The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 300 页

1. Earth Layer to Come: God Bows to Math; Will Leviathan? ⁹

A side effect of the unmanned programs of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), particularly Viking’ s initial probes to the surface of Mars, is what Kim Stanley Robinson calls comparative planetology, the consideration of pattern and difference among astronomical bodies. ¹⁰ Arguably, the leverage of such a perspective would be greater than that of the more iconic visual knowledge of the Apollo “ Earthrise ” or “ blue marble ” photographs, which demonstrated the formal coherency of Earth as one geophysical unit. ¹¹ Now the special singularity of that sample can be measured by comparing variation among like and unlike cousins, each of which represents an alternative chemical reality from which or toward which our own perch might be distinguished and interpreted. Given that other planets are assembled from the same chemical ingredients as is Earth (still mostly hydrogen, helium, some carbon, bits of other things, albeit in different ratios), the far end of the comparability is the full spectrum of possible recombinations of elements “ computing ” one another into the relative molecular stability of a planetary sphere. The universe could, in principle, disassemble one astronomic body and build a couple others out of the raw material, and in fact, in astronomic time, that is more or less how planets are made.

Seen from this outside, the Earth layer of The Stack is ultimately not only the plateau from which emerges the material and energy to run the other layers of a closed tower; it is also — in a sense — the basis of a second planetary computer, one laid on top of a first whose calculations resulted in the relative ecological and chemical stability of our planetary situation. More often than not, globally pervasive eco-computing is validated by a diagnosis model; it provides us with a way to detect pathologies. We detect pollution or telltale ecological traces in one way or another and render them as evidence. It is a way to visualize the invisible evil, drawing its picture so we can see where it is and where it goes, and one way or another prevent it from happening again. The maximal design image of pervasive computation — of this second planetary computer — is understood both rightly and wrongly as a smearing of the planet ’ s surface with an objective computational film that would construct a stream of information about the performance of our shared socionatural spaces through which geopolitical decisions can be made. Within a material public based on a truly ubiquitous computational infrastructure, the political formations that would cohere might be based on the aggregation of encounters and relationships between persons, things, and material events, including especially those in which people are not directly involved. But even if everything is seen and registered, not everything sees or works back on what it sees in the same way. Part of the design question then has to do with interpreting the status of the image of the world that is created by that second computer, as well as that mechanism ’ s own image of itself, and the way that it governs the planet by governing its model of that planet. That model is built on the interrelationship of nonhuman biologies and chemistries as well, and so the images that the designer can deduce or produce serve the representational agency to a matrix that otherwise would be invisible to itself beyond its most local chemical interactions.

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The Stack to Come