As for the geopolitics of computation, we can point to another shift, around 2008 or so. Before this break, the growth of planetary-scale computing systems was seen more generally as a beneficent blossoming. The old order would be swept away and a new day illuminated with the power of networks, iStuff, Twitter revolutions, “ Internet freedom, ” and smart cities. After this break, however, the sky darkened, and now the Cloud portends instead state surveillance, tax evasion, structural unemployment, troll culture, and flash crashes. Reality, however, is actually more radical in both directions. The thesis of this book holds that the official utopia and the official dystopia are not particularly useful frames of reference, and that neither provide a robust and intelligent program for art, design, economics, or engineering. In fact, the messianic effervescence of the former and the apocalyptic panic of the latter are part of the problem. Today we lack adequate vocabularies to properly engage the operations of planetary-scale computation, and we make use of those at hand regardless of how poorly they serve us. After the cycles of positive and negative hype run their course, we discover that computation holds both more potential and more risk than we foresaw. Going forward, we really do need new and better models, because computation already operates in ways that have surpassed and overflowed the regular cartographies.
This book starts with the technologies themselves, abstracting from them a formal model that is general and comprehensive, but not complete or fixed. The model does not put technology “ inside ” a “ society, ” but sees a technological totality as the armature of the social itself. It does not focus on computation in the service of governance, or in resistance to governance, but rather on computation as governance. In the first chapter, I propose that we view the various types of planetary-scale computation (e.g., smart grids, cloud computing, mobile and urban-scale software, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing, and robotics, and so on) not as isolated, unrelated types of computation but as forming a larger, coherent whole. They form an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is not only a kind of planetary-scale computing system; it is also a new architecture for how we divide up the world into sovereign spaces. More specifically, this model is informed by the multilayered structure of software protocol stacks in which network technologies operate within a modular and interdependent vertical order. The model allegorizes the logic of stacks into a general principle of systems, and uses it to describe both the geometry by which a political geography is subdivided as well as the aggregate shape of the technologies that occupy those spaces. The Stack model is global but it is not immutable. To the contrary, it is intrinsically modular and so this megastructure is also a platform, and an interface even, for the redesign and replacement of the Stack-we-have with a Stack-we-want (or perhaps with the Stack-we-want-the-least).
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Preface