{"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":56,"pdf_page":74,"physical_index":74,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"28d3d5e2767647a9a1c9bad9473992813fdef62dcc40f7f67c5bcdd541fbe8dd"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Conway ’ s law, coined in 1968 by programmer Melvin Conway, states that “ organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. ” Put differently, “ in order for two separate software modules to interface correctly, the designers and implementers of each module must communicate with each other. Therefore, the interface structure of a software system will reflect the social structure of the organization(s) that produced it. ” A corollary law might demonstrate that over time, the inverse is equally true: organizations come to take on the characteristics of their interfaces. If it goes both ways, then homologies between organizer and organized make the detection of cause and effect between cultural and technical systems rather difficult. For example, and to extend this problem to the largest scale, an understanding of the ongoing emergence of planetary scale computation cannot only be understood as a secondary technological expression of capitalist economics. <sup>17</sup> The economic history of the second half of the twentieth century is largely unthinkable without computational infrastructure and superstructure. In accounting for that transformation, it is not at all clear whether the computational technologies are more or less foundational than the economics that organized them and that they organize (even assuming that we could analytically separate the two, so as to put one in the fore and the other in back). Instead of locating global computation as a manifestation of an economic condition (as both its means of production and it superstructural expression), the inverse may be equally valid. From this perspective, so much of what is referred to as neoliberalism are interlocking political-economic conditions within the encompassing armature of planetary computation. The entwined polar positions of Sunnyvale, Caracas, Beijing, Brussels, Tribeca, and Tel Aviv don ’ t integrate capital and resource markets into network societies on their own, but are themselves “ computed ” into these arrangements. Either way, it is possible to delineate structural causality between technological and socioeconomic systems only in mode abstractions, because one always contains the other and is contained by the other at once. We cannot, for example, finally locate computation technologies as a base and information culture as a superstructure, bound together either through capitalintensive modes of production and exchange or through computational flows directly determining systems of valuation and exchange in their image. Rather, we could do so, but only with abstractions that are easily turned inside out. Neither serves as the last instance of the other, though today, neither can be defined without the other. Instead, we should work with this mesh on its own less mechanistic terms. Jameson, fo example, offers an injunction to treat such arrangements as active temporal operations rather than as a fixed architecture, “ basing-and-superstructuring. ” <sup>18</sup> We may think of foundation as a verb, base-ing , and to seek out how specific material technical systems come to take on causal force and when the same do not. Such flexibility might allow us to differentiate, for example, when the discursive structure of the relational database drives not only the information access policies of a company or state, but also in turn the form of its organizational hierarchies, and when the inverse is predominantly true, such as when the laws and logistics of trade channels structure the form and content of interoperable supply chain management software and the database designs on which it depends. In locating The Stack within the intercourses of economics, culture, and technology, both Conway ’ s law (that organizations design systems in their image) and our inverse Conway ’ s law (that systems and their interfaces produce organizations in their image) are interpretive tools that are useful to keep at hand.\n\n56\n\nPlatform and Stack, Model and Machine","previous_page":55,"next_page":57}