- Cerf is now chief scientist at Google and hard at work on, among other things, the embryonic “ interplanetary Internet, ” which seeks to account for the unique network design problems posed by slow lunar orbits, message delays due to interstellar lag in the speed of light, and so forth. As discussed in the Address chapter, the specification and implementation of IP version 6 addressing systems, with which he is also deeply involved, plays a crucial role in the material future of The Stack.
- Andrew L. Russell, “ OSI: The Internet That Wasn ’ t, ” IEEE Spectrum, June 30, 2013, http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt.
- The model platform Stack is not a perfect correlation with the “ real stacks ” that cohere the global Internet, nor is it meant to be. It is a heuristic, a diagram that is only as useful as what work it is asked to do. This leeway allows for considering how it could function in different ways. Unlike some models, such as OSI, which allow the passage of information only between adjacent layers, up and down or between sibling layers at the same level in adjacent stacks, the inexhaustibility of any layer suggests that The Stack might extend a conditional and exceptional promiscuity of direct communication between nonadjacent layers (e.g., Address directly to Cloud, User to Earth). It need not necessarily evolve into this kind of open totality, but potential contact between the technologies gathered in remote layers is a contingency continuously provoked by the persistent exception of the reversible border (usually most visible in the flip-flops of in and out at the Interface layer). We can speculate that the filtering, codifying, and governing of this eccentric splicing between layers of the platform not only implies very different design agenda but perhaps an as-yet-to-be-articulated geopolitics and geophilosophy as well.
- This parallels in many ways Jussi Parrika, The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Earth Layer
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