{"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":299,"pdf_page":313,"physical_index":313,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"05a76b4478fb07393b0b4e0bcf32a8b832c4671c6ea484a975d551917daf6e53"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"As far as geodesign is concerned, that blur between one Stack and another is not a symptom to be clarified and cured; rather, the blur is a high-resolution image of what is actually happening, which itself is blurry. To design with the blur instead of against it requires comfort with ambiguity. The hope is that we do have some handle on how to visualize The Stack today and how it organizes generic columns up and down. Without too much trouble, we can model a baseline scenario of an individuated human User citizen, named and profiled, using a vanilla platform Interface, connected to a stable mix of IP- addressed websites and smart objects, situated in a specific City connecting to a public/private mix of WiFi microterritories, governed by the application architecture of a global Cloud platform such as Google, and, at the Earth layer, drawing on local hydroelectric and coal plants that power the servers chiefly accessed by his usage. We can also imagine another Stack in which the User is a environmental sensor, the interface is a data-reporting application programming interface (API), Addresses are assigned to individual threshold chemical events as detected, all working in the City layer of a threatened rainforest as part of a transnational carbon risk reinsurance Cloud platform and pulling low-wattage power from plentiful solar and chemical energy sources. We can draw another Stack in which an assemblage of two robots, three delimited algorithms activated from afar, and three humans on three different continents constitute the composite User, linking them at the Interface layer through a Shanghainese fork of Android that translates between the five or six different “ languages ” at work. We can imagine them mapping and acting on a specific culinary-agricultural assemblage that has been Addressed according to Bronze Age dietary conventions, located in multiple, even hostile, City-states, accessing a mix of several public Cloud applications as well as locally encrypted databases, sucking up an all-of-the-above stew of utility electrons. Or, an unnamed kid at a quasi-public 3D printing works in Lagos using two different open source additive manufacturing APIs, downloaded CAD scripts, and YouTube Uploader to spoof the Addresses of pirated bicycle cranks that will now phone home and report that they are actually licensed and operational in Cape Town, but which are really being used to haul bags of cement to the fourth floor of a building that shows up having only two floors on Google Earth RealTime (at least when queried from South African IPs) al running on the AfriNIC version of Google ’ s “ no carrier fee ” Continent Cloud, sucking energy from a Franco-Chinese nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Chad, and chewing up circuitry minerals recycled from e-waste drone lifts from Bossangoa, Central African Republic, courtesy of All-African Defense Forces. And so on. It is not too hard to come up with political science-fiction scenarios, but it is hard to specify the shape of them working in combination, if only because any of the layers in the scenarios above could just as easily be combined with the layers of any of the others. Take two to five layers from each and sort, stir, and simmer. We need not one but many Stack design theories. Even the US Department of Defense are Stack theorists, having made their own version of a Stack model of planetary-scale computation in semisecrecy and featuring layers similar to the one described in this book (unknown to me until very recently). <sup>8</sup> Instead of neat utopias or dystopias, it is the divergent mixtures of the two, drawing on the energy loss and radiant waste materials of whatever is most distant or closest at hand, which may nevertheless be most crucial and fruitful.\n\nThe Stack to Come\n\n299","previous_page":298,"next_page":300}