In structural engineering, when the pressure difference between the outside and the inside of a building causes heat to rise up from the bottom, floor by floor, and try to escape from the top, this is called the stack effect. In the cycle of energy into and out of data centers, up through the layers to the User, a corollary process is at work for planetary-computational stacks as well, which is on the whole bad news for the ecology that it would hope to model. At the same time, it bears repeating that with terrestrial, oceanic, satellite, and atmospheric sensing networks, it is only through the medium of the Stack itself that we know so precisely how the carbon appetite of The Stack is contributing so decisively to our Anthropocenic predicament in the first place. This paradox (some may call it a self-cancellation) is only one reason that there is such strong disbelief that the current geopolitical, geoeconomic, or geoecological order can continue in its present form. We experience a crisis of “ ongoingness ” that is both the cause and effect of our species ’ inability to pay its ecological and financial debts. The Stack itself, this accidental megastructure, is surely as well a result of these same processes, and it may be seen as symptomatic from one perspective or emergent from another, but its ability to mature as a form of intelligence is dependent on learning to not cannibalize its planetary host. I also argue that some conceivable versions of a future Stack have a decisive role to play in making intractable problems of governance and design far less dangerous, and the abstract machine of the Earth layer ’ s second planetary computer is among these. Another argument laced throughout this book is that the necessary intellectual and technological achievements are not at hand, that we must make them so, and toward that we must be willing to entertain shifts in the relationship between software and sovereignty, taken as our primary example. That said, the picture is far from rosy. Despite appearances, one can easily argue that technological progress has slowed since the last quarter of the twentieth century (the 1973 oil crisis to be specific). The low-hanging fruits (e.g., the speed of transcontinental flight, increase in age expectancy, median income in affluent societies, crop yields, truly significant new medicines) have been gathered up, and in many cases their rate of progress has either slowed or even reversed. <sup>12</sup> Meanwhile, commodity prices have continued to rise, clean energy has yet to materialize at a necessary scale, and atmospheric carbon dioxide has broken the 400 parts per million barrier. It is true at the same time that the number of people living in extreme poverty (as defined by the dollar value of their daily available purchasing power) has been cut in half since only 1990, and the average family size, or total fertility rate, has also halved since 1950 from almost 5 children to fewer than 2.5 (concurrently the percentage of people living in cities has gone from 20 percent to 50 percent in one hundred years and is projected to be 70 percent by 2050.) These are all causes and effects of one another, each accomplishment coming at a sometimes savage price and each calamity with a silver lining (of sorts). None of this, however, proves that it is impossible to do what we know is required, but it may suggest that we are not willing.
The Stack to Come
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