
On Software and Sovereignty (Roger Whitson) 19.07.2016
Started Reading (alien ecologies) S.C. Hickman, 21.05.2016