The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

The notion of a “ right to the city, ” for anyone to move and navigate freely through urban space and to engage with it on his or her own terms, is a rallying truth for critical urbanism, but its exact terms are as uncertain as the convoluted control structures of the City layer against which the notion maneuvers. In addition to a right to general passage through urban interfaces, it also includes some right to use these for one ’ s open-ended creative purposes, not only for closed-loop consumption. ⁴² For its part, the TBIT device elegantly unknots several governments of mobility at once, including the mobility of the handset, enabling a territorial mobility of the person, in turn enabling a mobility of his position within political networks. ⁴³ Perhaps part of the reason that TBIT, even just as a poetic prototype, drew such seething anger from some quarters is that how it obliquely but unambiguously signals a structural shift in the agency of excluded Users to access the regional interfaces-networks-territories. ⁴⁴ The alegal status of the migrant shifts between two modes of the biopolitical: that which is banished and left to die and that which can be killed with impunity. ⁴⁵ The migrant is not only outside the walled protection of human settlement but sentenced to the vast unwalled “ camp ” of the desert, both inside the law of national border and outside the confines of the societal. Drifting, she is cast into a zone of ungovernable nature, further animalized by xenophobic paramilitaries on the prowl, themselves acting both outside the law but also in the name of a jurisdictional border, defending the arbitrary line itself as the true sovereign. In the nativist view, it is not the migrant ’ s right to passage or employment that is or is not legal, but that she herself, her very person, is illegal. It is less that the migrant commits the felony of entering the country without permission and is therefore a person who has committed a felony (like tax evasion, securities fraud or animal cruelty, for example). Rather, by a strange inversion of habeas corpus , it is more that her very body and its presence on the land is a felony, and so to arrest her mobility is not just to stop the movement of a person, rightly or wrongly; rather, the capture of her biological person is to police a crime that is embodied therein.

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TBIT does not attempt to transform the nonperson of the migrant into a formal citizen; rather, it positions her as a User, and that User position, halfway as it is between dispossession and citizenship, may prove to be a more powerful and resilient subject agency than we might normally expect, not only for migrants but for Cloud Polis going forward. ⁴⁶ For this User-as-sovereign, the apparatus is an interface to the territory, functionally agnostic to the User’ s formal legal identity, and so it can rewrite the geography not by rigid subdivisions of mutually hostile states and the prophylactic imperatives of national immunity, but toward another unspecified urban vocabulary of an open territorial commonwealth. Here we also get a useful glimpse of what the virtual software envelope, to extend Zaera-Polo ’ s schema, is capable of providing besides constitutional programs of control and commercial software mash-ups. The reorganization of spatial access through a new interfacial regime introduces new de facto “ rights to the city ” to those with otherwise insufficient political agency, and so it encourages alternative geographies to proliferate, not by decree but by physical occupation (as even Schmitt would have to acknowledge). As they do, they promote and enforce innovative claims over what the City layer is and does, and for whom and for what. The nativists ’ outrage was not incorrect in this sense, as the acute implications of the project are indeed catastrophic to the idea of ethnically and geographically pure polities. And so, one generative accident of this layer is the germination of such informal User “ cosmopolitanisms. ” They arrive as functions of the omnivorous neutrality — even universality — of an interfacial regime that produces a polity of User subjects that is far more inclusive than state sovereignties can manage. States often react to these by refortifying their policing of identity, even of their own “ organic citizens, ” and so, as said, we can anticipate some scenarios in which the noncitizen User may enjoy more spatial permissions than the citizen User because the City layer ’ s vision is not programmed to see and govern her. At the same time, as we ’ ll discuss further in the User chapter, this agnostic universality can extend User suffrage not just to humans, but to any agent capable of interacting with that interfacial regime as a deliberate actor (e.g., car, animal, microbe). This should alert us already to the limits of interpreting interfacial governance along an axis of individual agency versus collective interest. Instead, the design problematic is to make more explicit how plural configurations of User positions cohere across different scales and rhythms.

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A global political and geographic dynamic is demonstrated by the TBIT controversy, and that a real subjectivization is at work may also clarify some of Agamben ’ s unfortunate confusion regarding the contemporary mobile apparatus. As we consider how global geography is remade by The Stack, another lesson to glean is that whenever there is a persistent and broadly experienced mismatch between, on the one hand, a residual legal-political form (an old legal statute attempting to govern and contain what it can neither describe nor circumscribe) and, on the other hand, an emergent social-technical form (a new social condition arising from a new network condition), then we can expect the structural momentum of that emergent form to spawn various “ criminal ” connections and transferences, both amorally and asubjectively. It just does. A critical mass of such emergent connections or actions may, for good or bad, eventually overwhelm heritage lines in the sand. To be clear, this is very different from the transgression of an active code. It is less illegal than it is alegal: illegible, invisible, outside, or just incommensurate to established legal supervision. Even if the state can see it at all, it still cannot name it properly. The alegal represents an embryonic quasi agency, neither exactly inside or outside governance, nor exactly inside or outside markets, but largely generated by platforms directly, and they can also be founding figures of a preferable geopolitics that we may honestly anticipate for The Stack.

This is especially true if that future platform, that interfacial regime to come, would technically be illegal according to today ’ s statutes. Worse perhaps than the criminalization of culture is the criminalization of infrastructure. Such alegal actions and events, normative tomorrow but prohibited today (Do we call them “ postcrimes ” ?) fulfill the programs provided by new networks in an autonomic and sovereign disregard of zombie jurisdictions. Alternative geographies appear in the repetition of actions and processes that are as illegal for one jurisdictional geography as they are constitutional of another, even as the two occupy the same location. To design the City layer in the image of that emergent political geography (with the emergence, not against the emergency) also means to design, as B.A.N.G. Lab has done, through the interfacial agencies that this alternative is already formulating in its disinvestment from the geographies it overwrites. That is how to conjure it.

1. Megastructure and Utopia

That ’ s no moon, it ’ s a space station.

— -Obi-Wan Kenobi

In the accidental platform sovereignty of a migrant ’ s apparatus, we may see a certain slow-burn afterimage of G ö bekli Tepe and the circling movements of its mobile admirers, and as part of that image, what some might call a virtualization of the City layer is certainly part of the design program. At the same time, those Westphalian geographies are engaged not just at the tactical level of the savvy User, but also at the scale of the Cloud platform , and their interests and intentions are very different. While Cloud platforms may capitalize interactions between any and all Users, their own designs for the City layer may be represented more by megastructural artificial geographies — formal utopias even — that allow them to program their own encapsulated territory according to more predictable plans. What kinds of cities are our major Cloud platforms actually building, and how do they choose to make architectural scale footprints on the City layer? Put differently, after the above consideration of how the City layer ’ s envelopes and interfaces might be expressed at the Cloud and User layers of The Stack, and what kinds of deliberate and accidental platform sovereignties this enables, we also need to ask how the Cloud layer expresses itself directly at the level of the City layer, and when this preserves or dissolves those platform sovereignties.

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The Stack, as a whole, structures the City layer through the consolidation of urban nodes into megacities and also through the consolidation of both public and private urban systems in megastructures. We ’ ll find that instead of heterogeneous and open interfacial platforms, for their own footprints Cloud platforms prioritize instead urbanscale walled gardens. The megastructure provides a bounded total space in which architectural and software program can be composed by complete managerial visualization; for it, the border, the gate, and the wall bend into closed loops containing vast interiors, sometimes in pursuit of utopian idealization and isolation. The megastructure is an enclave within the city that also holds a miniaturized city within itself, and so the specific and different terms of that miniaturization are the vocabularies of differing utopian agendas, whether explicit or suppressed. Its curation of opacity as both a spatial strategy and an affectation operates not only in and on the skin of its closed physical envelope but also within its capturing claims on the virtual territories of the Cloud Polis. As we ’ ll see, these closures are often interdependent, one closing off a physical site into an artificial island for which the inward bend of the envelope gathers a polity into form and the other cordoning off parts of the electromagnetic spectrum itself as another equally important megastructural territory to utilize. Their geographic secession provides the megastructure one measure of spatial sovereignty, one that begins as a function of autocratic enclosure but can also be leveraged well beyond physical jurisdiction and into the realms of iconic form and charismatic mobilization. The politics of both are utopian and dystopian at once, one never really able to purge itself of the other, always able to flip into the other and back again, depending on where you may be standing and why.

The image of global urbanity as a single contiguous body is drawn at the scale of the whole spherical planetary surface, and we certainly have no shortage of depictions of it, especially at night, as a throbbing weave of life, light, movement. (What telecommunications brand can make it through one fiscal quarter without advertising itself thusly?) It ’ s less clear, however, what this obligatory geographic icon might communicate other than communication itself. Like the Incan geoglyphs of pre-Columbian Chile, does the global urban weave have pictographic content to be read from above, or, like the Earth art and maps of Robert Smithson, does it make a pedagogic point about geological time and perspective? ⁴⁷ The image of urban neural nets draws more specifically on an aesthetics of logistics (more in this in Interfaces chapter) and from an admiring contentment with network topologies as some final form and format. In such renderings, networks more than cities (and specifically the metanetwork of The Stack) are indeed monumentalized. The pronouncement may be something like, “ We are those who have wrapped the planet in wire. This is the signal accomplishment of our time. Our pyramids are gossamer shaped. ” This image infrastructure tries to capture some important change in the local-global telescoping between anthropometric habitat and the wider urban envelope. The City layer of The Stack itself operates as a massively distributed megastructure and draws on, however obliquely and opportunistically, the reservoir of speculative, even utopian megastructural design projects of years past (built and unbuilt), even realizing them after the fact with a sometimes perverse inversion of their original intent. As discussed in the Earth chapter, in and around the years when the first photographs of Earth were taken from space, speculative architectural design was inspired by the visual scale of the whole Earth as a comprehensive site condition and spawned scores of now canonical megastructure projects. Many proposed total utopian spaces (islands cut off from the rest of the world, per Fredric Jameson ’ s discussion of the utopian genre in science fiction), including, as already mentioned, OMA ’ s Voluntary Prisoners of Archi tecture (1972) and Superstudio ’ s planet-spanning Continuous Monument (1969), while others sought the utopian through the maximal perforation of boundaries by ludic interfaces and absolute grids, including No-Stop City (1969) or Constant ’ s New Babylon (1959 – 1974). The merger of cities into planetary-scale conglomerations was imagined, among others, by Constantin Dioxiadis as Ecumenopolis, a single planned urban form across the whole world, and Paolo Soleri as Arcology, enclosed megacities rising into the lower atmosphere, so large that they constitute their own ecosystems. The impetus for these massive, even planetary-scale architectural propositions may be a positive or negative reaction to the Buckminster Fullerian vision of Spaceship Earth as a single design problem, and attempts to see the whole of society in terms of the whole of space (part of the desire for totality important to Jamesonian utopian desire and dystopian anxiety). ⁴⁸ The projects provided a link between the grandiose progressivism of high modernity, such as the massive Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, a neighborhood-sized building from 1930 holding over 1,300 apartments, and ideas for extraplanetary colonies on Mars, dating at least to the late nineteenth century. For many of these, the goal is a wholesale replacement of the modern programmatic order of nested and individuated buildings, cities and states with new models and programs, perhaps along that continuum from strong architectural authority (Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture) or to an open, ludic urban field (New Babylon), for which megastructures serve a new spatial authority more appropriate to a properly global society.

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The composite megastructural form of the City layer of The Stack (composite in the interweaving of physical and informational infrastructures in a given site, as well as in the differential integration and disintegration of continental urban sites) is, in some ways, a realization of Apollo-era architectural mega-utopianism (total envelope, universal interfacial grids, superimposition of quasi-sovereign layers) and in other senses an almost complete inversion of it (regularization of production and consumption cycles strong filtering of individual mobility, intensive capitalization of every encounter and gesture). We can see aspects of these utopian projects in the City layer today and recog nize their evil doppelgangers as well. This is possible perhaps because The Stack works as both a control mechanism and a means to open up and flatten access, providing one because it provides the other, and so it is not surprising, then, that it would discover the legacy of utopian megastructures through this very reversibility. For example, Fox conn is the largest private employer in China and assembles much of the human-scale digital electronics equipment that connects urban society to The Stack. Its largest fac tory city, in Longhua, Shenzhen, situates an estimated 300,000 employee residents in a massive live-work complex. It is a megastructure by sheer architectural scale and social totalization, and one could also say that Foxconn is an island and therefore prone to both utopian and (as has been more the case) dystopian imaginations. Along the spectrum of platform openness versus closure, Foxconn ’ s regimented cycle of life passing from one phase to another, perhaps until death, places it at the end of a dotted line leading through Voluntary Prisoners to the present, each the prototype for the other. Its factory floor is responsible for the physical assembly of much of the world ’ s consumer devices, laptops, smart phones, and as these are the essential physical interfaces between Users in motion and the recombinant landscapes they strategize, it is also a savage realization of Archigram ’ s Plug-In City (1968) and Computer City (1966). We see Superstudio ’ s fabulous Continuous Monument realized by Global Crossing ’ s massive deployment of transoceanic fiber optics during the dot-com frenzy in the late 1990s. Superstudio ’ s was successful as a project but unbuilt; the telecom ’ s was built but busted its investors. We can measure No-Stop City in the compulsive speed of ambulatory urban computing and the interfacial city without beginning, end, or middle. We imagine Cedric Price ’ s Fun Palace (1961) turned inside out by North Korean stadium pageants where the audience itself is the media content, but instead of free to play, each actor is instead rendered into disciplined pixel within a larger choreography of the spectacular image. We could mark an ancestral trace from Yona Friedman ’ s La Ville Spatiale to the new Asian smart cities such as New Songdo City ( “ a ubiquitous city, ” says its brochure) in South Korea ’ s Incheon development, or see Paolo Soleri ’ s Arcology as a first pass at Masdar, the massive “ green ” smart city in Abu Dhabi. (Both

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Songdo and Masdar were built with Cisco and IBM as key partners.) Is Situationist cutand-paste psychogeography reborn or smashed to bits by Minecraft? What binds the hyperlibertarian secessionism of the Seasteading Institute, which would move whole populations offshore to live on massive ships floating from port to port unmolested by regulation and undesired publics (Facebook funder Peter Thiel is a key funder) with Archigram ’ s Walking City project from 1967, which plotted for Star Wars Land Walker – like city machines to get up and amble away to greener pastures as needed? For that matter, as models of programmable planets and embryonic Matrioshka brains, how should we weigh Cisco/NASA ’ s Planetary Skin, which, as we know, would blanket the globe ’ s epidermal crust with ubiquitous physical sensors, on one hand, and the Death Star, on the other? For the Death Star, as for the animal brain, many of the most important information processing and mission-critical tasks take place on the outer surface of the sphere — on the skin, not in the core. Palm Jumeirah, Taitlin ’ s Tower, USS Enterprise, the Pentagon, Noah ’ s Ark, Le Corbusier ’ s Plan Voisin, the New South China Mall, Ryugyong Hotel, San-Zhi Pod Village, Sim City, Irvine: it gets harder to keep all these walled megagardens straight.

Just like the City layer does and does not generate new forms of sovereignty as a function of a specific politics of envelopes, both physical and virtual, themselves defined by the reversibility of its interior and exterior, the urban platform is also defined by the reversibility of a design gesture ’ s ultimate effects. The utopian and dystopian will invert one into the other without even switching places! The aspiration to the comprehensive “ content management ” of everything that lives inside its fold drives the City platform to open and close, to centralize and decentralize, over and back again, instituting control though the universality of its interfacial protocols, and vice versa. It may be that the agonistic logics of politics — drawing lines between friend and enemy over and over — make it more difficult to see how the technical achievements of constituencies that we believe we oppose also can form the basis of the real alternative systems we also seek to design. For the geopolitical ruptures of The Stack, we can be sure that reversibility sloshes both ways: if Voluntary Prisoners can become Foxconn, then the Foxconn apparatus-assembly archipelago could also provide the genesis of further inversions and utopian opposites. If it does, would we be able to notice them? The Obama era, you will recall, started with a new vogue for infrastructural investment and governance, but the fashion proved short-lived and easily diverted. The overleveraged early 2000s “ Bilbao effect ” architectural projects were supposed to give way to massive public spending on large built systems that actually did things, but the new New Deal didn ’ t happen. ⁵⁰ For some bets, attention turned toward compressed natural gas development at the expense of more difficult-to-solve renewable energy sources and systems, and for others to actively preventing infrastructural development of, for example, airport expansion or the Keystone tar sands pipeline from Canada into the United States. For the most part, the new infrastructuralism sought less to mitigate against the risks of algorithmic capital and anthropocenic growth than to update their armatures: think Sir Norman Foster ’ s Beijing Airport (built) versus the North Sea wind farms proposed by OMA (not built). Around the time of Obama ’ s second inauguration, we also received word that Foster had received a most extraordinary commission. His office was asked to work with the European Space Agency to design structures to be 3D-printed on the moon. The prospect of constructing new civilizations from whole cloth on nearby planets and moons has inspired no shortage of utopian schemes, but in this case, that cloth is the moon itself, turned into the printed matter with which off-Earth habitations might be mechanically excreted. ⁵¹ Such a project should be called robotic terraforming as much as off-planet urbanism because instead of sending designers and building supplies across the vacuum of space, the mission calls instead for programs (call them what you like: scripts, recipes, algorithms) that would instruct a replicating printer to build up new structures layer-by-layer of lunar soil, and in time fill the sunny southern lunar pole with new airport cities.

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The choice of Foster ’ s office for this project like this is not surprising, as he is arguably the preeminent architect of the Google Earth perspective: he might terraform the Moon because he has already, project by project, terraformed Earth. Regardless of how you may like or not like the projects, from Masdar to the new Reichstag and the Gherkin, few contemporary offices have done more to expand the perspectival scale of architectural figuration than his. Architectural students now include “ satellite ” view along the required plan, section, elevation, and axonometric perspectives on their projects, and his portfolio suggests one reason why. While a building ’ s face has usually been read from the view of a pedestrian front or entrance, Foster ’ s projects (especially but not uniquely) are sometimes best considered from tens of thousands of feet in the air, as landscape-scale interventions in relation to the urban regions that they gather into their midst. The megastructural scale of the projects also confirms a gathering of social totality into a single envelope (as drawn from high above, instead of in sectional view as for the Palace of the Soviets or OMA ’ s CCTV, or D ü rer ’ s Triumphal Arch, for that matter) into which that massive enclosure inhales utopian aspirations (of the client and their publics). At the same time, the universal management platform of the smart city, such as Foster ’ s Masdar plan (with IBM, Cisco, and others), gathers its world less through the anthropometric technique of the envelope than through the anticipatory and parametric management of the discrete energy event. By circumscribing and rationalizing a local polity of the electron as the core constituency of urban governance, this genre of urbanism supervises not only a social totality of humans but also a closed ecology of bounded energy flows. For urban projects such these, the preference is for green infrastructural systems that sense and spit back data suitable for macroscopic images of those flows which are then made into interfaces and thereby instruments for the recursive management of those flows (see the Interfaces chapter). As legacy cities are slow to acquiesce to this managerial and ecological reason, megastructural architecture refers back more and more to the Apollonian scale-image of the Earth to prosecute on behalf of its synthetic ecologies, now so much more manageable because they are legally and ecologically delimited by the building envelope.

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A case in point is Foster ’ s unbuilt Crystal Island in Moscow, a massive hyperboloid, Christmas tree – like tower that would contain a myriad of residential, cultural, and educational programs under its glass skin and within its 27 million square feet, four times the size of the Pentagon. After the financial crisis, development financing was frozen, and the tower is not likely ever to be built. Keller Easterling also links the project to utopian schemes of yesterday, some now registered into architecture ’ s critical canon, others still languishing in the historical junk pile of unacknowledged visionary cranks. Like Masdar, Foster ’ s secessionist Island chooses to recommends itself as an exemplar of green urbanism in that it can generate much of its own energy needs, allows carbon-friendly internal transportation from home to work to leisure, and as a city within a city, offers a centralized economy of scale and density for the consumption of resources. Easterling ’ s critique, however, draws on a Sloterdijkian trope of the planetary condition seen as vast interlocking layered interiors, and she argues that “ capital A ” Architecture ’ s response to the challenge of the Anthropocene is not properly met by bubble-era faux-Arcologies such as these. Ultimately it may well be that The Stack ’ s intensive global mesh of megacities will support megadense resource economies that drive the development of larger and larger buildings, like the larger and larger bombs of the 1950s and the larger and larger airplanes of the 1970s. Both of those arms races were “ won ” by the Soviet Union, with the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba and the 300-foot Antonov 225 airplane, neither put to much real use, and now Moscow could someday add Crystal Island to this collection of hypertrophic trophies. It may also be that this scalar recalibration of built interiors will realize the positive effect of drawing more and more networks, and even territories, within one building ’ s single, intelligent interfacial design scheme.

Even so, the proper architectural address of the design challenges of a now permanent ecological exception remains with the still-unfinished Copernican conceptual recalibration: that our planet itself is already the megastructural totality in which the program of total design might work. The real design problem then is not foremost the authorship of a new envelope visible from space, but the redesign of the program that reorganizes the total apparatus of the built interior into which we are already thrown together. ⁵² At best, flightless spaceships, such as Crystal Island, will be interim experiments that clarify the imperatives for more ambitious and meaningful geodesign. At worst, they are alpha versions of luxury enclaves, post-crash storage facilities for dead currency notes, or props for the closing shot of the next Planet of the Apes remake. However we may choose to read the lessons they provide, there is no expansion or any a single building envelope that can actually accomplish what is asked of these projects: “ architecture ” is perhaps the wrong metaphor for architectural thinking and experimentation to lean on. As the larger architectural imaginary tries to shift from what the professional assembly of buildings asks from it and toward the technological reassembly of the territory itself, we join it in groping toward a design brief for the governance and geopolitics of The Stack, especially in regard to that Anthropocenic ecological exception. In doing so, we realize that Foster ’ s building is simply way, way too small. ⁵³ It is actually a miniature in comparison to what is needed, and far too beholden to the traditions and economics of urban program from a bygone era. Instead we would do better to draw energy from artificial envelopes that do less to seal off and subdivide urban polities and do more to enable the appearance of programs that we cannot already anticipate, measure, or rent and resell in advance: a megastructuralisim based not on the metaphor of the ark but on the scale and ubiquity of Earth ’ s atmosphere.

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1. Platform Cities

Early results are mixed. Cloud companies building smart cities and key architects designing enclaves for Cloud companies might together point us toward that ark or to something more interesting if less recognizable. ⁵⁴ They may provide some additional clues for the design brief, both by what they get right and what they get wrong. It is in this context that we can also tally how global Cloud platforms choose to express their terrestrial presence through the medium of architecture on the City layer, not only by marking the imprint of their subterranean data centers but also by a close reading of the new megastructural headquarters built to house the embodied human intelligence of particular Cloud corporations in Silicon Valley, California. By comparison, recall the Chrysler Building on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City, designed by William Van Alen for Mr. Chrysler himself in the late 1920s, as exemplary of an older contiguous and self-contained organizational body. The preponderance of a company ’ s executive staff coinhabited a vertical castle, summoned into a singular, internalized corporate hierarchy, modeled in the stacked floors and rigid posture of the tower. ⁵⁵ In his ponderous film Cremaster 3 (2002), Matthew Barney takes on the construction of the Chrysler Building as an occult epicenter of bygone symbolic economies of industrial power, old money, and organic class hierarchy. The conspiratorial conflict involves “ the architect, ” an “ entered apprentice, ” and some other stuff related to Masonic lore and the grandiloquent opacity of deep wealth. Now in considering, for example, the Googleplex in Mountain View, or the proposed new Apple headquarters in Cupertino, we might well wonder (and shudder) if some future Matthew Barney will dance through their hallways with similarly reverent obsequiousness? Do the old and the new headquarters even traffic with the same denominations of spirit and cash? The answer leads mostly to other questions. Below, then, and to conclude our discussion of this layer, is a bit of architectural phrenology and corporate-scale palm reading (or at least one biased interpretation of platform models replicated as organizational space and form) of current headquarters plans understood as an expression of the Cloud layer into the City.

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