{"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":323,"pdf_page":337,"physical_index":337,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6dbc884635bfdd96efa71fa7f7443144e62f2103ab2cab60e5c821b0e35cfeb1"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"California ’ s network of roads and freeways, it is not without reason that the CalTrans headquarters is a kind of fortress, but it does not really look like one exactly. It looks like irreverent sculpture, but it is in fact the whimsical artistic sculptural elements that also are the defensive techniques in play and at work. The building ’ s architect, Thom Mayne, and I once discussed this, and the irony is not lost on him that one key function of the expressionist gestures of the LA School is now to serve as security programming. This displacement is by no means limited to this kind of design. In this nervous selfcontradiction, the urban public body is redefined by its supposed relation to imminent violence by extrastate actors, but with design flair and ingenuity. It is another mode of the paranoid style in American spatial politics, one for which urbanism ’ s primary use cases are always, on the one hand, the tax-paying citizen who may actually also be suicide bomber and, on the other, the symbolism of a responsible and transparent institution held up and out of unauthorized reach. Attempts to reconcile the performative and symbolic demands of security and the open society within the same architectonic entity, whether a building or a park or a city, means interweaving openness and closedness into a complicated pattern of open and shut, bulletproof glass that makes building skin transparent, massive car bomb deterrents as public art in pedestrian plazas, evacuation corridors that link floors with sculptural public walkways that also sort and filter crowds into firewalled zones in case of emergency, and more. This combination of Enlightenment transparency of publics and gated bunker with weaponized interfaces is a special design solution that we could call a glass fort. The combination of apparent opposites into adjacent fabrics and into a single form is one version of what reversible political boundaries and interiors collapsing on themselves — the normalized exception of the reversible interface — look like as a design language. Its utopian enclave is less Elysium than executive lounge membership check-in protocol, and its dystopia is less the vast pens of Agamben ’ s canonical camp , and more the furtive moments of political exception, sandwiched between moments of generalized mobility, like the ten minutes spent in airport security lines.\n\nWhile we can interpret the political complications that give rise to these forms, we are less certain of their ultimate effects, even as we get used to them. The securitarian utopia of total interfacial visualization works at the scale of the individual building or city because it also works at the scale of subdivided states and jurisdictions, especially when its ability to separate one from the other is mostly legal and symbolic. The border, like any other interface, activates as much energy and information as it cleaves and suppresses, and while there are persistent calls to finalize a West Bank – style total wedge between the United States and Mexico, from the Pacific to the Gulf, the utopian securitization that motivates this is not possible. The border economy is so deeply and thoroughly interdependent (money, goods, labor, people, data, water, food) that to tilt toward their final disentanglement by strong sorting is a fantasy. Instead the emergent flow of day-to-day networking continually overwhelms the zombie jurisdictions of this prophylactic geopolitics. On the other side of the world, Jerusalem itself is in many ways archetypical of this sort of designing against regional intracontamination. The physical city materializes the sacred maps of three major religions, one layered on top of another, one woven through another, history and prophetic future differentially activated for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. These exist also in the imaginary architectures of rebuilt temples, original foundations, polydimensional boundaries and land rights codes, and of course a real wedge introducing an artificial canal, torturing the limits of legitimate jurisdictionally past their breaking point. But the boundary of this theocratic enclave/camp economy is not only at the external membrane of official Israeli territory. Like the international borders held deep within landlocked airports nowhere near another country, the checkpoints that dot the political border, marking interior from exterior, are repeated again and again inside Jerusalem proper. These external-but-internal checkpoints multiply the border interface, absorbing it into the interfaces of everyday life and folding the civil war of Abrahamic monotheism into their programming. Finally, as their association is concretized in the governed interfaces of mutual immunization, it is also no clearer where the secular economy is predicated on theocratic military segmentation, and where theocratic military segmentation is built on the secular economy.\n\nThe Stack to Come\n\n323","previous_page":322,"next_page":324}