My conclusions are speculative and meant to inform and support further design of these systems. Like any other good theoretical design research, it handles slippery problems in ways that are provisional, prototypical, and provocative — not necessarily policy (yet). The story arc begins by tracing the political division of earthly territories — land, sea, and air among them. Throughout history, each arrangement of those divisions expresses a particular and evolving geometry of sovereign space and a specific topology of segmentation and jurisdiction, and because these orders are unfixed, they are also redesignable. <sup>5</sup> It becomes clear, for example, that the stability of geopolitical architectures based on the land-bounded nation-state as the indispensable unit of sovereignty is continually undermined by its own successes and exceptions (and with them, many political identities are as well). I argue that in order to account for the real effects of planetary-scale computation and to make it accountable as a designable platform, a decentering of some conventional ideas about political geographic norms is necessary. Maps of horizontal global space can ’ t account for all the overlapping layers that create a thickened vertical jurisdictional complexity, or for how we already use them to design and govern our worlds. Instead of lamenting all the exceptions to the norm, hoping that they will get back in the box where they belong, perhaps it is time to map a new normal. Toward conceiving an alternative geometry of political geography, looking forward more than backward, this book considers the model of The Stack.
I propose The Stack as a way that we might map political geography, but also for how we understand the technologies that are making that geography. Planetary-scale computation takes different forms at different scales — energy and mineral sourcing and grids; subterranean cloud infrastructure; urban software and public service privatization; massive universal addressing systems; interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand, of the eye, or dissolved into objects; users both over-outlined by self-quantification and also exploded by the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Instead of seeing all of these as a hodgepodge of different species of computing, spinning out on their own at different scales and tempos, we should see them as forming a coherent and interdependent whole. These technologies align, layer by layer, into something like a vast, if also incomplete, pervasive if also irregular, software and hardware Stack. To be clear, this figure of The Stack both does and does not exist as such; it is both an idea and a thing; it is a machine that serves as a schema as much as it is a schema of machines. It lets us see that all of these different machines are parts of a greater machine, and perhaps the diagrammatic image of a totality that such a perspective provides would, as theories of totality have before, make the composition of alternatives — including new sovereignties and new forms of governance — both more legible and more effective. As the shape of political geography and the architecture of planetary-scale computation as a whole, The Stack is an accidental megastructure , one that we are building both deliberately and unwittingly and is in turn building us in its own image. While it names the organization of a planetary-scale computing infrastructure, my purpose is to leverage it toward a broader program for platform design. In the depiction of this incipient megastructure, we can see not just new machines but also still-embryonic geopolitical institutions and social systems as well. For these, The Stack is powerful and dangerous, both remedy and poison, a utopian and dystopian machine at once (it can go either way, and as Buckminster Fuller said, it will be touch and go until the last instant). As a model, The Stack is simultaneously a portrait of the system we have but perhaps do not recognize, and an antecedent of a future territory, and with both at hand, we hope to prototype the alien cosmopolitanisms these engender for us and suggest to us.
4
Introduction