The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

Below we examine several ways that The Stack is grounded at the City layer, from the scale of global networks to that of the individual envelope, and back again. We will see that this integration of one into the other looks less like Leon Battista Alberti ’ s organismic city, all parts fitting into natural wholes, than gory multispecies nested parasitism, one organism living inside another, itself perhaps living inside yet another, and shuttling energy in and out, through skins and interfaces. For this figure, the City layer is an urbanism of catalytic digestion more than settled homeostasis; its appetites are computational but no less violent for it. The Stack is also expressed in City versus City remote warfare, as dramatized by the launching of the Stuxnet virus into Iranian nuclear facilities (perhaps physically installed there by hand, perhaps inadvertently downloaded), where the software took hold of specific centrifuges and tricked them into malfunctioning but reporting themselves as fully operational. ¹² This sort of weaponized transurban code is not so unlike a parasitoid fungus, Orphiocordyceps unilateralis, for example, which infects the brain of a species of ant and directs its zombie to crawl to the precise height in the jungle canopy suitable by temperature and humidity for the fungus to fully spore and where the ant husk becomes a factory for the production of more fungus. Such is the model infrastructural information warfare of microorganisms, insects, mobile software, and megacities. ¹³

At landscape scales, The Stack supports the consolidation of bandwidth infrastructure into continental nodes as well as the design of massively integrated architectural forms and programs, encapsulated into architectural megastructures visible from a now primary satellite perspective: buildings at Stack scale. These megastructures may be there to organize human habitation or object flow (e.g., corporate campuses, airports, warehouses), but in many cases, the design problems are increasingly similar to one another. The end result is not so much a neutralization of placefulness but rather a monumental (or antimonumental) hyperinscription, a total architecture withdrawn from the public city and bound by its own structural borders, gates, walls, and skins, gardens, introverted from its immediate environment so as better to connect to external planetary economies on its own terms. Enclaves inside of enclaves digest one another all the way down. For these megastructures, spatial integration is defined in the paired tongues of experience and logistics, and realized by folding their urban functions under a single roof and programming them (attempting to at least) as a single architectural system, as a self-binding and homogeneous geodetic datum. Some of the most dramatic examples are, not surprisingly, the headquarters of Cloud platforms themselves. But like the Sith from Star Wars, megastructures always come in pairs: their purification of program from immediate urban situation and withdrawal into formal singularity is always necessarily and irreducibly dependent on a doppelganger megastructure (or more than one) somewhere else.

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1. Exposure and Control

Touchpoint by touchpoint, the City layer is perhaps where the birth pangs of Stack geopolitics are felt most viscerally. The arrival of any political constitution is accompanied by a corresponding foundational violence, and this is no less true of planetary computation and the jurisdictions emerging in its interfacial networks. But unlike modern political states that may have exploded into being by the breaching or establishment of specific symbolic centers, the constitutional violence of planetary computation ’ s platform sovereignties occurs at the surface of the entire city, in and on every object seemingly all at once, as ubiquitous and convergent as it is partial and partitional. The City layer rests on residue of this violence, so where into its shallow surfaces can we dig? The urban interface was not always conceptualized in terms of its manifest spatial, political performance, but two essays, written in the Paleolithic years of the digital era, still clarify some of what is at stake for the City layer in particular. First, Virilio ’ s essay, “ The Overexposed City ” (1985), synthesizes many of his ideas on the mediatization of the city by focusing on the airport, as both a security environment and a model for the city ’ s compression through command, communication, speed, and inertia. Long ago, the ceremonial interface to a city may have been a gate or a bridge, which, when closed, also shut off the city from the movement of goods, people, ideas, microbes, and more. These orifices between city and periphery were where the martial risk and complexity of contact were modulated, but now the airport is that interface into the city and to the nation-state, regardless of the global point of departure, and regardless of how close the airport is from any actual formal border. Airports, even in the deep national interior, contain within them legal international borders, safe zones, duty-free zones, security screens, unsafe and quarantine zones, and other liminal jurisdictions and complementary policing programs. Looking at airports as a model for intermodal information exchange, we see that the global mobility of people and things is possible in part because of the protocological standardization of an interfacial network of airports and cities, arranged by increments of first-person travel time, hub-and-spoke econometrics, and its flattening affectless provisionality of boarding lounge culture. Movement through the airport ’ s multistage rituals of filtering and sorting paces the User through densely juxtaposed police and leisure zones. Security agents examine and handle your person in ways usually reserved for criminals and sans-papiers as you pose in the midst of the leisure corridors where summary versions of human culture have been miniaturized into inspirational magazines and the unchallenging solicitations of snack food.

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Airport urbanism in general is characterized by this critical cohabitation of security and entertainment: securitized entertainment and entertaining securitization. In what Virilio calls a “ new topological order, ” control is both hard and soft. The machine guns are real and terrorists ’ obsession with these sites is real, and the unspoken threat of being grabbed offstage to be questioned behind closed doors by state agents able to eject the User back across the world is also real. ¹⁴ No less real are the digital departure and arrival screens, the hyper-legible black-on-yellow Helvetica signage, the precise strategic placement of the coffee carts exactly so many steps away from bathrooms, and again that omnipresent media and candy matrix. Human occupation of this space, a soft enveloping of delays and digestion in collaboration with the hard enveloping of security and filtering, is elevated now to a general principle of contemporary urbanism. For Virilio, this easygoing layering of exceptional, militarized space with the ambient landscape of airports ’ generic “ Singaporization ” of the global city, positioned at the critical interface connecting urban nodes within an expanded global sphere, is the model for the city as rendered as information hardware and software. That is, the airport discloses without fanfare that cities are airports. Airports are not simulations of cities; rather cities are simulations of airports. It is where police deep-scan your person while blending you a delicious smoothie of your choosing, and to do so without irony or contradiction of purpose and affect. But this is not (only) a surreal pun on despotism; as universal urbanism, the business model also has to include the reactive management of individual User actions provoked by this accidentally sadistic little drama.

The scattering distribution of interfaces and the intensification of potential agency reflected in the increased computational capacities of each does not dissipate the weight of platform authorities, but it does reformulate their permissions. Perhaps counterintuitively as interfaces become ubiquitous, interface decentralization becomes the engine of Cloud centralization, and as these interfaces become channels of increasing end User management, swarm intelligence, and spontaneous utility, Cloud centralization becomes as well the engine of interface decentralization. The logic of the City layer of The Stack power is thus both decentralized top-down and centralized bottom-up , as well as directed side-to-side interaction monetized as a raw social currency of cognition and circulation. Look over there by gate 12 at the search field on every screen, in every hand and on every lap, while the Users wait for their flights. See that what finally empowers the interface is less its function as some coercive frame for all signification and gesture than because it is so uniquely and relentlessly responsive to the nuances of every User ’ s own desires, interests, and intentions. It may do one because it can do the other.

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A second essay from the same era extended these dynamics into a new diagram of the social writ large. Among his very last published writings, the essay “ Postscript on Societies of Control ” ended up as Deleuze ’ s most widely leveraged observation on the contemporary city and media. This very brief text is concerned with the historical transformation of cities from an older “ disciplinary ” mode, coercing inhabitants into governable mass envelopes such as schools, factories, prisons, office buildings, and barracks, toward a new “ control ” mode, for which anyone ’ s self-directed movements through open and closed spaces is governed in advance at every interfacial point of passage, as built up parametrically through filtering gateways, point-of-purchase identity verification, and the local geography of entertainment. Control, which Deleuze defines in terms of the addiction-debt-mimicry tropes of William S. Burroughs, normalizes oscillations between the striation and smoothing of urban space and gives real-time shape to social systems convened by the soft cybernetics of interface design. We recognize the city he describes as filled with suspicious responsive environments, from ATM PINs, to key cards and parking permits, e-tickets to branded entertainment, personalized recommendations from others who have purchased similar items, mobile social network transparencies, GPS-enabled monitoring of parolees, and customer phone tracking for retail layout optimization. In the “ control ” city, there may not be a Foucauldian disciplinary gate because there is no “ outside ” to which anyone might escape .¹⁵ For other Users, the interfacial regime at work already knows in advance that they are not allowed into the generalized gated community, and for them there is only outside.

Deleuze ’ s essay begins by contrasting Virilio ’ s analysis of the “ ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system ” to Foucault ’ s disappearing societies of carceral discipline as evidenced by a general crisis of enclosure. Where enclosures are “ molds, ” controls are instead a “ modulation, ” a “ self- deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point, ” as laid over soft focus phase transitions of activities without distinct beginning or end. Techniques of identity are externalized into codes and passwords, overcoming the mass/individual dynamic whereby each User is a provisional individual and each plurality is a market of patterns and predictive models. Deleuze saw that an evolution into societies of control is marked by the predominance of computational information technology as its signal apparatus: “ The societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. ” He closes the essay with a warning of sorts about a hypothetical control city that from today ’ s perspective looking back to 1991, when it was written, seems quaint:

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The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one ’ s apartment, one ’ s street, one ’ s neighborhood, thanks to one ’ s ( dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person ’ s position — licit or illicit — and effects a universal modulation.

Now such urban interfaces — some carrot, some stick — are commonplace platforms for overexcited social media innovation, for mixtures of locative media, augmented reality, biometric and digital security, personal tracking and mapping, fitness Apps, automated point-of-purchase check-out, and the products and services based on their convergences and combinations.

He concludes, “ The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports, ” and indeed the drift through this version of the control city is an encounter with layers of visible and invisible interfaces, mapping you and rendering the world as an image map and image instrument for your particular idealized conception of it. The scenario he describes is one where the only apparently rhythmless intersections of free agents surfing across smooth urban canyons are in fact governed by the highly striated weave of dense differential connections in specific networks: one only because of the other. This city is not managed from some central command position in the cybernetic equilibrium machine, like the Alpha 60 master computer in Jean-Luc Godard ’ s Alphaville, but rather the inverse. Dispersal of authority into hypergranular interfacial fields is the constitutional power; each “ dividual ” is cast as a sort of cellular automaton, expressing absolutely specific intentions and instructions for an emerging territory in formation. That territory in turn is driven from the bottom up according to the limited frames of thought, action, access, and expression that its own aggregate field of interfaces presents to each User. The interfacial array of the City layer is designed according to these conditional pragmatics of interfacial access and communication points, each of which is both a particular discretely tuned portal and an instance within a larger array. ¹⁶ A totality of interfaces is then more than the sum of these single encounters, as it also comprises the active power that divides peoples and cities according to regular spatial and temporal programs; such totalities emerge through the repetition of activation of particular combinations of interfaces and are thereby a medium through which control distributes Users in turn. As they serve as both indexes of interfacial connection and as media by which those connections are given shape, these networks also establish new territories by smothering precedent territories or interweaving with them asymmetrically. The soft violence of this establishment is, once more, the constitutional logic of the City layer as a social system and geopolitical framework, a logic of incorporation more than imposition. As discussed below, some visual interfaces also work as regularized cognitive maps of the urban interfacial territories in which they are situated, and as such, their semantic content can function as a binding collective representation of The Stack ’ s geography (or even of a projected jurisdiction or an idealized polity), providing for its social regularity and durable structure.

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As The Stack enrolls individual cities into common platforms of energy, water, labor, information, and so on, it also links their resource economies toward new capital streams based on urban services integration. Just as Google generates revenue by repackaging the notions, preferences, clicks, and pathways of its Users, the City layer generates sustenance not only through extractive taxation, but through the network value drawn from perpetual interaction with the interfaces that constitute the city in situated space. For this metroeconomics, the costs for sustaining infrastructure are to be born by the platform ’ s algorithmic governance of its User-citizen-laborers-customers ’ social intercourses and may also generate a platform surplus for those stakeholders and for itself. In couching our idiosyncratic paths through city space, some ambient urban interfaces become cash cows for the right Cloud urbanist, and so as cognition and movement are translated and capitalized from User to Cloud, everyday living and thinking in the smart city become a form of information labor.

Under these circumstances, geodesign focuses in on the plasticity of sovereignty, not only on individual privacy but also on the valuation of plural motion, gesture, and movement as the basis of fabricated polities. As we will see, one axis of innovation is between the rights and responsibilities that the urban interface gives to and demands from a User who is a formal legal citizen of its explicit jurisdiction versus those it gives to and demands from a User who is not. We will find that in the future, the noncitizen may in some ways enjoy certain advantages over the citizen as infrastructures may not already be preprogrammed to govern that User directly as a formal subject but merely to transact services with her. We may, in time, see the world ’ s population of noncitizen residents of the City layer tip the scales to shift the architectures of software and sovereignty away from formal state jurisdiction and toward the platform sovereignties of other transurban and transcontinental communities, configurations, and allegiances. Or, we may not. The Cloud layer ’ s own political geographic accidents draw one framework for this, but the immediate provision of access at the point of an interface that is deliberately ignorant of the national status of its User may draw another. Concern over private versus public space takes on a different tenor when each is considered in relation to a Stack urbanism for billions of noncitizen temporary residences, as guaranteed by a metroeconomics that equates User interaction with value generation irrespective of other legal claims that states would make on those transactions. This sort of politics of the urban interface (also of the envelope and of the membrane, of the visible and the invisible) may point toward another geopolitics of the City layer, one where the grim and suffocating closure of Virilio and Deleuze ’ s “ cities of control ” gives way to descendant genres of urban-scale computation that their initial accounts could not anticipate. In other words, like any other territory comprising reversible exceptional interfaces, megastructures can sometimes be inverted in situ.

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1. Force Finding Function Finding Form

As already suggested above, too much of our actually existing Stack urbanism is naive and fragile, obsessed, for the time being, with the optimization of doomed municipal arrangements and designed by marketing departments to be sold to urban managers who don ’ t actually control what they think they control. This is to be expected, to a certain degree, from a smart city discourse built on enthusiasm for simple fixes and broken urban politics, but again there is still potential in what has gone wrong. The Stack already sees the city as one layer in a larger totality, and not surprisingly, several contemporary schools of thought conceive of designable urban space as a function of delimited totalities, plotting how to rearrange every square meter of a zero-sum geographical pie always threatened by a creeping ocean (real and figural). For some of these indirect descendants of No-Stop City, the city is modeled as a dense material and logistical equation within a receding horizon of data. Urban territory and graphical statistics are morphed into towers of intensive quantitative mass, sometimes representing programmatic adjacencies, sometimes graphical indexes of relative sums, sometimes formal profiles, and usually some mountainous and brightly colored combination of these all at once. ¹⁷ But such architecture may confront more problems raised by the mutual design of quantified space and programmatic narrative than it resolves. In all but a few cases, the dysfunctional relationship between database and narrative ends in a stalemate, two symbolic forms able to communicate only by awkward irony. We can still acknowledge impasses as lessons: the contrived statistical normalization of unlike kinds of urban Users demonstrates just how difficult it is to design urban interfaces for so many demanding occupants of the same location. ¹⁸ Even as certain totalizing ambitions of the City layer, those that see space as a closed set of universal modules of production and consumption and cities as spreadsheets waiting for the right formulas, are doomed to self-cancellation, perhaps the contradictions of this approach illuminate other paths. ¹⁹ Cities are also media for rot. Smart cities are also dumping grounds, platforms for human warehousing, telelabor dormitories, floating prison ships, entropic megaslums, spontaneous war zones, colonial settlements and encroachments, contested archaeological dig sites, fabled ruins, periodic abandonments, dead malls, sleeping cranes hovering over skyscrapers on pause, and similar things that defy easy tabulation and calculation. We see that the global composite platform City isn ’ t filled up by one total informational model but by the overlapping and superimposition of multiple models, multiple totalities competing for air, life, and dominion, and as their juxtaposition comforts some, it discomforts others. By design or by accident, they are all City-level expressions of The Stack.

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More visible than esoteric forces of production and consumption, but no less important as governance interfaces, are those architectural surfaces and envelopes that articulate physical and figural politics of urban space. At the same time that spatial planning management consultants employ predictive financial models to ensure, they suppose, a preferred quality of urban-economic performance, architectural design studios increasingly rely on generative algorithms as form-finding agents to calculate indi vidual building morphologies in pursuit of other, sometimes conflicting, performative goals. This division of labor between formal economics and designed form sometimes bedevils progressive architectural design, a disciplinary project relegated to a thinner and thinner slice of the structural pie. Among the most emblematic and visually striking formal machinations of today ’ s architectural vanguard are perhaps those gathered under the rubric of parametricism. These practices and techniques, much more diverse that they may seem at first glance, use algorithms as design agents for the partially automated genesis of complex forms and also supposedly to guarantee an intelligent index of the intrinsic and extrinsic forces that couch a project ’ s programs. In theory, important design solutions — programmatic circulation, interarticulation of subsystems, site posture, material distortion, proportion and nested symmetry, energy administration — may find direct formal expression by the mediation of the building ’ s envelope as machine. ²⁰ As one contemporary derivation of D ’ Arcy Thompsons ’ s “ form is a diagram of forces, ” parametricism ’ s often extremely self-conscious self-theorization claims to use architectural form to communicate the social, economic, ecological, cogni tive forces that, after having been codified somehow into Grasshopper scripts, are now well disposed to disclosing themselves through the exacting distortions of involute morphology. At the project level, it concentrates expertise on the delineation of bones, surfaces, and skins at the unit level of individual architectural envelopes, hoping to capture the lightening of global forces into the bottle of programmable metallic flora. This strategy is partially a response to the diminished and decorative economic position for even famous architects in the post-Bilbao effect era, but it is also supported by much broader and more substantial disciplinary interests (especially those that one would not consider to be “ parametricist ” as such) in surface performance, living and nonliving emergent systems, and alternative topologies as the loci for future design as consolidated by a global signal style. They also speak to the unsure agency of algorithms in the design and organization of space beyond the professional domain of architecture and architects. Pessimistically, we may lament that the impoverished perch from which architecture has authority to say which assemblages go where is now reduced to variously thrilling or bombastic skins, shells, and special effects. Optimistically, we might say that in these same post-Euclidean habitats, the stage is set for new, complex, and challenging points of tactile encounter between human and architectural bodies that don ’ t just index client programs but forcefully reinvent them. More than perfect obedience to macroeconomic energistic field conditions, the more creative promise of continuous involuted forms involves perverse moments of folded contact and nested cohabitation between unlike bodies, flesh and form.

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For the moment, parametricism and related programs have won one circumscribed battle to represent early twenty-first-century supercontemporary style for airport cities, but architecture in general has badly lost the war for the design of urban space. The two are at least correlated. Instead of design studios, management consultants — McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and Halliburton to Cisco, Siemens and IBM — are winning the city-making game, and they have rather different design interests in the flows of algorithmic capital and its spastic valuations of land, energy, information, and human capital. They too can be said to render the City layer as an imprint of the layers above and below, and they possess equally deliberative mechanisms to structure urban systems accordingly. Their topological imaginary, however, is not the folded surface but the calculative grid, and any disinterested alien intelligence would observe that today most efficacious “ parametric ” urban design software is Microsoft Excel. In effect, management consultant – driven design has dislodged architecture and traditional urbanism from the prime seat of authorship over urban form, as new built space becomes a formfinding by-product of speculative space-use and site-cost simulations. Their methods pull data-driven design from deeper strata of The Stack, telescoping descriptive and prescriptive algorithms set in motion in the Cloud layer and building their local franchises into urban (or “ urbanish ” ) investments. ²¹ Their spatial-systems economics often outpaces legal codification, leveraging an arbitrage of gaps in formal building code and zoning (but as well, from such gaps generative accidents of interfacial sovereignty also hatch themselves). Their portfolios can be measured in millions of square kilometers, but it seems that the quantity of officially futuristic cities is inversely proportional to the quality of their futurism. New “ totalistic ” (not really totalitarian) smart city initiatives from global information technology companies have borne real fruit for those offering them, often finding clients in sovereign capital funds or in sovereign governments directly. ²² They also are in no way allergic to collaboration with (or subcontracting to) globally known architectural design firms. This mix of “ real ” architects and urbanists with consultants and IT systems architects and administrators is neither intrinsically offensive nor automatically fortunate, but it does alter the relative tabula rasa on which synthetic megacities are built. No more Brasilia or Tsukuba Science City; now we have variations on J. G. Ballard ’ s Super-Cannes: Masdar (Norman Foster, Partners, et al.), Skolkova (Cisco et al.) Songdo City (Cisco, IBM, et al.), KAUST (IBM, HOK, et al.), and on and on. ²³ These Moon-bases on Earth are spliced from Soviet science cities, Silicon Valley campuses, Orange County gated communities, and a mutual understanding between political despotism and technological innovation. They are what cities look like in the shadow of airports, Special Economic Zones, and “ sustainability mandates. ” Some of these would redefine city-states as carefully policed service platforms, and for this, their urban-planning expertise relies on CRM (Customer Relationship Management), DRM (Digital Rights Management), server virtualization, end- User usage metrics, object synchronization across multiple devices and device synchronization across multiple data objects, at least as much as it does on architectural design, and often not at all on things that are normally thought to make interesting cities interesting. ²⁴ Like all Ballardesque metropoli, these cities are “ post-interesting, ” which is itself interesting. Contrary to parametricism ’ s claims, figural virtuosity is subordinated to building forms that are recognizable and ad hoc, popular and stupid, but amenable to the real estate metrics that outvote other politics of the envelope. A partial list of these benchmarks includes both the sensible and the sinister: on-site carbon footprint minimization, energy and water management, replaceable and recombinant building materials, perimeter gate security, civic control contingency planning, bombresistant membranes, crowd circulation administration, tightly curated digital signage, assigned parking spaces, account credit-issuing recycling bins, and, for some, separate public entrances for citizens, tourists, women, unclean animals, and service staff. ²⁵

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1. Envelope and Apparatus

In order to design with or against any given program, we need to understand exactly how a given interface can construe the User of the City layer as a particular kind of political subject. We start with an interim summary of the varied and dynamic qualities of the urban interface. Platform sovereignty can be a function of how a border or interface addresses one or many Users and their interlocking relationships, while the City layer ’ s physical and virtual interfaces and its architectural edges and envelopes can be equally decisive in their governing methods. As these form a matrix of capture and control, like all precedent models of spatial governance, they also enable new and unpredictable stages for urban performance and need not be computational in order to align the urban environment into The Stack ’ s polyvalent claims on global space. Inside cities, the line, the gate, and the wall separate inside from outside, quasi-private from quasipublic, and generate and direct flows accordingly. Some corralled spaces persist longer than others, fleeting or permanent, and so even as they fix space, urban interfaces may be in motion, however imperceptible their speed. Lines not only shift and perforate; their ability to interiorize and exteriorize is also always reversible, and so even when it does not move, which side is being exteriorized by the other can switch in the blink of an eye: as it orders the landscape around itself, the center might hold, but what it holds may come and go. As computational media prostheticize User mobility, virtual envelopes also slice up and program urban space, but along rather different planes than fixed architectural surfaces do, and they do so with increasingly authority. The mobile device ’ s interface is based on the semiotics of graphical diagrams more than architectural vernaculars, and so it can index and express The Stack ’ s organization of the city as the City layer with greater explicitness than any building-scale morphology, and it can do so on the fly for different Users according to different governing programs. That said, it is only by conceiving the design of both physical and virtual modes of the urban interface at once, either as conflicting or complementary parts of a whole, that we can hope to intervene in their effects with consequence.

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