{"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":194,"pdf_page":210,"physical_index":210,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1076109300de8fa5b7a33674b8e07dc699bb2a673804f3b68b0977450e74e0bd"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"An addressing regime does more than imprint identity onto an existing geography of things; a new regime of segmentation and organization overhauls relations between what is enrolled within it, and does so regardless of whether it is organizing physical or virtual space. As in Thomas Pynchon ’ s The Crying of Lot 49, the control of the postal address code is essential to how states, real and imagined, can see and manage both territory and the territorialized. As its authority delimits the addressed and is itself in turn limited by the addressed, the focus of its control shifts to the enforcement of these systems of signification and to how each system subdivides and individuates the world in different ways and toward different ends. For example, the number of possible addresses in any addressing scheme is based on the ultimate granularity of the total possible senders and receivers within that delimited space. According to the five-digit US postal code system, the entirety of US sovereign land can be subdivided into $1 0 ^ { 5 }$ possible zones (including all possible ranges from 00000 to 99999). Because this has proved insufficient for automated paper envelope routing, another four suffix digits were added in 1983. (Compare this to the Millionth Map project beginning in 1913, which would have subdivided the Earth into 1 million individual mapped zones.) <sup>5</sup> With the development of global information technologies, the capitalization of new forms of virtual space suggested additional addressing measures, including the subdivision of the frequencies within the radio spectrum and their defined allocation for specific public and private uses. Here the “ geography ” is as physical as the ground, if also invisible to humans, and measured not by longitudinal grids but in the incre ments of wavelength: kilohertz, megahertz, and gigahertz. At different frequencies, dif ferent communication networks are provided specific zones of operation so that they won ’ t interfere with one another, including commercial television, broadcast radio, cellular telephony, satellite communication, aeronautical radio, commercial Internet, and secure military lines. For this, the division of space into specific discrete plots is less to identify sites within a point-to-point messaging network, as it is for post, but to delimit and corral mutually incompatible signals and channels from one another. For the former, the governance of addressing ensures the triumph of signal over noise by making sure messages arrive only where each is intended and meaningful; for the latter, it ensures that unlike messages don ’ t trample over one another as they occupy different parts of the spectrum but pass through the same physical location. A per spective that foregrounds the infrastructural agency of Hertzian space in relation to territories of ground and water might understand the entirety of that spectrum as a kind of atmospheric megastructure, another invisible architecture enveloping and organizing the world within itself. Inside it, two channels compete for the ability to occupy a certain enumerated frequency according to their physical distance from one another in the spectrum and by the sheer strength of signal. The antagonisms of Hertzian geography aren ’ t an oceanic or aerial smoothing over the striated limits and edges of mountainous land; their addressing is based more on resonance within a field than on discrete position and on relative amplitude more than simple presence and absence. Nevertheless, in order to make practical use of the spectrum, humans require tangible hardware that can carefully tune, send, and receive signals, and each piece of hardware often requires a single discrete address, as if it were a house on a street, in order for a particular message to be properly relayed to it and to it alone. At the social level, when particular pieces of hardware, such as a telephone and its telephone number, are linked to particular individuals, we are accustomed to saying that this person has this phone number, so that he or she is known by that spectrum address. In ye olde times, people kept “ personal phone books, ” paper volumes in which they wrote names and numbers, to associate people known to them and the addresses of the telephones they were most likely to answer if called. People even committed some of these numbers to memory so that intimate friends and family could be reached on a moment ’ s notice by entering a code string into local hardware. Today with Cloud-based contacts Apps, those device codes are hidden one layer beneath a roster of proper names or faces, and once entered into a private database, they are possibly never seen again no matter how often you activate the spectrum to connect with that person ’ s associated address or “ phone number. ”\n\n194\n\nAddress Layer","previous_page":193,"next_page":195}