{"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":304,"pdf_page":318,"physical_index":318,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0165dca8e06ea990062e2d57692599c17cb6b458c113ddc087c9dea921335832"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"In a talk that I gave on the topic of popular discourse on innovation, a feeble genre of “ middlebrow megachurch infotaintment, ” I said:\n\nThe most recent centuries have seen extraordinary accomplishments in improving quality of life. The paradox is that the system we have now — whatever you want to call it — is in the short term what makes the amazing new technologies possible, but in the long run it is also what suppresses their full flowering. Another economic architecture is prerequisite. … We hear that not only is change accelerating but that the pace of change is accelerating as well. While this is true of computational carrying-capacity at a planetary level, at the same time — and in fact the two are connected — we are also in a moment of cultural de-acceleration. We invest our energy in futuristic information technologies, including our cars, but drive them home to kitsch architecture copied from the 18th century. The future on offer is one in which everything changes, so long as everything stays the same. We ’ ll have Google Glass, but still also business casual. This timidity is our path to the future? No, this is incredibly conservative, and there is no reason to think that more gigaflops will inoculate us. Because, if a problem is in fact endemic to a system, then the exponential effects of Moore ’ s law also serve to amplify what ’ s broken. It is more computation along the wrong curve, and I doubt this is necessarily a triumph of reason. … [Our current conversation] has too much faith in technology, and not nearly enough commitment to technology. It is placebo technoradicalism, toying with risk so as to reaffirm the comfortable. So our machines get smarter and we get stupider. But it doesn ’ t have to be like that. Both can be much more intelligent. Another futurism is possible. <sup>13</sup>\n\nAs far the Earth layer is concerned, “ another futurism ” is what we call geodesign, which would include geoengineering, understood as possible techniques for ecological restoration operating directly upon the atmosphere, but certainly not only that. There are other ways to intelligently and deliberately intervene in the architecture of geopolitics, geoeconomics, and geoecology, and some of these recall “ utopian ” plans of the Apollo era. The crisis of ongoingness may, however, demand that options that may have once seemed fantastic are now imperative, and what is most normal is now also the most unlikely path forward. In his essay, “ Who Will Build the Ark? ” Mike Davis puts it this way:\n\nFrom this perspective, only a return to explicitly utopian thinking can clarify the minimal conditions for the preservation of human solidarity in face of convergent planetary crises. I think I understand what the Italian Marxist architects Tafuri and Dal Co meant when they cautioned against “ a regression to the utopian ” ; but to raise our imaginations to the challenge of the Anthropocene, we must be able to envision alternative configurations of agents, practices and social relations, and this requires, in turn, that we suspend the politico-economic assumptions that chain us to the present. 14\n\n304\n\nThe Stack to Come","previous_page":303,"next_page":305}