Shifting down from mathematics to mere algorithms, this oscillation in perspective may parallel how we situate artificial planetary-scale computing, such as The Stack, in relation to the rest of the physical world. The latter is already a “ first ” planetary computer on top of which our far less capable synthetic copy has been laid down or, perhaps it is an intensively organized local manifestation of a general geocomputational evolutionary landscape that could be rendered in silicon or carbon or hydrogen at different times in different ways. The former might be inclined to see calculation in or on the world, and the latter to see the world as taking shape through the (negative) swerve of bits in the first place, and calculation as the world. For one, technology may or may not affirm the world (even without our having access), and for the other, the rest of the world sets forth its own machines to access us (who are also — lovingly — real machines). I wonder then whether this is why machines that rely heavily on software to achieve their utility are seen as more artificial, as layered onto the real, than those that work through analogic mechanical operation, which are more likely to be seen as within the real? <sup>17</sup> For me, what is at stake is not philosophy or physics but the means by which we abstract actual work into intelligence and back again according to ideas of preferred function and outcomes. As the last starting point, design of the next Stack must not define itself by a symbolic or operational opposition between the virtual and the real, or the soft and the hard (or even the thinking and the unthinking). It must work with both the positive assembly of matter in the void, on the plane and in the world, and also with the negative maneuver of information as the world, from its form and through its air.
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The Black Stack