{"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":331,"pdf_page":345,"physical_index":345,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6ba9beea95a9a9f3c8f0b07d39b02094c658e348218828e86ec1faba37e1f889"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"There is a joke (now an old joke) that goes like this, “ Question: What is the most significant accomplishment of communism? Answer: The Apollo Space Program. ” The implication is that state communism not only accomplished nothing with the violent upheavals of its misguided and self-corrupted effort at building egalitarian society from scratch, except by way of stimulating market-based societies to greater heights in response. It ’ s not my interest to revisit or revitalize Cold War ideologies (or evangelize twentieth-century economic ideologies, as should be clear by now) and so will offer instead an update and correction of this joke. <sup>56</sup> The most significant indirect contribution was not Apollo; rather it was Google. Is that still even a joke? The Page-Rank algorithm that formed the initial core of Search was based on “ collective evaluation ” as opposed to expert evaluation, which would be more expensive, slower and less reliable when dealing with massive amounts of unstructured and dynamic data. As described by Massimo Franceschet in his article “ PageRank: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, ” which locates Google ’ s algorithmic methods in the long and diverse history of econometric, sociometric, and bibliometric information evaluation and calculative techniques, “ PageRank introduced an original notion of quality of information found on the Web: the collective intelligence of the Web, formed by the opinions of the millions of people that populate this universe, is exploited to determine the importance, and ultimately the quality, of that information. ” This too is synthetic catallaxy, the real-time weighing of the value of information within a differential field too large for any one actor to envision or evaluate, let alone steer. But instead of this system taking place “ spontaneously ” and for the purpose of realizing profit by one side of incremental transactions (there is no buyer or seller — yet), it is done through the unilateral centralization of decision-making algorithms into a single governing computational platform. For Google, that is itself an incipient intelligence as taught by its Users, is guided by the cosmic vocation “ to organize the world ’ s information and to make it universally accessible and useful ” and to do all this at a unit transactional price of zero and for half the planet at once. Again, what would have the engineers of Red Plenty have called this? <sup>57</sup> Perhaps they would call it “ my employer ” ? The genealogy of a project as complex as Google is much more twisty than any straight line from 1958 to 1968 to 1998, but it is impossible to understand the Google variant of Cloud Polis, and the accomplishment of engineering a freely available, global-scale econometric infrastructure, let alone the impetus to do so without also understanding the design ambitions of socialist/ communist cybernetics for a universal platform-of-platforms that produces nothing on its own but would optimize everything to everyone. <sup>58</sup> By some Gordian knot in political-economic history, among the most important contemporary accomplishments of capitalism is a descendant flower from the rubble of communism, our beloved and feared Google Gosplan (NASDAQ: GOOG). Perhaps — it is as yet to be determined — the inverse may also be true, and an ultimate consequence of Google ’ s platform universality will be an economic and informational social apparatus that bypasses the pricing and planning deficiencies of twentieth-century economic doctrines. In some variants of Marxian theory, it is an article of faith that socialism will emerge once capitalism has perfected technological systems to a degree that competitive ownership is unnecessary. In time, so the parable goes, the state itself will give way and dissolve into the generalized sovereign network of the general intellect. In the future, once all the information is “ made universally accessible and useful, ” it is unknown whether the future descendant(s) of today ’ s Google Gosplan will also fade away. “ My work here is done, ” says the Interface one morning. “ OK, Google, ” we reply.\n\nThe Stack to Come\n\n331","previous_page":330,"next_page":332}