{"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":14,"pdf_page":32,"physical_index":32,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"fa64e339b6a56d0c698c020536e418507130979bd7d5080b22ead166f82085e4"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"We need ways to account for the intersecting complexities of computational globalization, its thickened geographies, its mysterious weaving of geometries of governance and territory, seen on their own terms, not as transgressions of some other system. The emergence of computation as global infrastructure contributes to an ungluing and delamination of land, governance, and territory, one from another. <sup>12</sup> Accordingly, sovereignty is now less guaranteed by the conceptual resolution of the flattened geopolitical plane as offered by the Westphalian nation-state system, but that does not mean that takes leave. As said, that particular compromise on the delimited monopoly over sovereign space is unbuttoned from its mooring, perhaps only to be refastened even tighter in another way. Indeed the appetite of the state is rejuvenated by the same processes of computation that delink modern sovereignty and geography and challenge that particular consensual framework. The state ’ s own future is to be decided through its own negotiation of encounters with the challenges posed by planetary-scale computation to its geographic and jurisdictional legacies. The state continues by extending up and down into the new scales offered by multiple interdependent layers of The Stack, which sometimes do not blend into one form, but rather produce unresolved compound images and unresolved compound worlds, jurisdictions, frontlines, and boundaries. The gaps opened up by this rotation, a simultaneous coming undone and refortification, is where the reprogrammability of things plays out. The touchpoints between these layers make substitute locations and addresses, variously new and primeval; they are translations, wet with life, descriptive and consistent with what can be repeated over and again as governance. Squinting hard to make out the contours as they slip and slide off the map, we realize that only a blur provides for an accurate picture of what is going on now and to come. For better or worse, blur is what they are and what they do. Our description of a system in advance of its appearance maps what we can see but cannot articulate, on the one hand, versus what we know to articulate but cannot yet see, on the other. This oscillation between the real-but-as-yet-unnamed and the imagined-but-as-yet-not-real — this blur between them — might sustain the necessary challenges to the imagination and even enforce what it conceives, a giving way to compound images and sectional perspectives: to stacks.\n\nFor this investigation, that compound image is articulated through the lens of computation operating at planetary scale (which it does very unevenly). But this is also exactly what makes the question of that future more difficult to ask with precision because it is also too easy to ask. <sup>13</sup> To say that the future of geopolitics is a function of the future of computation is to risk saying nothing at all or, worse, to repeat everything that shouldn ’ t have been said in the first place. Isn ’ t the conflation of globalization with “ digital, ” under a rubric that cajoles allegiance to a computational teleology, today ’ s quintessential nonthought, a mere sequencing of the most obvious into something that stands for history because it renders the mundane for us at a historical scale? Yes. Yet if looking from the future at the present instead of the present for the future, we were to consider that exact situation from the virtual perspective of a world already utterly realigned, we would see plainly that a fundamental and computationally determined realignment of our world is already well underway. Where it goes is anything but settled, and today ’ s official futurism may have little to contribute when all is said and done. We can, however, say a few things about where it goes with some confidence. This future-antecedent revision of political geography owes itself to a calibrated repetition, a desimulation, of the blur noted above in at least two ways. First, it is realized within a tangible geographic agency of material computation, a physical information geology, that is already at work, already spoken about ad nauseam and so therefore escapes adequate description; second, it is today latent in some possible articulation that could give it formal composability in advance. We can hope that even as the blur confounds, that we designate it further so that it can design us in the course of its own articulation. It may be that our predicament is that we cannot design the next political geography of planetary computation until it more fully designs us in its own image or, in other words, that the critical dependence of the future ’ s futurity is that we are not yet available for it! It is less that the contemporary hyperbole for computational globalization is a lie, that it doesn ’ t truthfully describe what it purports to map, but that what it maps doesn ’ t yet exist. The difficulty in formulating a sufficient geopolity is a function of both what we think we know it has done (but don ’ t actually know because it hasn ’ t done that yet) and of what it has done and will do (but which we don ’ t know and actually don ’ t know how to know). Unfortunately, for learning how to know it, direct amplification in the intensity and resolution of our answers to the inevitably wrong questions will not help us.\n\n14\n\nIntroduction","previous_page":13,"next_page":15}