The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

“ In the plex, ” Google ’ s footprints seem less determined by architectural innovation than by the nuts-and-bolts accommodation of an elite, idealized elective community. Prioritized over style is the compound ’ s performance as a support system for the peak cognitive labor that is staged there. Instead of being stationed with magisterial Art Deco appointments as were Chrysler ’ s executive elect, Googlers lunch together on artless furniture, and while they do, they enjoy free and nutritious gourmet meals. Why fuss with decorative aesthetics when something far more valuable is being hatched during the meal? Available onsite amenities include massage, free bikes, indoor rock climbing, and regular symposia with thought leaders on a range of topics. Efforts are made to couch an idealized version of programmer lifestyle in its own idiosyncratic luxuries and to dampen any distraction or discomfort that might interrupt collaborative innovation, including perhaps going home. The Googleplex (the architecture of which was designed incidentally by Clive Wilkinson and others) may already serve as a kind of model sub-urban spatial system for the maintenance of global software platforms, but for that, it is also a highly selective population of Users. Unlike some utopian communities, Google ’ s infamous and seemingly obtuse interview questions guarantee that entrance into this rarified colony is filtered according to demonstrable problem-solving acumen, creativity, and academic pedigree.

This older more insular version of Google Cloud Polis’ footprint will apparently be getting an upgrade if it is approved by municipal councils. The oddly paired Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick may be designing a new Google campus in North Bayshore, initially dubbed “ Google 2.0 ” and marked by ambitiously open groupings of buildings ( “ workshops ” ) and gardens beneath semi-transparent canopies. The project seems to enable a more open and diverse social machine than a hermetically sealed campus bubble might. It is still geared toward staging and accelerating cognitive accomplishment, or as Heatherwick says in the project ’ s video, “ what is the best possible environment we can make, to invent, engineer and most importantly, make ideas happen and go out into the world? ” ⁵⁶ Strategies for that staging move past the open-plan faux warehouse, “ our self-driving car team, for example, has very different needs when it comes to office space from our Search engineers, ” Google executive, Daniel Radcliffe explains. Others are more circumspect about the “ Googledome, ” arguing that it is either a wasteful expenditure or that its success will further gentrify the area, making it all but unlivable for anyone but the elect. ⁵⁷ It is too early in the project to say anything definite about is success or failure on specific terms, but we can read in the choice to keep (at least parts of) the campus open to publics including retailers and non-employee pedestrians that Google wishes for its footprint to be more than a high-performance vitrine for its human resources, and more like a spatial platform that draws surplus value from and provides lesser surplus value to those who come. It suggests an idea about the company that is more urbanistic than architectural, however artificial it may appear at this point. The project seems to aspire to be not a basecamp for a single optimal community but a prototype armature for an optimal microsociety through which people move in and out. If the campus is a sort of utopian idealization of the Google Cloud Polis itself, this version, unlike some others, at least makes some gestures toward including the outside User in its model. The project is still to be approved, if at all, by Mountain View city council, and so we shall have to wait and see what is actually built to compare the real environmental platform to that proposed. ⁵⁸

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By contrast, looking at Frank Gehry ’ s early proposals for a new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park (nicknamed “ Zee Town ” after company founder, Mark Zuckerberg) we see a plan for a more traditional corporate campus, designed, it appears, to ensure the managed serendipitous contact between employees in motion. In this encapsulated “ company town ” winding pathways and strategic lines of sight connecting interior and exterior views are embedded in a multilevel landscape where sub- and superterranean greenery twists and turns onto and under the collection of buildings. ⁵⁹ At their desks, the aggregate social graph of the on-site employee/resident population is framed and displayed to itself as it moves and involves itself within itself in airplane hangar – scale open-plan work space. It ’ s an obvious but valid observation to note that the collected body of Facebook employees is here mediated by Gehry ’ s proposal as a closed-loop network of people, one that will ostensibly perform at a higher level should its undulating nodes and edges be given a single supportive program. Unlike the old Googleplex, defined by robust services in a generic, no-frills context (like Google perhaps), Facebook ’ s seems more tuned to the advantages of the active performance and the structured monetization of captured human networks (like Facebook itself). For its part, Amazon recently took over a huge high-rise campus in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, and there it will help to consolidate its scattered executives into one big storefront. ⁶⁰ Plans for another nearby location also include a “ biosphere ” building featuring three huge glass domes in which full size trees and other flora will grow in simulated ecologies. ⁶¹ For Amazon to encapsulate ecosystems of nonhumans is perhaps the point. Together, the urban headquarters will integrate the company into the fabric of a “ real city ” in ways that the suburban Silicon Valley campuses will not. Amazon ’ s society will have comparatively blurry boundaries between itself and the rest of the world, similar perhaps to how the mega-retail platform is a more agnostic medium of supply, demand, and algorithmic recommendation, defined by behind-the-scenes engagement with its outside suppliers and Users.

This is fine and well, but the far more important architectural-urban footprint of the Amazon Cloud platform is not in Seattle but distributed among the company ’ s many fulfillment centers, especially in and around the logistics plantations near the airports of Louisville, Kentucky (UPS ’ s hub) and Memphis, Tennessee (FedEx ’ s hub). ⁶² Amazon ’ s platform logic is based on the massive coordination of the pricing, retail display, storage, and delivery of its flat commerce ontology of objects. If Google ’ s mission is to organize the world ’ s information, Amazon ’ s may be to organize the world ’ s tangible commodities. This places it on a direct collision course with Walmart, but that company has been slow to move into e-commerce and still largely uses its supply chain omniscience to guarantee itself economies of scale with a limited range of downmarket goods — a very short-tail strategy — sold through its network of grim retail centers to people who may not have so many other options. ⁶³ Amazon uses the physical supply chain itself (especially Cloud infrastructure, airports, warehouses, and third-party delivery services) in lieu of any big box retail holdings. These networks, taken together as a composite Amazonian territory, are the platform ’ s megastructural play at the City layer, all but invisible to its Users save for the vast Amazon.com website. One can go inside those object-network machines and find unsentimental beauty in their airportadjacent logistics so precise and responsive that they could be described as a form of artificial intelligence. That description will become more true as Amazon ’ s warehouses, sorting, and distribution facilities become further populated by robotic systems and “ workers. ” ⁶⁴ We might anticipate that in a few years, an Amazon platform User could choose an item online and have it retrieved (even manufactured), mailed, and delivered with no human touch, at least until the last postal mile. This may be welcome or terrifying news to the precarious population of current Amazon warehouse workers. As discussed in the Cloud chapter, many are nomadic part-timers coming and going with the ebbs and flow of retail demand. Those with relatively permanent positions, called Amazon fulfillment associates, are divided among those on the receive lines, the pack lines, stockers, and pickers who are directed by handheld devices to find your order wherever it may be among the immediate stocks of children ’ s bicycles, shoe repair kits, and physics textbooks. By all accounts, Amazon space is already built on the nimble precision of a logistical engineering of human workers ’ movements with a repetitious efficiency probably better suited to robots. In describing the stress and precariousness of work in Amazon fulfillment centers, GigaOM, a Bay Area technology blog, went so far as to characterize employment at Amazon as a “ dystopian model of neofeudalism. ” ⁶⁵ As Amazon absorbs, centralizes, and consolidates production labor into tighter strata of proprietary commerce-logistics algorithms, the future of work is made that much more uncertain, and along with it the buying power of the workers who would also be their customer- Users. ⁶⁶

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Perhaps the boldest (not necessarily best) design statement made by a Cloud platform is Campus 2 in Cupertino, as proposed by Apple and Sir Foster during Steve Jobs ’ s last years (though when Jobs pitched the plans to the Cupertino City Council, he neglected to mention with whom exactly his vision sought collaboration; Foster was not named). Plans show a giant toric “ spaceship ” (Jobs ’ s own word) landed among apricot groves in apparent prelaunch posture. ⁶⁷ The design harkens to Eero Saarinen ’ s Watson Research Center for IBM (1961) and the many mid-twentieth-century suburban corporate exurban campuses, but instead of a set of buildings, Foster ’ s closed ring fits an entire campus inside one curving arc. ⁶⁸ To many, it resembles an austere relative of Herzog and de Meuron ’ s Allianz Arena (2005) as transplanted from Munich into more bucolic Northern California or, better, a cult-inspired interplanetary escape craft straight from a Michel Houellebecq novel. ⁶⁹ The vast closed (infinite) loop contains 2.8 million square feet of interior space, but appears to have no face to the outside world, no real front or back, beginning or end. Perhaps this replicates the looped border of the Westphalian state or the utopian island. Descriptions used in the proposal like “ integrated ” and claims that it will “ create a physically unified community ” rather understate the insularity of this habitat with its central plant, cavernous underground, and off-site parking. Once employees have made their way back to the surface from the subterranean automobile rump state, they will look out and see only the trees for the forest. Withdrawn into this island package, Apple citizens will enjoy the benefits and suffer the fragilities of the reserved enclave. ⁷⁰ Bunkers imply security, control, purification, and impenetrability, but like the walled garden of iOS itself, it can also suffer from having to serve as both platform and content at once. As others have observed from the distant sidewalks across the entrance roads, this sort of suburban walling off of a corporation ’ s population may be less futuristic than it is a throwback to 1950s campuses. As opposed to the old “ creative class ” accommodations of urban contact and stimulation, here Apple recedes and secedes into the controlled space of the curated megastructure. As the price of total interiority is a “ disappearance of the outside, ” for utopian platforms like Apple ’ s, the price of that curation is closure. ⁷¹

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Perhaps, however, the design gesture is working at a much larger scale, not in relation to any one nearby downtown but, as for all of Foster ’ s projects, as part of a higherstakes process of terraforming the Earth and building his own distributed portfolio of Earth bases (in many cases directly on behalf of The Stack ’ s expression). The shapes of things to come? What has already been said about the Apple Cloud Polis in the Cloud chapter is perhaps also seen here extruded into an architectural programming strategy: curated and closed off, affectively perfected, explicitly branded, secretive and opaque, totalizing and majestic, a theological rhetorical voice, etc. The utopia on offer to its OS Users is a slightly ecstatic platform that seems to transcend mere computation and operate more within a realm of ineffable experience. That the social contract of that experience would demand such secrecy, silence, restriction, and exclusivity is not necessarily unusual as political theologies go, but that it would be invested in branded equipment that connects Users to the Cloud layers of The Stack is an important novelty. In anticipation of the ultimate footprint and expression of the Apple Cloud platform into the City layer of The Stack, we also note that the integration of the closed megastructural platform model is now planned to include Foster ’ s refresh and redesign of Apple ’ s most public terrestrial presence, its hundreds of brand retail stores. That Foster ’ s office would become the house architect of the Apple platform ’ s human-facing earthly permeation suggests that his acumen with megastructures serves to organize the physical expression of the Apple Cloud Polis’ s City layer more generally. Apple has invested in the biological extravagance of the iconic megastructure in ways that the other platforms have not, including its resolute ambition to utopian totality. Certainly the data centers, warehouses, and logistics parks that give shape to Google, Amazon, and Facebook are no less geographic in scope, but they are not foregrounded as the face of the Cloud Polis in the same way. The incipient Cloud Polis of these other platforms does not rely on the ethics and aesthetics of total design closure with nearly the same intensity as Apple does. Google ’ s networks surely are megastructural in their scope and universality, but they do not observe the guardianship of interior borders as the essential principle and promise of User experience, whereas Apple ’ s do.

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So truly, with Foster ’ s other commission to design printed structures on the Moon, should we decide to categorize the Apple Cloud Polis as part of that collection of megastructural Earth bases? The question remains, however, per Crystal Island, whether this design is properly suited to post- Apollo logics of geographic scale and the recognition of any project ’ s expanded planetary situation. Is it instead another ark built for paranoid withdrawal, a design to sustain life on a hostile alien planet even if that planet is our Anthropocenic Earth? There are surely many ways to characterize how the megastructure works at the City layer and from these to draw out different implications. Unlike a real moon base or Buckminster Fuller ’ s Domed City, for example, many such structures are not designed only for the permanent or even semipermanent housing of humans in settled encampments. Like the temple at G ö bekli Tepe, they may also be monumental landscape switching stations through which we might pass on our way. Their scale and centrality demand this passage, and the arcs of our movements are composed in their bending toward the gigantic nodes. We don ’ t reside in Foster ’ s Beijing Airport, but we must pass through its digestive system if we are to reach the next level of our passage in or out of China. Other megastructures are not only impermanent, they are also not designed for the mediation of humans at all. Most of the very largest buildings in the world accommodate and express the algorithmic resorting and distribution of inanimate objects, commodities, and cargo from sites of extraction, to assembly, to consumption, and back into landfills or the production cycle. As already noted, the relative freedom of objects to cross borders and gather global materials into themselves is far less restricted than the passage of people, bound as we are to the rights and restrictions of formal political citizenship. The physical object becomes the exemplary noncitizen User of the City layer, as the most intensive impact of algorithmic capital into the physical realm of The Stack is in the molecular reassemblage of standardized matter, its global redistribution as manufactured objects, and the computational optimization of their itineraries through supply chains. All of these enjoy their own kinds of megastructural theater. At the City layer, this object-oriented economy of molecular logistics is expressed in “ planetary supersurfaces ” such as warehouses that are so large that their floors have been laser-leveled against the curvature of the Earth. Instead of walls and windows, these spaces are programmed by bar codes, RFID chips, and scanners and populated by robotic platforms, shelves, and stockers that can easily lift over a ton of goods at once. ⁷² From the perspective of The Stack looking out at the Earth, these architectures of and for things are perhaps even more essential than those rendered for the benefit of human appreciation (as discussed in more detail in the User chapter).

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Taken as a whole, these Cloud platform megastructures concentrate the City layer by drawing economies of flesh, information, energy, and symbolization into a web of settlement and displacement as vast as it is uneven and asymmetrical. Often a megastructure will have a special interdependent relationship with another, such that its own enveloping closure belies dependence on a doppelg ä nger megastructure, one perhaps a continent away, for its own energy, purpose, and support. For example, as said, Apple ’ s spaceship in Cupertino, California, where design and strategy live, cannot possibly exist without the Foxconn factory campus in Langua, Shenzen, where Apple ’ s products are assembled from parts into the perfected slabs that tether its Users to its Cloud platform. ⁷³ Even as they occupy different corners of the globe and remain selectively ignorant of what goes on in the other site, the two megastructures are intimately paired. They share a unique bond across the strange distances of the City layer binding them together in ways that penetrate the total closure of their envelopes by doubling and mimicking one totality into the other. Foxconn ’ s fences sit next to suicide nets as Apple ’ s sit next to apricot fields, Foxconn ’ s dorms occupy Apple ’ s subterranean parking, and Foxconn ’ s massive assembly lines tag along with Apple ’ s customer service training programs. Together these megastructures, along with the network of mall-based retail embassies, constitute the terrestrial urbanity of the Apple Cloud platform, but their symbiotic relationship may prove to be more fragile than it may seem. Like the Eloi and Morlock from H. G. Wells ’ s The Time Machine, the megastructures ’ two paired populations share the same world but inhabit different spaces, one above ground and the other underneath. One lives in the perpetual innocence of play and leisure, experience, design, and innovation, staying strategically distanced, oblivious, or uninterested in how it all appears every morning for them, while the other runs the machine underneath, toiling against the Earth, forcing it to produce the bounty over and again. It is perhaps a bad omen for Cupertino that the bargain between the subterranean world of the Morlocks and the surface world of the Eloi is maintained only because the Morlocks periodically harvest Eloi like cattle and eat them. ⁷⁴ Lesson: for better and for worse in various measures, the cannibal economies between networks of megastructures at the City layer of The Stack are actually not always what they first appear to be, and almost always reversible. ⁷⁵

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Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body.

— Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory¹

Never will he [the emperor ’ s messenger] win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door — but that can never, never happen — the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.

— Franz Kafka, “ An Imperial Message ” ²

The objects on call for The Stack ’ s logistical imaginary are organized in whirlwinds but their itineraries are anything but random. The cartographic imperative of planetary-scale computation extends beyond remapping the Earth ’ s surfaces in horizontal and vertical subdivisions of land, air, sea or cloud; it includes the addressing of every “ thing ” therein that might compute or be computed. Individual units of life, loaded shipping containers, mobile devices, locations of datum in databases, input and output events and enveloped entities of all size and character are kept in rhythm not only by the mixed envelopes that contour their paths but also by the synthetic address cartography superimposed on their global fluctuations. In many cases, the geography of this addressing bears little or no resemblance to the physical proximity of one addressee to another in physical space. Two things adjacent to one another may have completely nonsequential addresses, and things with sequential addresses (perhaps considered adjacent according to some virtual geographic order) may be many time zones apart from one another. Furthermore, as we will see, the Address layer of The Stack is not only a master plane where individuated addressees are situated; it is also a medium of communication between them. Things can send and receive information to and from one another because they are positioned on this common plane, and so planetary-scale computation is made ubiquitous not just at the macrolevel of the Cloud but also at the microlevel of the humble object, whatever its name or career. ³

Address Layer

Common addressing tables are a means to enable forms of universal communication with sometimes very different ends, and so more than one specter of ubiquitous computation haunts the landscapes of our material imagination. The design problematics of planetary-scale computation push up against the expansion of infrastructure at urban and transcontinental scales but also draw on the dilution of small-scale objects into something like a universal solvent of synthetic computation. By comparison, we are no longer so impressed by the prospect of “ smart objects, ” interactive habitats, and reflexive architectures. Now projects seek “ networked matter, ” the hybridizing of digital bits and pieces of the physical world, both above and below anthropometric scale, into an ambient field of systematic intercommunication and assembly. Joining the battalions of RFID-enabled objects would be smart dust, robotic insects, transistors inside of living cells, and programmable clay filled with zillions of nanometric machines that can take on any animated form. Research programs such as Hewlett-Packard ’ s Central Nervous System of the Earth (CeNSE), work toward the trillion-sensor world in which bridges, trains, warehouses, earthquake faults, trees, flowers and animals, and even internal organs are filled with tiny sensors, each transmitting data directly to one another or to the Cloud. ⁴ The promise (or threat) of designing with a computation that is so deeply laced into the structures and behaviors of matter is an ambition for addressing platforms of comprehensive transparency and the remote interaction with the world at a chemical and atomic scale. The motes falling in space that fascinated Lucretius would be addressable data points and their transit fields a programmable clinamen. Why stop at a trillion? The “ googol sensor world ” or “ Avogadro ’ s number address world ” might allow Users to search the whereabouts and state conditions of any “ thing ” that one could imagine as a discrete addressable event. This open assignment is the basis of many different possible designs. One path suggests a full-spectrum surveillance society, in which no biochemical misdeed goes unsearchable and unnoticed, but another suggests an almost inconceivable reopening of the possible qualities, grammars, temporalities, and polities of material communication and design. For one, the world closes down on itself, reduced like an algebraic equation to baseline symmetries, but for the other, it opens up as never before. The design brief of the Address layer of The Stack contains the seeds of both outcomes.

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1. Scale, Scope, and Structure

For any thing or event to participate in the worlds I just described, it must have an identity and location that makes it available for connection with other things and events. On its own, it is not present; it needs to be made into an $ { \mathrm { ~ \textrm ~ { ~ ~ } ~ } } ^ { \prime \prime } { \mathrm { ~ \textrm ~ { ~ ~ } ~ } } ^ { \prime \prime }$ with a location. It needs an address to have an identity, and any address requires an addressing table commensurate with the scales of our Stack scenarios. The ability to assign addresses is critical to any geopolitical system (including The Stack). As discussed above regarding the nomos, it is essential for any political-geographical regime to be able to identify the individual sites, fields, instances, and actors within its jurisdictional field, such that any of these would be able to send and receive messages from the others as part of a regular and governable flow of information through space. The terms of the nomos are also the shape of that space as configured by the flows that fill it up. For modern governance, this requires not only the subdivision of geography by lines, but also the superimposition of a formal addressing matrix onto new or existing geographies and the assignment of individual addresses to unique points within them. Furthermore, the hierarchical semantics of the address may also express divisions of geography (e.g., the sequence of building number, street, city, and state for Western postal addresses). Political space is both made and made legible through such categorical presentations, and the ancient and modern histories of cartography, geography, geometry, and geoscopy are interwoven with comparisons between real physical features of the world and these ideal abstractions that measure, codify, and explain their scales, similarities, and differences. That legibility depends on the identification of individual datum (any reference point on the planet ’ s surface) against which position and measurement are made, in reference to the addressing of some subsection of that surface (e.g., that site pinpointed as the intersection of longitudinal and latitudinal lines). In turn, the composite whole model is derived finally from the spaces of difference between internal individual points and sections, occupying positions relative to one another. The model names the points, and the points add up to the model.

The drawing of such a matrix of lines and inscription on the Earth, perhaps in military competition with another enemy abstractions, is also a demarcation of possible interior and exterior relations and of political spatial orders to be accumulated and occupied. At the level of the City layer, however, the structure of addresses is applied less in the service of absolute state geography than for the production and regularization of sender and receiver relations among situated networks. The assignment of a unique postal address to a building gives it a certain legal, political identity as a public entity to which and from which messages can be sent, and the official enumeration of these identities by the state has been an essential feature of the political modernity of cities and a source of sovereign legitimacy for their governance. That legitimacy is enforced by maintaining the apparatus of postal identify for sites within the polis and securing the right to recognize and assign new identities with new addresses. Sovereignty over communication flows may arise from this monopolistic addressing of senders and receivers, even if the privacy of individual messages is formally guaranteed by physical and virtual envelopes. Later, states (and others) would credentialize permission for messaging with postage stamps, imprinting the message with its official seal and selling access to a delivery infrastructure on an parcel-by-parcel, address-to-address basi (consider that it is Charles Babbage, inventor of the first modern computer during the Victorian era, who also contributed to the design of the first system of flat-rate postage pricing instead of rates based on distance). The problems posed by international post for the mutual recognition between different stamp-and-addressing sovereignties were worked out as late as the Treaty of Bern and the establishment of a Universal Postal Union in 1874 (China did not sign on until 1914). But even with some functional measure of global interoperability between postal domains, the heterogeneity of legacy and local addressing schemes and procedures persists and even multiplies with the development of information technologies. For example, whereas in Western systems, postal addresses go from the smallest to largest entity (person, house number, street, city, state, country), in Japan, addresses can move from the largest to the smallest (prefecture, municipality, ward, city district, city block, house number) in addition to a postal code. Moreover, exceptions are found inside the exceptions. In Kyoto, wards are very small, and often they share the same name, and so informal addresses are commonly used instead; in Sapporo, the city is divided into quadrants, and blocks are named according to their distance from the intersection of the center point of convergence of the North-South and East-West divisions. Around the world in many older cities, building numbers may have been originally and unsystematically assigned according to the chronology of their construction and so sometimes in relation to buildings long since gone. More recently, some master-planned campuses also feature buildings numbered in near chronological order, while other developments subdivide areas according to vertical and horizontal grid matrices, like a spreadsheet with addresses of $^ { \prime \prime } { \mathrm { A } } 5 ^ { \prime \prime }$ and “ F9. ” Each system is logical in its own way. At the same time, the assignment of addresses and street names is not only a matter of logistical rationalization; it can also stage highly charged political symbolism. Revolutions are often solidified through the replacement of one geographical regime of street names with another, giving a new identity to the physical polity and its urban stage (France in 1789 – 1799, Russia in 1917 – 1921, and Iran in 1979 are well-known historical examples).

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