The Stack Refers to a transformation in the technical infrastructure of global systems, whereby planetary-scale computation has so thoroughly and fundamentally transformed the logics of political geography in its own image that it has produced new geographies and new territories that can enforce themselves. Unlike modern political geography, which divided up horizontal maps, Stack geography also vertically layers spaces on top of one another. Instead of surveying all the various forms of planetary-scaled computation — cloud computing, smart cities, ubiquitous computing, massive addressing systems, next-generation interfaces, nonhuman users, and so on — as different genres or species of computing, each off on its own, this model locates them on layers of a consolidated metaplatform, an accidental megastructure. We observe these bottomup from the Earth layer up to the User layer. Energy drawn from planetary resources at the Earth layer drives Cloud computation, and its global platforms organize new political topologies. The City layer is animated by those Cloud platforms from within, organizing things, events, and relations at the Address layer into Interfacial regimes that provide a window into the whole system for Users. Together these sectional layers comprise the larger apparatus: The Stack. The Stack is equally a descriptive system and a design model that may point us in a different direction from its current configuration. The Stack is a model for thinking about the technical arrangement of planetary computation as a coherent totality, as well as a conceptual model for thinking the contradictory and complex spaces that have been produced in its image. It is both a schema that refers to a technical system, and a technical system that demands different kinds of interpretive schema from us. It is a work of partially accidental geodesign that demands from us further, better deliberative geodesign.
Synthetic Catallaxy Popularized by Austrian school economics, catallaxy refers to the shared values, knowledge, information, and communication of those participating in a market economy. Friedrich Hayek employed the term to describe what he saw as an essential failure of planned economies, namely, that central planners could never know or process the real information exchange within an economy in such a way as to properly set prices or govern transactions. Contemporary Cloud platforms radically complicate any strong distinction between planned and market economies, with many setting prices, planning infrastructure, and modeling demand in real time, as well as making these same tools available to Users as they plan and transact. They represent in this way a kind of synthetic catallaxy.
User Layer The top layer of The Stack and the sixth from the bottom, just above the Interface layer. This layer situates how Users (e.g., human, animal, machine) view The Stack and that initiate chains of interaction (columns) up and down its layers, from Interface to Earth and back again. It is also the position at which The Stack views those Users. As such the “ user ” has represented a contemporary technical image of the self, sometimes reduced to utilitarian frames and also sometimes allowing for unexpected new kinds of platform sovereignty. This includes both the exaggerated depiction of self that the User position may provide, as well as its equally radically fractured or dissolved reflection in multiple layers of data. The User-subject is a position that can be occupied by anything (or pluralities, multitudes, and composites) capable of initiating a column, especially anything that can do so and respond to how The Stack communicates back to it. This generic universality of the User-subject is both how it can flatten or curtail the human experience of remote interactions and how it introduces otherwise unrepresented agents into mediated contact with the whole.
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