- Digestion
In the dynamic between natural computation expressing itself through artificial computing machines and those machines in turn remaking the world, each bends and countersimulates itself awkwardly and incompletely in the other. The Earth layer is shaped by this irregular and perhaps unsustainable interplay between the one and the other — sensing, drawing, enumerating, consuming, effecting. While it is a mistake to imagine computation as something that just sprang into existence with the rise of computing machines, or as the superimposition of some synthetic layer on top of everything organic and analogous and ultimately separate from natural algorithmic processes, it is also wrong to imagine computation as existing on a dry virtual plane sealed off from wet economies of energy, water, arbitrary valuation, remote capture, and geographic chance. So irrespective of the mathematical limits of algorithmic reason, The Stack is interested instead in the limited and sufficient compositional capacities of a megastructure already under construction, the thresholds of which are geological, sociological, economic, chemical, and geopolitical as much as they are calculative. This chapter draws on those limits and on the risks that come with positioning the Earth as a layer in a synthetic machine, and for this Earth is the Earth— a physical planet — not a metaphor for “ nature. ” There is no planetary-scale computation, now a vast network of many billions of little Turing machines, that does not intake and absorb the Earth ’ s chemistry in order to function. The Stack is a hungry machine, and while its curated population of algorithms may be all but massless, their processing of Earthly material is a physical event, and therefore the range of possible translations between information and mechanical appetites has another limit that is not mathematical but defined by the real finitude of substances that can force communication between both sides of this encounter. <sup>20</sup> Furthermore, like any megamachine the Earth layer is as socially constrained as it is technologically configured, and so there are political economies of Turing machines that are only accessible through misaligned and uneven hierarchies of geography, energy, and programmability. <sup>21</sup>
Earth Layer
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