There are important lessons for The Stack from this history. By the relative simplicity and rigidity of a modular architecture of translation, the platform gathered unlike and unforeseeable users into its media, and only by translating any “ content ” into generic information can it provide the effective universality of communication and exchange. This gathering of unlike Users into a central system that can then govern the terms of infrastructural and platform participation largely depends on how well it makes use of computational ubiquity to amplify the agency of all the nodes, wherever they may be. Perhaps most important, despite the fact that TCP/IP was intentionally authored as a scalable platform, it rose to preeminence in the governance of networks not because it was the most perfect, or because everyone voted for it, or because it was the most legally sound; rather, it just worked to tactically glue together lots of different things at different scales into more manageable and valuable forms. The same is basically true of The Stack as an accidental megastructure. There was no one commission or council whose vision authored it (though versions of it have appeared in dreams and nightmares for centuries). Its layers “ just worked ” for Users and platforms to make immediate tactical gains, and the accumulation of these trillions of maneuvers terraformed the planet. As for “ the Internet, ” we still can ’ t really point to it as one network, or one technology, or one stack. It is a conceptual assemblage of billions and billions of little machines that we treat as one thing. The Stack, as well, doesn ’ t really exist per se, and yet there it is.
The Stack is an engine for thinking and building. The architectural metaphor may suggest an exclusive design for one given site, but it should direct us instead toward a geometry in which different things occupy the same site at the same time and cohere into a stable system because of this co-overlapping. The Stack is built of real things, but how we conceptualize its totality depends on powers of aesthetic abstraction. While machinic networks demand their own recognition and when formalized these become infrastructural and platform sovereignties, the Stack diagrams these as techniques to use (or refuse) alternative political geographies but never allows for simplistic one-to-one correlations between one layer and one geopolitical operator. I am not suggesting, for example, that China functions “ like ” the physical layer of the OSI model or that Google functions “ like ” the application layer . Rather, different organs of state and Cloud platforms intersect jaggedly. Their intersections on multiple layers (e.g., Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User) can be understood through the model lens of The Stack, not just as an unaccountable proliferation of exceptional enclaves, exclaves, and liminal legal zones, but also as the topos (if not nomos) of a normative order in which these very “ exceptions ” are regularized. It is a political geography for which the vertical is on equal footing with the horizontal and demanding its overdue tribute (their crisscrossing piling of jurisdictions, on-platform and off-platform, not only works through The Stack; it is a stack). State and nonstate Cloud platforms can operate both independently and interdependently, but their position is always now in relation to one another and to what is above and below them. Our model is, we hope, both a schematic map of this dynamic and a means for its retooling; it is infrastructure that is also simultaneously a projective interface for its own recomposition and for a geopolitics-to-come. It is a space of deep addressability nominating and enumerating Users and interlocking their traces easily or uneasily across unnatural scales. Layers are delimited like borderlines, invisible membranes just as arbitrary as their enforcements, but as they gather unlike technologies into their own level, they also fold their lines around them into a frame. Especially at the Interface layer that draws Users into the fold, their lines exude platform sovereignty through an intrinsic reversibility. This nomic principle of The Stack persists.
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Platform and Stack, Model and Machine