{"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":92,"pdf_page":108,"physical_index":108,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"43655adf1d3c19576373cf025aba903a6019bad63263dcf563c02b1d5e9c29a8"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"20. Smart Grid: Ouroboros\n\nAs biological economies are dependent on energy economies, so biopolitics is dependent on the polities of energy. <sup>50</sup> Projects like Planetary Skin attempt to ensure one sort of compatibility between energy and biology by modeling their computational equivalence. Not only is carbon priced according to its negative costs, but the chemistry of life-forms that absorb carbon dioxide and ameliorate those costs is quantified and qualified as a valuable “ service. ” Rainforests, mangroves, and sea grasses eat the gaseous excrement of industrialization, and for this they and their legal custodians are perhaps due rent. Geophysics itself is thus made into a form of material labor, and its surpluses are enumerated, invested, exchanged, collateralized. But the Earth layer is not only where energy is monitored; it also the source and provisioner of the brute energy to run the other layers of The Stack; it is the bedrock stratum where energy economies produce the networkable electrons necessary to animate the machines above, fabricated in steel, cement, plastic, silicon, and flesh. Regardless of its source (solar, nuclear, compressed natural gas, wind, hydrothermal, coal) or the network architecture of its industrial generation and distribution (from massively centralized, like a nuclear fission power plant, to informal and decentralized, like an off-the-grid solar panel cluster), energy dictates the variability of human settlements and their ultimate risks, costs, and benefits. Our design interest therefore is not aligned with a notional sustainability conceived as conservative homeostasis, but with the force routes of a disequilibrium that reverberate through matter and transform the world in creative rhythms, slow and fast, including especially its plastics and fleshes.\n\nThe Cloud layer, just above the Earth layer in The Stack, makes epic, rapidly expanding energy demands (the total carbon footprint of the world ’ s data centers has already surpassed that of the airline industry and is presumed to triple by 2020), and so risk is not hard to find. Data centers are located to mitigate cost and uncertainty, away from likely natural disasters, in proximity of cheap or clean energy sources, diverse power grid interconnects, favorable land use zoning, and inexpensive intermediate bandwidth, for example. <sup>51</sup> Because there is no planetary computational economy that is not first a planetary energy economy, the limits to growth for The Stack are not only Moore ’ s law and Shannon ’ s law (accelerating the speed of processors and squeezing more information into existing channels) but also, and perhaps foremost, to secure the energy necessary to power those data centers, smart cities, homes, cars, roads, smart objects, and phones, as well as the real costs (or benefits) of doing so at the expense of other infrastructure, like new roads and buildings. <sup>52</sup> In principle, there is a potentially virtuous correlation at work for innovation across computation and energy sectors, and the gamble on that potential is another generative accident of the Earth layer. The continuing growth of The Stack and the computationally intensive transformation of energy sourcing and distribution infrastructures on which it depends likely cannot occur without one another. The architectures of new energy-information networks, including so-called smart grids, require pervasive computational systems to realize necessary gains in the timely, efficient, and equitable distribution of megawatts of energy across networks. For this, each point in the grid that might produce or consume energy, which is in principle pretty much anywhere and anyone, must not only be able to store or transmit that energy, but also to calculate and communicate its activities to platforms that steer the whole. All electrons must pass through the angelic regime of recording and optimization, but today such grids are slow to come online. <sup>53</sup> Their politics are filled with inertia and gamesmanship, and, moreover, the underlying physics is uncooperative; electrons do not work “ like bits ” no matter what your smart city consultants are saying. At the same time, The Stack itself depends on new energy grids to feed and undergird its growth. It requires a conjoined-twin energy-information network that can generate, calculate, and allocate those usable electrons point-to-point. Absent a radical relaxation of energy scarcity by renewable sources, the finely grained electron sorting between points of production and consumption must be realized at global scale or the growth of planetary-scale computation will hit physical energy limits and will stall. <sup>54</sup> A more scalable grid of electrons needs to be wrapped inside and around The Stack ’ s Earth layer. In short, planetary-scale computation needs smart grids to grow, and for smart grids to grow, they need more ubiquitous computation. The computational future of energy and the infrastructural program of computation form such a coil, one end feeding on the other like Ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail.\n\n92\n\nEarth Layer","previous_page":91,"next_page":93}