User Interface Address City Cloud Earth
- The Layers of The Stack
How does this work? What is the model exactly? The Stack is divided into six layers, moving from the global to the local, from geochemical up to the phenomenological: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User. For The Stack, multiple layers co-occupy the same terrestrial location (horizontally) but gather and subdivide their processes vertically into discrete machinic “ jurisdictions. ” That subdivisional geography is bound within the mechanism of the platform, but at the same time, The Stack platform itself disturbs existing models of jurisdiction and projects its own out into the world. Each layer configures and coheres its own specific forms of governance over what it touches, and so the difference between one layer and another is also a difference between those forms and processes. That is, the Cloud layer is defined by certain spatial and temporal demands that include what we conventionally recognize as Cloud infrastructure (e.g., data centers, fiber optics, and in-browser applications), but those demands may press on rather unlike things as well (parking spaces, medical equipment, food supply statistics). The six chapters that follow discuss each one of these layers in sequence, detailing especially how each produces its own governing logics of scale, physicality, textuality, embodiment, force, motion, stability, and, perhaps most important, how each of these logics provides productive accidents that may direct us toward unexpected design outcomes.
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Platform and Stack, Model and Machine