{"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":246,"pdf_page":262,"physical_index":262,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e9289e0b4192be1300328a3b24ad87167a3210ad8764f3647859e1b89d237fd1"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"While The Stack is a real physical construction, it is also a canvas on which spatial imaginaries are screened, and the spaces over which that competition moves and fills what we call geoscapes. Why this term? Interfaces, and most especially interfaces like AR, locate competing master dogmas not just about what the world does but what it is about. <sup>67</sup> This projective geographic image is one means by which specific interfacial regimes govern the mediation of their Users, The Stack, and the parts of the world they can access. The Interface, as an image of this territory, becomes a means by which territory is written and managed, and finally the medium through which other territories are challenged and the whole apparatus is contested. To augment Arjun Appadurai ’ s now canonical lexicon of “ scapes, ” I nominate this addition: geoscape. A geoscape is a contested terrain of contested terrains, a shifting landscape made up of shifting land scapes: image maps, projections and plans, irredentist land claims, borders and jurisdictions, strata and striations, imagined worlds, macroeconomic forecasts, projected homes and homelands, addressing systems, and various terra incognita. All of these can, but need not necessarily, enter into irregular public exchanges whereby contrasted spatializations are both supplied and demanded according to a panoply of capitals. Compiled into one, geoscapes are a form of content that cannot not be designed and designed for. They represent a population of territorial alphabets mutually interiorizing and exteriorizing each other, which includes cosmograms, images of the entirety of global space and the order that it is seen to frame, govern, and distribute. For example, the revived global caliphate, as envisioned by the Lashkar-e-Taiba , ISIS, and some others, is an image of the whole world captured under a particular interpretation of Islam. It is a cosmogram that describes, validates, motivates, and delimits their program by its image and for this, we have to count their vision as kind of geopolitical design agenda. <sup>68</sup> Google, China, the US State Department, or a diasporic community lodged in a remote enclave: each of these may have its own projective geographic solidarity in play. Everywhere, as cosmograms fight it out with other cosmograms and with other local situated claims, they compose together a cumulative territory of territories over which such antagonistic actors compete to enforce a primary, sovereign description of the geographic distribution of things, location, distance, borders, and their significant juxtapositions. Geoscapes comprise then both sacred and secular projections, as they are in relation to one another: exceptional territories, patchworks of the enclave, and exclave zones overflowing competing totalities. <sup>69</sup> In turn, the inscriptions of the nomos, drawing and framing sovereign interiors, can find traction to the extent that the surface on which it writes is recognized by its neighbors.\n\nThis multiplicity of territorial claims and types of claims is held in an overflowing and finally incommensurate, if also interdependent, polity of quasi-fictitious illustrations, and perhaps at the end of the day, this is all that geopolitics ever is. Geoscapes are a conceptual assemblage of territorial claims as well as the conceptual space that it might occupy. That is, the geoscape is not an empty arena into which territories would move and be counted or installed, but an irregular territory never empty but always exactly as full as the spaces that comprise it. Whatever highly conditional equivalence or exchange that exists is not an a priori feature but the result of the real operations of encounter. Instead of being real spaces into which we might go, geoscapes are entered into and so made real by their occupation. By contrast, other versions cosmopolitanism presuppose global space as a self-evident panorama into which politics might take place. They often depend on representations of that space derived from mapping platforms that are supposedly so secular and neutral that they can absorb and position all interested geographies that might course through them (something perhaps like Google Earth). However, geoscapes emerge from a more agonistic politics for which the juxtaposition of difference is not within a shared consensual mechanism, not a spectrum of opinion inside a given frame, but is itself an irreducibly dissensual array of positions without a common master plane of situation. The geoscape extends in all possible directions at once and is held only by the tensile strength of the imagined geographies that compose it by their co-occupation. One geography on another, interfacial regimes interlace but cannot ultimately resolve into any last instance. Their geopolitics are driven instead by a generic fissiparousness, and so while any given interfacial image map may be (part of) a total image, the cumulative incongruity of multiple totalities renders every whole only partial. The geoscape stages these incommensurate projections, including those that deny the legitimacy or even existence of other projections with which they share the same physical location, and it is that incompatibility, the noisy grinding of incompatible terms for addressing things, events, and territory, that is, in practice, the engine of geopolitical design.\n\n246\n\nInterface Layer","previous_page":245,"next_page":247}