{"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":77,"pdf_page":93,"physical_index":93,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2faf4dfc978f68187eac61971d9ccd59656b467f13325692a4499e904a0c2548"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Intel ’ s initial approximations of microprocessor technology for universal computation, putting a mini-Turing machine on a silicon wafer. <sup>5</sup> In different ways and for different ends, both grapple with matter as vibrant, contingent, and mutable, as reproduced in the careful calculation of sets of differences drawn from particular virtual possibilities. At the end of the day, Deleuze ’ s philosophy is more about chemistry than computation, continuities more than discrete digitalizations, but his philosophical imagery of worlds appearing from the multiplication of imminent processes and generic diagrams, on oscillations of the physical and the virtual, is not unfamiliar to the projects of information realism. In the words of the late Friedrich Kittler, “ Silicon is nature! Silicon is nature calculating itself. If you leave out the part of engineers who write little structures on silicon you see one part of matter calculating the rest of matter. ” <sup>6</sup>\n\nThe shimmering idea that the world is composed not of given forms on a fixed stage but of an atomic field of flux and churn is ancient. The idea precedes our ability to mathematize the hypothesis experimentally and predates by millennia the engineering of machines that can simulate a calculation of discrete bits of information as if they are those atoms. Close your eyes and visualize dust motes floating and falling in the white light of a projector. See them just barely touch or miss one another. This swirling and tumbling through the void is also, given some poetic license, one model of elemental computation. Around 1 A.D., Lucretius called these atomic bits primordia or seminarerum, and for the Epicurean philosophical tradition, this flux is ontological and the basis of their own information theory avant la lettre. <sup>7</sup> It says that what seems to be naive observation as solid figures and grounds, withdrawn into themselves and oriented as objects, are but clusters of bits that have fallen into one another over time, and will in more time fall apart and again into other things, conjugating or calculating themselves again and again. The name for the force of collision that causes their downward arcs to tumble into assemblage is translated from the Latin as swerve. Atomic bits swerve, as if by accident, and in their accumulation, the entropy of the noisy void gives way to the negentropic formulation of the world and its temporal orderliness: from this calculation, forms form. Lucretius called this economy of entanglement between atoms, located by their fluid communication in flight, the clinamen, and it has been the source of considerable philosophical and literary rumination (including Marx ’ s doctoral dissertation).\n\nToday, enjoying a vantage point that includes contemporary atomic physics, we see the clinamen less as a spontaneous lurch of some thing from its track (the universe as the eventual archive of these accumulated deviations) than as interlocking fields of stochastic probabilities structuring emergent order in this way or that. The details evolve, but the idea of calculative emergence persists. The basic innovations are well known. In twelfth century Majorca, Ramon Llull described logical machines, influencing Gottfried Leibniz, who developed a predictive calculus and a biliteral alphabet that, drawing on the I Ching, allowed for the formal reduction of any complex symbolic expression to a sequence of discrete binary states (zero and one, on and off). Later, the formalization of logic within the philosophy mathematics (from Pierre-Simon Laplace, to Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor, David Hilbert, and so many others) helped to introduce, inform, and ultimately disprove a version of the Enlightenment as the expression of universal deterministic processes (of both thought and physics). In 1936, with his now-famous paper, “ On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” a very young Alan Turing at once introduced the theoretical basis of modern computing and demonstrated the limits of what could and could not ever be calculated and computed by a universal technology. Turing envisioned his famous “ machine ” according to the tools of his time to involve an infinite amount of “ tape ” divided into cells that can store symbols, moved along a stationary read-write “ head ” that can alter those symbols, a “ state register ” that can map the current arrangement of symbols along the tape, and a “ table ” of instructions that tells the machine to rewrite or erase the symbol and to move the “ head, ” assuming a new state for the “ register ” to map. The Church-Turing thesis (developed through the 1940s and 1950s) would demonstrate that Turing ’ s “ machine ” not only could simulate algorithms, but that a universal Turing machine, containing all possible such machines, could, in theory, calculate all logical problems that are in fact computable (a limit that Turing ’ s paper sought to identify). The philosophical implications are thorny and paradoxical. At the same moment that Turing demonstrates the mechanical basis for synthetic logic by machines (suggesting real artificial intelligence), he partially delinks the correlation between philosophical thought and machinic calculation. The implications continue to play out in contemporary debates from robotics to neuroscience to the philosophy of physics, as has Turing ’ s later conceptualization of “ thinking machines, ” verified by their ability to convincingly simulate the performance of human-to-human interaction, the so-called Turing test. <sup>8</sup> In the decades since Turing ’ s logic machine, computation-in-theory became computers-in-practice, and the digitalization of formal systems into mechanical systems and then back again, has become a predominant economic imperative. Through several interlocking modernities, the cal culation of discrete states of flux and form would become more than a way to describe matter and change in the abstract, but also a set of standard techniques to strategically refashion them as well. Computability moves from a universal logic to a generic technology (and so contemporary claims that this passage is reversible are both predictable and problematic). Although the twentieth century invented computers, it did not invent computation so much as it discovered it as a general force, and offered some initial basic tools to work with it more directly. We are, like everything else, also its product.\n\nEarth Layer\n\n77","previous_page":76,"next_page":78}