{"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":148,"pdf_page":164,"physical_index":164,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2db9ea80d601afb3ccf9758f1d4a7483e2b59436ef5deefc1ef02c1ceca42bae"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"The contemporary “ mediascape ” has given such primacy of place to communication that it has transformed it into substance itself, the very material of which we, and our world, are made. Yet all biological substance is founded on signaling, from the first single-cell organisms nearly 3 billion years ago to the most sophisticated forms of human social life today. There is no family of animal that is not defined by its capacities for signaling and no ecological niche that is not defined by the infrastructure that supports this signaling. When the human line broke off from its ape ancestors it was a result of a new capacity for communication (a new hand-eye-brain-mouth machine) and the rise of a new signaling niche in the environment to be filled (the long distance savannah). <sup>5</sup>\n\nArchitecture at landscape scale, whether as continuous networked urban fabrics or as withdrawn megastructure, is a particularly important communications infrastructure, in harmony or dissonance with those tunings and countertunings of tools and perception. In this guise, The Stack enrolls the city as a discrete layer within its larger sum by the binding of sensation and scale with enclosure and envelope and by pairing the tactility of the virtual with the effervescence of the monumental. As such, architecture itself serves as both a compositional model for stacks and stacking and as the tangible infrastructure for its manifestation as cities. While it captures humans and consoles them within walls, it also provides boulevards of escape toward other urban interiors, and at least in this way, the City layer of The Stack does not enforce dichotomies between urbanisms of enclosure and urbanisms of mobility as much as it combines them. One may turn into the other at any moment. For this project, the City layer ’ s basic building unit is the interfacial partition, the physical or virtual boundary that is made systematically reversible by the situation of its functions within larger computational systems. As we ’ ll see, it opens up and closes off urban spaces to different Users in different ways, allowing different City morphologies for some than it does for others, and in doing so, it generates and automates visceral first-person experiences of platform sovereignty, whether invited to do so or not.\n\n148\n\nCity Layer","previous_page":null,"next_page":149}