The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

The Stack to Come 293

1. Seeing The Stack We Have, Stacks to Come 293
2. Earth Layer to Come: God Bows to Math; Will Leviathan? 300
3. Cloud Layer to Come: Cloud Feudalism and Its Discontents 307
4. City Layer to Come: Multiple Utopias and Rough Totality 320
5. Address Layer to Come: Platform-of-Platforms 327
6. Interface Layer to Come: Ambient Interface 337
7. User Layer to Come: Inventing Users 343

The Black Stack 351

1. Angelus Novus Is Gone 351
2. The Stack and Its Others 355
3. Concluding Remarks on Design and The Black Stack 359

Glossary 367
Notes 377
Index 461

III The Projects

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Contents

Series Foreword

Software is deeply woven into contemporary life — economically, culturally, creatively, politically — in manners both obvious and nearly invisible. Yet while much is written about how software is used, and the activities that it supports and shapes, thinking about software itself has remained largely technical for much of its history. Increasingly, however, artists, scientists, engineers, hackers, designers, and scholars in the humanities and social sciences are finding that for the questions they face, and the things they need to build, an expanded understanding of software is necessary. For such understanding they can call upon a strand of texts in the history of computing and new media, they can take part in the rich implicit culture of software, and they also can take part in the development of an emerging, fundamentally transdisciplinary, computational literacy. These provide the foundation for software studies.

Software Studies uses and develops cultural, theoretical, and practice-oriented approaches to make critical, historical, and experimental accounts of (and interventions via) the objects and processes of software. The field engages and contributes to the research of computer scientists, the work of software designers and engineers, and the creations of software artists. It tracks how software is substantially integrated into the processes of contemporary culture and society, reformulating processes, ideas, institutions, and cultural objects around their closeness to algorithmic and formal description and action. Software studies proposes histories of computational cultures and works with the intellectual resources of computing to develop reflexive thinking about its entanglements and possibilities. It does this both in the scholarly modes of the humanities and social sciences and in the software creation/research modes of computer science, the arts, and design.

The Software Studies book series, published by the MIT Press, aims to publish the best new work in a critical and experimental field that is at once culturally and technically literate, reflecting the reality of today ’ s software culture.

Acknowledgments

This book took shape over several years, and only due to the friendship, collegiality, and support of many people. Whether or not I knew it at the time, at different moments, each of them ensured that this project would reach fruition. For the conversation, critiques, and cajoling, I am in their debt. At some point, I would like to host them all at once for a grand dinner. An incomplete invitation list must include Lida Abdul, Alisa Andrasek, Julieta Aranda, Armen Avanessian, Carla Azar, Juan Azulay, David Bergman, Ryan Bishop, Mike Bonifer, Alexi Bourbeau, James Bridle, Sheldon Brown, Anne Burdick, Jose Caballer, Ben Cerveny, Karl Chu, Peter Cowhey, Jordan Crandall, Kate Crawford, Sean Crowe, Teddy Cruz, Rene Daalder, Marc Davis, Joe Day, Manuel de Landa, Jessica D ’ Elena, Neil Denari, Robert Densworth, Ricardo Dominguez, Tim Durfee, Keller Easterling, Greg Edwards, Adam Eeuwens, Joel Ericson, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Numair Faraz, Conn Fishburn, Jane Fitzgerald, David Fore, Brady Forrest, Peter Frankfurt, Ming Fung, Vincent Gallo, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Ken Goldberg, Eugene Goreshter, Marcelyn Gow, Adam Greenfield, John R. Hall, Serene Han, Usman Haque, Dick Hebdige, Oliver Hess, Bradley Horowitz, Georgina Huljich, Jeffrey Inaba, Xeni Jardin, Adriene Jenik, Daniel Jennett, Natalie Jeremijenko, Andrew Jones, Joshua Kauffman, Ed Keller, Cheryl Kellond, Jeff Kipnis, Wolf Kittler, Norman Klein, Peter Krapp, Vinca Kruk, Steve Kurzman, Sanford Kwinter, Sylvia Lavin, Rachel Law, Neil Leach, Carla Leiato, Elizabeth Losh, Sylv è re Lotringer, Peter Lunenfeld, Greg Lynn, Geoff Manaugh, Miltos Manetas, Elena Manferdini, David Maymudes, Cynthia McCauley, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Rebeca Mendez, Andrew Mitchell, Christian Moeller, Phillipe Morel, Eric Owen Moss, Reza Negarastani, Leonard Nevarez, Robert Nideffer, Marcos Novak, Juilian Oliver, Lisa Parks, Jussi Parrika, Matteo Pasquenelli, Constance Penley, Rene Peralta, Paul Petrunia, Florencia Pita, Sascha Pohflepp, Dave Ragsdale, Ramesh Rao, Casey Reas, Kim Stanley Robinson, Irit Rogoff, Rory Rowan, Mohammed Salemy, Joachim Sauter, Axel Schmitzberger, Patrik Schumacher, Tien-Ann Shih, Benedict Singleton, Kevin Slavin, Michael Speaks, Marcelo Spina, Jay Springett, Nick Srnicek, Brett Stalbaum, Molly Wright Steenson, Bruce Sterling, Gabie Strong, Lin Su Nalepa, Tiziana Terranova, Skylar Tibbetts, Elizabeth Timme, Bruce Tizes, Daniel van der Velden, Kazys Varmelis, Victoria Vesna, Joseph Wang, McKenzie Wark, John Welchman, John Wilbanks, Alex Williams, Tom Wiscombe, Nick Whitford-Dyer, Ben Woodard, Katharine Wright, Liam Young, Adam Zaretsky, and Peter Zellner. Special thanks are due to Roger O. Friedland whose extraordinary support during the most formative period of research made it possible to realize this project. The decade that I spent teaching at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) would not have been possible without the support and friendship of Hernan Diaz-Alonso. Moving from Los Angeles to La Jolla at the University of California, San Diego Department of Visual Arts and Calit2 was made possible by Lev Manovich and Larry Smarr. I am in debt to all those I have named and to these four in particular. While teaching at UCSD, the European Graduate School, and SCI-Arc (as well as at UCLA ’ s Department of Design|Media Arts and Art Center College of Design ’ s Media Design Practices graduate program), I had the privilege of working with several incredibly talented artists, writers, and designers, many of whom I first met as their teacher and then later again as their student. There are too many to list, but I especially thank Eli Altman, Adam Bandler, Simon Battisti, Ian Besler, Zach Blas, Sean Dockrey, Jeremy Douglas, Seth Ferris, Willea Ferris, Moira Henry, Richard Hollington, William Huber, Jordan Kanter, Miles Kemp, Aaron Koblin, Sam Kronick (who talked me through some of the key structural ideas of the book as they were forming), Alejandra Lillo, Benjamin Lotan, Nicholas Pesca, Drura Parrish, Daniel Rehn, Jessica Rivera, F. Myles Sciotto, Necole Tang, Josh Taron, Kyle Thomspon, Tricia Wang, Angela Washko, Emily White, and many others. I also thank Doug Sery at MIT Press for his patience and encouragement in the metamorphosis of this book from idea to object. Thanks also to Lawrence Chit and Pratik Pramanik for assistance with preparing the final manuscript. Most of all, I thank my family, and its odd diagram: Bruce, Janet, Dee, Michael, Marci, Jamie, Cindy, Karen, Dave, Edie, Marion, Ed, Bill, Ethel, and Bruna and Lucien.

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Acknowledgments

This development of this book was honed largely through invited lectures and conference presentations to varied disciplinary audiences, including art, architecture, design, computer science, economics, international relations, literature, media studies, philosophy, and political science. My thanks to those responsible for invitations to present and discuss interim versions of this work at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London; proto/e/co/logics 2 conference, Rovink, Croatia; É cole-Normale Sup é rieure d ’ Architecture Paris-Malaquais; Parsons/The New School, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; University of Michigan; Berlage Institute, Rotterdam; Studio-X, Columbia University, New York; Princeton School of Architecture; Moscow State; St. Petersberg State; Institute for Higher Economics, Moscow; Carnegie Endowment, Moscow; Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University; e-flux Main Space, New York; Winchester School of the Arts, University of Southampton; Strelka Institute of Architecture, Moscow; The Fall Semester, Miami; The Summer Forum, Joshua Tree, California; Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; Incredible Machines conference, Vancouver; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; University of Buffalo; University of Southern California; The Guardian Summit, New York; University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario; Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; TBA21- Augarten, Vienna; Kazan State University, Kazan, Tartarstan, Russia; European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland; Duke University; UCLA; UC Santa Barbara; UC Irvine; and others.

The material in the book is previously unpublished, save for a few passages drawn from articles and book chapters I have published over the past few years. In most cases, I have reworked these here, but the cores of the ideas are in the original versions, and I acknowledge them with thanks. Sections of the “ Earth ” chapter appeared in New Geographies 7: Geographies of Information, ed. Ali Fard and Taraneh Meshkani (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2015). Sections of the “ Cloud ” and “ Interface ” chapters draw from “ On Geoscapes and the Google Caliphate: Except #Mumbai, ” Theory, Culture and Society Annual Review 26 (2009): 329 – 342. This original article in many ways was the seed material around which this book evolved. My thanks to Ryan Bishop for his invitation to contribute, and also for setting The Stack in motion. Sections of the “ City ” chapter draw from “ Ambivalence and/or Utopia, ” in Bracket 2: Goes Soft, ed. Neeraj Bhatia and Lola Sheppard (Barcelona: Actar, 2013), from “ Megastructures, ” in Entr ’ acte, ed. Jordan Geiger (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), and from “ Parametricist Architecture (Would Be a Good Idea) ” in The Politics of Parametricism, ed. Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Sections of the “ Interface ” chapter draw from “ iPhone City (v.2008), ” Digital Cities AD: Architectural Design, ed. Neal Leach, volume 79, no. 4 (2009): 90 – 97 (London: Wiley, 2009), and from “ On Apps and Elementary Forms of Interfacial Life, ” in The Imaginary App, ed. Paul D. Miller and Svetlana Matviyenko, 3 – 16 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). Sections of the “ Earth ” and “ User ” chapters draw from “ What We Do Is Secrete: On Virilio, Planetarity and Data Visualization, ” in Virilio and Visual Culture, ed. Ryan Bishop and John Armitage, 180 – 206 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Parts of the concluding chapter draw from “ The Black Stack ” e-flux journal, no. 53 (March 2014), with special thanks to Julieta Aranda. This e-flux piece was a reworked version of a co-keynote at Transmediale 2014 with Metahaven; thanks to Ryan Bishop (again), Jussi Parikka, and Sean Cubitt for the invitation to Berlin. Finally, special thanks to Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk of Metahaven for their ongoing friendship and collaboration (and for the excellent book cover). Many of the key ideas of this book developed in relation to our dialogues, some published and others not.

Credits

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Credits

This book is both technical and theoretical. It is unapologetically interdisciplinary in its perspective and its project; it is a work of political philosophy, and architectural theory, and software studies, and even science fiction. It draws links between technologies, places, processes, and cultures that may exist at different scales but which are also deeply interrelated. In this crisscross, we observe that “ computation ” does not just denote machinery; it is planetary-scale infrastructure that is changing not only how governments govern, but also what governance even is in the first place. Computation is a logic of culture, and so also a logic of design. It is both how our culture designs and is itself that which we need to design better, but to do that we need to take a step back and view an emerging big picture that is different from what has been predicted. We may glimpse that another model of political geography is cohering before our eyes. What can we do with it? What does it want from us? The answers depend on our theories and tools, on our models and codes.

For design, theory and computation have been intertwined for decades. One might even suspect a direct correlation between the end of theory and the rise of software (software being a form of technology that is linguistic as well as a form of language that is technological). Sometime from 1995 to 1997 or so, especially in academic design programs, software seemed to displace theory as a tool for thought. Many students interested in asking essential questions about how things work turned to software, not just to describe those things but also to make them, and not just to make them, but also to think through them. This shift came with trade-offs. Thinking with tools, and in this case, working with the fixed capital of advanced technologies, is a good thing. It is part of the genesis of our species. It is how we mediate the world and are mediated by it; we become what we are by making that which in turn makes us. This is no less true (or less complex) as software becomes a more ubiquitous feature of the whole world: in your hand, in the building, part of every supply chain, every image, every archive, every query. I am of the opinion, however, that as we quickly learn more precise and higher-resolution processes, it becomes correspondingly harder to see the whole at once. Accomplishments of analysis are paid for with a dissipation of synthesis. As such, software may need theory at least as much as theory needs software.

Preface

As for the geopolitics of computation, we can point to another shift, around 2008 or so. Before this break, the growth of planetary-scale computing systems was seen more generally as a beneficent blossoming. The old order would be swept away and a new day illuminated with the power of networks, iStuff, Twitter revolutions, “ Internet freedom, ” and smart cities. After this break, however, the sky darkened, and now the Cloud portends instead state surveillance, tax evasion, structural unemployment, troll culture, and flash crashes. Reality, however, is actually more radical in both directions. The thesis of this book holds that the official utopia and the official dystopia are not particularly useful frames of reference, and that neither provide a robust and intelligent program for art, design, economics, or engineering. In fact, the messianic effervescence of the former and the apocalyptic panic of the latter are part of the problem. Today we lack adequate vocabularies to properly engage the operations of planetary-scale computation, and we make use of those at hand regardless of how poorly they serve us. After the cycles of positive and negative hype run their course, we discover that computation holds both more potential and more risk than we foresaw. Going forward, we really do need new and better models, because computation already operates in ways that have surpassed and overflowed the regular cartographies.

This book starts with the technologies themselves, abstracting from them a formal model that is general and comprehensive, but not complete or fixed. The model does not put technology “ inside ” a “ society, ” but sees a technological totality as the armature of the social itself. It does not focus on computation in the service of governance, or in resistance to governance, but rather on computation as governance. In the first chapter, I propose that we view the various types of planetary-scale computation (e.g., smart grids, cloud computing, mobile and urban-scale software, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing, and robotics, and so on) not as isolated, unrelated types of computation but as forming a larger, coherent whole. They form an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is not only a kind of planetary-scale computing system; it is also a new architecture for how we divide up the world into sovereign spaces. More specifically, this model is informed by the multilayered structure of software protocol stacks in which network technologies operate within a modular and interdependent vertical order. The model allegorizes the logic of stacks into a general principle of systems, and uses it to describe both the geometry by which a political geography is subdivided as well as the aggregate shape of the technologies that occupy those spaces. The Stack model is global but it is not immutable. To the contrary, it is intrinsically modular and so this megastructure is also a platform, and an interface even, for the redesign and replacement of the Stack-we-have with a Stack-we-want (or perhaps with the Stack-we-want-the-least).

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Preface

Accordingly, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty is a book of design theory. Its interests are speculative and projective as well as analytical; it is about sketching things in advance of their arrival as much as mapping things as they are. It describes a consolidation of cultural, institutional, and technical systems through the exponential logics of planetary-scale computation and considers how we might recognize and engi neer alternative effects. The design horizon for each layer of The Stack is understood both by what it accomplishes as an ideal technology and, perhaps more important, by what accidents it brings that also define its real impact. My interest is in how design — designating things according to program — can work through these schema, across their disparate scales and toward different futures. What new forms can we compose for this computational and geopolitical condition, first to map it, then to interpret it, then to redesign it?

More precisely, then, this book is a design brief; it outlines a design problem and invites new interventions. It articulates a project of “ geodesign ” to be taken up as a collaborative megaproject. Problems inevitably arise that cannot be defined in isolation, but also cannot be engaged other than by specific technical practice, so opportunistic approaches and experiments are necessary. The argument of this design brief is neither simply pro-Stack or anti-Stack. Any infrastructure of this scale inevitably gathers and binds power into itself, and so is either remedy or poison or both. The system we have now is both what makes these extraordinary technologies possible, but is also what ultimately retards their real potential. In response, we need a geopolitics of design that is comfortable not only with computation but also with vertical systems of designation and decision. The Stack model is a diagram that works only when it is put to use. Perhaps by drawing the whole, we stand a better chance of designing a better architecture of globalization. Perhaps we are not lacking ideas but a platform to situate, deploy, and enforce them.

Because The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty draws on many disciplinary discourses, it is inevitable that some passages may seem opaque and others obvious, and differently so for different readers. Most important are the lines of connection between ideas and their illustrations. I chose the examples for how they clarify a point made, but I claim no definitive treatments of any of them. I tried to choose examples that are not too of-the-moment. Given the subject matter ’ s pace of change, referring to events that are richly elucidative even though slightly untimely, may help ensure that the narrative stands the test of time. Similarly, many books about design rely heavily images to make their point, and my editor and I decided early on that the text should stand on its own. Let the book be a book. There are (almost) no pictures to be found, but the companion website (thestack.org or bratton.info/thestack) includes many images and illustrations accompanying each chapter, and (if you choose) you may refer to these as you read and approach the book in a way that is a bit more like my visually elaborate public talks. Like any other project that tries to draw wholes, The Stack produces its own vocabulary (e.g., platform sovereignty, loop topology, Cloud feudalism) that becomes clear as the argument accumulates. To aid readability, I have included a glossary to consult, or perhaps even to read first.

Preface

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