The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

Tilting our eyes slightly higher, we see that the urban fabric has shifted from huntergatherer landscapes to sedentary fortresses and back to itinerant mobilities between enclaves and exclaves, linking not just points within one city but all cities as a discontiguous constellation. It transforms dwellers into Users of an integrated energy, carbon, cement, information aggregation, adding as many points of quasi-sovereign access as they draw lines, borders, and walls. Its primary architectural expression, besides the distributed grid, is the totality of the megastructure, erecting new topologies of control and overexposure, built into the programmatic field of ambient interfaces. These interfaces are integral to platform logics of simultaneous centralization through ubiquitous decentralization and decentralization through the investment of each interface with supercomputational capacity. Competing for air, multiple interfacial totalities cohabitate in and on urban surfaces, including the dense extreme parametric articulation of architectural envelopes. These are pregnant with computational intricacy, freezing a field of forces that is, however, always itself in motion and never finally reducible to formal mediation, and thereby splitting any politics of the envelope between those physical membranes and the equally determining electromagnetic delineations thrown up by information media and protocols. In the multiplication of these, accidental sovereignties are made available to anyone or anything interpolated as a User of those dual systems and of the city that couches them. That city is in turn part of a layer of the larger Stack hollowing some old territories into zombie jurisdictions and generating new as yet informal alegal openings. For other Users, it composes elaborate megastructural enclaves and geoglyphs, even for Cloud platforms themselves, each competing to express itself as an urban-scale subject and each also paired with its own doppelganger megastructure on which it depends and through which its total enclosure is always contaminated.

Swirling just closer to the top of the image, we see that any instance, singular or plural, of matter, particle or wave, is potentially identified by massive universal addressing systems, in which mapping and linking of Avogadro ’ s number of haecceities may be allotted to every User. The global credential of the address subdivides heterogeneous territories, hard and soft, Hertzian space and carbon space, into a disintegrated communicative array, an atmospheric metropolis built of digit strings. The addressability of physical objects withdrawn into their specific enumeration is itself overmatched by the addressability of abstract relations between objects and their compositing and sorting into higher-order sets, any of which also address and are addressed by one another in a process that is itself addressed by them: meta-addressing all the way up and down into the abyss. This deep address is not only a mechanism for the capture of what exists and a formalization of their juxtaposition; it is also a medium for the creative composition of the traces, positions, and interrelations between them, across natural scales and tempos, drawing otherwise illegible forms into a wider Internet of haecceities. This places micron-scale processing of Shannon information into irregular meshes of networked matter and substantialized abstractions, toward absolute communication and absolute incommunication at once, as multiple maps and geographies name and number intersecting territories and enroll addressees into assemblages that may be effectively invisible to one another. As any addressee is compelled to appear to one platform of ubiquitous computation, this compulsion may also guarantee its disappearance from alternative addressable landscapes to which it may be all but invisible. In the end, the mastery of master perspectives is overcome by the proliferation of other master perspectives that cannot recognize, let alone contain, one another.

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Four of the six layers are seen now at once, and above them we locate Interfaces, particularly graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that make legible the far-flung Earth, Cloud, City, and Address layers of this Stack for Users who cannot possibly map the cause-and-effect relations of their own actions without some instrumental narrative. As they multiply, Interfaces assemble into interfacial regimes that present and enforce synthetic diagrammatic total images of how the entire platform can work for a User who perceives that platform through the grammar of that same regime. In turn as the User’ s own actions are also sensed and read by the Interface; they are incorporated into its totality and into governing procedures for monetizing User activities according to that regime ’ s own aesthetics of logistics. Hand-based tools may have passed for a moment into iconic point-and-click modes of the interface, but they now return to embodied gesture and perception, including App subplatforms that introduce new interfacial capacities to generic hardware. In this naturalistic synthesis of cognition and interfaciality, the metaphorical space between icon and what it represents, or between the single interface and the platform it interfaces, begins to implode. Subsequently, some platform totalities are drawn into theological projections, for which the work of anamnesis is externalized into perceptual-instrumental events that pre-decide the significance of real world interface elements, as well as the terms of encounter the User should have with them. We fear a militarization of cognition itself, as avant-garde and atavistic fundamentalisms move into the direct augmentation of reality and new political theologies emerge alongside them. Again, totalities are layered on top of totalities, but here the elemental terms of their superimposition are a catechism of war.

Enrollment and motivation according to the interfacial closures of a political theological totality might work by ludic sequences for human Users or by competitive algorithmic ecologies for nonhuman Users. But for each the proto-sovereignty of the User is drawn from both the artificial individuation of each User as well as the dissolution of that individuation by the overwhelming accumulation of incorporating information flows, some parasitic and others infrastructural. First, the political economic position of User, born of Taylorist rationalization, becomes the site of a different universality for which the User-subject position is circumscribed in the measurement of its appetite for carbon, energy, water, and data: the footprint. But eventually the maximal user — the absolutely quantified and qualified self — is dissolved by the intersection of multiple indexes and traces; its singularity is drawn and quartered by the accumulation of its relations. Further, the interfacial apparatus that coheres the human User as an economic subject also addresses nonhuman agents (algorithmic, animal, and machine users) with the same ease, placing all Users on a common plane and shifting the design question for the platform from a design for Users to a design of Users.

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This is The Stack-we-have. We can see it as one image and so perhaps can also see how it might be recomposed as a whole. Our most lucid attention now needs to be on the Stacks-to-come. The fissiparous geopolitics of Stacks includes the adjustments noted above as well as strategic Stack-versus-Stack warfare ( “ destroying a society one controller at a time ” ). Any of the possible Stacks-to-come can each be imagined as a whole, linking some User down to Earth, or they may intersect layer by layer, producing heterogeneous mixtures. Any relationship with or between infrastructural technologies might converge or diverge according to plan, or despite the plan, but can also be undone by Users driving columns into and out of other Stacks ’ layers. In the Cloud layer chapter, I outlined some of the logics of four existing platforms as Cloud Polis models (Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook) in order to demonstrate that their particular strategic combinations are not inevitable, and so just as we can imagine new combinations of these four, all the possible Stacks-to-come will be (as Stacks are now) made useful by real Users in dynamic amalgamations. The User layer of one model links to the Interface layer of another to the Address layer of a third, all perhaps situated in a City layer unreferenced by any of these three but drawing on the Cloud Polis of the second and the Earth layer of the first. The agnostic generosity of universal resolvers enables overlapping jurisdictions, and as a User moves from Stack to Stack to Stack, moment by moment, it also enables multiple and simultaneous sovereign positions.

These intersections are the normal condition with which and against which design must work, and there are at least four ways that adjustment between layers and between Stacks can be anticipated. They can be adjusted by the overlapping of one layer from one Stack by a column through a layer of another (as described above). There is also an adjustment in space, whereby two layers and two Stacks are situated adjacent to one another, like two cities. If a single User is in location X, then he can access Interface layer X, but if he is in location Y, then he will access Interface layer Y. A User traveling to another country who has to access another “ foreign ” wireless network is a familiar example of how two Interface layers may relate to one another by their adjacency in physical space. There is also an adjustment of sequentiality and of the relation between layers and Stacks over time. A User may access two different relatively homogeneous Stacks, one after the other, such that the use of the first makes possible the use of the second, or the use of one layer within one Stack may be a prerequisite for the use of another layer within the same Stack (which it usually is) or within another. It ’ s not hard to imagine different security scenarios that require a very specific sequence of actions to precede others. There are also adjustments in scale, both between Stacks and between layers. As discussed in the Interface chapter, an interface can be as small as an icon on a screen or as large as a security barrier between two countries. A User could be as “ small ” as an algorithm executed on a particular server or as “ large ” as the human population of a City combined over the span of a year. A Stack will work just as well with a tight scalar fit between what is situated at different layers (i.e., a human User and a standard keyboard Interface) or a loose scalar fit (i.e., a tiny algorithm and a distant megastructure, such as for Stuxnet). The Stack, and therefore also the design of The Stack, is qualified by these kinds of simultaneities, correspondences, parallels, desynchronizations, mismatches, and phase shifts.

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As far as geodesign is concerned, that blur between one Stack and another is not a symptom to be clarified and cured; rather, the blur is a high-resolution image of what is actually happening, which itself is blurry. To design with the blur instead of against it requires comfort with ambiguity. The hope is that we do have some handle on how to visualize The Stack today and how it organizes generic columns up and down. Without too much trouble, we can model a baseline scenario of an individuated human User citizen, named and profiled, using a vanilla platform Interface, connected to a stable mix of IP- addressed websites and smart objects, situated in a specific City connecting to a public/private mix of WiFi microterritories, governed by the application architecture of a global Cloud platform such as Google, and, at the Earth layer, drawing on local hydroelectric and coal plants that power the servers chiefly accessed by his usage. We can also imagine another Stack in which the User is a environmental sensor, the interface is a data-reporting application programming interface (API), Addresses are assigned to individual threshold chemical events as detected, all working in the City layer of a threatened rainforest as part of a transnational carbon risk reinsurance Cloud platform and pulling low-wattage power from plentiful solar and chemical energy sources. We can draw another Stack in which an assemblage of two robots, three delimited algorithms activated from afar, and three humans on three different continents constitute the composite User, linking them at the Interface layer through a Shanghainese fork of Android that translates between the five or six different “ languages ” at work. We can imagine them mapping and acting on a specific culinary-agricultural assemblage that has been Addressed according to Bronze Age dietary conventions, located in multiple, even hostile, City-states, accessing a mix of several public Cloud applications as well as locally encrypted databases, sucking up an all-of-the-above stew of utility electrons. Or, an unnamed kid at a quasi-public 3D printing works in Lagos using two different open source additive manufacturing APIs, downloaded CAD scripts, and YouTube Uploader to spoof the Addresses of pirated bicycle cranks that will now phone home and report that they are actually licensed and operational in Cape Town, but which are really being used to haul bags of cement to the fourth floor of a building that shows up having only two floors on Google Earth RealTime (at least when queried from South African IPs) al running on the AfriNIC version of Google ’ s “ no carrier fee ” Continent Cloud, sucking energy from a Franco-Chinese nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Chad, and chewing up circuitry minerals recycled from e-waste drone lifts from Bossangoa, Central African Republic, courtesy of All-African Defense Forces. And so on. It is not too hard to come up with political science-fiction scenarios, but it is hard to specify the shape of them working in combination, if only because any of the layers in the scenarios above could just as easily be combined with the layers of any of the others. Take two to five layers from each and sort, stir, and simmer. We need not one but many Stack design theories. Even the US Department of Defense are Stack theorists, having made their own version of a Stack model of planetary-scale computation in semisecrecy and featuring layers similar to the one described in this book (unknown to me until very recently). ⁸ Instead of neat utopias or dystopias, it is the divergent mixtures of the two, drawing on the energy loss and radiant waste materials of whatever is most distant or closest at hand, which may nevertheless be most crucial and fruitful.

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1. Earth Layer to Come: God Bows to Math; Will Leviathan? ⁹

A side effect of the unmanned programs of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), particularly Viking’ s initial probes to the surface of Mars, is what Kim Stanley Robinson calls comparative planetology, the consideration of pattern and difference among astronomical bodies. ¹⁰ Arguably, the leverage of such a perspective would be greater than that of the more iconic visual knowledge of the Apollo “ Earthrise ” or “ blue marble ” photographs, which demonstrated the formal coherency of Earth as one geophysical unit. ¹¹ Now the special singularity of that sample can be measured by comparing variation among like and unlike cousins, each of which represents an alternative chemical reality from which or toward which our own perch might be distinguished and interpreted. Given that other planets are assembled from the same chemical ingredients as is Earth (still mostly hydrogen, helium, some carbon, bits of other things, albeit in different ratios), the far end of the comparability is the full spectrum of possible recombinations of elements “ computing ” one another into the relative molecular stability of a planetary sphere. The universe could, in principle, disassemble one astronomic body and build a couple others out of the raw material, and in fact, in astronomic time, that is more or less how planets are made.

Seen from this outside, the Earth layer of The Stack is ultimately not only the plateau from which emerges the material and energy to run the other layers of a closed tower; it is also — in a sense — the basis of a second planetary computer, one laid on top of a first whose calculations resulted in the relative ecological and chemical stability of our planetary situation. More often than not, globally pervasive eco-computing is validated by a diagnosis model; it provides us with a way to detect pathologies. We detect pollution or telltale ecological traces in one way or another and render them as evidence. It is a way to visualize the invisible evil, drawing its picture so we can see where it is and where it goes, and one way or another prevent it from happening again. The maximal design image of pervasive computation — of this second planetary computer — is understood both rightly and wrongly as a smearing of the planet ’ s surface with an objective computational film that would construct a stream of information about the performance of our shared socionatural spaces through which geopolitical decisions can be made. Within a material public based on a truly ubiquitous computational infrastructure, the political formations that would cohere might be based on the aggregation of encounters and relationships between persons, things, and material events, including especially those in which people are not directly involved. But even if everything is seen and registered, not everything sees or works back on what it sees in the same way. Part of the design question then has to do with interpreting the status of the image of the world that is created by that second computer, as well as that mechanism ’ s own image of itself, and the way that it governs the planet by governing its model of that planet. That model is built on the interrelationship of nonhuman biologies and chemistries as well, and so the images that the designer can deduce or produce serve the representational agency to a matrix that otherwise would be invisible to itself beyond its most local chemical interactions.

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The status of that ecology in relation to the designer, considered now in emergent models of software and sovereignty, conjoins sensing, sense-making, and image-making into a generic infrastructure of sensors, databases, displays, firmware-in-the-wild, and so on — in other words, a “ stack ” system that both reflects and congeals what it “ represents ” technically and politically. The columns going up and down the paths of this Stack link a politics of seeing to a politics of our being seen, and through them, one becomes the other. It compiles a diagnostic image by diagramming present and potential relationships between agents within its line of sight. We assume that any (human or nonhuman) component ’ s ability to recognize and consume that image, and thereby also consume the projection of a set of potential governable relationships between the variables within that interface, does so not just for utilitarian imperative but with real affective intensity. In this utility and intensity, another proposition is made about how it is that we may sense the world, or how the sensibility of the world might be distributed or organized, made infrastructural, and activated to become part of how the landscape understands and narrates itself. It is not only a diagnostic image then; it is a tool for a geo-politics in formation, emerging from the parametric multiplication and algorithmic conjugation of our surplus projections of worlds to come, perhaps in mimetic accordance with one explicit utopian conception or another, and perhaps not. Nevertheless, the decision between what is and is not governable may arise as much from what the model computational image cannot do as much as from what it can. Its geopolitical effects are as reliant on stockpiles of failures as on capacities for success. This is no less true of the surplus of interfacial utopias constituted with information visualization than it is for the parliamentary politics born of an agrarian time and persisting long enough to provide funding for those Viking missions to Mars.

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And so, “ comparative planetology ” works not only between this astronomic body and that one, but also between one body and the computational model that simulates it and governs it in turn. For the Earth layer of The Stack, the fragility of this model comes also from its purported successes, and specifically, from how much it underestimates the difficulty of achieving them. Core to the utopian project for pervasive computation and ecological governance is positing a world in which every square inch is in some way constantly outpouring infinitely communicable information about itself, overwhelming some expert systems while spawning others, enabling the world to declare itself as data tectonics. From this another polity could emerge in this parametric swarm of information secretion and consumption, one that represents itself to itself through these enforceable representations. It implies (perhaps) a flatter, a less authoritarian, a less anonymous, less humanistic (and even less designed) geopolitical space — or perhaps instead just another mode and method for its design. However, the simpler and sadder truth is that we are, as of now, incapable of governing ourselves according to the already available, more rudimentary information that ecologies communicate. A clouded river, a shrunken branch, a coughing fish: these are also instances of “ data visualization, ” and we do a bad job of interpreting them and acting on them. At best, we attempt to pathologize them and even criminalize them because they do not conform to quality metrics and thresholds (and higher resolution of images of the pathology will not ensure that the model can govern better). Still, perhaps the problem is also that the vast plurality of worldly actors are left out of the picture, and perhaps by rendering those variables visible and transmissible, by incorporating them at the scale of a planetary archive, those “ trees ” become things for which political engineering can be more systematic and effective. The most difficult question for this design-and-monitor-and-diagram system remains whether a more appropriate geopolitical architecture can be deduced from and designed by and for the Earth layer.

In petabyte-aggregations of ecological knowledge and application, is there a channel for these instances to pluralize, to assemble into networks of different size, so that they can in fact become more durable forms and be properly empowered to make gestures at the scale of the forces that affect their fates? Can the “ second planetary computer ” create worlds and images of worlds that take on the force of law (if not its formality) and effectively exclude worse alternatives? If so, its mediations will surely include some abdication of the central piloting role of modern political subjects as played by the anthropic “ human ” who is the geological agent of the Anthropocene. Here technical representation and political representation become more symmetrical and less rather than more “ parliamentary. ” The process by which sovereignty is made more plural becomes a matter of producing more than discoursing: more about pushing, pulling, clicking, eating, modeling, stacking, prototyping, subtracting, regulating, restoring, optimizing, leaving alone, splicing, gardening and evacuating than about reading, examining, insisting, rethinking, reminding, knowing full-well, enacting, finding problematic, and urging. In these, mediation and translation between ecology and model move from one scale to another, up and down and back again, and that itinerary is where the action is and where the story plays out.

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In structural engineering, when the pressure difference between the outside and the inside of a building causes heat to rise up from the bottom, floor by floor, and try to escape from the top, this is called the stack effect. In the cycle of energy into and out of data centers, up through the layers to the User, a corollary process is at work for planetary-computational stacks as well, which is on the whole bad news for the ecology that it would hope to model. At the same time, it bears repeating that with terrestrial, oceanic, satellite, and atmospheric sensing networks, it is only through the medium of the Stack itself that we know so precisely how the carbon appetite of The Stack is contributing so decisively to our Anthropocenic predicament in the first place. This paradox (some may call it a self-cancellation) is only one reason that there is such strong disbelief that the current geopolitical, geoeconomic, or geoecological order can continue in its present form. We experience a crisis of “ ongoingness ” that is both the cause and effect of our species ’ inability to pay its ecological and financial debts. The Stack itself, this accidental megastructure, is surely as well a result of these same processes, and it may be seen as symptomatic from one perspective or emergent from another, but its ability to mature as a form of intelligence is dependent on learning to not cannibalize its planetary host. I also argue that some conceivable versions of a future Stack have a decisive role to play in making intractable problems of governance and design far less dangerous, and the abstract machine of the Earth layer ’ s second planetary computer is among these. Another argument laced throughout this book is that the necessary intellectual and technological achievements are not at hand, that we must make them so, and toward that we must be willing to entertain shifts in the relationship between software and sovereignty, taken as our primary example. That said, the picture is far from rosy. Despite appearances, one can easily argue that technological progress has slowed since the last quarter of the twentieth century (the 1973 oil crisis to be specific). The low-hanging fruits (e.g., the speed of transcontinental flight, increase in age expectancy, median income in affluent societies, crop yields, truly significant new medicines) have been gathered up, and in many cases their rate of progress has either slowed or even reversed. ¹² Meanwhile, commodity prices have continued to rise, clean energy has yet to materialize at a necessary scale, and atmospheric carbon dioxide has broken the 400 parts per million barrier. It is true at the same time that the number of people living in extreme poverty (as defined by the dollar value of their daily available purchasing power) has been cut in half since only 1990, and the average family size, or total fertility rate, has also halved since 1950 from almost 5 children to fewer than 2.5 (concurrently the percentage of people living in cities has gone from 20 percent to 50 percent in one hundred years and is projected to be 70 percent by 2050.) These are all causes and effects of one another, each accomplishment coming at a sometimes savage price and each calamity with a silver lining (of sorts). None of this, however, proves that it is impossible to do what we know is required, but it may suggest that we are not willing.

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In a talk that I gave on the topic of popular discourse on innovation, a feeble genre of “ middlebrow megachurch infotaintment, ” I said:

The most recent centuries have seen extraordinary accomplishments in improving quality of life. The paradox is that the system we have now — whatever you want to call it — is in the short term what makes the amazing new technologies possible, but in the long run it is also what suppresses their full flowering. Another economic architecture is prerequisite. … We hear that not only is change accelerating but that the pace of change is accelerating as well. While this is true of computational carrying-capacity at a planetary level, at the same time — and in fact the two are connected — we are also in a moment of cultural de-acceleration. We invest our energy in futuristic information technologies, including our cars, but drive them home to kitsch architecture copied from the 18th century. The future on offer is one in which everything changes, so long as everything stays the same. We ’ ll have Google Glass, but still also business casual. This timidity is our path to the future? No, this is incredibly conservative, and there is no reason to think that more gigaflops will inoculate us. Because, if a problem is in fact endemic to a system, then the exponential effects of Moore ’ s law also serve to amplify what ’ s broken. It is more computation along the wrong curve, and I doubt this is necessarily a triumph of reason. … [Our current conversation] has too much faith in technology, and not nearly enough commitment to technology. It is placebo technoradicalism, toying with risk so as to reaffirm the comfortable. So our machines get smarter and we get stupider. But it doesn ’ t have to be like that. Both can be much more intelligent. Another futurism is possible. ¹³

As far the Earth layer is concerned, “ another futurism ” is what we call geodesign, which would include geoengineering, understood as possible techniques for ecological restoration operating directly upon the atmosphere, but certainly not only that. There are other ways to intelligently and deliberately intervene in the architecture of geopolitics, geoeconomics, and geoecology, and some of these recall “ utopian ” plans of the Apollo era. The crisis of ongoingness may, however, demand that options that may have once seemed fantastic are now imperative, and what is most normal is now also the most unlikely path forward. In his essay, “ Who Will Build the Ark? ” Mike Davis puts it this way:

From this perspective, only a return to explicitly utopian thinking can clarify the minimal conditions for the preservation of human solidarity in face of convergent planetary crises. I think I understand what the Italian Marxist architects Tafuri and Dal Co meant when they cautioned against “ a regression to the utopian ” ; but to raise our imaginations to the challenge of the Anthropocene, we must be able to envision alternative configurations of agents, practices and social relations, and this requires, in turn, that we suspend the politico-economic assumptions that chain us to the present. 14

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The regression Davis mentions refers to a willingness to trade the comfort of ideal “ solutions ” for the work of fundamental transformation, but perhaps given the precariousness of the situation, having learned to entertain the utopian impulse with imaginative schemes may prove an extremely practical capability to possess. This also relates to what Heidegger once called our “ confrontation with planetary technology ” (an encounter that he never managed to actually make and which most Heideggerians manage to endlessly defer, or “ differ” ). ¹⁵ That encounter should be motivated by an invested interest in several “ planetary technologies ” working at various scales of matter, and based on, in many respects, what cheap supercomputing, broadband networking, and isomorphic data management methodologies make possible to research and application. These include — but are no means limited to — geology (e.g., geochemistry, geophysics, oceanography, glaciology), earth sciences (e.g., focusing on the atmosphere, lithospere, biosphere, hydrosphere), as well as the various programs of biotechnology (e.g., bioinformatics, synthetic biology, cell therapy), of nanotechnology (e.g., materials, machines, medicines), of economics (e.g., modeling price, output cycles, disincentivized externalities), of neuroscience (e.g., behavioral, cognitive, clinical), and of astronomy (e.g., astrobiology, extragalactic imaging, cosmology). In that all of these are methodologically and even epistemologically informed by computer science (e.g., algorithmic modeling, macrosensors and microsensors, data structure optimization, information theory, data visualization, cryptography, networked collaboration), then all of these planetary technologies are also planetary computational technologies. The question of planetary-scale computing addressed by this book is therefore not only a topic for us to understand; it also names our mechanisms of inquiry. I would insist on the inclusion as well of art, design, philosophy, film and literature (especially their science fiction genres) — or at least my own preferred conception of them — which themselves may or may not be computational. These are our key technologies for conceiving the inevitable ambiguities of planetary-scale computational computation and its potential vectors up and out, but they don ’ t work well when they are asked to resolve ambiguity instead of conspiring with it and cultivating its efficacy. The geodesign that I have in mind would draw on all of these in varying measures for its subject matter, for its means, for what it may be called on to know, but it would also provide a platform for these disciplines ’ rotations from ways of knowing toward ways of making. It may do this because there is no local, only global, to invert Bruno Latour ’ s well-known and unfortunate maxim. ¹⁶ To pull intelligently on one thread is to tug on the whole at once, a whole that has come together in one particular way at one particular moment in the form of a thread and someone to pull it. ¹⁷ This not a wish for renewed human mastery or transcendence. It is rather a call for the difficult, even traumatic work of disenchantment and demystification and toward a geopolitics based on what our species knows that it knows about our limited position and on how we might recompose ourselves accordingly.

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