While systems that arguably operate as platforms might be found in every culture, where does the concept of platform come from, specifically in relation to the development of modern machines? The etymology of platform refers to a “ plan of action, scheme, design ” and, from the Middle French, platte form, or, literally, a plateau or raised level surface. As Benedict Singleton writes, this conjoined with the plot, which itself first implies a plot of land. Once situated on the platform of the stage, the “ plot ” becomes a more abstract structure that situates characters into the forgone conclusion of its unfolding, even as they suffer the choices that aren ’ t really theirs to make. As Singleton would have it, here the plot is a diagram that ensnares the Users of the platform in its designs. <sup>5</sup> By at least 1803, platform takes on more explicitly political meaning, as in a “ statement of party policies. ” All three of these connotations (platform as a plan of action, as a stage for a plot, and as proposed rules governance) are important for understanding The Stack as a platform and for platform sovereignty in general. One is set of instructions, one is a situated place where action is played out according to plan, and one is a framework for a political architecture. Already these connotations are slipping and sliding into one another.
Now consider the word program. Its etymology refers first to a “ public edict, ” and in the early modern era, it also comes to mean variously a plan or scheme, a list of events to be presented, a menu of proposed political ideas, and a way to organize how people will occupy architectural space. Only after World War II does “ to program ” mean “ to write software. ” For architecture, computation, and politics, the “ program ” has central significance as a design problem and governing technique. The triangulation of designed site, designed action, and designed polis traces that of “ plot ” : platform and program overlay one another asymmetrically. For example, an architectural program might be defined as an intended organization of Interfaces in a particular arrangement so as to coordinate social contact and interaction (or prevent it). As a diagrammatic image, an architectural program indexes the significance of that organization. A software program is a set of instructions that a designer gives to computational systems with the intention of coordinating that system ’ s internal and external interfaces in relation to itself, to compatible systems, and to Users. An interfacial image of that program, usually the graphical user interface (GUI), summarizes, reduces, and makes those instructions significant for Users. And clearly today, these two kinds of programs intermingle. In many respects, what society used to ask of architecture — the programmatic organization of social connection and disconnection of populations in space and time — it now (also) asks of software. We will return to that shift more than once in the following chapters, and we will have to question what is or isn ’ t the remaining work of physical architecture in light of this. Among what remains is the active contingency of programs, both hard and soft.
Platform and Stack, Model and Machine
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