The New Normal

PREFACE
This short book is the first in a new series from Strel-
ka Press, one that parallels the institute’s 2017-19
program, The New Normal. Several more titles in
the series are forthcoming.
As the new program director, I traveled last
October to Moscow, Kazan, St. Petersburg, Yekat-
erinburg, Helsinki, Berlin, and Copenhagen to in-
troduce our research plan. The text here is an ex-
panded transcript of that presentation (with a lot
of overdubs).
It is part manifesto and part syllabus. It lays
out why we would undertake an urban design pro-
gram with such a strong emphasis on emerging
technologies and speculative philosophy; or con-
versely, why we would convene a think-tank on
emerging technology and speculative philosophy
that takes urbanism — Russian urbanism, in par-
ticular — as its assignment. The talk is aimed at
inviting applications to join us in Moscow, and
the book is meant to invite a wider audience into
our project.
The urban design proposals we produce will
experiment with soft and hard infrastructures, fact
and fiction, future and past, and how they may con-
verge or diverge in unexpected ways. The program
itself is also an experiment. It will mix seminar,
studio and technical workshops in an alternating
sequence of modules that closely link conceptual-
 The New Normal

ization and prototyping, one folding into the oth-

er. We will find theoretical insight from technical
experimentation, just as speculation will be a tech-
nology for discovery and debate.
The New Normal is planned as a multi-year ef-
fort. For each cohort it brings together archi-
tects, programmers, interaction designers, game
designers, artists, philosophers, filmmakers, nov-
elists, economists, and “free-range” computer sci-
entists. The outcomes will be new design practic-
es and projects, and also, as I discuss below, a new
glossary of terms with which we might articulate
what does and does not count as our “new nor-
mal” condition.
We discover the most creative ideas by pursu-
ing our unique sort of hyper-functionalism, taking
nothing for granted and thereby finding uncanny
possibilities. Speculative urbanism (which covers
much more than cities) is where the future of de-
sign may realize the design of the future.
— December 2016.
“A fire broke out backstage in a theater. The
clown came out to warn the public; they thought
it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the
acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how
the world will come to an end: to general applause
from wits who believe it’s a joke.
— Kierkegaard

“The ape regards his tail; he’s stuck on it. Repeats

until he fails, half a goon and half a god.”
— Devo
 Benjamin H. Bratton

During my first visit to Moscow after becoming

program director at the Strelka Institute, one par-
ticularly significant thing did not happen. I have
been thinking about it not happening a lot lately.
On an errand to buy a SIM card, I happened
to pass the Russian White House, the scene of the
failed 1991 coup that brought Boris Yeltsin to pow-
er and which is — as much as any one event can
be — the symbol of the end of the Soviet Union.
It was also, thanks to an early Relcom link
sending updates to the outside world, in some
sense a launch event for the Russian Internet.
By coincidence, as I was walking I noticed the
date — August 21, 2016 — the 25th anniversary of
the end of the coup. I am not one to stand on cere-
mony, but for someone who grew up in California
in the midst of the Cold War, finding himself in
Moscow on that day to witness such silence was ee-
rie. There was nothing at the White House to hint
at the anniversary. Nothing much about it on TV
either, certainly not on the state television chan-
nels. At the site of its occurrence, the anniversary
of this “revolution” was an unmarked non-event.
I had been to Russia many times before. The
first time was as a teenager visiting the city then
still called Leningrad, and I have had the chance to
reflect (in print and otherwise) on the deep, strange
interrelations between Russia and my home, Cali-
fornia, particularly the space race and the rise of
algorithmic governance, attempted and realized.

11
 The New Normal

Both have their unique politics of amnesia. For the

beautiful and banal La Jolla, it is phones, drones
and genomes. For Moscow, it is a century or more
of unmourned, unprocessed utopian regimes.
Now, it seems these may seek some awkward (and
illiberal?) convergence. We are the passengers of
that convergence, and, I wonder, something else?
The think-tank we are hosting at Strelka
takes urbanism — quite broadly, but still specif-
ically conceived — as a medium whose messages
are both determinant and up for grabs. To begin,
I will share some of the initial thoughts on the pro-
gram’s research theme that I wrote up earlier this
summer, and discuss some of what we hope to ad-
dress and to accomplish.

THE NEW NORMAL

Something has shifted, it seems. We are making
new worlds faster than we can keep track of them,
and the pace is unlikely to slow. If our technologies
have advanced beyond our ability to conceptual-
ize their implications, such gaps can be perilous.
In response, one impulse is to pull the emergency
brake and to try put all the genies back in all the
bottles. This is ill-advised (and hopeless). Better
instead to invest in emergence, in contingency: to
map the new normal for what it is, and to shape it
toward what it should be.

12
 Benjamin H. Bratton

At Strelka, the previous program’s research

theme was called “Hybrid Urbanism,” based on the
idea that physical/virtual mixtures are still a nov-
el hybrid. But this interlacing is not a hybrid; it
is a normal thing, and if we don’t have the right
words to name it, then let’s make them.
Our theme for this three-year research proj-
ect is “The New Normal.” The term can have sev-
eral connotations and I like that slipperiness. The
first is that design must map these bizarre circum-
stances anew if it has a hope of ever designating
their futures. From there a second connotation,
working to enforce new normative claims, is clear.
Design’s reaction to the new normal can’t be
phrased only in terms of acceptance or resistance,
but of re-determining what norms will be. Despite
appearances, this is still possible (what seems in-
surmountable may be a hollow).
The language of hybrids is part of the prob-
lem. When something new appears, we may under-
stand it as a combination of familiar things. A car
is a “horseless carriage.” A handheld computer
+ camera + wireless data is a “mobile phone.” A me-
tropolis woven with sensor networks and informa-
tion technology is called a “smart city.” A block-
chain is, more or less, “digital money.” And so on.
Our formal and vernacular languages are strewn
with horseless carriage metaphors. In the short
term, hybrids may make sense by way of analogy
and continuity, but soon they create confusion,

13
 The New Normal

and even fear, as the new evolves and resembles the

familiar less and less. Hybrid terms delay recogni-
tion and defer understanding of what requires our
most audacious attention.
So instead of piling on more hybrids, excep-
tions and anomalies, we need a glossary for a new
normal, and for its design and redesign. But why
is that so hard, and what is the new normal any-
way, or better, what should it be? I ask this because
much of the new normal doesn’t seem “new” at all.
To the contrary it seems like a nightmarish regur-
gitation of history-themed vulgarities: stupidity
locked in to a long winter’s ground war against
reason. As 2016 is pulled remorselessly on into
2017, we are dumbstruck. Sometimes things are
not as they seem (and sometimes they are even
more what they are than they appear to be.) To see
things new again, strange and marvelous, requires
our most adventurous faculties of imagination.
The new normal condition twists distant sites,
one into another. Discontiguous megastructures
cohere from molecular to urban to atmospheric
scales into de facto jurisdictions. Ecological flows
become sites of intensive sensing, quantification
and governance. Cloud platforms take on the tra-
ditional role of states, as states evolve into cloud
platforms. Cities link into vast discontiguous ur-
ban networks as they also multiply borders into
enclaves inside of enclaves, nested in gated com-
munities inside of gated communities. Interfaces

14
 Benjamin H. Bratton

present vibrant augmentations of reality: now ad-

dress, interface, user. In my book The Stack: On Soft-
ware and Sovereignty (one diagram with a 500-page
caption) this is described as an accidental mega-
structure of planetary-scale computation.
Strelka is a school of design and also a school
of thought, and so a language of and for the urban,
a new language for the new urban reality is essen-
tial. The New Normal program frames not just
cities and their relationship to information tech-
nologies but (even more) of emergent economics,
politics, and cultural norms: a multipolar Anthro-
pocenic precipice, unfolding crises of authority
(too much, too little), genomic flows and flux and
fundamentalisms, financial melodramas, and a vid-
eogame-like geopolitics full of hidden trapdoors
and Easter eggs. How to name these directly? It
is not just hybrid terms that are suspect, but good
words too, like “sovereignty,” “politics,” “identity,”
“human,” “organic,” “citizen,” “home,” “modern,”
“authentic,” “progressive,” “natural,” etc. What do
these words mean anymore? Or rather, does what
they mean describe what is actually happening?
When does the gap between what they mean and
what is happening become so wide that we need to
move on to new words? Can we invent a conceptu-
al language fast enough to describe what we need
to? How to design a more effective glossary? Can
we do it fast enough? In order to articulate new
normative claims, perhaps the most valuable thing

15
 The New Normal

we could hope to design is a viable glossary with

which to name our situations directly.
To assume that the future will be like the pres-
ent — only more so — is a risky bet. The historical
evidence is against it. The value of emerging tech-
nologies may be less that they bring new solu-
tions, but that they pose essential problems and
questions: automation of what? Machine vision of
what? Recognition of what pattern? Whose artifi-
cial intelligence about what? The future city when?
Who is included and excluded from the new norm;
on what terms will we be included in each other’s
worlds, or not? We do not know what these tech-
nologies are for good for yet; they remain open to
definition. That is the good news.

PROGRAMMING
THE PROGRAM
I will speak to the structure of the program more
specifically. I wrote the core outline for The New
Normal program during a residency on Suomen-
linna island, a 15-minute ferry ride from Market
Square in Helsinki. (December 6 this year, by the way,
will be the centenary of Finland’s independence from
Russia.) The curriculum is structured as a series of
intensive modules in which students will critically
engage urban futures in traditional and non-tra-
ditional ways: formal analysis, scenario develop-

16
 Benjamin H. Bratton

ment, site modeling and programming, specula-

tive design, quantitative cultural data analysis and
visualization, and the contemporary philosophy of
technology, design, and aesthetics.
The program is based on a long-term collabora-
tion between faculty, students and local and glob-
al experts from varied disciplinary backgrounds.
Students will be in residence in Moscow for five
months, plus a field trip to California. The program
is for interdisciplinary designers, theorists, pro-
grammers, entrepreneurs who think across scales,
sites, and platforms, and who are comfortable with
digital platforms, with applied complexity, with
counterintuitive perspectives. They will realize de-
sign research that combines conventional and un-
conventional forms, formats and outcomes (and as
discussed below, will form the basis of new practic-
es to be launched from the program). Even as we
take emerging technologies as our urban tool-kit,
the attitude with which we plot our research is both
technical and exploratory (and one because the oth-
er). For this, the speculative is not supplemental to
serious work; it is essential to our research respon-
sibilities in a moment of change and uncertainty.
Among relevant J. G. Ballard quotes is “the fu-
ture is a better key to the present than the past.”
But part of the new normal is that the very idea of
the future (a future, any future at all) seems both
a foregone conclusion and impossible to imagine:
a dark tautology and a vanishing illusion.

17
 The New Normal

That double-helix, however, is the stuff of pro-

phetic fatalism, not entrenched and thoughtful long-
term design. Compared to California where “the
future” is a cottage culture industry, in Moscow an
ambient museum of futurism weighs heavy. Per-
haps cycles of change are felt to be both inevita-
ble and inconsequential. When the future comes,
and after, will things will be even more the same?
I was asked by some Russian journalists wheth-
er our program would bring practical designs
that help Muscovites right here and now, or wild
and impractical gestures that would not. It is, of
course, both the right and the wrong question.
By the latter I surmised that they meant, for ex-
ample, the grove of isolated skyscrapers that com-
prise the quite-Ballardian Moscow City, conjured
up as a flat-pack financial district near the Third
Ring Road, and told them that we hold quick-fix
schemes in low regard.
That said, the program is a research think-
tank and we make no apologies for this. We draw
upon some speculative design methods and per-
spectives, and not others. As our program consid-
ers what Russian urbanism may be and do, our brief
takes the year 2050 as a target. But whereas for
others, that year may underwrite “design futures”
(where the future is an alibi into which present
problems are deferred), for us it does not. 2050 is
not the future. We are designing 2050 right now,
with every little and large system we use or abuse.

18
 Benjamin H. Bratton

Perhaps it is because our natural sense of cause

and effect is so weirdly foreshortened, so over-
tuned to the most immediate subjective experienc-
es, that we accept 2-5 year project cycles as “long
term.” Instead, longer circuits between decision
and outcome should be more carefully internalized,
not because it would be ideal but because it is the
most practical approach. It presumes a “thick now”
in which the depth and complexity of this wider
moment (roughly1850CE - 2050CE) is seen more
comprehensively. Cities and ecologies operate at
rhythms that are both much faster and much slow-
er than human social time. To engineer them one
incremental decision at a time sets in motion a tro-
phic cascade that can, in principle, coalesce into an
emergent intelligent order, but which also lets lo-
cal pathologies pile up into landscape-scale irratio-
nalities. A core function of design intelligence is to
abstract patterns above and beyond individual per-
spective and incremental optimization, such that
systems might be steered away from banal dysfunc-
tion or self-destruction. Is that too much to ask?

ТХЕ НЕW НОРМАЛ

I should speak to the Russian context for this work,
as it is obviously an “interesting” (some would
say problematic) position from which to map
these circumstances.

19
 The New Normal

These days, it is no secret that mainstream

Russian political discourse is not entirely enam-
ored with the premises of universal modernity.
That is an ironic shame in that for much of the
20th century, Moscow was seen as the seat of an
ambitious internationalism. Against this current,
we ask how past Russian futurisms (literary, cin-
ematic, scientific, social, etc.) might yet shape
urbanism in Russia and elsewhere. This is not
as quixotic as it may seem, in that contradicto-
ry impulses pull this moment between opposing
neo-modern and neo-reactionary narratives, and
it is not always clear which is which. The aims of
our little cosmopolitan sect of speculative urban-
ists are unambiguously universalist, but what that
means now requires continual re-discovery.
From our campus on the river, we are in the
center of Moscow and in its legacies of melan-
cholic utopianism and voluptuous dystopianism.
The city links European and Asian passages, Arc-
tic and Baltic flows, and is where during the 20th
century, algorithmic governance found one of its
primordial forms. As it intends to double or triple
its jurisdictional circumference will “the Moscow
agglomeration” innovate a regional vernacular
of duplicative sprawl, or interlocking nested me-
gastructures, or both, or neither? At 20 million
inhabitants and counting, will its path be one to-
ward lower density or higher density — and den-
sity of what? How much energy can it draw into

20
 Benjamin H. Bratton

the centripetal force of sovereign centralization

until — like the Antonov 225, Tsar Bomba, Os-
tankino Tower or Norman Foster’s unbuilt Crystal
Island — the city, like any such system, is just too
big to function, and finally is set aside for other op-
tions? Will it only find new ways to rehearse the
existential malaise of the Strugatsky brothers’ The
Doomed City?
Russia’s expanse launched mankind’s initial
vertical forays into space, freeing us from one sort
of planetary predicament and revealing others
which we can never leave. A century ago, Fedor-
ov, Tsiolkovsky, and the Cosmists imagined mi-
gration off-planet a necessary evolutionary step
for the species. While for them that mission was,
in such strange ways, part of a national orthodoxy,
now we might make it into what Strelka faculty,
Benedict Singleton, calls “maximum jailbreak.”
So where to? From Bogdanov’s Red Star to
A. Tolstoy’s Aelita to Fokin’s (and Coppola’s) Nebo
Zovyot to the Mars 3 craft (in 1971, the first Earth
machine to land on the red planet), Mars has been
a preferred location for Russian charter cities. Ac-
cording to this tradition we will conceive our char-
ter cities and charter stacks (discussed below) as if
they were for Mars, because, in a way — whether
it is for Laika’s little space suit or growing food
under a domed desert — they are. Perhaps, as be-
fore, the path out is upward, where the idealism of
internationalism and the geometries of the global

21
 The New Normal

give way to a stark planetarity (and what Ed Keller

calls the post-planetary).
Of course, “outer space” is not actually out of
anywhere (I once had to remind a student, whose
speculative design project was about “the first
human born in space,” that all humans, hurtling
around the sun as we are, were born in space) How
space signifies an exterior alternative (or alterna-
tive exteriority) is provisional, but productively so.
Whether from orbit or on Mars, we may perceive
the interdependent totality of planetary circum-
stance untethered from our intuitive horizon-
talism, and when we do, this suggests but never
guarantees the possibility of comprehensive alter-
natives. In this, if Mars stands for Planet B, it is
less because we will move there than because solv-
ing systems for its arid plains makes solving for
Earth’s teeming tropics easy by comparison.
With our 2050 brief in mind, the urban is taken
more as a format for design than a genre of design.
Cities are media for the circulation of potentials (as
well as the encapsulation of foregone conclusions)
and to search that potential this means getting out
of our own skins. In the oscillations between hard
science and science-fiction which set the rules for
our spatial scenarios to play out, and to make the
future look Russian, we will have to cultivate that
most Russian ethos: alienation.

22
 Benjamin H. Bratton

CHARTER STACKS
In the months since we announced our theme, the
phrase “the new normal” has trended in popular
discourse. It is often used in concert with declara-
tions that certain new things should never be con-
sidered “normal” and should not bend the frame of
acceptability to include them. We are reminded of
Eugène Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros, in which peo-
ple rationalize away the massive savannah mam-
mal suddenly marauding through town. “Give it
a chance, wait and see. Maybe it’s a rhinoceros and
maybe it’s not. How bad could it be, really? I heard
that it’s not even happening.”
Among our trending themes is the demeaning
of the real by conspiracy, fake intrigue, supersti-
tious populism, clickbait science, causality/cor-
relation fallacies, and motivated inference.
Exemplifying these tendencies in spades is
Adam Curtis, whose cut-and-paste political doc-
umentary, Hypernormalization, spins a good yarn
about the deep history of this iniquity, superglu-
ing it to the rise of Neoliberalism and all his pet
peeves (including a longstanding refusal to grasp
how technological systems operate with effects
that exceed political representation.) When Cur-
tis announces that now “no one has any vision for
a different or better kind of future,” he speaks only
for himself. We also see the new normal in the long
collapse of avant-garde novelty cycles, such that

23
 The New Normal

technologies become normal even before they be-

come real. A.I. is already normal. Universal Basic
Income? So August 2015! Driverless cars are nor-
mal and they aren’t on the road yet. Your mom was
playing Pokemon Go! before some of society’s moral
guardians knew to denounce it.
In the exact spot where a viable future should
be, something insufferably backward fills it in:
a psychotic simulation of medieval geopolitics.
The rise of ethno-nationalist populism is a global
phenomenon with global causes. Yet in each case,
locals either blame or congratulate themselves for
their unique failure/accomplishment. But from
Manila to Milwaukee, we see the same demo-
graphic voting patterns of urban, highly-educated
cosmopolitans and rural, less-educated, monocul-
tural nationalists (and/or national monocultur-
alists). Even as globalization has delinked class
from geography in uneven ways, we try to deal
with the phenomenon one 18th-century jurisdic-
tion at a time. And yet this is also when networks
of city-states seem decisively detached from their
national hosts. For those from “District 13” in our
real-life Hunger Games, the city is a source of arbi-
trary power. Looked at this way, isn’t urbanization
itself a focus of the populist backlash?
We may be seeing the emergence of a new
(old) multipolar order of geographically encapsu-
lated domains, an amalgamation of legacy polities
that may last a few years or a few decades. While

24
 Benjamin H. Bratton

some functions of globalization proceed accord-

ing to the dynamics of spheres and networks, the
nomos of the Cloud is subdividing into multilater-
al sovereign domains, each with a parallel stack of
servers, sensors, data, applications and users/citi-
zens. A silver lining of the enclosure into regional
sovereign stacks (North American, Eurasian, Chi-
nese, etc.) may be a diversification of innovation at
each layer according to differing contexts.i
Such consolidations may be another phase
in the ‘great convergence’ of political economies
under information logistics, and if so it holds both
light and dark potentials. The segmentation of
stacks may force diversification and speciation of
software and hardware by hemispherical “Galapa-
gos effects.” Among the strange implications may
be its effects on the evolution of artificial intelli-
gences, which are bound to the data they are al-
lowed to sense and process and so may be phys-
ically constrained by the Great Firewalls of the
regional stacks inside of which they are born. For
the coming years, the morphogenetic diversity of
A.I. may be a function not only of their application
domains but of their sovereign domains as well.
Along the coast or countryside, on Earth or
Mars (one standing in for the other) the question
of urbanization is now, and will remain, a question
of who and what is urbanized, and when and how
so. For our program, the ante is a tempered alien-
ation from conventional answers.

25
 The New Normal

SPECULATIVE
SENSING &
SENSATION
For all our interest in planetary-scale systems, the
most cutting-edge aspects of urbanism are at the
level of sensing and sensation, both human and
machinic. Smart city scenarios are full of sensors
in the service of administrative loops, but they
tragically undersell the potential of machine sens-
ing at urban scale. In real cities, much more inter-
esting applications already flourish (and besides,
cites have always been information-rich). Concur-
rently, technologies that augment human sensa-
tion, such as virtual reality and augmented reality,
are becoming mainstream and as they do, they ex-
tend and focus the perceptual practice of everyday
urban life. We see these vectors — machine sens-
ing and augmented sensation — as correspondent
to and convergent with one another. For machine
sensing, the surfaces of the city are made more vi-
tal as they respond to light, touch and motion in
new ways, and for augmented sensation the living
inhabitants’ sensory apparatuses are infused with
new layers of hot and cool stimulus. There is an
urbanism to be found in the hatched membrane
between these.
We will be working with biosensing, 360 vid-
eo, 3D-scanning, virtual reality and augmented re-

26
 Benjamin H. Bratton

ality, studying how these sensory systems “read”

the world. At stake is both how we sense the city
and how the city senses us, and itself, and thus how
each “makes sense” of the other in turn. For each
of these technologies our interest is not urban ad-
ministration per se, but extending what can be ex-
perienced and modeled.
Casey Reas, an artist who co-invented the
Processing creative coding platform, will teach
a drawing/programming masterclass. Besides
allowing for beautiful, rich algorithmic flora, as
Reas’ own art exemplifies, the software also teach-
es an immediate, visceral link between code and
image. For designers used to working only with
image and language, Processing is a gateway drug
to think both visually and algorithmically at once,
and an ideal sketchbook to link our designers from
different sub-disciplines into a shared vernacular.
The centrality of drawing to design, especial-
ly for algorithmic form-finding, is underscored
differently by Sougwen Chung, whose collabora-
tions with her drawing robot connect human and
machinic hands, such that the augmentation of
creative intelligence flows both ways. Her recent
work takes leave of paper and moves into virtual
reality where drawings gain motion and multiple
perspectives. A growing number of cinematic prac-
titioners are centering their work around the links
between virtual reality and machine vision. Their
work may locate the viewer/user into positions

27
 The New Normal

and perspectives that disclose alien lifeworlds.

These worlds are composed by machine observa-
tion, such as Lidar and 360° imagery, which are the
sensing technologies that also increasingly live on
the surfaces of our cities, and so to learn to see the
city as those machines see, is also to learn to see as
our cities see us. The two perspectives bend into
and away from each other, and counter-augment
one another.
For the intrepid flâneur, augmented reali-
ty (AR) is arguably more exciting and dangerous
than VR because it dispenses with immersive fic-
tion and uses the real world as the stage. Keichi
Matsuda’s cinematic explorations of what an AR
urbanism might entail are appropriately inspiring
and disconcerting. From first- and third-person
user viewpoints, he makes us pedestrians in alter-
nate urban realities overcooked by the interfaces,
drawing us into kaleidoscopic scenes of faith and
preference, epiphany and banality, branding and
desperation.
For this new tale of sensing and sensibility,
the very large scale is made intimate — and vice
versa. As boundaries between interior and exteri-
or phenomena, the body and its urban habitat, are
made less certain, it may lead to the amplification
of apophenia and misapprehension, but not only
that. Just as Ready Player One, the popular novel
about VR, is all about amnesia, a perpetual interfa-
cial present-tense may actually help de-subjectiv-

28
 Benjamin H. Bratton

ize historical trace and trauma. Without memory,

whose agency is left?
As the Foucauldian disciplinary society based
on institutional walls gave way to the Deleuzian
society of control based on switches and gateways,
perhaps a biopolitics of synthetic sensing (includ-
ing seeing) is now the physical location of metro-
politan power. If so, synthetic sensing and sensa-
tion can be used to narrate urban designs; but also,
user by user, they are bricks out of which cities
are built.
For our program, such technologies are taken
as both tool and subject matter. Each may or may
not make its way into the core competencies of the
urban design practices that emerge from our pro-
gram, but we will learn to think with each and to
understand a bit more how each thinks us. We will
make use of these as drawing tools with which to
tell stories, and in some scenarios, some technolo-
gies may also be protagonist or antagonist.

SPECULATIVE
MEGASTRUCTURES
But where do we find these cities? It may be true,
as Rem Koolhaas (a former Strelka director) has
suggested, that we’ve invested precious little time
in re-thinking what urban form might be, and that
the concentration of human populations into meg-

29
 The New Normal

acities has allowed us to overlook revolutions in ru-

ral and suburban peripheries.ii It is in data centers,
distribution warehousing zones, ports, crop fields
and energy farms where the logistical sublime of
algorithmic urbanism has reshaped the built envi-
ronment perhaps most decisively.
Even as these places serve huge metropolitan
populations, they may be manned by lean crews
of technicians and service staff, itinerant or not.
Given their scale they surely count as megastruc-
tures, but of a different sort than the now-canon-
ical 1960’s-era utopian models of the Metabolists,
Buckminster Fuller, or Constant, though they
may more resemble Archizoom’s networked re-
fractions, with wide grids optimized for programs
other than human habitation. An urbanism for in-
animate objects is not itself a speculative exercise
but now one pillar of what already is and will con-
tinue to be the norm. This doesn’t diminish factors
like energy and access; to the contrary, they come
to the fore in ways that they probably would not if
this architecture were designed as stages for hu-
man dramas.
Megastructures have played a starring role
in urbanism’s own historical “speculative design”
avant la lettre. They have been a way to make sense
of planetary scales and non-local integrations;
they have extruded diagrammatic plans of uto-
pian society into domed sections; and they have
been — from Exodus: Voluntary Prisoners to Biosphere

30
 Benjamin H. Bratton

2 — a figure of totality, social or ecological or both.

Their currency is traded for and against ideas of
what those totalities should be, and so they are, at
least in this way, models that are at once descrip-
tive, predictive and projective. Now as the Anthro-
pocene binds social time to geologic time, the to-
tality of totalities becomes a yet more critical, and
in no way hypothetical, geodesign brief. Even so,
given that the continuation of urban design con-
ventions will not clarify this work, speculation is
a necessary, not fanciful, method.
Among the best directors of such portfolios is
Liam Young, who will help guide our program to-
ward our charter stack scenarios, splicing the cin-
ematic and urban. Besides the role of hard science/
science-fiction for Anthropocenic urbanism, Liam
and I share an interest in discontiguous megastruc-
tures as the essential platforms we must under-
stand and design. The cloud urbanism that now
drives core-periphery dynamics links moments of
production, distribution, habitation and consump-
tion into fantastically regular cycles. Their chore-
ography also piles on dangerous effects, and this is
all the more reason to commandeer the algorith-
mic coding and zoning machines toward better
outcomes.
For The New Normal think-tank, we will detail
how the cloud enables and prevents different ur-
ban forms. Just beneath the city’s skins, the cloud
is a vast animating engine we tap into with our

31
 The New Normal

various appliances (buildings, cars, phones, etc.)

Where it oozes through screens we mark a digital
aesthetic, both human and inhuman at once, un-
graspable, like weather patterns. As urbanism it
binds contact, conflict, consensus, and monumen-
talization, taking form in cities but not reducible
to them.
In search of our own cloud brutalism, we
will take the think-tank north to the Arctic coast,
where Russia (along with Norway, Canada, and
others) is building automated shipping ports in
anticipation of the further melting of the polar cap
and the opening of the Northern Passage. There is
little that is more “new normal” than a networked
archipelago of hyperborean robot cities, sending
containers back and forth to one another across
the top of the planet.
On our way, we will be reminded (perhaps
literally) of Stalin’s “Great Plan for the Transfor-
mation of Nature” in the 1940’s, terraforming the
country’s agricultural interior through massive in-
frastructural works and Lysenkoist geoengineer-
ing. If the enduring value of post-WW2 utopian
megastructures is how their ambitious urban-scale
architecture (or architecturally-enveloped urban-
ism) sought to diagram a programmatic totality,
their weakness was an inability to adapt to intrin-
sic or extrinsic perturbations that demanded ac-
commodation. Despite the modularity of contem-
porary platforms, we shouldn’t be overconfident

32
 Benjamin H. Bratton

that our discontiguous cloud megastructures are

so different from their forebears in this way.
As urban systems (macro to micro) link mole-
cules and continents, cause and effect are difficult
to model, and in the face of that difficulty, place-
holder clichés from smart city advertising stick
around beyond their shelf life, and become an in-
advertent conventional wisdom that is difficult to
dislodge. So while our projects will illustrate inte-
grative scenarios, we will also focus on micropro-
tocols, games and ruses, not as minor exceptions
but as a primary grammar for how spatial sys-
tems work.
We call dibs on maneuvers that produce unex-
pected outcomes as the basis of a more hard-real-
ist urban cybernetics. We do so because attention
paid to incrementally more precise measurements
is often at the expense of understanding what
needs and does not need to be measured in the first
place. Which levers should be pulled to manage
urban systems? Perhaps our indexes are metering
a ghost economics, and our game theories, legal
fictions and incentive zones are poorly disposed to
a zero marginal cost platform economics.
Or perhaps not. As ever, reflexively treating
each awkward signal as anomalous to the rule,
instead of as a reason to fix new rules, patterns,
norms, only defers conclusions. The alternative is
for design to wield its essential craftiness, cunning
(and critique) to trick those norms into appear-

33
 The New Normal

ance (Singleton again). As Keller Easterling puts

it, two can play at this game.iii
One of the key games for any architecture
is based on who and what is inside and/or outside.
At a regional scale, who or what is not a migrant
of one sort or another? But in that solidarity, there
are such differences: for some, that status is a death
sentence and for others it’s a token of privilege.
Among the uncanny effects of climate change
is how the ground shifts beneath our feet. Whole
habitats migrate north or south, their species chas-
ing or escaping the sun. Do their inhabitants fol-
low them or are they left behind as indigenous ref-
ugees? Such are the now normal conundrums with
which our discontinuous megastructures organize
and entangle. Our response is design on behalf
of the emergent, not just the emergency, and in
doing so to leverage the unexpected (and perhaps
the unexpectable) to our cause.
Next on our calendar, the think-tank will
pull up stakes and head west to the Pacific wall
of California where we will visit several studios,
schools, laboratories, and companies, large and
small. California boasts the sixth-largest economy
in the world, larger than Russia’s (though accord-
ing to one estimate by a team of scientists at
Stanford and University of California, Berkeley
by 2099 climate change could see Russia’s GDP
increase by over 400% while US GDP may drop
by 36%).iv

34
 Benjamin H. Bratton

As hinted at earlier, the legacy of the Cold

War means California and Russia have more in
common than a bear and a red star. Our course’s
itinerary is geared to comparing and cross-polli-
nating scientific and aesthetic approaches. As far
as urban traditions go, each place represents a pole
on a spectrum between over- and under-central-
ized planning. In terms of cloud sovereignties,
entrepreneurialism and mischief, each holds for
the other a somewhat mythical status, positive
and negative, and we would do well to demystify
these somewhat.

PATTERN
RECOGNITION
We are a species whose success is based in pat-
tern-recognition but this comes at the price of false
positives and negatives. Cognitive biases run deep.
Like finding faces in clouds, even when we know
for certain that the pattern we see is illusionary, we
can’t help but see it anyway. Those biases are per-
haps strongest when it comes to human cultural
phenomena. When it comes to one another, we see
what we want to see and don’t see what we have
no words for. At the scale of a whole society, when
important patterns of cause and effect, life and
death, are outside understanding, then biases may
accumulate into fantastic apparatuses, invested

35
 The New Normal

with sacred and secular authority reinforcing the

apophenia. A casual stroll in any modern metropo-
lis provides a trove of evidence.
We have found some ways around this. Per-
ceptual/cognitive prostheses, like the telescope
and microscope, allow us to see things that we
could not see before, and to see things as we could
not see them before. With them we deduce and in-
duce different, less wrong patterns in how things
work, but this requires counter-intuitive and even
anti-intuitive methods. Conclusions we draw may
be uncomfortable and weird and they may demand
acceptance of disturbing, disenchanting models of
reality (like heliocentrism or chemical mutagene-
sis). Their weirdness, quite often, comes from how
they establish links between phenomena at spatial
and temporal scales that are difficult or impossible
for us to perceive intuitively.
In the past, important information was pains-
takingly processed and stored in books, which
were stored in buildings known as libraries. Whole
societies, universities, were built in their vicinity
because of how hard it was to access that archive
of knowledge. Now we have the opposite problem:
there is more information and more data about the
world at hand than we can possibly handle. Upon
querying the world, we need a summary of a sum-
mary of the answer before we can make sense of
it. As a result, we turn to interpretive prosthetics
like data visualization and statistics. This is, how-

36
 Benjamin H. Bratton

ever, a “new normal” shift on which our knowledge

institutions and economies are choking. In prin-
ciple and sometimes in practice, new cognitive in-
formation tools, such as formal data analysis and
visualization, are important ways of finding and
sorting unusual patterns. When they work well,
they provide not omniscience over contingency
but often alien conclusions that can’t possibly be
true but are (and when they work less well, we see
math used as heraldry to replicate local epistemic
conventions).
Drawing on Russian Formalism as much as
Gabriel Tarde’s monadology, Lev Manovich’s cul-
tural analytics trains such methods on culture,
communication, and aesthetics to find insights
that may have been obscured or invisible.
As Structuralism once disenchanted the an-
thropos by deducing fundamental semiotics across
context, these statistical-visual methods may shift
how we count the building blocks of culture. Here
the “digital” is not just as a type of (new) media,
but a hyperinductive epistemological instrument
that moves culture a bit further away from natural
languages. In turn, as we become more aware of
such patterns, they not only describe what we do
but reflexively shape what we do as well. Cultur-
al feats may be strategized based on how they are
or are not traced by our ambient social archives,
articulated for or against the pattern that they are
likely to make. In this way, the statistical norm

37
 The New Normal

(the mean and median) are also, important conno-

tations of a new “normal.”
In our program, given our own presumptions
and blind spots, we will be finding and sorting pat-
terns that contribute to drawing out our charter
cities and charter stacks, and in doing so we will be
careful to remember that our intuitions about how
things work are, perhaps, illusory.
We will use quantitate methods not only for
analysis (to compose descriptive models) but as
a drawing method as well (to compose predictive
and projective models) and to use statistical visual-
ization to specify rich fictive detail for our scenar-
ios. We will draw our cities and stacks with lines
and volumes, but also with the diagrammatic pat-
terns that trace what would ensue: just as with syn-
thetic sensing, the conjunction and disjunction be-
tween code, image and model is multidirectional.

PLATFORM
AESTHETICS
The circumstances into and onto which our proj-
ects move are dark webs. Appearances confuse.
What looks like a clean slate may actually be a can-
vas so full of contradictions that no light can pen-
etrate it. What seems uncertain may not be, what
looks like cool gamesmanship may be a slow-mo-
tion nervous breakdown. The post-truth mode of

38
 Benjamin H. Bratton

power/knowledge may be less a cunning scheme

than a sign that the sovereign has nothing left to
lose. Or it may be nothing but a facile preference
for conspiracy myths that keep the hero’s senti-
mental journey in center frame. What good is al-
gorithmically-augmented pattern recognition for
someone who thinks they already know how the
movie ends?
The projects from The New Normal program
will mix traditional models with emerging cin-
ematic and post-cinematic forms, just as actual
cities do. The development and communication
of speculative urban platforms will feature plan,
section, elevation, and satellite scale diagrams, and
also work with/against tropes of branding, POV
jump cuts, paradoxical use-case narratives, and
all the ‘known-unknown’ sleights-of-hand that
turn audiences into users, developers, believers,
and collaborators.
Our charter cities and stacks are proposed as
fungible platforms, not fixed master plans. As de-
scribed in The Stack, platform systems are not re-
ducible to politics or markets, but have their own
economics and aesthetics that allow them to work
as they do.
As urbanism itself variously sprints and me-
anders toward platform economics, those aesthet-
ics take on more gravity. To design accordingly is
not straightforward. It solicits gestures of revela-
tion and secrecy, and hiding as a kind of revealing.

39
 The New Normal

It involves both stating things plainly and telling

winding stories, a hardcore cultural realism based
on hiding in plain sight. Steganography, for exam-
ple, is the practice of encoding information with-
in other non-secret text or data, such as messages
hidden in the raw code of a JPEG image.
Understood as an expert technique that would
inform a design practice, such nuance is wielded
like a scalpel by Metahaven. Known for their in-
novative graphical design, their recent film, The
Sprawl, takes on our intersecting virtual reali-
ties with surgically precise non-linearity. I have
worked with Daniel Van Der Velden and Vinca
Kruk closely over the years, developing The Stack
vehicle, and in addition to tutoring the final studio
of project development, they will teach a seminar
based around Russian film and literature.

URBAN PRACTICES
Once more, the program is advertised for those
who are more comfortable with counterintui-
tive perspectives and working across differing
scales than their current circumstances may allow
them. Research will draw upon urban data, urban
economics, urban philosophy, urban software,
urban cinema, urban services, urban science-fic-
tion, urban systems, urban interfaces (and even
urban planning).

40
 Benjamin H. Bratton

It will enroll multiple conceptual languag-

es to engage the new normal and things to come:
search, orientation, projection. In recent decades,
design practices may have been divided into
sub-disciplines (graphic, industrial, interaction,
architectural design, etc.) and now they are sup-
planted by another distribution (robotics, ecology,
biotechnology, software-augmented intelligence,
etc.) I counsel applicants that the latter does not
directly replace the former — as if a more-proper
avant-garde — but that practices should mix a few
of the older and the newer on their own terms.
They should hone a generous philosophical ap-
proach to them, and deploy them with as much
coldness and cruelty as they can muster.
Our charter cities and charter stacks will fill
online content feeds with good images and ideas,
and new terms will build a new glossary, but the
real “deliverables” of our program are new de-
sign practices.
In that urbanism intertwines so many scales
and modalities of design (as noted above) there is
need for and room for “hybrid” urban design prac-
tices which may deploy combinations of these
as a full-stack service and/or as an independent
development concern. These should live high-
er in the value chain than where we usually find
planners, and our program will provide room for
such practices to be incubated and prototyped.
Here, however, the connotation of “hybrid” speci-

41
 The New Normal

fies not just interdisciplinary synergy, but is more

in line with forms of now normal asymmetrical
battle, operating on many fronts with dissonant
messages aimed at the same goal and sometimes
without clear attribution of blame, credit or au-
thorship. We have made the discontiguous mega-
structures, now we need to make the discontigu-
ous megastructuralists.
To close, I think back to last year’s unmarked
anniversary of the failed 1991 coup, and wonder
what the lesson may be about a purported fidelity
to “events” when such revolutions are eventless?
Perhaps it is that the real processes by which they
take place don’t need to be marked by human-scale
events. Like cities, they just keep on happening
with or without our observances. Who knows?
By 2050, we may look back on 2016 as “pre-war
years.” If so, let the record show that the danger
was less artificial intelligence than old-fashioned
human stupidity.
The questions of what is the new normal, what
it should be, and what should be resisted and nev-
er normalized are poorly served by the simplistic
narratives that brand this moment (we will not
want to give them an anniversary parade). Some
systems may be broken because they are deeply
cemented niches impervious to new signals, and
others because they do nothing but receive, reflect
and amplify every desire back to itself. Cities are
guilty of both, but they are victims too.

42
 Design always takes a risk when address-
ing any state of exception, in that its techniques
of mitigation may prematurely normalize, and
so sustain, a pathology that would otherwise dis-
sipate by its own failures. In hopes of protecting
what is good, design interventions can smooth the
way for what is harmful to carry on. Sometimes the
best defense is to let something destroy itself.
So, again, pick your emergency (electron dis-
tribution, value exchange, protein capture, carbon
dioxide storage, etc.) What is actually worth what
to whom: how much value is there in the world and
why? What should be done with the cities, now?
To repeat the point: to see things anew, and to see
them for what they really are, in all their marvelous
strangeness, both beautiful and ugly, will require
both our most intense and adventurous imagina-
tion and techniques. The future has not been can-
celled. The future is where we will live and grow,
but first we need to catch up to the present.
 END NOTES
i WeChat — at the very least — is perhaps dis-
abusing notions that Californian app models
are merely copied by their Chinese analogs.
ii See his 2014 lecture “Countryside and Hinter-
land” at Strelka (remotely)
iii See her talk, “Extrastatecraft” at Sonic Acts,
Amsterdam. February 23, 2013.
iv David Rotman ,“Hotter Days Will Drive Glob-
al Inequality” MIT Technology Review, De-
cember 20, 2016.