The diagram of The Stack in figure 3.1 shows a vertical-sectional relationship between possible positions occupying all six layers at once. It demonstrates that while positions on layers are held simultaneously, each layer governs that position semiautonomously. In the practice of real communication, any one instance of such a stack works only in combination with another, and in this pairing, the real social form of active stacks comes into focus. That structure of connection and communication is similar to OSI or TCP/IP. Connections tunnel down, across, and back up stacks, creating temporary circuit-like connections in a U-shaped trajectory. User connects to User by initiating a “ message ” that tunnels all the way down through the other layers to the bottom and then back up again, and so direct communication between Users activates all six layers down The Stack and then all six layers again back up The Stack. The whole of the system is invoked and activated by any one connection; the whole is “ folded ” into each single instance of activation, bending the universal and the particular into one another. We define any one such path taken down and up The Stack in a U-shaped trajectory as a column. For one “ session, ” however fleeting or stable, columns fix one User to another by linking layers to those above and below into a whole, but they allow anyone or anything that is a User to initiate (or be initiated by) as many other simultaneous columns as needed. That is, as any given column tracks up and down, there is no final instance of vertical or horizontal integration that would truly and ultimately resolve a User down to the Earth layer or Cloud layer for good. Any one User will initiate millions of different columns at different moments over time, thereby executing different combinations of nested positions. This slipperiness does not correspond well with modern logics of last-instance sovereignty and citizenship. It ’ s not that there is no “ there there ” but rather that moment to moment, there are too many “ theres ” for any one sovereign geography to finally decide all the others.
At the top of any column, a User (animal, vegetable, or mineral) would occupy its own unique position and from there activate an Interface to manipulate things with particular Addresses, which are embedded in the land, sea, and air of urban surfaces on the City layer, all of which can process, store, and deliver data according to the computational capacity and legal dictates of a Cloud platform, which itself drinks from the Earth layer ’ s energy reserves drawn into its data centers. Paths between layers are sutured by specific protocols for sending and receiving information to each other, up and down, that do the work of translating between unlike technologies gathered at each plateau. In this sense, each layer can then simulate and countersimulate the operations of the other (for Users, Interfaces “ simulate ” the instrumental capacities of the entire Stack, as the hard and soft networks of the Cloud and City are “ translated ” one into the other). Their interlocking adherence to standard protocols guarantees the linking of information up and down and between like layers (or even skipping layers occasionally), and for this, an external application can enter into The Stack at any level and begin to move between levels from that starting point. Any path from top to bottom is but one possible route among many others. For example, one path from Interface to Address may be very different from another from Address to City. There are any number of possible links between User to Address, Interface to Cloud, and Earth to City, or horizontally between the same layer of two stacks (i.e., City to City). The durable form of one layer, in one context, might enable or prevent variation within another layer, because different layers function with a contingent whole with greater or lesser degrees of stability or variability. For example, identical configurations on the Cloud layer of column may link very different contexts on the User layer that is necessarily more responsive to dynamic cultural nuances.
Platform and Stack, Model and Machine
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