{"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":52,"pdf_page":70,"physical_index":70,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2e90c663a14accc6137f5304592c0a9e9e62971156c0779c579d384c5efe7b7c"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"11. Stack as Model\n\nStacks are a kind of platform that also happens to be structured through vertical interoperable layers, both hard and soft, global and local. Its properties are generic, extensible, and pliable; it provides modular recombinancy but only within the bounded set of its synthetic planes. It is an autogenerative parametric topography, but one that grows precisely through an initial subdivision of technologies into planar layers and then through an autocratic consolidation and rationalization of these through internal interfaces and protocols. As for any platform, that consolidation is driven less from centrally planned legal prescription than through the algorithmic conduction of selfdirected behaviors by free-range Users. The Stack discussed in the following chapters is a vast software/hardware formation, a proto-megastructure built of crisscrossed oceans, layered concrete and fiber optics, urban metal and fleshy fingers, abstract identities and the fortified skins of oversubscribed national sovereignty. It is a machine literally circumscribing the planet, which not only pierces and distorts Westphalian models of state territory but also produces new spaces in its own image: clouds, networks, zones, social graphs, ecologies, megacities, formal and informal violence, weird theologies, all superimposed one on the other. This aggregate machine becomes a systematic technology according to the properties and limitations of that very spatial order. The layers of The Stack, some continental in scale and others microscopic, work in specific relation to the layer above and below it. As I have suggested, the fragile complementarity between the layers composing The Stack is discussed both as an idealized model for how platforms may be designed and as a description of some of the ways that they already work now. The metaphor and the machine are diagrams made real in the megastructure.\n\nIf you start looking for them, “ stacks ” are everywhere. In a way, the Earth itself is a spherical stack, from its molten core, to the lower and upper mantle, to the crust on which organic life evolved under the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere. Humans evolved between two and only two of these layers. Charles and Ray Eames ’ s famous “ Powers of Ten ” films for IBM showed generations of high school students how to start from one everyday spot and from there think down to $1 0 ^ { - 9 }$ meters and up to $1 0 ^ { 2 3 }$ meters, from quarks to walls of galaxies, and back again. In a way, their presentation is a kind of telescoping stack. Archaeology organizes and depicts the temporality of unearthed assemblages according to the Harris matrix, and its interlocking principles of original horizontality, original continuity, and stratigraphic succession. The Marxian model of base and superstructure provided another verticalized image of social totality, whereby economic structural causality flows bottom-up, from foundational technical processes of production, valuation, and relations in the base, to their ultimate expression in cultural and political institutions, as superstructure. Marx wanted to model historical cause and effect, but history is full of images of society organized instead into static stratified layers of arbitrary hierarchies (Albrecht D ü rer ’ s 1515 woodcut The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I comes to mind). Many contemporary technical systems work on stack principles, including smart grids that segment a power layer, below a communications layer, below optimization and applications layers. Examples are plentiful, and while some are recognizable as software stacks, others are fuzzier, more heterarchical than hierarchical. <sup>13</sup> Beyond software, is the generic composability of any one layer in relation to another within a generative vertical platform that may help qualify systems as stacks.\n\n52\n\nPlatform and Stack, Model and Machine","previous_page":51,"next_page":53}