First, the Earth layer provides a physical foundation for The Stack. This chapter begins by considering the agency of silica as a computational substrate and how the classical idea of a universal granularity of atomic matter has framed how we understand the physics (and metaphysics) of computation. It argues for a foregrounding of the geological substrate of computational hardware and of the geopolitics of mineral and resource flows of extraction, consumption, and discarding. <sup>34</sup> It examines arguments regarding the ultimate energy sourcing and routing necessary for planetary computational infrastructure and the paradoxes posed by the race to build smart grids capable of supporting its continuance and maturation. In important ways, it is possible for us to sense, quantify, and predict ecological precariousness through Stack technologies, and yet the production and feeding of those same systems are also key contributors to those same risks. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the knotty problems of ecological governance and the issues posed by turning the ecology itself into a kind of final, ambient emergency.
The Cloud layer chapter discusses the vast server archipelagoes behind the scenes and behind the surface that provide ubiquitous computational services as well as the geopolitical intrigue that involves them. It includes in this the entire infrastructural complex of server farms, massive databases, energy sources, optical cables, wireless transmission media, and distributed applications. It focuses on the conflicts arising from the juxtaposition and superimposition of state geography and cloud platforms (i.e., the Google-China conflict) and on how the evolution of states into cloud platforms extends and complicates the locations of infrastructural and legal sovereignty. The chapter also compares several existing Cloud platforms as models for alternative Cloud polities.
The City layer of The Stack comprises the environment of discontinuous megacities and meganetworks that situate human settlement and mobility in the combination of physical and virtual envelopes. These partition and subdivide access to urban space, but in their generic comprehensiveness, they may also provide for forms of accidental cosmopolitanism, ones derived not from parliamentary certificates but from a shared physical relationship to pervasive infrastructure. We also examine the urban-scale imprints of major Cloud platforms and how their physical postures and positions disclose specific geopolitical imaginaries.
Now closer to the scale of familiar objects and interactions, the Address layer examines massively granular universal addressing systems such as IPv6 (Internet Protocol version six) (including cryptographically generated hash addresses), which would allow for a truly abyssal volume of individual addressees. Such individuated addresses make any thing or event appear to the Cloud as a communicable entity, and for The Stack, computation then becomes a potential property of addressed objects, places, and events, and a medium through which any of these can directly interact with any other. While scenarios for ubiquitous computing and an “ Internet of Things ” suggest information exchange between “ smart ” natural objects, what I refer to as “ deep address, ” is interested in communication between very different spatial and temporal scales, absorbing any addressable “ haecceity ” into vast, if also fragile, communicative fields that may exceed the limits of conventional control or literacy.
70
Platform and Stack, Model and Machine