The design of protocols, platforms and programs can be as speculative as needed, but the generativity of standards remains. Protocological interoperability works not only to componentize tangible things, but also to represent undetermined relations between things, events, and locations and to provide the means to compose that traffic in advance. In some cases, these are formal notational systems, and the most ingenious are not always the most widely adopted, and sometimes those adopted become so naturalized that they disappear into the fabric. <sup>7</sup> By design, systemic standardization is enforced by fixed physical measurement and procedure, and perhaps here most particularly, the paradoxical tendency of platforms to control and decontrol at the same time is most evident. For example, the formal urban grid in a major city is for the most part rigid and inflexible, but precisely because of this linear and universally authoritarian topography, it affords both maximum tumult of dynamic horizontal interchange in the street plan as well as vertical recombinant programmatic complexity in the skyscrapers that pop up in each of its cells (more on this in the City layer chapter). <sup>8</sup> Similarly, it is the legal and practical standard size of the humble paper envelope that makes it possible for it to shuttle messages both discrete and discreet; like the urban grid, the envelope ’ s power is in its dumbness. In the 1970s as the world ’ s cities began to more fully merge into the networked hierarchies of today with the widespread standardization of very-large-scale envelopes, made of steel instead of paper, in the form of fixed proportion and attribute shipping containers. Containerization migrated the packet switching from telecommunications onto the transit of physical objects (or perhaps the other way around). It traded the standardized, linear traffic program of the grounded asphalt grid for another, now smoothed into liquid shipping lanes, pacing big packets of objects back and forth across the avenues of oceans.
Platform and Stack, Model and Machine
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