- Stack as Political Machine
The emergence of planetary computation as a global and intelligent system can be traced in broad strokes from perhaps Roman and Chinese military accounting, to the first Victorian calculators through to today, and it is marked by celebrated breakthroughs as well as long-ignored dead ends, some of which are eventually celebrated retroactively. By their appearances on the scene, it seems that every globalizing communication network, from printed books to telegraphy, railroads, radio, telephony, and television, was celebrated (and lamented) as the coming of some universal political community, messianic or degenerate or both. In their formative years, new regimes of digital global media are as well invested and inflated with world-historical importance, as signaling the ultimate arrival of a too long postponed cosmopolitanism. (Both Hegel ’ s political time and Kant ’ s political space were themselves conceived in intimate proximity of that most modern of global mass media, the network body of the state, which would continue to reinvent its own anatomy in relation to new media regimes.) If we are more used to living so much of our lives inside the shells of planetary-scale computational networks, we also observe that the political realities of universal global information turn out to be far more problematic, more mundane, and unusual than envisioned, feared, and hoped for. This disappointment itself may be the most timely message of the medium, but not necessarily its most lasting. Perhaps the persistent utopianism around communications infrastructure still works, not because of how well it predicts the outcome of large-scale technological interventions, but because as the genesis of productive accidents, it is able to make room for otherwise unauthorized political and social forms in its wake. The Stack, like any other technology of such scale and significance, both constitutes a new political-geographic order and enforces an existing cultural-economic order already in place. <sup>16</sup> It does each in different ways and at different locations, and the untangling of these is part of the design brief. Toward this, we have to do more than map platforms; we have to learn to read them and interpret them.
Platform and Stack, Model and Machine
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