The wrestling between geodesign and platform states is also defined by the limiting condition that designable space is never empty and that the precarious world is always already full. No tabula is ever rasa: the world is filled but never completed, with no Genesis alibi on call. In this, political geography is less a zero-sum image of territories to acquire than the design of a substitute totality, which may or may not be correspondent with the unitotality of any one world image (such as a globe in space). Already design today is preoccupied with managing the archive of all “ content ” produced in preceding centuries; we don ’ t make new things; we innovate on the archive and index what is already there, moving from “ event ” to database and back again. Whereas industrial platforms like Ford and Toyota innovated the manufacture of complex industrial machines from scratch at mass scale, Google ’ s mission is not to make new raw information per se, but to structure and curate the total space of all the world ’ s information — a standing reserve that already exists, however underformalized — and to manage it within its anti-obelisk of data centers and make it a medium for reflexive action on the world now rendered as a computational plateau. We rotate from the system of objects to an economy of metadata. If mass mediation and information scarcity once demanded the architecture of formal ideological systems, now governance is predicated on the differential management of open and closed data sets, still also realized as animal violence. The care of any archive is one present moment ’ s self-accounting toward an unknowable future — an ethics — and a database is just a particularly active kind of archive, one for which information that is drawn from the world more easily becomes an instrument for working reflexively back on it. It ’ s unclear though if the shift from scarce, sacred texts to overabundant, instantaneously archivable information still requires the same promise of ethical completion to motivate and justify our participation and promise toward the future. We could act as if it does, until we find out.
Across this span, we are confronted with both a surplus of new worlds and a lack of clear civilizational frontiers, other than those simulated by various senile medievalisms now in ascendance. Can we survive that? Can we address the openings closest at hand fast enough that they generate new geographies before we can ruin them? The curation of these dysfunctional archives directs our attention onto geodesign projects beyond our economic comprehension, because after all, humans have already redesigned the Earth (The Stack is itself a reflection of that dubious accomplishment), and it took all our capital since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to do it. The Anthropocene should represent a shift in our worldview, one fatal to many of the humanities ’ internal monologues, but it is also the broadest clich é , one favored by business journalists and know-nothing primitivists alike. In just the century of industrialization, or centuries since wide-scale agriculture, we ’ ve managed such a radical transformation in life on the planet ’ s crust — climate change, population growth, deforestation, ocean acidification, asphaltization, massive extinction, mega-urbanization — that we ’ ve finally smothered it whole and brought a new geologic era named after the pervasive and permanent impact of the human genome on the geophysical profile of the Earth ’ s crust and atmosphere. The bad news is evidenced by the longer odds we hang over our own heads, filling markets with promissory notes to extract and rationalize more natural resources than may actually exist. The good news is that we know for certain that short-term “ geoengineering ” is not only possible but in a way inevitable, but how so? How and by whom does it go, and unfortunately for us the answer (perhaps) must arrive before we can properly articulate the question. For the darker scenarios, macroeconomics completes its metamorphosis into ecophagy, as the discovery of market failures becomes simultaneously the discovery of limits of planetary sinks (e.g., carbon, heat, waste, entropy, populist politics) and vice versa; The Stack becomes our dakhma. <sup>7</sup> The shared condition, if there is one, is the mutual unspeakability and unrecognizability that occupies the seat once reserved for Kantian cosmopolitanism, now just a pre-event reception for a collective death that we will actually be able to witness and experience. We shuffle along, soggy-footed. For the brighter scenario, Shanzhai nanotechnologies may save us from the gray goo of the landfills, putting them back to work, allowing us to make and buy unnamable assemblages with no relation to our needs or wants, forcing the world ’ s supply chain algorithms to go haywire, not knowing how to model this or that impulse, or what to stock on shelf interfaces, putting dog food next to hex wrenches with peach syrup on top, and for this, the logistical absolute would careen toward universal molecular flux. <sup>8</sup> Put another way, The Stack ’ s infrastructure failure interdependencies include the provision of secure potable water. While many platform states may exercise monopoly control over interfacial exception within their gardened walls, they have no monopoly on monopolies, and so, opt out to where? The Apollo program ’ s Apollonian planetary photography may have rendered an eco-calculative interiority, but the outside didn ’ t end there on that day; for both left and right politics, that outside was always an illusion of geocentric ideological habits.
The Black Stack
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