{"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":320,"pdf_page":334,"physical_index":334,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b0d5395db0f9747609f7ee6159789bc8eb0b36772d269530fa96a3b23c58ce59"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"71. City Layer to Come: Multiple Utopias and Rough Totality\n\nIn the modern tradition, the utopian is bound up with the future and the future with the utopian. <sup>46</sup> As intimated, however, it also spawns the fundamentalist utopian futurepast and the totalitarian future-present, as well as other impulses that sometimes work without messianism. It does, however, require a kind of imagination — what we might otherwise call “ fiction, ” an alternative that is not exactly true or false but is, like all other models, a simulation of logical intentions. Now today we seem to rely on more sordid measures and untoward means, apocrypha, apophenia, and the gruesome populism of conspiracy theory. Design is not immune to this, and the City layer of The Stack may succeed by doubling up again on the actual fictions. In Los Angeles, for example, the rhetoric of future utopia was part of the official foundational brand of the city, a city with so much future because it had so little history. Today the city has less an official utopia than an officially cracked utopia . To speak of the Angeleno condition, its precipice, in the dystopian vernacular is not a critical stance; it is the party line (or more precisely, the oscillation between the utopian and the dystopian, back again, over again, in and out, one through the other, both occupying the same place and plot). The Tyrell Corporation and Rand Corporation, Reyner Banham and Darby Crash, Squeaky Fromme and Ryan Seacrest. Joan Didion ’ s self-driving Google car and Gregory Ain ’ s gated community project in Calabasas. Philip K. Dick ’ s spec screenplay for the Farmville movie, and Rene Daalder and Rem Koolhaas ’ s 1974 screenplay about computergenerated actors and digital films taking over Hollywood. Diller, Scofidio & Renfro ’ s use of proprietary film script analysis and focus group testing algorithms ported into Grasshopper to simulate crowd flow at the Broad Museum, and blockchain – based digital object identifier infrastructure linking Disney ’ s DRM copy protection to Prism. Morphosis ’ s CalTrans building ’ s second career as the bad guy ’ s headquarters in every cop show ever made, perhaps soon dethroned by versions of Apple ’ s UFO megastructure headquarters up the coast in Cupertino. Among the many quotable dictums of British urbanist and science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard, one is “ sex times technology equals the future. ” We might modify it slightly, perhaps even without changing its essential meaning, to political theology times technology equals the utopian catastrophe. Put differently, even once more, the history of the city is, after Walter Benjamin, bound to the rhythms of theological and prophetic history, and in the guise of the city, that prophetic economy becomes both utopian and dystopian at once. For Benjamin, the persistence of theology is its own revelation, but for my thesis, it is more of a nuisance, but one with explanatory value nevertheless. The design of political systems in the here and now (which can extend in variously extreme durations) is, for better and for worse, often enacted through some politico-theological projection for which real cities and real societies exist, always in a fallen simulacrum of an eventual ideal. For example, after the beginning of the never-ending and never-not-ending War on Terror, the globalization of risk has brought with it an aspirational vision of security as a utopia of urban interfaces , an image of all urban interfaces in a single governable totality. The geodesign of the City layer must surpass or evade this program.\n\n320\n\nThe Stack to Come","previous_page":319,"next_page":321}