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# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty
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The network stacks conceived in the 1970s and 1980s by teams led by Vint Cerf (TCP/IP) and Charlie Bachmann (OSI) (among many others) were designed to solve complex but very specific transmission and communication problems. The big idea was not to disrupt modern geopolitics. However, for The Stack, we recognize them to represent a more universal topography and geographic machine, one that we may come to see as having real effects of a similar order of magnitude as the loop topologies ratified at Westphalia. It must be said that for a book of design theory, The Stack platform ’ s logical structure is far more important than the technical details of existing networks, but one provides for the other. As indicated, however, a crucial consideration for these models was massively distributed infrastructural modularity as a way to accommodate unplannable new demands and new machines within discrete layers as the key to future growth of the system. For this they exemplify platforms far more than master plans, and they are direct technologies for governance at least as much as tools of governments. At the same time, the armature for that modularity guarantees the predictability of these inclusions and the scalability of the whole, and so as for any platform, the governing regularity of stack protocols is necessarily inflexible and regular. What is simplest and most fixed provides for Hermes ’ s ephemeral work of transit and translation.
All of this is was and is highly contingent. It was quite possible that neither OSI nor TCP/IP would become anything like a central systems mechanism for global communications. The standards wars of this era divided phone companies, which preferred a system that would support discrete circuits between one sender and receiver, like older telephony networks, versus many computing companies, such as IBM, which lobbied hard for packet switching technologies that could treat all messages (e.g., voice, data, image) as recombinant bits flowing over whatever future hardware that could connect with the network. The models of communication (equally technical and social) posed by both options contain profound downstream implications for the geopolitics of an information society. A polity of circuits and a polity of packets are in epistemological and functional opposition. For the circuit model, its stack is a bounded utility for which use is metered by monopolistic caretakers who, by guaranteeing the circuit between sender and receiver, retain de facto sovereignty over the channel. For the packet switching model, at least in the minds of Cerf ’ s group, the platform would prioritize the edges of the network, asking them to do more of the work to reassemble transmitted packets and calculate the content of messages. Cerf ’ s group presumed increasing computerization of networks from node to edge, but even more than its authors intended, their model would depend on the exponential growth of the computational capacity of all network equipment, soup to nuts (e.g., terminals, routers, servers), in order to bring the network to life at a global scale. The greater the computational carrying capacity of the entire network apparatus, the more information it can convey with greater speed, and the more information it conveys, the more demand for capacity by organizations increasingly reliant on its competitive efficiencies. In this way, Moore ’ s law is not just the cause of the software society; it is also a contingent effect of a platform architecture design decision.
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Both OSI and TCP/IP are packet switching models, but for better or worse, the sevenlayer OSI model that Bachmann described never really took off. The simplified TCP/IP four-layer model described by Cerf ’ s group did get traction, and based on those early adoptions, the Internet as we know began in earnest. 31 TCP/IP was ratified in 1980, and besides compressing the stack geometry by combining the top three layers of the OSI stack into one, it proved a much simpler and flexible solution for early industrial and government network adopters. 32 TCP/IP “ won ” not simply because its early adopters were more visionary but because it just worked better to link together heterogeneous existing systems and translating between them so that they could work as one. America ’ s factories were not linked by the organicist tissue of TRON; they were full of various proprietary computing systems running mutually incompatible software. TCP/IP made it much easier to design and implement general-purpose hardware and software that could link all these together — as is — and thereby quickly realize gains in efficiencies with the machines that managers already had. As more sites (and more nodes and more Users) connected systems through this network platform (factories connected to suppliers to headquarters to warehouses and so on), the network became that much more valuable to every connected User. As the platform that glued all these together became more established, the opportunity cost of using alternatives such as OSI increased (a good example of generative entrenchment). We see that platforms that allow for a tactical appropriation to optimize existing systems have an advantage over those that would appear from a tabula rasa, at least within this context for established industrial systems. Over time, the entirety of those original economies and mechanisms may be replaced bit by bit by new technologies and new communicative norms that are better tuned to take advantage of the wider systems that emerge.
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There are important lessons for The Stack from this history. By the relative simplicity and rigidity of a modular architecture of translation, the platform gathered unlike and unforeseeable users into its media, and only by translating any “ content ” into generic information can it provide the effective universality of communication and exchange. This gathering of unlike Users into a central system that can then govern the terms of infrastructural and platform participation largely depends on how well it makes use of computational ubiquity to amplify the agency of all the nodes, wherever they may be. Perhaps most important, despite the fact that TCP/IP was intentionally authored as a scalable platform, it rose to preeminence in the governance of networks not because it was the most perfect, or because everyone voted for it, or because it was the most legally sound; rather, it just worked to tactically glue together lots of different things at different scales into more manageable and valuable forms. The same is basically true of The Stack as an accidental megastructure. There was no one commission or council whose vision authored it (though versions of it have appeared in dreams and nightmares for centuries). Its layers “ just worked ” for Users and platforms to make immediate tactical gains, and the accumulation of these trillions of maneuvers terraformed the planet. As for “ the Internet, ” we still can ’ t really point to it as one network, or one technology, or one stack. It is a conceptual assemblage of billions and billions of little machines that we treat as one thing. The Stack, as well, doesn ’ t really exist per se, and yet there it is.
The Stack is an engine for thinking and building. The architectural metaphor may suggest an exclusive design for one given site, but it should direct us instead toward a geometry in which different things occupy the same site at the same time and cohere into a stable system because of this co-overlapping. The Stack is built of real things, but how we conceptualize its totality depends on powers of aesthetic abstraction. While machinic networks demand their own recognition and when formalized these become infrastructural and platform sovereignties, the Stack diagrams these as techniques to use (or refuse) alternative political geographies but never allows for simplistic one-to-one correlations between one layer and one geopolitical operator. I am not suggesting, for example, that China functions “ like ” the physical layer of the OSI model or that Google functions “ like ” the application layer . Rather, different organs of state and Cloud platforms intersect jaggedly. Their intersections on multiple layers (e.g., Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User) can be understood through the model lens of The Stack, not just as an unaccountable proliferation of exceptional enclaves, exclaves, and liminal legal zones, but also as the topos (if not nomos) of a normative order in which these very “ exceptions ” are regularized. It is a political geography for which the vertical is on equal footing with the horizontal and demanding its overdue tribute (their crisscrossing piling of jurisdictions, on-platform and off-platform, not only works through The Stack; it is a stack). State and nonstate Cloud platforms can operate both independently and interdependently, but their position is always now in relation to one another and to what is above and below them. Our model is, we hope, both a schematic map of this dynamic and a means for its retooling; it is infrastructure that is also simultaneously a projective interface for its own recomposition and for a geopolitics-to-come. It is a space of deep addressability nominating and enumerating Users and interlocking their traces easily or uneasily across unnatural scales. Layers are delimited like borderlines, invisible membranes just as arbitrary as their enforcements, but as they gather unlike technologies into their own level, they also fold their lines around them into a frame. Especially at the Interface layer that draws Users into the fold, their lines exude platform sovereignty through an intrinsic reversibility. This nomic principle of The Stack persists.
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The aspect of this book that qualifies as a design brief hinges on how The Stack is already a larval geopolitical architecture and how its refashioning requires unexpected and uncomfortable redefinitions of what geopolitics might entail. As discussed above, The Stack is at once a machine that becomes a state, and a political geography that derives and is derived from the structure of that machine. The Stack includes all the various planetary computational technologies we now build with fanfare, but its significance is its reflection of the totality that emerges unintentionally. The platform sovereignties that it enables emerge in relation to material systems opened to the subjective image of all User positions and identities that cohere around them. In exploring the active contradictions of sovereignty in relation to emergent planetaryscale computation, we need a diagram of the global Stack that we have as it actually is (e.g., electricity grids, mineral sourcing, strange interfaces, smart and dumb cities, alien users) to give a technical specificity to our speculations on geopolitical and geosocial alternatives, but also to better abstract its scattered technical heterogeneity into a fungible totality. What binds that analysis and that design to one another is that while The Stack is a platform for computational networks and economies, it is also a metaplatform that works to gather, support, and superimpose multiple totalities at once (e.g., states, Cloud platforms, cities, projective political theologies). Each of these positions is itself in slippery contact with The Stack ’ s layers, circumscribed by one and shuttled between several. In so doing, it has repositioned itself in relation to other little totalities along the way, creating and claiming some part of the territory of planetary computation.
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User Interface Address City Cloud Earth
15. The Layers of The Stack
How does this work? What is the model exactly? The Stack is divided into six layers, moving from the global to the local, from geochemical up to the phenomenological: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User. For The Stack, multiple layers co-occupy the same terrestrial location (horizontally) but gather and subdivide their processes vertically into discrete machinic “ jurisdictions. ” That subdivisional geography is bound within the mechanism of the platform, but at the same time, The Stack platform itself disturbs existing models of jurisdiction and projects its own out into the world. Each layer configures and coheres its own specific forms of governance over what it touches, and so the difference between one layer and another is also a difference between those forms and processes. That is, the Cloud layer is defined by certain spatial and temporal demands that include what we conventionally recognize as Cloud infrastructure (e.g., data centers, fiber optics, and in-browser applications), but those demands may press on rather unlike things as well (parking spaces, medical equipment, food supply statistics). The six chapters that follow discuss each one of these layers in sequence, detailing especially how each produces its own governing logics of scale, physicality, textuality, embodiment, force, motion, stability, and, perhaps most important, how each of these logics provides productive accidents that may direct us toward unexpected design outcomes.
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The diagram of The Stack in figure 3.1 shows a vertical-sectional relationship between possible positions occupying all six layers at once. It demonstrates that while positions on layers are held simultaneously, each layer governs that position semiautonomously. In the practice of real communication, any one instance of such a stack works only in combination with another, and in this pairing, the real social form of active stacks comes into focus. That structure of connection and communication is similar to OSI or TCP/IP. Connections tunnel down, across, and back up stacks, creating temporary circuit-like connections in a U-shaped trajectory. User connects to User by initiating a “ message ” that tunnels all the way down through the other layers to the bottom and then back up again, and so direct communication between Users activates all six layers down The Stack and then all six layers again back up The Stack. The whole of the system is invoked and activated by any one connection; the whole is “ folded ” into each single instance of activation, bending the universal and the particular into one another. We define any one such path taken down and up The Stack in a U-shaped trajectory as a column. For one “ session, ” however fleeting or stable, columns fix one User to another by linking layers to those above and below into a whole, but they allow anyone or anything that is a User to initiate (or be initiated by) as many other simultaneous columns as needed. That is, as any given column tracks up and down, there is no final instance of vertical or horizontal integration that would truly and ultimately resolve a User down to the Earth layer or Cloud layer for good. Any one User will initiate millions of different columns at different moments over time, thereby executing different combinations of nested positions. This slipperiness does not correspond well with modern logics of last-instance sovereignty and citizenship. It ’ s not that there is no “ there there ” but rather that moment to moment, there are too many “ theres ” for any one sovereign geography to finally decide all the others.
At the top of any column, a User (animal, vegetable, or mineral) would occupy its own unique position and from there activate an Interface to manipulate things with particular Addresses, which are embedded in the land, sea, and air of urban surfaces on the City layer, all of which can process, store, and deliver data according to the computational capacity and legal dictates of a Cloud platform, which itself drinks from the Earth layer ’ s energy reserves drawn into its data centers. Paths between layers are sutured by specific protocols for sending and receiving information to each other, up and down, that do the work of translating between unlike technologies gathered at each plateau. In this sense, each layer can then simulate and countersimulate the operations of the other (for Users, Interfaces “ simulate ” the instrumental capacities of the entire Stack, as the hard and soft networks of the Cloud and City are “ translated ” one into the other). Their interlocking adherence to standard protocols guarantees the linking of information up and down and between like layers (or even skipping layers occasionally), and for this, an external application can enter into The Stack at any level and begin to move between levels from that starting point. Any path from top to bottom is but one possible route among many others. For example, one path from Interface to Address may be very different from another from Address to City. There are any number of possible links between User to Address, Interface to Cloud, and Earth to City, or horizontally between the same layer of two stacks (i.e., City to City). The durable form of one layer, in one context, might enable or prevent variation within another layer, because different layers function with a contingent whole with greater or lesser degrees of stability or variability. For example, identical configurations on the Cloud layer of column may link very different contexts on the User layer that is necessarily more responsive to dynamic cultural nuances.
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In practical terms, two different Users may make use of the same Interfaces and Addresses within the same City, but each may have very different privileges and limitations at the Cloud layer. As that may be the layer on which it is most decisively perched, a state may see what the Cloud layer can see (and not what it can ’ t see) in the recursive path up and down the columns that are visible to that particular layer ’ s techniques of perception and its own dispositions of looking. At the top layer, because no two Users have the same level of privilege and access within the space of possibilities in which a particular column might form, political tension pulls tight around that difference. Perhaps then the ultimate identity of any one User within The Stack could be calculated by those limitations that contrast one User to its neighbors plus the patterned aggregation of the columns it has activated over time (not unlike how today ’ s commercial Cloud platforms track and model their subscribers). For any User a particular position on one layer might guarantee a corresponding position on another layer, or might disqualify it altogether; not only are layers technically interdependent, but their social effects are as well. Attention to this leverage between layers is essential because the possible designable distribution of such positions in relation to one another may also drive the contested governance of the Cloud and of any alternative geopolitics it might engender. Even so, for the Stack platform to work, each layer still reserves its own limits, rules, and concreteness that is never finally reducible to the terms and jurisdictions of another. On the one hand, the layer ’ s modularity within the whole means that its effects are never exclusive or exhaustible, and on the other, the rigid simplicity of the total platform apparatus demands that its direct functions remain encapsulated. 33 Even as any one layer ’ s operations unfold in relation to those of adjacent layers, and so may also affect events that fall well outside the entire platform ’ s borders, the movement of hard and soft information must always pass through the protocols that divide and bind that layer ’ s work from the others.
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While any one layer ’ s operations in a given site or moment could be captured (or guaranteed) by state, nonstate, transstate, superstate, or substate actors, all the different layers within the arc of a specific column trade on multiple and incongruous strategies, all or none of which may be codified by one legal jurisdictional vision (itself perhaps unrecognized by the jurisdiction underwriting local control of another layer). A spectrum between incongruent policing and practical interoperability nevertheless characterizes the politics of stacks and is also itself even subject to local enforcements, both inside and outside the column or layer that may be in dispute. In daily practice, specific columns (hundreds of millions of them every second) are separated from one another by their unique and particular nestings of these positions and counterpositions and by the interlocking coordination of their simultaneity, fixed or unfixed by the force of formal state description. Because the autonomy of individual layers in the platform resists total capture of the platform ’ s totality, the interslicing of aggressive “ little totalities ” between columns might be rough or smooth, honed by the investments of happy Users or just as easily by the grinding tones of mutual resistance. For any column, any strong sovereign claim (state or nonstate) can only extend over some layers in any given moment or location, but never on the entire Stack at once. Interface and Address may be monopolized by one jurisdictional totality in one context, and Earth and City for another in another context, but absolute dominion over all six layers across contexts is doomed by the superimposition of multiple geographies at once, communicating with one another without master steerage or any one final settlement of transactions. At least in this way, The Stack is (we hope) a totality that is resistant to totalitarianism, even as its governing coherency depends on the gravitational pull of each layer and on the gathering of more and more of the world into its logistics (even making the opportunity cost of transactions and transitions too cheap to measure). In the six chapters that follow, I illustrate a provisional geopolitics of The Stack with which we work, one layer at a time and in aggregate, and speculate about a blossoming of exotic sovereignties that each layer might support or contain, in isolation from and in concert with others. The tilt is not toward how a sublime coordination of Stack technologies might hasten the arrival of some full-spectrum computational end of history, but how its gnashing juxtapositions generate peculiar new spaces, fractured enclaves, and how its newly normalized exceptions are perhaps instructive beyond their immediate scope. As said, each individual layer spits out its own possible accidents as it abut its neighbors, and each is presented not only as a medium for design but as a technology for accidents.
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First, the Earth layer provides a physical foundation for The Stack. This chapter begins by considering the agency of silica as a computational substrate and how the classical idea of a universal granularity of atomic matter has framed how we understand the physics (and metaphysics) of computation. It argues for a foregrounding of the geological substrate of computational hardware and of the geopolitics of mineral and resource flows of extraction, consumption, and discarding. 34 It examines arguments regarding the ultimate energy sourcing and routing necessary for planetary computational infrastructure and the paradoxes posed by the race to build smart grids capable of supporting its continuance and maturation. In important ways, it is possible for us to sense, quantify, and predict ecological precariousness through Stack technologies, and yet the production and feeding of those same systems are also key contributors to those same risks. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the knotty problems of ecological governance and the issues posed by turning the ecology itself into a kind of final, ambient emergency.
The Cloud layer chapter discusses the vast server archipelagoes behind the scenes and behind the surface that provide ubiquitous computational services as well as the geopolitical intrigue that involves them. It includes in this the entire infrastructural complex of server farms, massive databases, energy sources, optical cables, wireless transmission media, and distributed applications. It focuses on the conflicts arising from the juxtaposition and superimposition of state geography and cloud platforms (i.e., the Google-China conflict) and on how the evolution of states into cloud platforms extends and complicates the locations of infrastructural and legal sovereignty. The chapter also compares several existing Cloud platforms as models for alternative Cloud polities.
The City layer of The Stack comprises the environment of discontinuous megacities and meganetworks that situate human settlement and mobility in the combination of physical and virtual envelopes. These partition and subdivide access to urban space, but in their generic comprehensiveness, they may also provide for forms of accidental cosmopolitanism, ones derived not from parliamentary certificates but from a shared physical relationship to pervasive infrastructure. We also examine the urban-scale imprints of major Cloud platforms and how their physical postures and positions disclose specific geopolitical imaginaries.
Now closer to the scale of familiar objects and interactions, the Address layer examines massively granular universal addressing systems such as IPv6 (Internet Protocol version six) (including cryptographically generated hash addresses), which would allow for a truly abyssal volume of individual addressees. Such individuated addresses make any thing or event appear to the Cloud as a communicable entity, and for The Stack, computation then becomes a potential property of addressed objects, places, and events, and a medium through which any of these can directly interact with any other. While scenarios for ubiquitous computing and an “ Internet of Things ” suggest information exchange between “ smart ” natural objects, what I refer to as “ deep address, ” is interested in communication between very different spatial and temporal scales, absorbing any addressable “ haecceity ” into vast, if also fragile, communicative fields that may exceed the limits of conventional control or literacy.
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The Interface layer describes the projective, perceptual cinematic, semiotic layer on a given instrumental landscape, including the frames, subtitles, navigable maps, pixelated hallucinations, and augmented realities through which local signification and significance are programmed. Interfaces provide imagistic and linguistic mediation between Users and the Addressable computational capacities of their habitats, priming the pump for possible communication. The chapter outlines a typological history of interfaces, from the mechanical, to the semiolinguistic, to the haptic and gestural. As an interface, any surface or gateway oscillates between open and closed in a given context, and because of this, it is where the reversibility of the interior/exterior decision by platforms is most clearly observed. As an interactive diagram, GUIs present a visually coherent image of otherwise discontiguous and opaque logistical flows, but when aligned with new interface technologies, such as augmented reality that superimposes interfacial elements directly into the perceptual field, they can collapse a metaphorical space between object and interpretation. This literal projection of the ideas and ideologies of an imagined community onto perceived objects and events can engender undesirable cognitive fundamentalisms.
At the top of The Stack is the most culturally complex layer, the User. This chapter describes how The Stack sees the humans and nonhumans that initiate columns up and down its layers, from Interface to Earth and back again, As a contemporary image of self, the User is asked to speak through utilitarian scripts, and yet its subjectivity is also opened up to unexpected kinds of universality. Human and nonhuman Users are positioned by The Stack (perhaps rudely) as comparable and even interchangeable through a wide-ranging and omnivorous quantification of their behaviors and effects. The preponderance of data generated by Users and the traces of their worldly transactions initially overtrace the outline of a given User (e.g., the hyperindividualism of the quantified self movement), but as new data streams overlap over it and through it, the coherent position of the User dissolves through its overdetermination by external relations and networks. The User’ s enumeration is first a grotesquely individuated selfimage, a profile, but as the same process is oversubscribed by data that trace all the things that affect the User, now included in the profile, the persona that first promises coherency and closure brings an explosion and liquefaction of self.
The concluding chapter draws out from these discussions some of the most tangled and complex implications of The Stack as geopolitical design challenges to be achieved or resisted. Among these is the proliferation of enclaves as a political and architectural expression of network geographies. As each layer is considered in relation to its accidents, The Stack itself is the composite accident that may define the course of geopolitics to come. As a global platform, its demand for universality and totality should be read in both utopian and dystopian registers equally. The Stack may represent an epochal enclosure of the planet under an absolutist regime of algorithmic capital, or the fragility of its totality may force new breaks as its infrastructural universality spawns new, even emancipatory programs of disenchantment, discovery, and design. The design brief begins on the cliff ’ s edge of the Anthropocene, and tilts toward an acceleration into risk and reward; it presumes that the megainfrastructures of “ actually existing ” algorithmic capitalism are not, as of now, able to break clear of their own failures and realize a break for and toward the latent potential of a postscarcity geoeconomics. That acceleration is not therefore an acceleration of The Stack or away from its risks, but toward a particular termination and succession, and toward the articulation and realization of a more genuinely luxurious social geology. We are resigned that the emergence of that planetary condition, wherever and whenever, will likely not include or require human geopolitics as we currently understand it. As such, we commit to the ongoing design of the accidental megastructure knowing full well that its ultimate purpose may be to disappear before it fully arrives.
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