{"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":54,"pdf_page":72,"physical_index":72,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ec10851057ec30c9f4838444a1b00ea5809872c32633c2361906bedbade1bceb"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"The architecture of The Stack, this one particular megastructure of planetary-scale computation, is an interoperable physical-informational system of systems, distributed under, onto, and over the surface of the globe, with its layers organized into a patchy, uneven vertical section. As said, The Stack is composed of geologic, humanistic, and mineral layers charging feedback loops between these. As a cybernetic landscape, The Stack composes both for equilibrium and for emergence, one oscillating into the other for diagonal purposes in barely accountable rhythms. The state conditions (and literally for governance, the condition of the States that its platform logics describe in advance) are derived both from stacks as abstract diagrams and, through its unenumerated operations, as real existing machines. In turn the infrastructural sovereignties of The Stack may, in principle, emerge from either of these. It can be derived from its career as accidental megastructure, which itself may or may not be the model for geogovernance to come, or from its immediate, projective, and potential designability. It goes both ways. Today, The Stack that we can analyze frames the one we can conceive, just as the one we can conceive frames the one we are beginning to realize. Alternatives are conveyed from its distortions.\n\nThe Stack ’ s disciplining of communication as an ecology of isomorphic techniques makes the world appear as a system that demands from us a constant redesign of its ever more granular interoperations. The history of these technologies is also then the history of multiple competing communication standards. Protocol politics is always rough trade because to control the standard is to influence the economies it enables, which is to influence how they interrelate with other systems and the meta-economies those interoperations in turn give rise to. As should be plain from current events, the interweaving of otherwise incommunicative hard and soft systems into new assemblages continues apace, and so the politics of standards (e.g., open source, intellectual property, net neutrality, encryption) becomes integral to the “ democracy ” of infrastructure and to the little sovereignties of everyday life. Looking back, it is not coincidental then that formal systems theory and information theory appear historically concurrently and are part of the larger crest of cybernetics. The discernment of information as a first-order principle of material difference in the twentieth century would come to all but consume the very definition of systems tout court. The study of information bridged linguistics, symbolic logic, biology, chemistry, art, literature, and the theory of calculus with the practical engineering problems of automated logarithms, algorithms, cryptography, and long-distance signal transmission relay. In turn, the modeling of all of these and more as forms of information, as well as the conception of distributed multimodel apparatuses ultimately as information systems, becomes an overriding epistemological ambition of twenty-first-century globalization. This registration of all systems as information systems a priori tracks software ’ s migration from military logistics to consumer footprints. In this enforced translation of any thing into the status of information within a system, all things may possess their worlds and be possessed by their worlds only to the extent that they possess the attributes necessary for intermodal communication with other platform systems. Whether for bits or atoms, numbers or nectarines, no impedance mismatch can disallow the activation of that intermodality, and so compatibility within a given scale as well as the interoperability between scales, becomes itself the critical vernacular definition of computability as an economic technology. As all systems come to mean information systems, then computation, which otherwise might be defined differently, comes to refer to “ algorithms holding systems of information together. ” The Stack, as a particular megastructure, emerges from this history of systems conceived in relation to computation, and computation in relation to systems. It has inherited some of its limitations, ambitions, accomplishments, and blind spots and has evolved beyond others.\n\n54\n\nPlatform and Stack, Model and Machine","previous_page":53,"next_page":55}