The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 87 页

1. From Global Surface to Planetary Skin

The Stack ’ s visual geography amplifies economies of mutual simulation between land, image, and interface by redefining the surface of the Earth as a living and governable epidermis, and recomposing that skin as a bio-informational matrix enrolled into other hard and soft systems. As a landscaping machine, The Stack combs and twists settled areas into freshly churned ground, enumerating input and output points and rerendering them as glassy planes of pure logistics. It wraps the globe in wires, making it into a knotty, incomplete ball of glass and copper twine, and also activates the electromagnetic spectrum overhead as another drawing medium, making it visible and interactive, limning the sky with colorful blinking aeroglyphs. ⁴⁰ The Stack walls off whole layers of that spectrum for private purposes by optimizing it through finer and finer atmospheric grids, turning location into geolocation and geolocation into application engineering. Its image of infrastructure and the infrastructure of the image flip-flop their respective works, repositioning geoscopy as geoaesthetics and geoaesthetics as geoeconomics. For example, the Earth layer also situates a network of telescopes “ looking out ” into space from many positions at once, so as create a composite “ false ” image of a portion of the universe. This technique, known as very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), creates a single discontiguous machine distributed among many countries, useful only if it is operated across multiple time zones at once. As a Stack geographic machine, Google Earth can be thought of as an inverse of VLBI, in that it looks inward instead of outward to create a composite “ false ” image of the distributed surface of the Earth by integrating the perspectives of multiple orbital satellite perspectives into one (interactive) visual totality. Standing for a global domain drawn in place, this mosaic draws Earth ’ s skin as an island to be measured and mastered. As it builds on the Apollo 8 image of figure and void, Google Earth amplifies it into a general-purpose application interface through which the User layer and Earth layer of The Stack seem to inform one another directly. ⁴¹ Here the geoaesthetics of Stack geo-graphy displays ecology as an archive to be indexed, cataloged, and sorted, and only then acted on (and as discussed in the Interface chapter, that archive is also made into an interface toward itself, provoking User-initiated feedback loops between icons and events).

Such Stack geographies both complicate and clarify the design of platform sovereignty, as much for what they make possible as for what they disrupt. Google ’ s mission statement, “ to organize the world ’ s information and to make it universally accessible and useful, ” changes meaning when the world itself is seen as being information, such that to organize all the information is to organize all the world. Furthermore, synthetic computation expands what is sensed, measured, calculated, communicated, stored, and worked on. That is, the ascendance of digital computing from a narrowly deployed, elite scientific-military instrument into a general-purpose planetary-scale consumer infrastructure shifting what states (and other systems of governance) can see, know, and affect, transforms it into an organ of organizational cognition. As sensing extends to all specific surfaces, no longer dumb but rather now affective, the net sum of spaces opened up or closed off by computation largely defines what it is that any governance platform now chooses to sense and not to sense in general. The information that is sensible to it is more often that not on the surfaces of the territory, intensifying governmental focus on them. Skin, after all, is the largest sensory organ of any animal body, composed of multiple dermal and epidermal layers holding organs together and mediating multiple layers of individual interiority and exteriority (the governance of skin will also figure prominently in the City chapter — in that case, urban skins and envelopes). ⁴²

Earth Layer

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