The Automation of Decision
A syllabus entry, which starts from one quotation and pushes on it.
"De facto, functional decision-making — you could call it sovereignty, although I don't think we even need this word — is built into technical systems in ways that are not available to legal manipulation… Traditional Schmittian concepts about 'the political' … no longer really explain much… Technology can even be defined as the automation of decision."
— Benjamin Bratton, interviewed in Palladium, 11 January 2021
Bratton isn't arguing that sovereignty should move. He's reporting that it already has — into the stack of software and infrastructure that actually decides who gets water pressure, credit, a visa, a search result, before any legislature is consulted. His displacement runs downward, into the machine. My bet runs the other way: outward, into the metabolic systems the machine depends on to keep running at all. Both readings agree on the diagnosis — the old seat is empty. We disagree hard about what's sitting in it now.