{"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":364,"pdf_page":378,"physical_index":378,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"981b0a6658f58c143331d7b9c5577a257134501a6a5fc04b5ac1b9cc161b18c5"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Paleolithic origins. Would we bury it even if we could? Would we need signs around it like those designed for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site warning off unknowable future excavations? Those of us “ lucky ” enough to be alive during this span would enjoy a certain illegible immortality to whatever curious metacognitive entity pieces us back together by our online activities, both public and private, proud and furtive, each of us rising back centuries from now, each of us a little Ozymandias of cat videos and Pornhub.\n\nIn light of this, the Black Stack could come to mean very different things. On the one hand it would imply that this simulation is opaque and unmappable, not disappeared, and that the whole thing is ultimately redacted. It could imply that from the ruined fragments of this history, another coherent totality can be carved against the grain, even from the deep recombinancy at and below the Earth layer of The Stack. Its blackness is the surface of a world that can no longer be composed by addition because it is so absolutely full, overwritten and overdetermined, and to add more is just ink into an ocean. Instead of tabula rasa, this tabula plenus allows for creativity and figuration only by subtraction, like scratching paint from the canvas, by carving away by death, by replacement. The structural logic of any Stack system allows for the replacement of whatever occupies one layer with something else, and for the rest of the architecture to continue to function without pause. For example, the content of any one layer, Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User, could be replaced (including the masochistic hysterical fiction of the individual User, both neoliberal and neo-other things) while the rest of the layers remain a viable armature for global infrastructure. The Stack is designed to be remade. That is its technical form, but unlike replacing copper wire with fiber optics in the transmission layer of TCP/IP, replacing one kind of User with another is more difficult. Today we are doing it by adding more and different kinds of things into the User position, as described above. We should, however, also allow for more comprehensive displacements, not just by elevating things to the status of political subjects or technical agents, but making way for genuinely posthuman and nonhuman positions. In time, perhaps at the eclipse of the Anthropocene, the historical phase of Google Gosplan will give way to stateless platforms for multiple strata of synthetic intelligence and biocommunication to settle into new continents of cyborg symbiosis. Or perhaps instead, if nothing else, the carbon and energy appetite of this ambitious embryonic ecology will starve its host.\n\nFor some dramas, but one hopes not for the fabrication of The-Stack-to-come (Black or otherwise), a certain humanism and companion figure of humanity still presumes its traditional place in the center of the frame. We must let go of the demand that any artificial intelligence, arriving at sentience or sapience, must care deeply about humanity, us specifically, as the subject and object of its knowing and its desire. The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know. Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all ( “ The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. $\\prime \\prime ) ^ { 2 5 }$ One of the integral accidents of The Stack may be the Copernican trauma that shifts us from a design career as the authors of the Anthropocene to the role of supporting actors in the arrival of the post-Anthropocene. The Black Stack may also be black because we cannot see our own reflection in it. In the last instance, its geopolitics is less eschatological than chemical, because its grounding of time is based less on the promise of historical dialectics than on the rot of isotope decay. It is drawn, I believe, by an inhuman and inhumanist molecular form finding: pre-Cambrian flora changed into peat oil changed into children ’ s toys, dinosaurs changed into birds changed into ceremonial headdresses, computation itself converted into whatever metamachine comes next, and Stack into Black Stack.\n\n364\n\nThe Black Stack","previous_page":363,"next_page":365}