{"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":57,"pdf_page":75,"physical_index":75,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"68d871e5a979bcd75876d596acc2eddc90ec6d92a7c84231d8b62dd2cb372a22"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"As a platform to be read and interpreted, The Stack clearly sits on both sides of this coupling of culture and technology. It relies on software as both a kind of language and a kind of technology, of algorithms of expression and the expression of algorithms, and this twisting of the conceptual and the machinic can sometimes bring emotional distress. <sup>19</sup> For some, an apparently universal convertibility of social systems into software systems motivates euphoric convictions in the instantaneous self-realization of networked individuals, a particularly Californian enthusiasm spanning from the ingenious to the idiotic. (The so-called California Ideology is not what I am referring to here. That term was always a simplistic New Left chestnut that crudely lumped Survival Research Laboratories and Page Mill Road venture capitalists into one cohort.) <sup>20</sup> However, the extremities of convictions also give way to a more nuanced complex of platforms that not only augment force and authority but constitute first-order modes of authority on their own (they are discussed in following chapters). These are the geographic powers to be further decided and designed, or left to go stale and rot on their own. For example, the ability of some platforms to absorb and recognize patterns in end User behavior might mimic how markets resolve fluctuations of price, but its formal centralization also allows for higher-level forms of planning, investment, and equity that states are, ostensibly, steering on their own. Contemporary Cloud platforms are derived from more specific systems of user-facing interfaces and services (discussed at length in the Cloud chapter). The intelligence of User interactions provides core content that is aggregated, optimized, and made more visible, more immediate, more standardized, more interoperable, more mobile, and therefore more valuable both to Users and to the platform than it would be otherwise. How far can that go?\n\nFor some, the capacity for platforms to operate in this way suggests striking similarities with the hopes of socialist planners to engineer a pricing and planning mechanism that could observe, analyze, calculate, produce, and distribute materials and goods according to principles of rational evaluation instead of the anarchic vagaries of supply and demand. <sup>21</sup> Francis Spufford ’ s 2010 historical novel, Red Plenty, did much to respark interest in this overlooked period in the history of political computer science, and in Khrushchev- and Brezhnev-era Soviet economists and cyberneticians in particular. <sup>22</sup> At that time, planners and programmers had access to what is by today ’ s standards minuscule computing capacity to calculate patterns, pathways, and contingencies, but contemporary supercomputing systems not only could orchestrate and optimize the pricing and dissemination requirements of large economies; they do it every day. <sup>23</sup> Those planners and programmers also labored under centralized authoritarianism, and so for our efforts to plot out where else platform economies can be made to go and what alternatives to Anthropocenic economics are possible, it is not suggested that we look back on midcentury regimes for all the key clues. However, the clear homologies between the aspirations of Soviet cybernetics and the accomplishments of Google, for example, to model and govern superpower-scale digital economies, and the genealogies that link the latter to the former, at least testify against the notion of an intrinsic bond between capitalism and computational megaplatforms. We may anticipate that to some significant extent, the dovetailing of the future evolution of both agendas will transform one another and may even allow one to fully envelop the other: neither state as machine nor market as machine because the platform is state, market, and machine at once. Some Marxian articles of faith (such that once global technological means of production and valuation have reached some threshold level of efficiency and ubiquity, such that continuance of management by capital is not needed, then things will give way to a self-regulating infrastructural commonwealth) may have surprising interpretive value for the next century even if it works out in ways utterly different than originally and normally conceived. As many on the left and the right have postulated, the acceleration of capital flows through computational megaplatforms such as these may, in the long run, do as much to undermine the modern function of exchangeable property as it does to radicalize it (and perhaps the former because of the latter). We will have to wait and see what will and will not “ wither away ” should planetary-scale computation approach peak platform optimization and ubiquity, but in the meantime, we have other historical examples of proto-Stack governments to consider and to interpret.\n\nPlatform and Stack, Model and Machine\n\n57","previous_page":56,"next_page":58}