Every thing is, it seems, a stakeholder and is at stake. The consequences hinge on what is the most difficult challenge to our uncertain competency to redesign our own geogovernance, that is, the fragility of our climatic and ecological commonwealth. The bedraggled UN Climate Change conferences underscore why intersovereign federations have a limited ability to enforce deep transformation through legal consensus. The ecological crisis will likely necessitate the formulation of new scales of bioregional jurisdiction (both smaller and larger than a state), new modes of calculating energy (quantifying, computing, distributing, visualizing a polity of electrons), and new forms of networked geopolitics (that can represent both urban megasettlements as well several hundred million migrants with equal representational facility). States and sovereignty as we know them may be ill-suited to these tasks, and so the option may prove to be, quite literally, adapt or die. And these are just the problems we know, the known-unknowns.
The project to be taken up sees politics as infrastructure, systems as law, totalities as site condition, supply chains as ecologies, and energy as money. Each of these, and each layer of The Stack drawn from them, is a unique but dependent logic of design and governance. Most of the unfamiliar questions arise from problems that cannot be answered in isolation and cannot be properly addressed by extrapolating and extruding familiar models from past modern eras or by presuming that the past is actually in the past (despite the earnest protestations of some who would say they can). <sup>14</sup> What maps, what media of exchange and equivalence, what agency of synthetic objects, which currencies for ecological economics, what ethical appetite of risk or promiscuity, what bargains with violence are necessary? These can ’ t only be decided by philosophical discourse or solved by engineering, nor can we engage the blur that makes them partially legible to us without also deploying both at once. Opportunistic variations of thinking and making must be enrolled, all at once and in dissonant combinations, braided one into another (just as their subject matter already is). We may not have to wait long to find out which way things will break. Geographies that were comfortable and doxic are now transient and alien, inhabited uncannily. But even as strange geographies corrugate, fracture, and smear worldly scale and tempo, the ground isn ’ t somehow evaporated into virtual information flux; to the contrary, we are brought to a certain end of nonplace. For this, a different kind of placefulness is reestablished, one that is not the organic inverse of artificial abstraction, but an experience of place as one resonant scale within a much larger telescoping between local and global consolidations. <sup>15</sup> That reestablishment is not a generalized secessionism or irredentism, a natural regrounding, or transcendent escape into technological raptures. It is designation, a composition, a design aesthetics, and a projective ethics of pan-infrastructure deployed for a geopolitical reality that cannot possibly untangle material from information, materialism from informationalism, earth from sky.
Introduction
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