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# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

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59. John Thackara, “ Lightness, ” in In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 18 – 19: “ Power tools are another example. The average consumer power tool is used for ten minutes in its entire life — but it takes hundreds of times its own weight to manufacture such an object. Why own one, if I can get ahold of one when I need it? A product-service system provides me with access to the products, tools, opportunities, and capabilities I need to get the job done — namely, power tools for me to use, but not own. ”

60. Based on a working presumption that the “ glass ” in Google Glass — or some daughter tech nology with longer-term traction — would also be well suited to windshields, another group of students developed a prototype suite of geolocative augmented reality games to be played by passengers in cars sharing nearby locations on the road through vehicle-to-vehicle networks. From this, other applications are easy to imagine, from the mundane (videoconferencing) to the whimsical (site-specific virtual flora and fauna superimposed over the passing outlines of the landscape) to the ugly (advertising-supported toll routes). See also Ryan Lawler, “ Dispatch from the Future: Uber to Purchase 2,500 Driverless Cars from Google, ” TechCrunch, April 25, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/25/uberauto/. Chunka Mui, “ Dispatch from 2023: Google Considers Buying 250,000 Driverless Cars from Tesla, but Buys Tesla Instead, ” Forbes, August 29, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2013/08/29/dispatch-from-2023 -google-considers-buying-250000-driverless-cars-from-tesla-but-buys-tesla-instead/.

61. Gary Marcus, “ Moral Machines, ” New Yorker, November 24, 2012, http://www.newyorker .com/news/news-desk/moral-machines.

62. Nick Bilton, “ Disruptions: As New Targets for Hackers, Your Car and Your House, ” New York Times, August 11, 2013, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com//2013/08/11/taking-over-cars-and -homes-remotely/.

63. See, for example, Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

64. See Danielle Citron, “ Bright Ideas: Anita Allen ’ s Unpopular Privacy, ” Concurring Opinions, January 13, 2012, http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2012/01/bright-ideas-anita -allens-unpopular-privacy.html.

65. Jacob Applebaum, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann, and Julian Assange, “ Episode 8, Part 1, ” WikiLeaks World Tomorrow, April 2012, https://worldtomorrow.wikileaks.org/ episode-8.html.

If you look at it from a market perspective, I ’ m convinced that there is a market in privacy that has been mostly left unexplored, so maybe there will be an economic drive for companies to develop tools that will give users the in-dividual ability to control their data and communication. Maybe this is one way that we can solve that problem. I ’ m not sure it can work alone, but this may happen and we may not know it yet. — Jeremie Zimmermann

Philip Mirowski writes that “ the Incredible Disappearing Agent has had all sorts of implications for neoliberal political theory. First off, the timeworn conventional complaint that economics is too pigheadedly methodologically individualist does not begin to scratch the neoliberal

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program. ‘ Individuals ’ are merely evanescent projects from a neoliberal perspective. Neoliberalism has consequently become a scale-free Theory of Everything: something as small as a gene or as large as a nation-state is equally engaged in entrepreneurial strategic pursuit of advantage, since the ‘ individual ’ is no longer a privileged ontological platform. Second, there are no more ‘ classes ’ in the sense of an older political economy, since every individual is both employer and worker simultaneously; in the limit, every man should be his own business firm or corporation; this has proven a powerful tool for disarming whole swathes of older left discourse. It also appropriates an obscure historical development in American legal history — that the corporation is tantamount to personhood — and blows it up to an ontological principle. Third, since property is no longer rooted in labor, as in the Lockean tradition, consequently property rights can be readily reengineered and changed to achieve specific political objectives; one observes this in the area of ‘ intellectual property, ’ or in a development germane to the crisis, ownership of the algorithms that define and trade obscure complex derivatives, and better, to reduce the formal infrastructure of the marketplace itself to a commodity. Indeed, the recent transformation of stock exchanges into profit-seeking IPOs was a critical neoliberal innovation leading up to the crisis. Classical liberals treated ‘ property ’ as a sacrosanct bulwark against the state; neoliberals do not. Fourth, it destroys the whole tradition of theories of ‘ interests ’ as possessing empirical grounding in political thought. ” See his remarks, “ The Thirteen Commandments of Neoliberalism ” at http://www .the-utopian.org/post/53360513384/the-thirteen-commandments-of-neoliberalism.

66. The simple formula that the powerful should be transparent and the powerless opaque means something only if those terms are self-evident and if they sit still while the world turns. Neither is a reasonable assumption. Consider this example. Solly Benjamin and his colleagues looked at the impact of the digitization of land records in Bangalore. Their findings were that newly available access to landownership and title information in Bangalore was primarily being put to use by middle- and upper-income people and by corporations to gain ownership of land from the marginalized and the poor. The newly digitized and openly accessible data allowed the well-to-do to take the information provided and use that as the basis for instructions to land surveyors and lawyers and others to challenge titles, exploit gaps in title, take advantage of mistakes in documentation, and identify opportunities and targets for bribery, among others. They were able to directly translate their enhanced access to the information along with their already available access to capital and professional skills into unequal contests around land titles, court actions, offers of purchase, and so on for self-benefit and to further marginalize those already marginalized. Solomon Benjamin, R. Bhuvaneswari, P. Rajan, and Manjunatha, “ Bhoomi: ‘ E-Governance, ’ or, an Anti-Politics Machine Necessary to Globalize Bangalore? ” CASUM-m working paper, January 2007, http://casumm.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/bhoomi-e-governance.pdf.

67. “ Virtual People to Get ID Checks, ” BBC News, July 29, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ technology-14277728.

68. Charles A. Shanor, “ Making a Mountain out of a Digital Molehill, ” New York Times, June 7, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/making-a-mountain-out-of-a-digital -molehill.html.

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69. Consider Cloud Inc., “ a non-profit working to create a contextual markup language around identity. ” See “ Austin Nonprofit Trying to Help the World Get Back Its Online Identity, ” Statesman, July 24, 2011, http://www.statesman.com/news/technology/austin-nonprofit-trying-tohelp-the-world-get-back/nRcwY/. Or, Kyle Vanhemert, “ For \$300, You Can Buy a Stunning 3-D Printed Version of Yourself, ” Wired, August 2, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/08/this -company-will-transform-you-into-an-incredibly-detailed-3-d-printed-figurine/.

70. Andy Greenberg and Ryan Mac, “ How a ‘ Deviant ’ Philosopher Built Palantir, a CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut, ” Forbes, August 14, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia -funded-data-mining-juggernaut/.

71. Hugo De Garis, The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines (Palm Springs, CA: ETC Publications, 2005).

72. Gigi Fenomen, “ New App Allows Piloting a Drone with Google Glass Using Head Movements, ” Android Apps, August 24, 2013, http://android-apps.com/news/new-app-allows-piloting -a-drone-with-google-glass-using-head-movements/.

73. Let me propose that Philip K. Dick ’ s novel A Scanner Darkly (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), should be part of the standard high school literature curriculum, if only because the existential psychology of the User will prove to be based on first-person access to third-person experiences of first-person experiences.

74. Singleton, “ On Being Crafty. ”

75. Benedict Singleton, “ Maximum Jailbreak, ” e-flux journal, no. 46 (June 2013).

76. Mark A. McMenamin and Dianna L. Schulte, Hypersea: Life on Land (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

77. Katherine Harmon, “ Undead-End: Fungus That Controls Zombie-Ants Has Own Fungal Stalker, ” Scientific American, November 8, 2012, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ zombie-ant-fungus-parasite/. The line, “ animal living inside of animal living inside animal ” is Ed Keller ’ s.

The Stack to Come

1. Dave Eggers, The Circle (San Francisco: McSweeney ’ s, 2013).

2. Writers Against Mass Surveillance, “ A Stand for Democracy in the Digital Age, ” a collectively signed petition at https://www.change.org/p/a-stand-for-democracy-in-the-digital-age-3. First published December 10, 2013.

3. From Chris Anderson ’ s talk at Google, Authors@Google: Chris Anderson (2012), https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=3grzYoJ2oPQ.

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4. Jacob Appelbaum, “ Art as Evidence ” (panel at Transmediale, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin, January 30, 2014), http://www.transmediale.de/content/presentation-by-jacob -applebaum-at-transmediale-2014-keynote-art-as-evidence.

5. Charles Manson, “ Lie, ” recorded August 9, 1968, Phil Kaufman, 1970, vinyl recording.

6. A sectional tracking shot, as in Hitchcock ’ s Rear Window, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount, 1954). Made in USA, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (Anouchka Films, Rome Paris Films, S.E.P.I.C, 1966). (Or, for that matter, Shigeru Miyamoto ’ s video game Donkey Kong.)

7. This line of thinking is represented by John Perry Barlow ’ s “ Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace ” manifesto from 1996, as well as various anarchist and libertarian platforms. To states he warned, “ You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. ” To his credit, Barlow ’ s opinions have evolved considerably since this text was first posted.

8. One of the ways that states hope to manage a transition and translation into Cloud platforms is to take it on themselves to realize a cartographic and optical authority — omniscience, if you like — over the entirety of the space they call “ cyber. ” In September 2014, as part of an ongoing wave of disclosures, Der Spiegel published a PDF file of a PowerPoint deck, “ Bad guys are everywhere, good guys are somewhere, ” presented by the NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center, which included a slide featuring the US security agencies ’ own version of The Stack. As said, the US Department of Defense has Stack theorists too. The diagram is not secret, it has been around a while, and it depicts what Paul Rosenzweig calls “ the five layers of the cyber domain. ” This book ’ s stack is Earth and Cloud at the physical layer, City and Address at the network layer, and Interface and User at the application and agent layers. The Department of Defense ’ s stack has a Geographic layer, a Physical Network layer, a Logical Network layer, a Cyber Persona layer, and a Persona layer. The deck also discusses an initiative called Treasuremap, which purports to “ map the entire Internet — Any device, anywhere, all the time. ” A whole chapter of this book could have been devoted just to the US federal Stack programs at work, especially those detailed in similar decks and perhaps that will be a follow-up in one way or another. Detailed images of the Defense Stack, and of these programs ’ publicly available diagrams and publications, are at the book website, thestack.org. Another notable usage of “ stacks ” is by Bruce Sterling, who around the same time as I was giving public lectures based on this book, made several references to what he called “ The Stacks. ” For him this term refers, roughly speaking, to large Cloud platforms such as Google, Apple and Facebook. He contrasted these systems to an ideal “ open internet. ” See for example Sterling ’ s closing address at the 2012 South By Southwest conference, Austin, Texas. March 13, 2012. And his essay “ State of the World 2013 ” (with Jon Lebkowsky) at http://www.well.com/ conf/inkwell.vue/topics/459/State-of-the-World-2013-Bruce-St-page01.html. Sterling and I have exchanged notes on the implications of the term, and he has also blogged about this book ’ s developing research. See for example, “ The Cloud, The State and the Stack ” at http://www.wired .com/2012/12/the-cloud-the-state-and-the-stack/ and “ On the Nomos of the Cloud: The Stack, Deep Address and Political Geography ” at http://www.wired.com/2013/02/on-the-nomos-of-the -cloud-the-stack-deep-address-internal-geography/.

9. “ God Bows to Math ” is a song by Minutemen, from the album Double Nickels on the Dime (SST Records, San Pedro, CA, 1984).

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10. See “ Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, ” http://bldgblog .blogspot.com/2007/12/comparative-planetology-interview-with.html.

11. That it is not surprising does not make it any less disappointing, but that famous “ blue marble ” photograph that ostensibly gave figural clarity to a globally politicized Ecology movement was taken by astronaut, Harrison Schmitt, later a vociferous climate-change denialist senator from New Mexico. Further, the original version of the photograph showed the continent of Africa with the tip of the Cape of Good Hope facing “ up ” and so putting the occluded areas Europe and the United States “ below ” Africa in perspective. There is no north or south in space, but the public versions of the photo inverted this perspective to a north-up map orientation restoring a completely artificial natural order.

12. On Peter Thiel ’ s thesis see “ Technology Stalled in 1970, ” MIT Technology Review, September   
18, 2014, http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled-in-1970/.   
13. See my “ We Need to Talk About TED ” editorial published by The Guardian, December 30,   
2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted.

14. Mike Davis, “ Who Will Build the Ark? ” New Left Review, no. 61 (January/February 2010): 45, http://newleftreview.org/II/61/mike-davis-who-will-build-the-ark: “ Tackling the challenge of sustainable urban design for the whole planet, and not just for a few privileged countries or social groups, requires a vast stage for the imagination, such as the arts and sciences inhabited in the May Days of Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus. It presupposes a radical willingness to think beyond the horizon of neo-liberal capitalism toward a global revolution that reintegrates the labour of the informal working classes, as well as the rural poor, in the sustainable reconstruction of their built environments and livelihoods. ”

15. Martin Heidegger interview with Der Spiegel by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, September   
23, 1966, published May 31, 1976.

16. Latour ’ s unfortunate and broadly dismissive remarks on geoengineering: Bruno Latour, keynote speech (CAST Symposium: Seeing/Sounding/Sensing, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, September 26, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7hAP4wG71s.

17. The case for geoengineering is made by David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Nick Srncicek ’ s review of Keith ’ s book is at http://review31.co.uk article/view/196/prometheanism-and-the-precautionary-principle. On the importance of preemptive international agreements governing if, when, and how geoengineering may be initiated, see David G. Victor, Global Warming Gridlock: Creating More Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

18. Speaking of platforms, fossil-fuel-based economies are themselves subordinated by platform lock-in, in this case, for the extraction and transmutation of particular molecules.

19. By all accounts, Amazon space is already built on the precision of an object flow that engineers the movements of human workers with a repetitious efficiency probably better suited to robots. In describing the stress and precariousness of work in Amazon fulfillment centers it may be that less human labor is more humane, but as Amazon (and really all the major Cloud platforms) absorbs, centralizes, and consolidates production labor into tighter strata of proprietary commerce-logistics algorithms, the future of work is made that much more uncertain, and along with it, the real economic power of their workers to also be their customer- Users.

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20. For example, Ian Berry, “ Monsanto to Buy Planting Technology Company, ” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023047076045774221621 32896528.

21. Sleep Dealer, directed by Alex Rivera (Vaya Entertainment, 2008).

22. From a private Facebook post by Christopher Head.

23. For example, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, David Graeber writes: “ Hardly surprising: if it were not possible to effectively imprison the majority of people in the world in impoverished enclaves, there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin with. Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would collapse. This is another thing to bear in mind when people talk about the decline of ‘ sovereignty ’ in the contemporary world: the main achievement of the nation-state in the last century has been the establishment of a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers across the world. It is precisely this international system of control that we are fighting against, in the name of genuine globalization. ” See Tom Mertes and Walden Bello, Walden, a Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible? (London: Verso, 2004), 206.

24. A similar conclusion from the other side of the political spectrum, foldling around the point where left anarchism and right libertarianism carry water for one another. Arnold Kling, “ Exit, Voice, and Freedom: An Example, ” Library of Economics and Liberty, August 13, 2009, http:// econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/08/exit\_voice\_and\_2.html.

25. For a list and typology of enclaves and exclaves, see Jan S. Krogh ’ s “ Geosite: Enclaves and Exclaves, ” http://geosite.jankrogh.com/exclaves.htm.

26. At the same time as the City layer of The Stack integrates individual cities more thoroughly into a general planetary infrastructure of energy, water, labor, and information, it also might shift the economics of that common infrastructure from one that is by necessity held in common to one that becomes, through its use, a revenue platform. Whereas Google generates revenue by reselling the thoughts, preferences, clicks, and pathways of its users, so might the Google City (of activated energy, water, and labor, as well as information) generate revenue by the “ using ” of the very interfaces that compose and comprise the city in situated space: user-citizen-laborers making money for a city ’ s charter investors by the simple arcs of their d é rive. The ambient urban interface is a cash cow for the right cloud urbanist. Such are the geopolitics of the City layer of The Stack.

27. See Elysium, directed by Neill Blomkamp (Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2013). As when Ukrainians seized the semisecret palace of deposed President Yanukovych, only to discover a museum of kitsch gold toilet seats, the audience of Elysium could only be disappointed with the incredible lack of imagination (and taste) exhibited by those who would abscond with the planet ’ s remaining wealth for their own benefit. That they would use the lives of billions of people for kindling is one thing; that they would purchase such dull garden-variety bourgeoisie, is the insult on top of insult. Dictators these days have no taste.

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28. J. G. Ballard, High Rise (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975).

29. See http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/23/history-border-crisis-central -america-gangs.

30. Recall recent attempts to shut off the water for at least tens of thousands of residents of Detroit, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/detroit-water-shut-offs-brings-u-n-scrutiny/ http://www .bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29697767. Martin Lukacs, “ Detroit’s Water War: A Tap Shut-Off That Could Impact 300,000 People, ” Guardian, June 25, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/ environment/true-north/2014/jun/25/detroits-water-war-a-tap-shut-off-that-could-impact -300000-people.

31. See http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/ex/digital-utopia.html, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A, and http://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public \_statements/promoting-internet-inclusion-more-things-more-people/140107ces-iot.pdf.

32. Balaji Srinivasa, “ Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit, ” speech at the Y Combinator Startup School, De Anza College, Cupertino, CA, October 25, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A. “ Peacefully start an international (1) company, (2) community, (3) currency, (4) country. We are now at step 3. ” (@balajis, January 3, 2014.

33. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty; Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

34. Larry Page, “ Google I/O 2013: Keynote, ” YouTube, May 15, 2013, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=9pmPa\_KxsAM.

35. Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net (New York: Arbor House, 1988).

36. Robin Hanson, “ More Inequality, Merited, ” Overcoming Bias, September 22, 2011, http:// www.overcomingbias.com/2011/09/more-inequality-merited.html.

37. “ Beyond this core agenda, the forces of Organized Chaos, by and large, think that the Internet should be allowed to evolve on its own, the way human societies always have. The forces of Organized Chaos have a pretty good sense of how it will evolve, at least in the short term. The Internet will stratify, as cities did long ago. There will be the mass Internet we already know — a teeming bazaar of artists and merchants and thinkers as well as pickpockets and hucksters and whores. It is a place anyone can enter, anonymously or not, and for free. Travel at your own risk! But anyone who wishes can decide to leave this bazaar for the security of the bank or the government office — or, if you have enough money, the limousine, the Sky Club, the platinum concierge. You will always have to give something up. If you want utter and absolute privacy, you will have to pay for it — or know the right people, who will give you access to their hidden darknets. For some services, you may decide to trade your privacy and anonymity for security. Depending on circumstance and desire, people will range among these worlds. ” Michael J. Gross, “ World War 3.0, ” Vanity Fair, May 16, 2012, http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/05/ internet-regulation-war-sopa-pipa-defcon-hacking.

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38. In the mature version of this particular Cloud feudalism scenario (again, it is one among many such scenarios, not a prediction), the walls of some gardens are hard and thick and resemble those of factories or zoos, while others are informal, invisible, or covered in pixels. The routinization of everyday life for the vast plurality of people reduces User-citizens to mere personnel in wider interplatform conflicts and dramas. The social and economic relationships between enclave/camps in a geography of Cloud polities operating at such radically different levels of power is likely to function like similar arrangements have in the past, through the extraction of arbitrary rent and the coordination of coercive exposure and autonomous servitude.

On the geopolitical stage, a not dissimilar mix of the new and the old, of consolidation and division, is played out. On the secular side, it is characterized by an apparently paradoxical dynamic between the entropic global integration of mobile people, goods, data, currencies, viruses, and genomes, versus pronounced state securitization, as well as nativist or irredentist claims against the effects, both real and imagined, of that mobility. The tension between geographic integration and disintegration emerges from an interdependent spatial-cultural economy in which the conditions of movement and the risks of interpenetration are mediated by the subdividing envelopes of interfacial provincialism and urban regionalism. Contemporary geopolitics depends on this tension just as much as the attacks on it from both the future front and archaic rear exploit it by elevating it to messianic first principle. Globalization results less on the disappearance of borders than in their perforated multiplication and superimposition, and in the proliferation of enclaves and exclaves bending around each other ’ s only-partial interior space. In this, the conditions of exclusive or partial membership of any Cloud Polis is determined not only by its technological services on offer but also by the more complex sociocultural, even theological, demands of those multiple interiors. That any User may occupy several, even at once, complicates how they are and are not mobilized by any one of these. This patchwork may generate new geopolitical belief systems, or make use of older ones, or combine them. Imagined communities might precede their migration to the Cloud (by several centuries in the case of religious or ethnic nationalisms) where they can reanimate and rearticulate older cosmologies and geographies. The appearance of new variations might be a novel function of the Cloud’ s most recent social moral communities to which they are native (such as Anonymous).

In practice, as for any transnational cultural sphere, the imagined communities that fill out any Cloud Polis with social content will draw on both an existing archive of cultural identities and tensions as well as employ novel logics of the Cloud to innovate on their conceptual alliances and practices of inclusion and exclusion. As we ’ ve explored, the fragility of such translations between the message and the medium includes ambiguities as to what is and is not a state or “ market ” endeavor in the first place, sacred or profane, inside and outside, here and there. At present, with that fragility at hand and those ambiguities in our hearts and mind, perhaps among the most urgent next steps for geodesign is to draw preemptive scenarios of their implications and work backward from them.

39. There is unlikely potential in other examples at a different scale as well. We have the curious cases of religious movements becoming parastates, such as the Vatican, or ISIS, or Hezbollah, the transnational Shi ’ a party, and military and social service apparatus based in Lebanon. Suspending from our minds only for a moment the ideological content of this entity, what in reality is the sovereign status of this organizational form? It is a state within a state, albeit one largely financed by another state, that has not seceded from its host nation but controls large swaths with lastinstance sovereignty. On purely formal terms, how would organizational apparatuses such as these compare to corporations that have, at least in the United States, been granted the constitutional protections of private religious belief? (Here market fundamentalism collaborates directly in desecularization.) We can easily imagine scenarios in which theologically programmatic Cloud platforms might compose their City, Address, Interface, and User layers as something that resembles Hezbollah at least as much as a mid-twentieth-century corporation.

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