The scenario described in the chapters to follow, and appearing before us in the real world, can be summarized as one in which Users, <sup>10</sup> human or nonhuman, are cohered in relation to Interfaces, which provide synthetic total images of the Addressed landscapes and networks of the whole, from the physical and virtual envelopes of the City, to the geographic archipelagos of the Cloud and the autophagic consumption of Earth’ s minerals, electrons, and climates that power all of the above. The most complex paths through these layers may displace well-established forms of human – machine-infrastructure interaction, perhaps so well established that entire cities were designed to accommodate them. This may insert machine control at almost any point, amplifying or diverting human control over any machine in which the User happens to be installed, or even of the whole infrastructural landscape in which those machines swarm together. For example, the integrated design of driverless cars includes navigation interfaces, computationally intensive and environmentally aware rolling hardware, and street systems that can stage the network effects of hundreds of thousands speeding robots at once. The next stable form of the “ automobile ” (a description that will become perhaps more and more accurate) may be as a mobile Cloud platform inside of which Users navigate the City layer of a larger Stack according to augmented scenery Interfacial overlays and powered by grids of electrons as well as bits. Planetaryscale computation involves the whole Earth from which silica, steel, and all manner of conflict minerals are drawn. Computation is not virtual; it is deeply physical event, and The Stack has an enormous appetite for molecules of interest and distributing them into our pockets, our laps, and our landfills. The chemistries and the terawatts that will feed The Stack, and us through it, force us to reckon that the ponderous heaviness of Cloud computing will be a key driver of geopolitical frictions to come. We are taking a high-stakes risk with the development of smart grids and the energy appetites per terminus they will enable. Will the platform efficiencies of The Stack provide the lightness necessary for a new subtractive modernity, an engine of a sustainable counterindustrialization, or will its appetite finally suck everything into its collapsing cores of data centers buried under mountains: the last race, the climate itself the last enemy?
In the figure of The Stack, we see not one totality but the production of multiple and incongruous totalities, some of which are “ interfacial regimes, ” some are superimposed landscapes of Addresses, and others are interwoven Cloud and state geometries. These geometries both draw and draw on the vertical platform of The Stack, and in doing so may also displace existing geographies with several alternatives at once. Perhaps these culminate in the apotheosis of Anthropocenic industrialism and perhaps they provide larval scripts for a post-Anthropocenic alternative, or both, or perhaps something much less decisive and dramatic. Our sights are not trained on how The Stack might hasten the messianic arrival of some seamless full-spectrum computational end of history, but how its gnashing and grating juxtapositions generate peculiar new spaces, normal enclaves, and how those exceptions are instructive as ways of deliberately reorganizing the world. Put differently, treatments of each of these six layers work with a particular caveat, that is Paul Virilio ’ s axiom that the invention of any new kind of technology is also simultaneously the invention of a new kind of accident. <sup>11</sup> This holds true for the emergence of planetary computation and its Stack, as much as it does for the forging of aluminum and airplane crashes, set theory and stock market crashes, and incandescent light bulbs and climate change. Each individual layer promises its own range of possible accidents as it abuts its neighbors, and in some way each of the six layers is presented as a technology for accidents . Each is described in terms of both how it resolves the emergent accidental megastructure of The Stack into one and how the essential accident of each layer, and of the combined whole, points toward very different kinds of geosocial relations and geopolitical systems, perhaps especially those determined not by today ’ s technology but by whatever technological regime will come after planetary-scale computation.
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Introduction