I conclude with some thoughts on The Stack-that-we-have and on what I call The Black Stack, a generic profile for its alternative totalities: the Stack-to-come. The Stack we have is defined not only by its form, its layers and platform, and their interrelations, but also by its content. As is now painfully clear, leak after leak, its content is also the content of our daily communications, now weaponized against us. If the panopticon effect is when you don ’ t know if you are being watched, and so you behave as if you are, then the inverse Panopticon effect is when you know you are being watched but act as if you aren ’ t. This is today ’ s surveillance culture: exhibitionism in bad faith. The emergence of Stack platforms doesn ’ t promise any solution or even distinctions between friend and enemy within this optical geopolitics. At some dark day in the future, when considered versus a Google Gosplan, the National Security Agency may even come to be seen by some as the “ public option. ” “ At least it is accountable in principle to some parliamentary limits, ” they will say, “ rather than merely stockholder to avarice and flimsy user agreements. ” If we take 9/11 and the rollout of the Patriot Act as year zero for the massive data-gathering, encapsulation, and digestion campaign by the United States (one that we are only now beginning to comprehend, even as parallel projects from China, Russia, and Europe are sure to come to the fore in time), then we could imagine the entirety of network communication for the last decade — the big haul — as a single deep and wide digital simulation of the world (or a significant section of it). It is an archive, a library of the real. Its existence as the purloined property of a state, just as a physical fact, is almost occult. Almost.
The geophilosophical profile of the big haul, from the energy necessary to preserve it to its governing instrumentality understood as both a text (a very large text) and a machine with various utilities, overflows the traditional politics of software. <sup>24</sup> Its story is much more Borges than Lawrence Lessig. Its fate is as well. Can it be destroyed? Is it possible to delete this simulation, and is it desirable to do so? Is there a trash can big enough for the Big Delete? Even if the plug could be pulled on all future data hauls, stopping it all immediately, surely there must be a backup somewhere, the identical double of the simulation, such that if we delete one, the other will be forever haunting history until it is rediscovered by future AI archaeologists interested in their own
The Black Stack
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