The Earth layer of The Stack is defined by this risk, also perhaps its most critical (and paradoxical) measurement and prediction challenge: the energy costs of planetary-scale computation on one side of the scale versus the energy savings of Internet on the other, the latter either rescuing us from the former or instead guaranteeing a catastrophe already underway. We may conclude that investment must be accelerated so that the costs of building The Stack do not sink the whole enterprise of industrial civilization, but if the energy and carbon costs of The Stack are too great to pay for the construction of the new grids, then the new grids cannot save us from the effects of those same costs. The Stack is in a race against its own physics, like a long-distance spaceship that must carry a prohibitive excess of fuel just to push the weight of that prohibitive excess of fuel. <sup>59</sup> If disaster calls, The Stack would also itself be a causality of its own potentially disastrous impacts. Its own machines and materials are also vulnerable to the foreseeable and unforeseeable disruptions brought by the climate change that its own appetite would exacerbate and ensure. “ The rainfall from Typhoon Morakot caused rivers to flood in Taiwan flushing large volumes of sediment into the ocean. This led to several submarine landslides which broke at least nine communications cables 4000m down. It disrupted the Internet and telecommunications between Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and other parts of Southeast Asia ” <sup>60</sup> Flooded data centers and compromised undersea cables can knock out whole networks, which is especially concerning when you realize that “ over 95% of global communications traffic is handled by just 1 million km of undersea fiber-optic cable. Rising sea levels increase the risk of flooding of coastal cable facilities and may also affect the stability of the seabed, making cables even more vulnerable. ” The really smart grid is the one that still works once the climatic effects of its construction come back to bite. In the composition of The Stack, we are conducting an experimental live-fire exercise on its Earth layer. Will the armature of The Stack organize a resilient computational geopolitics, or will its own energy thirst, ecological impact, and toxic production footprint finally overwhelm all, leaving behind elaborate labyrinthine ruins? Will planetary-scale computing prove to be, in some guise, the metaplatform of an alternative counterindustrialization, full of effervescent interfaces of metabolic exchange, or instead will it be the final machine, drawing us into its self-immolation?
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Earth Layer