The Earth layer is also made from the Earth itself, as the terraforming imperative of the Stack megastructure disembowels geological resources toward global conversions. These industrial processes are also as a kind of composition, one for which alternative geoaesthetics may point toward different outcomes. We will also consider how computational infrastructures at the Earth layer extend the planet ’ s capacities to sense and monitor its own energy usage by augmenting its “ skin. ” This is represented by grids that can rationalize energy use, but themselves may demand fatally large amounts of energy to construct. These contradictions contribute to uneven realignments of geopolitical jurisdiction according to the opposed positions of energy-producing geographies that most directly cause climate change and of those most affected by it. For The Stack, the identification, quantification, management, visualization, and provision of energy may serve as the last instance referent of economic value, and it may in time force the evolution of a platform capable of composing and governing such a system. This in turn may put the design of the Earth layer of The Stack in the untenable position of working on behalf of the exceptional “ emergencies ” that most threaten the platform ’ s coherency, such that in the decades to come, the self-amplifying logics of ecological governance demand not only geoengineering, but also incredible computational energy capture-and-distribution megastructures far beyond our current capabilities.
- Discovering or Inventing Computation?
For the relationship between computation and its terrestrial substrate, the Earth, it is never easy to separate metaphor from physics, and so for my thesis, their conceptual interrelation is perhaps just as important as their material involvements. The Earth layer of The Stack draws from both the conceptual and the material, not by collapsing them into one so much as tracing ever-thickening lines back and forth between them. As I imagine those lines thickening, I become immersed in a photograph of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, taken during a visit to Big Sur in the mid-1970s, as he sits on the California beach examining its sands and the breathing striations of the silica terrain. <sup>4</sup> The world remaking itself in waves, bit by bit and pebble by pebble. In trying to place the image, I also think about how just up the 101 freeway from where Deleuze was sitting, silicon was being repurposed as the physical medium of synthetic computational intelligence, in the areas near Palo Alto in a “ valley ” already having been named in honor of this element. For me these are conjoined, and not just by their geographic proximity: Deleuze on the beach contemplating (we might assume) what he called “ the plane of immanence, ” the field from which all potential forms emerge, and
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Earth Layer