{"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":328,"pdf_page":342,"physical_index":342,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0f369f460d216b28880f211543ce6340a76378adf59f11e12f4d9f35c50a11aa"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"In the “ platforms ” section of the first chapter, I briefly discussed the history of centralized cybernetic economic planning programs, including during the 1950s and 1960s in the former Soviet Union, under the supervision of many, including especially mathematician Leonid Kantorovich, as well as the Cybersin initiative, undertaken in the early years of Salvador Allende ’ s rule in Chile, as designed by British cybernetician Stafford Beer. Abstracted from the politics of their host nations, the Soviet Union and Allende ’ s Chile, there has been renewed interest in the sometimes tragic stories of these primordial computational economies that place them both on the shelf with other wistfully unrealized past utopias, as well as a more pragmatic interest in properly constructing a history of the present and perhaps to discover overlooked and highly relevant accomplishments, both technological and economic. <sup>49</sup> As part of a cyberleftist archaeology, these projects are included among Nikolai Federov ’ s “ Cosmism ” ; Alexander Bogdanov ’ s revolutionary-era proto-systems theory, Tektology, and Red Star, his science-fiction novel about a socialist utopia on Mars; Konstantin Tsiolkovsky ’ s involvement with Kosma Vojagho; Pavel Klushantsev ’ s space exploration films, even Marcuse ’ s speculations on automation and the end of scarcity; and any number of other interfaces between science fiction and speculative communistic futurism. <sup>50</sup> At the same time, in their matching of totalities, and of computational systems with economic and territorial totalities, they are also part of a larger genealogy that includes, on the one hand, the modernist design value for the rational manufacturing and distribution of a universal baseline of material goods based on the most advanced available chemistry and calculations, and on the another, capitalist platforms for economic governance, such as simulating markets, calculating optimal prices, futures modeling, consumer profiling, and logistical optimization. Liberal technocracy has its own (sometimes overlapping) utopian archaeology. As we ’ ll see from the perspective of the platform looking out at the economies it is being asked to compose, the differences between state and market planning are far less dichotomous than they may appear from perspectives looking in. In the 1960s, programmers tried to use available computing capacity (incredibly limited by today ’ s standards) to implement the multifactoral calculations demanded by Gosplans, the State Board for Planning, that supervised the Soviet five-year plans. They were attempting to rationalize through planned centralization the supposedly spontaneous pricing computations of the market — what Hayek called catallaxy. For Hayek, a market is itself a distributed computer of sorts that will always have better information with which to work because calculations happen at the very end-points of the network, within individual transactions and on their cascading pressure on aggregate supply. To the socialist cyberneticians, the market ’ s transactional calculations would always be fatally inefficient because they are driven not by the optimal distribution of goods and value but by the tactical extraction of profit, always providing a price that is a distorted reflection of that surplus and not the need fulfilled (among other reasons, of course). These are caricatures of real economic mechanisms that are always anything but pristine, but the terms of abstracted oppositions posed here are useful in that they may clarify what is most important about the platform economies that straddle both types.\n\n328\n\nThe Stack to Come","previous_page":327,"next_page":329}