Some years ago I was at a panel with HP research scientist Stanley Williams, who recounted a remarkable assignment he once had. He was part of a group of computer scientists who had been asked by the US Department of Energy to propose an architecture for a computer that would be capable of a high fidelity predictive simulation of the entire planetary climate, and of monitoring and simulating the entire planetary climate in real time. The group concluded that such a machine would require zettaflop computing, that is, a system capable of $1 0 ^ { 2 1 }$ floating-point operations per second. At the time, the fastest supercomputers were measured in petaflops $( 1 0 ^ { 1 5 } ) ;$ ; on-tap exaflops $( 1 0 ^ { 1 8 } )$ are still years away. Williams discussed how it is possible that zettaflop computing would demand a very different processing architecture from one based on silicon transistors and might instead be based on photonics and nanoswitches hybridized with silicon to increase performance without loss of volume and power. He spoke of layers and layers of nanoscale wiring weaving into dense synaptic computing fields. Could it be done? Somewhat anticlimactically, Williams also shared the conclusion of the group ’ s report: based on current technology technology, the necessary specifications would mean that the computer would not only be roughly the size of Paris, but it would consume so much energy that it would be the single most significant anthropogenic climatic event that it itself would be modeling! Short of fundamental breakthroughs, his anecdote underscores the paradoxical recursivity that undergirds the demand for global ecological omniscience, especially for an accidental megastructure such as The Stack. <sup>69</sup>
With the promise of irruptive emergencies in mind, as well as Williams ’ s figure of a megamachine eaten by its own image of the world as it tries in vain to source enough power to measure and simulate its own power consumption, how then should we think about design in relation to Stack emergencies and emergences? Remember that for our discussion of Schmitt, the exception draws an exemplary space that exists both inside and outside the law at once. It is where authority is absolute but derived less from normal law than from the sovereign decision both granting and granted by the state of emergency, one taken ostensibly to protect the framework of law that it itself supersedes. In relation to this, design must be genuinely suspicious of remedies that valorize the amelioration of symptoms. States of emergency often begin as a “ temporary measure ” — precaution, pilot program, protective custody, probation, prototype — but over time, through both political shift and in the normalization that appears through a design ’ s ingenious accommodations of the emergency, the exception becomes the rule, and the rule becomes the rule of law because it is now is seen as the normal shape of things. In the face of emergencies, design is asked to provide adaptation for those negatively affected and to give form to accommodation such that a sovereign decision would not be fundamentally threatened by the emergency that it has called into being. Design ’ s job too often is to reform the emergency, so that over time, the exception sheds its temporary and provisional character as its effects settle out.
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Earth Layer