The aspect of this book that qualifies as a design brief hinges on how The Stack is already a larval geopolitical architecture and how its refashioning requires unexpected and uncomfortable redefinitions of what geopolitics might entail. As discussed above, The Stack is at once a machine that becomes a state, and a political geography that derives and is derived from the structure of that machine. The Stack includes all the various planetary computational technologies we now build with fanfare, but its significance is its reflection of the totality that emerges unintentionally. The platform sovereignties that it enables emerge in relation to material systems opened to the subjective image of all User positions and identities that cohere around them. In exploring the active contradictions of sovereignty in relation to emergent planetaryscale computation, we need a diagram of the global Stack that we have as it actually is (e.g., electricity grids, mineral sourcing, strange interfaces, smart and dumb cities, alien users) to give a technical specificity to our speculations on geopolitical and geosocial alternatives, but also to better abstract its scattered technical heterogeneity into a fungible totality. What binds that analysis and that design to one another is that while The Stack is a platform for computational networks and economies, it is also a metaplatform that works to gather, support, and superimpose multiple totalities at once (e.g., states, Cloud platforms, cities, projective political theologies). Each of these positions is itself in slippery contact with The Stack ’ s layers, circumscribed by one and shuttled between several. In so doing, it has repositioned itself in relation to other little totalities along the way, creating and claiming some part of the territory of planetary computation.
Platform and Stack, Model and Machine
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