{"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":44,"pdf_page":62,"physical_index":62,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"00a5d819e8ceadf9b842cce6c9e0575a3f12313c4ac90d600b2e56b1480ea380"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"A recognition of platforms as a third institutional form, along with states and markets, situates the convergence of its architectonic and computational forms in a more specific and fundamental way. A central argument of this book is that the “ political program ” is not only to be found in the legal consensus (or dissensus) and policy admonitions of traditional “ politics ” but also in machines directly. This is where the global-scale arrangement of planetary-scale computing coheres into The Stack, and how the convergence of the architectural and computational design logics of program directly contributes to that system. For our purposes it is far less important how the machine represents a politics than how “ politics ” physically is that machinic system. The construction of platforms draws in, to varying and contingent degrees, strong connotations of “ design ” (design as in to “ designate, ” and to govern through material intervention) and, in this platforms are plots, and (per Singleton) also diagrams that “ ensnare ” actors in their fatal outcomes ( design as in “ to have designs on something, ” to trap the User just so). At the same time, platforms are not master plans, and in many respects, they are the inverse. Like master plans, they are geared toward the coordination of system Interfaces into particular optimized forms, but unlike them, they do not attempt to fix cause and effect so tightly. Platforms are generative mechanisms — engines that set the terms of participation according to fixed protocols (e.g., technical, discursive, formal protocols). They gain size and strength by mediating unplanned and perhaps even unplannable interactions. This is not to say that a platform ’ s formal neutrality is not strategic; one platform will give structure to its layers and its Users in one way, and another in another way, and so their polities are made. This is precisely how platforms are not just technical models but institutional models as well. Their drawing and programming of worlds in particular ways are means for political composition as surely as drawing a line on a map. However, as opposed to the public rights of citizens in a polis and the private rights of homo economicus in a market, we are severely lacking in robust and practical theory of the political design logic of platforms, even as they remake geopolitics in their image (or demand a different language to describe what the political is now or ever was). What we can know from the outset is that an essential logic of platforms is a reconvergence of architectural, computational, and political connotations of “ program ” back into one: the design logic of platforms is the generative program that is equally all three types at once.\n\nAt a more mechanical level, a platform is also a standardized diagram or technology. Its structure and the paths of interoperability that hold it together can ’ t be considered outside of the regularization and rationalization of how it connects to the outside world. As infrastructure, a platform ’ s regularity is often guaranteed less by laws than by technical protocols, and this is one of several ways that the sovereign decision is built into the platform ’ s interfacial partitions and surfaces. This kind of intrasystemic standardization was essential to the epochal metatechnologies of industrialization and post-Fordism, revolutionizing the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of massive quantities of identical tangible and intangible items. Because protocols are in place to standardize physical and immaterial properties of integral components and discontiguous manufacturing processes — from the width and direction of grooves in a screw, to the costs of stamps and the nomenclature of international postal zones, longitudinal mean times, cryptographic keys for international monetary transfers, stochastic synchronization of data transfers, and so on — the pace and predictability of industrialization could unfold as it did. <sup>6</sup> Artificial standardizations become naturalized as if they were always the measure of things. This kind of complementarity between technique and thought is familiar to adepts of Michel Foucault, Max Weber, Friedrich Kittler and Sam Walton. Standardization drives logistics, and logistics in turn enables geopolitical ambition and momentum. Innovations in munitions standardizations, allowing soldiers to quickly disassemble and repair guns on the battlefield with standard parts, contributed for better or worse to American military prowess in the nineteenth century and its ability to defend a hemispherical doctrine posited by a Virginia farmer, James Monroe. We appreciate the role of railroads, telegraphy, and telephony networks as the infrastructure of globalization, and their speed for the acceleration of the modernities of space and time, but perhaps we underappreciate the metastructuring importance of mundane anonymous standards to turn isolated mechanical inventions into infrastructural innovations (e.g., railroad gauges and spike lengths, timetable templates, the semiotics of graphical interface feedback conventions, transmission line materials, arbitrary telegraphic languages, packet-switching protocols, country codes and area codes, the fixed numeration of money itself, and so on). The centrifugal standardization of how individual components interrelate and assemble into higher-order systems, whether physical or informational, is as important as what any part or component may be. This is how platforms can scale up. To engineer systems that coordinate the shuttling of units from one point to another with efficiency, adaptability, and flexibility is to compose within the rules laid down by other systems, larger and smaller, with which interaction is required. If two different systems share common protocols, then the subsystems of one can interoperate with subsystems of another without nec essarily referring to any metasystemic authority. Systems swap material in this way, such that intermodality and intramodality come to enable one another: no standards, no platform; no platform, no Stack\n\n44\n\nPlatform and Stack, Model and Machine","previous_page":43,"next_page":45}