{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":101,"pdf_page":117,"physical_index":117,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"91871353f906afe9a71b55b9dec68a507b15c822ed98cf35433ebf82dd38bc0f"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"22. Designing for versus Designing with Emergencies\n\nMany of those design questions can be evaluated only by first evaluating the different positions in which they would situate the designer. There is a world of difference between designing for, against, or with these conflicts; as often as not, attempting one thing may result in an opposite outcome. The Earth layer is held in place by both an absolutist interest in computational transparency and the debilitating contradictions and ultimate impossibility of that transparency. Telescoping between planetary and atomic scales, The Stack introduces synthetic computation deep down, deep up, and deep into abyssal scales of intricate matter. That introduction can begin with the provision of an Address that allows a location to communicate data across scales, and that addressability may or may not be motivated by, for example, an avaricious splitting open of the world, from the atmosphere to the atom, toward a mandate of full-spectrum dominance. But programs for total capture are also vulnerable to their own comprehensiveness. Their interconnectedness can make them brittle. <sup>68</sup> The Stack works by vertical integration, across scales and across technological genres. This allows it to function as a core platform for multiple economies at once and to provide universal valuation and exchangeability only to the extent that participants can be represented as similar computational events. Because of this, it can also absorb, dissipate, and deflect forms of risk that might make any one layer more vulnerable, but at the same time, that integration can also distribute and amplify destabilizing forces and factors. This is not a bug; it is axiomatic of platform logics. In the constitution of a durable order through a hyperlinking of earthly energies and forms — things, people, words, cells, molecules — we recognize that this order can and will also be the generator of the disorder that it hopes to regulate. Philosopher Brian Massumi writes, “ The figure of today ’ s threat is the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing, systemically, self-amplifying threat of large scale disruption. The form of threat, fed by instability and metastability, is not only indiscriminate, it is also indiscriminable; it is indistinguishable from the general environment. ” The rough bargain of the universal platform, and of fullspectrum governmentality, is that the systemic feedback loops that give the structure life can also be dangerous or even fatal to the whole. For systems that link across scales, small events can quickly and unexpectedly scale up to threaten much larger processes, and supercomputing systems in particular not only provide no guarantee that they can contain those amplifying irruptions, they can easily magnify and intensify them. Besides rolling and interlocking component failure, the circularity of this infrastructural vulnerability is also the path by which the program of absolute transparency and computational omniscience comes to defeat itself by infinite regress.\n\nEarth Layer\n\n101","previous_page":100,"next_page":102}