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# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty
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Just as the overlaid geographies of the Cloud layer are generative of its most interesting future developments (and this geometric dissensus should be recognized as such), the same superimpositions will give structure to the pathways and limits of our own individual lives. In relation to software and sovereignty, each person, each plot of land, each addressable object, will be claimed by multiple incompatible jurisdictional authorities at the same time. Each such authority is in its way complete and “ universal ” within the limited domain that it can see and move, even if it is invisible to the others. The management of this multiplicity therefore works not in spite of overlapping claims, but because of their claims of exclusivity. We will see that finally, it is the mutual exclusivity and closure between delimited sovereign spaces that allows multiple universal claims to coexist in different dimensions, even as they claim the same person or site as a subject. Perhaps, as we will discuss in the following chapters, the most critical secondary accidents of the Cloud layer are those that automate the architecture of exclusion between territorial planes according to violent hierarchies of absorption and extraction. It may also be our hope, however, that the same operations bring with them their own generative accidents, ones that introduce unexpected and uncontrollable forms of spatial access and practical mobility for those otherwise curtailed by its intended predicaments. That is, the flip side of producing platform User identity when none is wanted is that it is also produced for Users regardless of how other systems may otherwise try to exclude them. By their normalization of exceptional reversibility, urban and infrastructural scale interfaces that once kept them out now let them in, automating sovereignty where states had decided alienation. To consider this in more detail, we ’ ll have to examine how the Cloud drives and animates the next layer up in The Stack, the one inside of which we all live: the City layer.
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No one, today, can know what the city of tomorrow will be. One part of the semantic wealth which belonged to it in the past … , it will lose that, certainly. ... The creative and formative role of the city will be taken charge of by other communications systems ... , perhaps ... television, radio, their vocabulary and syntax, consciously and deliberately.
— Jean-Luc Godard, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle1
The inhabitants [of Ersilia)] stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing. They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away. Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities2
It is not the line that is between two points, but the point that is the intersection of many lines. — Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers3
Whenever I hear the term smart cities, I reflexively think of Jacques Tati ’ s satires on the follies of automated modern architecture. However dark the humor, for master-controlled megacities and stale visions of bland efficiency, mega-hijinks are sure to follow. The poverty of off-the-shelf smart city strategies is all the more distressing given how important the intelligent composition of computational systems at urban scale actually is, especially for new platform sovereignties. Instead, however, if we view these supposedly futuristic digital technologies in relation to more primordial relationships with territory, we may conclude that our meandering, rootless itinerancy through the surpriseless pathways of junkspace, gripping our mobile Cloud platform tethers (aka “ phones ” and tablets and so on) scanning, sorting, poking, and choosing as we go, is a far less modern way of being urban than we assume. 4 Humans, as a species, have physically evolved very little in the last hundred thousand years, and barely at all since the appearance of writing. Our bodies ’ own sensory media are the same as those that allowed our ancestors to survive the predatory rhythms of the primal savanna, and in the City’ s landscapes of information production and reception, similar rhythms persist, now triangulated with new remote communication channels and various forms of augmented cognition. Perhaps we have tuned these rhythms so that they can resonate with new tools as much as we have tuned our tools to them. As Sanford Kwinter wrote,
City Layer
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The contemporary “ mediascape ” has given such primacy of place to communication that it has transformed it into substance itself, the very material of which we, and our world, are made. Yet all biological substance is founded on signaling, from the first single-cell organisms nearly 3 billion years ago to the most sophisticated forms of human social life today. There is no family of animal that is not defined by its capacities for signaling and no ecological niche that is not defined by the infrastructure that supports this signaling. When the human line broke off from its ape ancestors it was a result of a new capacity for communication (a new hand-eye-brain-mouth machine) and the rise of a new signaling niche in the environment to be filled (the long distance savannah). 5
Architecture at landscape scale, whether as continuous networked urban fabrics or as withdrawn megastructure, is a particularly important communications infrastructure, in harmony or dissonance with those tunings and countertunings of tools and perception. In this guise, The Stack enrolls the city as a discrete layer within its larger sum by the binding of sensation and scale with enclosure and envelope and by pairing the tactility of the virtual with the effervescence of the monumental. As such, architecture itself serves as both a compositional model for stacks and stacking and as the tangible infrastructure for its manifestation as cities. While it captures humans and consoles them within walls, it also provides boulevards of escape toward other urban interiors, and at least in this way, the City layer of The Stack does not enforce dichotomies between urbanisms of enclosure and urbanisms of mobility as much as it combines them. One may turn into the other at any moment. For this project, the City layer ’ s basic building unit is the interfacial partition, the physical or virtual boundary that is made systematically reversible by the situation of its functions within larger computational systems. As we ’ ll see, it opens up and closes off urban spaces to different Users in different ways, allowing different City morphologies for some than it does for others, and in doing so, it generates and automates visceral first-person experiences of platform sovereignty, whether invited to do so or not.
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34. Reversible Grids
Along with policing reversible partitions, the City also situates signposts and landmarks around which roving bodies might orient their passing. In many respects, for Stack urbanism, mobilization precedes and supersedes settlement. Instead of housing massive inert populations, the City layer is perhaps foremost a platform for sorting Users in transit, who in turn reprogram the urban platform, and through it re-sort one another. Consider, by way of analogy and allegory, the excavations beginning in 1994 that unearthed the G ö bekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey, among the oldest human-made places of worship ever found to date. The dig ’ s stratified layers, one upon another, were set over centuries. The earliest layers date to 9000 B.C.E., the dawn of the Holocene era a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramids, more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape, and 5,000 years before the first proto-states emerged in the Nile and Indus valleys. The temple predates not only formal agriculture but large-scale human settlement, and it is thought that it was a site of worship for numerous hunter-gatherer groups within a roughly hundred-mile radius. The discovery is obviously significant for Neolithic anthropology and has challenged some presumptions about the social and technological capacities of preagricultural societies. For our purposes, this temple as primal scene not only underscores the foundational role of “ theology ” in the centralization of symbolic interfacial authority well in advance of the proto-state, but also for its demonstration of the essential importance of geography, and geo-graphy, or “ writing on the Earth. ” We can imagine (perhaps naively) that for those following game and gathering food, the direction of G ö bekli Tepe , this ancient megastructure, may have been a guiding vector around which unpredictable landscapes were measured. Perhaps its collection of animal images served as an index of possible encounters, its funeral rituals as interfaces to the mysteries of life, and the imagined possibility of triumph in or over death. For unknown reasons, at the beginning of the eighth millennium B.C.E., the entire temple system was deliberately buried under 500 cubic meters of soil, preserving it until its discovery in the 1990s. The temple ’ s establishment and thousand-year career as a homing figure orienting the movements of groups in motion, by proximity, distance, access, and reference, marks an inception of landscape geography as an interface to the world as it is moved through.
Zipping back to the present, the City layer may be seen not only as enveloping space into fields of control, but also a return to these elemental functions of passage, direction, and narration. The modern urban surface is striated by regularized voids that provide self-directed passage from one enclosure to the next; we call some of those voids “ streets ” and some of those enclosures “ blocks, ” and we call the generative platform striation “ the grid. ” The grid serves the dual purpose of enclosure and escape noted above. At once, it subdivides urban space into geometric units, each bound by legal and physical membranes, and each also situated along the shore of avenues of linear flight toward other cities over the horizon. The City layer is filled with interfaces shifting between acceleration and enclosure, of both physical objects coursing through congested logistical routes and also data packets shuttled or throttled through glass wire and ambient electromagnetic fields. The urban-scale interweaving of both grids, one literally concrete and the other more delicate if no less heavy, binds the mysteries of our own temples to the spatial interfaces that turn sites into places. With Cloud-devices pointing the way and Apps at hand (or Apps as hand, as discussed in the Interfaces chapter), we hunt for and find our modern itineraries, gather food, tabulate risks, mark passage, manage personal economies of sovereignty and alterity, and make tribute to the cycles of synthetic time and governance that give shape to the landscape. 6
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The parabolistic history above dramatizes how the City layer also unwinds the well-worn distinction between two ideal cities (reminiscent of Schmitt ’ s land versus sea): one is a city of partitions, permanent centers, and enveloped populations, and the other a city of movement expressed through nomadic landscapes, shifting perspectives, and impermanent networks. For the latter City, the line is an angle of flight, a vector and trajectory. For the former, as it is for Schmitt, the line fixes and differentiates between inside and outside, a distinct boundary membrane that holds together a contiguous polity under voluntary siege, enforcing and naturalizing that polity ’ s lived experience of place. But just as any line is itself reversible (any outside also an inside), these two urban careers of the line are themselves equally as reversible. For the grid, both the line of absolute passage and the line of absolute partition become in practice a means for the expression of the other. Like the young girl – old woman optical illusion, the figure-ground prominence of the inside versus the outside and the grounded versus the mobile flips between one ideal resolution and the other, oscillating wildly and permanently. Its reversibility may be depicted in several other ways too. It could be a Euclidean grid of points specified on a plane, separated by equal distances in the crisscrossing of perpendicular lines, or the grid could just as well be the irregular thistle of pedestrian drifts, switched packets, infinitesimally granular addressees, unexpected sea sludge (and for the City layer, one may be the precondition of the other).
Like any other platform, the urban grid is both descriptive and generative. It both draws a map of its own host situation, providing by its rigidity and predictability both the four-squared coordinates that resolve City blocks and the open channels of circulation around them, making that land legible and available to exogenous agents. In anticipation of how such grids can link cities to other structures of vastly different scales, architecture has anticipated and modeled these sorts of reversible territory and topos in many different ways. For example, around the time of the Apollo 8 “ Earthrise ” photograph, the Italian architects Archizoom, led by Andrea Branzi, were interested in considering an image of the city “ in exclusively quantitative terms, eliminating the qualitative question from the debate. ” No-Stop City, their most recognized experiment toward a “ city without architecture, ” is organized primarily through “ systems of electronic instruments, products, information, and ... componential interior[s]. ” The dominant figure for the project is the minimal inspiration of the line , but less the line of primordial graphical marking than the line that emerges in the normalized repetition of instances into a nodal grid (or in the tonal line that resolves and dissolves in the score of minimalist musical composition or in the arc of a linear statistical tendency, for example). Their abstractions required no fancy computation; rather, the project featured intensely reductive urban grid plans composed partially on typewriters , with periods and commas for nodes and zeros and dashes overlaying these to create formal fields. Later, several mirror box installations presented fleshed-out models infinitely reflected on all sides to generate a similar infinite horizon of the same, reducing all objects within the geometry to recombinant instances of graphed information. Branzi writes that No-Stop City represents a city that is an “ apparently hyper-expressive reality but that is, actually substantially catatonic because it is the result of the infinite repetition of an alienating political system without density. ” 7 For this, the city equals the world, and the world is rendered as a conjunctive grid wrapping a closed informational array within the arrangements of urban totality. 8 One price of this totality is, for some, a “ disappearance of the outside, ” as there is nowhere to escape if everywhere is already gridded. 9 What remains, however, is less an architecture of qualitative symbolization than a spatial politics of addition and subtraction standing in for appearance and disappearance. For this, there is always more than one totality and more than one geography employed, and within the informational geodesies evoked by No-Stop City, the symbolic depth of cities doesn ’ t disappear so much as it itself becomes an interface to and for these totalities . Today the globalization of urban geography engenders a standardized fabric of flows, radically consolidating nodes into a more centralized and hierarchical matrix of continental interfaces, but some objects in motion are all the more free for it. Others are on lockdown, and some switch back and forth on the fly, both fast and fastened down. In other words, just as for hunters and gatherers, platform sovereignty is guaranteed more by what it does and where it does it than by what it is and who it does it to.
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35. City as Layer
Now that humans are a majority urban species, it is time to reevaluate what real, finalinstance sovereignties can be derived from a city ’ s (or all cities ’ ) surfaces and interfaces. To do so means to situate the City as an interdependent layer within The Stack, and thereby the management of urban networks within global information and energy Clouds. These infrastructures produce the fragments from which platform sovereignty is identified, codified, and enforced across scales, from the intrapersonal to the interfacial and the transcontinental. In contrast to conceptions of the political as a discursive realm transcendent of the physical urban polis itself, platform sovereignties emerge less through legislative birth canals than through the irregular but consistent access to public and private hardware. The layer is not encapsulated by legal boundaries but is spread throughout a global composite City for which any one metropolis is a localized instance of global economies of mobilization and partition. That composite is ultimately built not only of many different cities, but also grids of optical networks for photon exchange, energy grids for electron exchange, and concrete grids of object placement and displacement, which together link city clusters into geographical hierarchies. Any one grid situates actors according to its particular matrices, its own history, momentum, alliances, contradictions, and the overlapping of two grids might work to multiply those situations or at times to stereoscopically resolve them into one. (This is discussed further in the User chapter.) As part of the City layer in The Stack, each of these grids might be activated individually; more likely, they are combined by some functional equivalence whereby the Cloud layer below and the Address layer above connect to the grids in ways that are agnostic as to unique relative durability, history, or character of each. That is, within The Stack, glass, steel, power, and data (and their grids) may all look the same to the layers above and below. At the same time, more specific User relations are arranged by any of the interfacial surfaces of the urban fabric (not only buildings and roads, but also those energy, hydration and data grids), all of which prioritize differently how a city is open or closed to different people and purposes. The reversibility of platform sovereignties will often play out through the computational automation of interfaces into and out of these grids.
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From these, larval proto-citizenships are derived not just from formal borders and envelopes but also from the aggregate and crisscrossing steel-energy-information envelopes. As we all share some relationship to these composite envelopes, by using them and by being used by them, that commonality coheres and automates User positions in relation to one another. The road makes us all drivers, the fiber cable line makes us all callers, and the City layer makes us all inhabitants of a composite urban territory. It suggests that any one of us is (or could be, or should be) less a political subject of this one city— London, Mumbai, Shanghai — but of the City, of the globally uneven mesh of amalgamated infrastructures and delaminated jurisdictions. As for humans, our shared but unequal relationships to this aggregate metaurban layer of The Stack also means that political subjectivity is resolved variously for the “ User” of energy, information, or land. Different Users of the City layer are curtailed toward different outcomes, even if the calculative terms of resolution are common. An individual User ’ s value, profile, and footprint are sorted within this consolidated index, fixing the City layer ’ s control program, as much as terms of a common access and rights of inhabitation and mobility throughout the layer ’ s wider expanse. The program of capture within the envelopes of a given city is always as real as the prospects of flight, but neither is guaranteed. For both of these, residential jurisdiction of a single city may be only one moment within the arc of a larger itinerary. Any one of us might only be passing through for a short time (on tourist or worker visas) or credentialized as formal citizens or restrained from leaving (refugee camps, prison cities, factory towns) or employed to drift across urban infrastructural polis (legally or not). Each of us passes from one relative state of motility to another, day by day or lifetime by lifetime. We are situated in motion, both inside generic cities, modeled on airports, translating less and less between increasingly homogeneous places, and also in the heterodoxy of urbanity as globality for which interlocking networks of passage are leveraged to support mutually reinforcing rhythms of spatial consumption. Still the platform sovereignties that emerge in the technical relations of this composite urbanity are at best contradictory. As for any grid, the reversible interfacial surface of the urban fabric can produce a durable User subject because it also by definition is a potential technology of capture and control. Part of the design brief for The Stack is to disseminate a repertoire of accidents that might frustrate the more unwanted forms of centripetal incarceration. The ultimate challenge for this is to conjure alien genres of urbanization from the bounded universality of the generic User subject position: not an undead Kantian cosmopolitanism but a geopolitical hypermaterialism for which the “ right to the city, ” and therefore to The Stack, is an essential suffrage of all meaningful Users, human and otherwise. 10
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This is possible (or would be possible) only to the extent that the multiple grids of the City layer are also interfaces to other layers of The Stack. The Earth layer provides, for example, the incredible energy necessary to feed the physical appetites of the City layer ’ s composite urbanism. Its epidermal imperative for seeing and sensing is not only a substrate to the City layer; it also becomes an operative logic of interfacial control and composition (more on this below). The Cloud layer provides the generative and reactive ambient supercomputing that makes urban envelopes and Interfaces active and brings them into other formal and informal political geographic dramas. While the Cloud may see urban nodes and fabrics as like any other material for computational expression, its main switches are themselves gathered into tight rings of intensive transcontinental hubs, centralizing bandwidth economies into a specific few cellular cities. Away from those bandwidth capitals, smaller Cloud data centers, assembly factories, fulfillment centers, call centers, and shipping ports dot more remote geographies and gather itinerant laborers into their midst (or, alternatively, protect themselves against all human contact). In special cases, Cloud platforms design their own architectural footprints by gathering their higher-level cognitive-managerial functions into megastructural corporate headquarters, often city-scale buildings with backs turned on their immediate location (more on these below). Just above the City layer in The Stack, the Address layer provides network presence for any “ thing ” within the urban landscape and for the potential of communication among them. Unlike transnational postal systems, this layer doesn ’ t address sites based on their adjacent positions on the Earth ’ s surface, and unlike the formal addressing of parties by a modern legal system, it is available to potential addressees at very different spatial or temporal scales and even degrees of physicality and abstraction. The territories of addressed instances within the larger expanse of the City layer are named, organized, and made coherent and meaningful by the Interfaces that turn maps of addressable options into practical instruments. For the User, these maps cohere the range of possible interactions and transactions not only with the City layer, but also with the Cloud and Earth layers as mediated through it; Interfaces provide a channel for the User to model and monitor his or her own position within the range that they describe. Furthermore, The Stack is not only mediated through the City layer; the entire apparatus also expresses itself at the scale of the city and the built environment, and it does so in sometimes contradictory ways, characterized as much by centralization (e.g., the continental consolidation of key bandwidth channels into meganodes and megacities) and decentralization (e.g., the global predominance of increasingly powerful mobile handsets as an essential provision for everyday urban life). 11
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