{"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":356,"pdf_page":370,"physical_index":370,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0f2e061701fb17e5e40391923edad6eaf0149cf1f3fadcdf80f921be0406b3b2"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"come to take on the force of law, and then just maybe, if urbanists are savvy, these designate as law, and geography is recompiled and restocked, brick by brick, in their image. For design, working with alegal interfaces represents a form of constraint and also a medium for the proliferation or suppression of utopian and dystopian alliances and enemies. As said, Cambrian lurches forward in design tend to occur in response to a crisis: that is when design is most wildly inventive because no other option would be practical ( ‘ lines are drawn. Use cases are modeled. Budgets are allocated ’ ). And so, in response, deep systemic crises invite three interrelated and apparently opposing responses: acceleration, inertia and fundamentalism: fight, hide, and flight, accordingly. <sup>10</sup>\n\nIt bears repeating, especially as we tinker with the comparative planetology business, that as every technology brings new accidents, so too every accident brings new technologies. For design, planetary-scale computation is both, amplifying industrial modernity toward a ubiquity that is matched in intensity only by its imminent dissolution. Our experiment — indeed everyone ’ s experiment for the coming decades — is tied to an ecologically ubiquitous computing, a gamble that in many ways underpins all others. The Stack-to-come should tilt the outcome of that impact toward a renewed modernity, but will it — in some configuration of Clouds, objects, tags, Addresses, Interfaces, sensors, algorithmic phyla — provide the lightness necessary to organize a restorative, subtractive, resilient modernity, or will its own voracious energy appetite, toxic production footprint, and alienating virtualization finally overwhelm all? Put differently, where industrialization was a modernity for tabula rasa, today a subtractive modernity is what curates that world that is always already full. But can it power an interfacial modernity not of identity and maximalization, but of externality and transference? Will planetary-scale pervasive computing prove to be, in some guise, the integral media of real reindustrialization, allowing for light but powerful interfaces of governance and exchange, or instead, the final, most unsustainable machine consuming the remaining resources into its subterranean pits? Is it all or nothing? If it can succeed, it is because its radicality is not drawn from the historical or geographic momentum of a new world, but rooted in the precarity of globalizations that are as irresolvable as they are interconnected. Either way, we slowly learn to let go of certain things (of nationalisms, of monotheisms, of economic psychologisms, strong genomic and semiotic ontologies) and negotiate instead a deliberate and strategic dissolution — on-planet, off-planet — into whatever and whoever comes next. Somehow I am optimistic, if that is the right word. The thesis of this particular book is neither a manifesto nor an instruction manual, but as said, a design brief that invites others to collaborate on the articulation and realization of the renewed modernity described here, with all their deliberate commitment and expert abstraction. <sup>11</sup>\n\nFor that, the prevalent client-side versus the server-side critique of planetary-scale computational power becomes that much less relevant when it is the interfacial relays between addressable objects that are the real object of governance, and not the things themselves. We must assume that more governing pressure on the rights spots is how to go about geoengineering an economy, and we assume that such pressure will include how it is that interfaces exact terms of exception. If the reader ’ s work ing assumption is, however, that mathematics plus the force of law equals totalitarianism, then I suppose other issues are more pressing for you and your colleagues. <sup>12</sup> The geodesign I would describe means an exploration of how certain control systems, certain platform systems, and specific configurations work toward particular desirable and undesirable governmental effects ( “ there is no architecture without violence, because there is no architecture without program ” ). <sup>13</sup> Platforms are emergent systems that are informed by power. That is why they work (and where they work). As said, the frame of planetary computation not only houses and distorts multiple jurisdic tional claims; it directly produces new strata of jurisdiction where none existed before, and yet it causes any particular site, in any particular City, to be so layered with jurisdictional image systems that no one of these can ever really resolve into a single consensual sovereign geography. The political experience of the overlayered site is not only a competition for the right of legitimate force but the dominance of one addressable geography versus another, and often one because the other, hence the irresolvable surplus of utopian total images ( “ we are millionaires in images of revolution ” ). <sup>14</sup> Writ large, the layered architecture of The Stack makes vertical totality and hence the strategy of consensus more difficult than within a bounded horizontal encampment of whatever size and relative secularity. Political spectrums, between authoritarianism and communization or state and platform, may be different for each layer within the same Stack, and especially within a real-world column initiated by a real-world User. A gesture from one User, incorporating all layers on its way down and all layers again on its way back up again to another User, may pass through a zoo of different captured ideological zones fighting it out layer by layer, interacting with geographies of every imaginable purity or toxicity along the way, each one spinning to a different tune. <sup>15</sup> That is just the table stakes. From here comes the Promethean fascination with how intelligent systems, including human societies, evolve on and from this particu lar planetary perch, and a program to design first in the service of maximum possible wealth to the maximum possible interactions and intercourses, with prejudice toward disenchantment and without deference for superstition and sentimentality. Other alternatives suggest instead worlds of shit and pain. Delay and dissembling will insult current opportunities for enlightenment, prosperity, and jubilation and will only encourage the worst scenarios to reach fruition — letting some believe that those were fulfilled prophecies when they actually required the dour, bewildered participation of their victims.\n\n356\n\nThe Black Stack","previous_page":355,"next_page":357}