{"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":294,"pdf_page":308,"physical_index":308,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1032fcd02a26e43c5099c015e1ead580a535711ba4fd4b421f9553abe614fec7"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"These are predicaments that condition us, but design is out of sync with them at present. Some design appears in advance of what it wants to describe, while other designs lag behind what has already arrived but may not be recognized and named. The Stack-we-have does both, and so The Stack-to-come is drawn by a geoaesthetics and a geodesign that is, at best, seen now in a kind of double exposure: one future that is anonymously present with us, arrived but unnamed, and one that is already named but not yet here. As discussed at the very beginning of the book, to grasp that other geography, our attention is split between these two concurrent images that we must hold in mind at once, even as they blend into the other, both with and without our control. Our capacity to now design, govern, and draw sovereign geographies depends on the management of this blur. First, how has sovereignty already been redesigned, whether or not we can properly name or comprehend the character of all effects, and second, how can the genesis of another geopolitical geometry deliberately recast the terms of sovereignty that would give those realized formations some preferable structure? The unseen and arrived is interlaced with the seen and the delayed, the blur is precisely this oscillation between “ what is ” but does not yet have a name, and “ what might become ” because we can give it name in advance of its arrival. The challenge requires imagination but also enforcement, the establishment of foundations, the techniques of strategic position and material fabrication, such that they can form one another and form us through them. To hold the two images in mind is also to bring into focus the variables of their interpolation and to trace the pixelated translation between them. At the same time, the sorting of any single User-subject effect, yours or mine, is also an arc of decay, marked for itself only in passing, such that any entry point into The Stack is fixed by what we exchange among one another in passing: money, carbon, electrons, affect, law, territory — one serving as the referent standard for the other without final grounding. Its scope is global, but the interfaces into the machine, and the visible diagram of the work that it does, are always only partial.\n\nWith these caveats and limits, it is possible to see what appears to us as a reasonably complete image of the whole, and even to leverage this totality as a way to draw what might replace it, sooner or later. Perhaps we can see all the layers at once, both as what they are and as what they do. We start at the bottom of the image and move up, from Earth to User, in one vertical tracking shot. <sup>6</sup> The black death of oil is formed into brilliant plastic mobile decks; heterogeneous minerals are pulled from mountain streams in central Africa and elsewhere; satellite networks expand the circumference of the Earth, bearing down with optimized images of a denuded whole, now turned from a map into an interface and, in turn, into a vast planetary epidermis to be governed as a total living image. All this is powered by an Ouroboros-shaped energy grid that distributes electrons in peer-to-peer packet networks and so may rationalize and lighten the carbon burden of industrial computation, or may consume the last remaining terawatts and carbon dioxide gigatons into a black hole of data center – shaped future ruins. In doing so, it spawns new jurisdictions of those causing and those affected by climate change, turning the ecology itself into the final emergency against which we try to defend ourselves in a losing battle with the mathematics of systems biology.\n\n294\n\nThe Stack to Come","previous_page":null,"next_page":295}