The Antikythera Book Series

Antikythera develops a philosophy of technology that seeks to better understand, and thereby orient, planetary computation as a philosophical, scientific, and geopolitical force. The research program takes its name from the first known computer, the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient tool for orientation, navigation, planning, and prediction across planets. The program understands the future of computation as more than calculation. It is a technology to think with, an instrument for discovery.

In collaboration with the MIT Press, the Antikythera book series publishes unique titles by writers from diverse disciplines: computer science, philosophy, history, architecture, physics, science fiction, and more. These books investigate the creative and curious uses of our computational tools—or what we might more precisely call artificial computation. With those tools it is revealed that otherwise imperceivable building blocks of our reality and of our own flesh are themselves computational. The planet discovers itself through computation, and computation discovers itself through us.

At some moments in history, human imagination of technological accomplishment far outpaces what is possible, and, at others, technological capabilities overflow the concepts available to understand them. This moment in history is more the latter, and so the work of philosophy is less to project truisms onto reality than to generate new conceptual tools to align with what is already emerging.

This is a pre-paradigmatic moment, which necessarily means one that is on uncertain footing. As things we recognize as alive, intelligent, and technological combine in new ways, contemporary definitions of “life,” ”intelligence,” and “technology” converge as well. As the world is transformed through computation, our fundamental understanding of it (and ourselves) adapts in turn.

The Antikythera school of thought is neither utopian nor dystopian. Solutionism—technological or political—is not the focus. Instead, the project is epistemological, compositional, and existential: How does computation reveal fundamental qualities of this living, thinking planet, and what are its capacities as the now primary means by which complex intelligence remakes its worlds through interpretation, speculation, and construction?

The humanities are perhaps too content with reflexive critique, especially when it comes at the expense of deeper engagement. For Antikythera, the most necessary philosophy of technology (and as more technologies are computational, thereby the philosophy of computation) is one that contributes directly to the formation of that emergent paradigm. To do so is to draw fundamental philosophical positions from direct encounters with theoretical biology, information theory, planetary sciences, speculative engineering, and design, and the intellectual histories of all these.

If the Western philosophy of technology canon is darkened by the shadow of Martin Heidegger’s intuition that the essence of technology is an alienation of being, our approach leans more on the lessons of Copernicus (and so many others) who employed technological abstraction to achieve a precious allocentric awareness of where, when, how, and who we—in the broadest possible sense—are and may become. The estrangement that comes with the reformation of thought as it is bent through the prisms of machine perception, is not what prevents philosophical insight: rather, this is its foundation.

For this, the locus is not the singular thinking subject, nor even a species as a whole. Much more general and precious forces are at work. The philosophy of the next century is one for which life as such, intelligence as such, cognition as such, and computation as such all combine in new ways that allow them to both comprehend and transform themselves. Humans may be the agents of this combination, and this makes us genuinely exceptional within the biosphere and technosphere. Ultimately, however, we are not the protagonist; we are the vehicle.

Alongside an online platform, the Antikythera book series connects new ideas with new forms of digital information design. Both the books and the platform are interfaces to the ideas that constitute the Antikythera school of thought and, hopefully, its contribution to the philosophy of the future.

Benjamin Bratton
La Jolla, California
November 2024