The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World w/ Benjamin Bratton

Benjamin Bratton joins PTO to discuss his new book, The Revenge of
the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World. We talked about how
the Covid-19 pandemic could transform our sense of human
subjectivity, how to think about planning at a planetary scale - in
a way that neither falls prey to techno utopianism, nor retreats
into a romantic localism. We also talked about what the pandemic
means for populism, and why taking an epidemiological view of
society will aid us in dealing with future crises. And finally we
also discussed the unfortunate response of the Italian philosopher
Giorgio Agamben to the pandemic and why the dominance of the baby
boomers in academia has led to an overemphasis on what Benjamin
describes as a "negative biopolitics" that can only see governance
and systems of mapping and planning in sinister, authoritarian
terms.