The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

The assignment of autonomy and culpability (too often conflated) is equally messy. Some might anticipate a future in which rival Cloud polities will be defined as much by the real-world violence of their external conflicts as by their internal strategies. The development of weapons for large-scale infrastructural warfare through complex viruses is well underway — spy versus spy, algorithm versus algorithm, City layer versus City layer, and Stack versus Stack — and attracts some of the very best computer scientists to the problem space. In many cases, the strategy is not only to break an enemy ’ s servos, it is to weaponize that enemy ’ s Users “ against him, ” especially when the User is unaware of having being weaponized. The zombified personal computer, taken over by malware acting like a parasitic fungus, is a basic example, but the capacity of unprogrammed Users to wreak havoc on their own platform is almost limitless. In such a case, is the User or the owner more responsible? He who initiates the column of death or he who owns its Stack? Surely intention is important, but not from the system ’ s perspective on its own security. There are only low-risk and high-risk Interfaces and the Users attached to them. One lesson of this is that just as the diffusion of “ responsibility ” into the system cannot lay the blame at the doorstep of the unconscious User position, it cannot be designed around the effable conscious will of the User either. Colonel Jack Ripper might tap the first domino in order to protect the purity of essence of his precious bodily fluids, but even his maniacal self-sovereignty depends on a vast already existing machinic apparatus that springs into action. The sacralization of individuated privacy through encryption might also seem to guarantee purity of essence and the sovereignty of the atomized User, but it anonymizes some of the key variables in the larger human-technological chain of association, activity, and accountability, also withdrawing them from reasonable adjudication. Instead of containing the impacts of an exchange within the closed circle of those transacting, it instead makes some agents invisible to the trace routing of algorithmic governance altogether, thereby automating the free-rider problem, as well as making everything that transaction externalizes (both benign and pernicious) invisible even to the Users that spawn them. Out of sight, out of mind. This kind of tactical anonymization can both overinflate the end User’ s sense of commanding authority over all interactions (an inflation that is both technological and psychological) and withdraws the User from forums of accountability for the partial costs of his partial agency. It achieves the former by promising the latter.

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The overindividuation of User identity in accordance with modern conventions of political identity can produce both comedy and tragedy. During protests in Maidan Square in early 2014, the Ukrainian government of then-President Viktor Yanukovych sent a text message to the phones of many of those gathered that read, “ Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance. ” This fact should be obvious to anyone participating in the mass disturbance, but the implied threat that comes from the sudden revelation that the state knows who she is, or at least her phone number, is clear, if somewhat pathetic as well. An explicit drawing of sides does not benefit a weak regime, and the anointment of someone in the square as officially an enemy of the state would do little to shore up its flagging legitimacy. Furthermore, the awkward over-individuation of a mass protest that has power only because it is an emergent crowd, not a coincidental gathering of many Users at one time, must have provoked more chuckling than cowering. For the future of the User layer, the episode also dramatizes the mismatch between traditional political individuation versus real world User/ Interface/ City layer assemblages when one is clumsily overlaid on top of the other. Who knows how sophisticated the targeting was or ever would be in a future of cell proxies, IP spoofing, number forwarding, and urban software ( “ Dear sensor embedded in a bridge, you have been identified as a protester … ” ). The mismatch gets more convoluted when it has to account for the inadvertent interpolation of Users with citizen-like rights, on the one hand, and the unwanted segmentation and surveillance of individuated Users, on the other. It confuses one with the other because it sees them both only in relation to how they deviate from an obsolete figure of User as individual citizen.

A specific design problem for the Interface layer-to-come is this individuation of the interface itself. By hailing “ the ” User as a single agent with a single perspective, instead of an important but partial agency within many larger and small apparatuses at once, the placebo identity of a resolved Vitruvian User is not only accommodated; it is reproduced and fortified. What is the better “ sovereign unit ” of this assembly then? One wonders if the legal accounting of individuals is even a viable notion when systems and individuals become indistinguishable from one another. The Stack ’ s technologies of the self give enormous weight to formulas that seem to verify the existential discreteness of the individual, diagrammed by biographical quantification and attended to by single-serving pointing and clicking. This is so even as the technologies of the self we see at work in (or as, or through) The Stack do what seems to be the exact opposite of what I am suggesting, and instead give more and more weight to formulas of individuation that seem to verify the existential discreteness of the existential individual through the diagrammatic quantification of his biography. For the User-to-come, perhaps no door is built only for you, because your being, having, and knowing are never only yours alone? The door builds you as that which passes or does not, that which is absorbed by the profile or that which absorbs it. Real infrastructure involves many actors, some named and some unaccounted for by law or by software but nevertheless active. The interface constructs Users, but it is also constructed by Users, and so to remake the User-subject is to reform “ the door ” to better reflect all of what is actually present and active within any chain of exchange and to institutionalize these as interfaces into new normative systems. To innovate the agency of the User is then not just to innovate the rights of humans who are Users but also to innovate the agency of the machines with which the User is embroiled. A User may be anything that can initiate a column up and down The Stack, but because as any particular thing, human or nonhuman, may step in or out of that position many times over the course of the day we need to design modes of accountability all the way up and down the line. Only then can we reasonably expect to design a livable governance of automated decision on the inside and the outside, who and what goes where, and how to program algorithmic interfacial governance, all the while attentive to the exceptions that it decides and does not decide.

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Building a better armature for the User-subject position may not seem like the most pressing design problem, but in many ways, that is exactly what it is. An (only somewhat) unlikely consensus has formed around the structural importance of robotics and automation and their impact on the macroeconomics of labor and markets. Bets are placed from both the right and the left that a “ zero-marginal cost society ” or “ fully automated luxury communism ” is built into the future of software-driven globalization. A party line that crosses parties emerges in different versions, blending nanotechnology, industrial robotics, additive manufacturing (3D printing), Internet of Things, digital replication, biotechnology, and open networks to draw a scenario in which many physical commodities are rationalized into downloadable streams, and much of the heavy lifting (and flying) will be done by intelligent quasi- or fully autonomous machines. We shall have to wait and see, but algorithms and algorithmically intelligent hardware are already active Users in our world, and we need to give them their due. For better or worse, we and they occupy converging niches in a new equilibrium and its many punctuations. It is with vestigial stupidity that we police the human/animal divide in the way that we do, and it is equally misguided to insist that computing machines are “ just tools ” and not also co- Users along with us. The implications are both ethical and economic, and the geopolitics of the User must reflect not only how we want states and platforms to treat human Users, but how we would situate these ideals within interfacial regimes that are more effectively inclusive and more accurately representative (never fully — always by reduction) of who and what is interfacing with whom and what, regardless of species or kingdom.

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1. Angelus Novus Is Gone

To what extent is The Stack, and its stratigraphic model of interlocking and incongruent softwares and sovereignties, an answer to Clinton ’ s call for alternative geopolitical architecture — or is it an answer to another, better question? For our secular geodesign, the blur by which The Stack-we-have becomes The Stack-to-come doesn ’ t offer any messianic historical redemption; it is no one ’ s “ coming community. ” ¹ It is not a transcendental diagram into which matters can go to find their proper places; it is only a machine with which we can configure things and events of very different scales and duration, and to realize otherwise illegible abstractions now become infrastructure. Its formal rigidity necessarily multiplies itself, braiding political geography into rough weaves, giving sanctuary to double agents on a layer-by-layer basis. But one cannot be pro-blur anymore than one can be pro-Stack (or anti-Stack), and nor can design just remap one place onto the next, shifting sovereignty from there to here, from state to individual, from state to corporation, from law to protocol, from institution to network, from land to Cloud. Instead alternative actors, agents, objects, machines, and ethics will surely come into view and will fill up another diagram with another distributed tension. These aliens both are and are not us. The geopolitics of computation, its geographies of programmability, recombinancy, extensibility, recursively, and addressability, are not overseen by any one Angelus Novus that could, per Walter Benjamin ’ s assignment, make good on history ’ s knottily kneaded, well-promised catastrophe, always tearing and folding back on itself as it flies backward. Because of and despite its utopian timbre, planetary-scale computation may lead to desolation, tyranny, and destitution, but if it does, then perhaps it is our own fault.

Accidents fold into accidents into accidents, and jurisdictions into jurisdiction as the geopolitics become more plural, more compulsive, more contradictory, more composite and polyscalar. The interfacial totalities of our platform states, drawn from ambient signals of price and risk and faith and fundamentalism, decide sovereignty by extracting and extruding value from the ties that bind, their polarized multiplicities shimmering by fractal superimposition. Dual-booting citizens, all of them migrants in some way, are held in particular postures by algorithmic governance and granted premiums by firewalls. Nothing, anywhere, can really be “ native ” anymore ² and perhaps if we were to accomplish nothing more than this, it will have been worthwhile. See all the hearts and minds rented several times a day to different walled gardens and perceptual belief systems, and by “ the cunning use of flags ” everything that is anything is laundered, like Nauru launders passports, Cayman Islands launders money, and Guantanamo Bay launders people. ³ Crypto City-states enjoy protected rights of religion and speech, but less so the individuals who live for a time inside them, unless each or all of them are also incorporated in some manner, because when the state is sovereign, the individual seeks citizenship, but when the market is sovereign, the individual person seeks the status of the corporation. Immigration becomes the panicked face of climate wars; homelands are invented by the day, week, and month. Exodus and exile are branded, even at the expense of keeping time zones straight. ⁴ Nongovernmental organizations guarantee basic health insurance according to increasingly dubious definitions of net neutrality. Artificial intelligences make the deeper historical time of intergenerational governance more culturally acceptable, at least for what is mutually addressable by all parties, while all that is governed by its accountings of appearance and disappearance fills landscapes with sovereign interfaces and their automated decisions.

The Black Stack

Synthetic computation shifts what can be sensed, measured, calculated, communicated, or stored and performs feats of organizational cognition at a scale and speed previously unknown. There is a productive and generous cannibalism in this. For some, the friend-enemy distinction is rationalized by the ambiance of vast indoor airport cities, thousands of them each supporting hundreds of millions of people, most skirted by lethal security prophylactics. ⁵ Recall that the Biosphere 2 experiment did have a winner. It was the ants that beat back the cockroaches that made the humans go insane. ⁶ The lesson is that inside a domed totality, massively distributed single-mindedness may be a better evolutionary adaptation than individuated nuanced thinking, and so Google charter cities may be drawn more by stigmergic chemical communication than by glassy formal algorithms. Ants organize their war machine by epidermal secretion and sensation, and our own satellite-dependent relays do as well, staging the query, the result, the visualization of the result, the metadata about the query, the call and response. States involve these prostheses and are involved by them; they are confiscated by their own mechanisms, and for them the interface is very literally skin. As spaces opened up and closed off by computation are defined not just by what governance chooses to see and not see, but by what it chooses to sense and not sense, the distributed naming of what is and is not sensible expresses that epidermal mode of sovereignty, where securing in place and securing in motion guarantee the field of relations that anything might enter into. The abstracted granularity of things and the wetness of their membranes are both preconditions for how they sense the world and how the world senses them, how they are designed in place, how they are secured and provide security. In other words, the designability of skin is already also food by other means, and thereby also the state by other means. For geopolitics within comparative planetology, chemistry always wins.

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The wrestling between geodesign and platform states is also defined by the limiting condition that designable space is never empty and that the precarious world is always already full. No tabula is ever rasa: the world is filled but never completed, with no Genesis alibi on call. In this, political geography is less a zero-sum image of territories to acquire than the design of a substitute totality, which may or may not be correspondent with the unitotality of any one world image (such as a globe in space). Already design today is preoccupied with managing the archive of all “ content ” produced in preceding centuries; we don ’ t make new things; we innovate on the archive and index what is already there, moving from “ event ” to database and back again. Whereas industrial platforms like Ford and Toyota innovated the manufacture of complex industrial machines from scratch at mass scale, Google ’ s mission is not to make new raw information per se, but to structure and curate the total space of all the world ’ s information — a standing reserve that already exists, however underformalized — and to manage it within its anti-obelisk of data centers and make it a medium for reflexive action on the world now rendered as a computational plateau. We rotate from the system of objects to an economy of metadata. If mass mediation and information scarcity once demanded the architecture of formal ideological systems, now governance is predicated on the differential management of open and closed data sets, still also realized as animal violence. The care of any archive is one present moment ’ s self-accounting toward an unknowable future — an ethics — and a database is just a particularly active kind of archive, one for which information that is drawn from the world more easily becomes an instrument for working reflexively back on it. It ’ s unclear though if the shift from scarce, sacred texts to overabundant, instantaneously archivable information still requires the same promise of ethical completion to motivate and justify our participation and promise toward the future. We could act as if it does, until we find out.

Across this span, we are confronted with both a surplus of new worlds and a lack of clear civilizational frontiers, other than those simulated by various senile medievalisms now in ascendance. Can we survive that? Can we address the openings closest at hand fast enough that they generate new geographies before we can ruin them? The curation of these dysfunctional archives directs our attention onto geodesign projects beyond our economic comprehension, because after all, humans have already redesigned the Earth (The Stack is itself a reflection of that dubious accomplishment), and it took all our capital since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to do it. The Anthropocene should represent a shift in our worldview, one fatal to many of the humanities ’ internal monologues, but it is also the broadest clich é , one favored by business journalists and know-nothing primitivists alike. In just the century of industrialization, or centuries since wide-scale agriculture, we ’ ve managed such a radical transformation in life on the planet ’ s crust — climate change, population growth, deforestation, ocean acidification, asphaltization, massive extinction, mega-urbanization — that we ’ ve finally smothered it whole and brought a new geologic era named after the pervasive and permanent impact of the human genome on the geophysical profile of the Earth ’ s crust and atmosphere. The bad news is evidenced by the longer odds we hang over our own heads, filling markets with promissory notes to extract and rationalize more natural resources than may actually exist. The good news is that we know for certain that short-term “ geoengineering ” is not only possible but in a way inevitable, but how so? How and by whom does it go, and unfortunately for us the answer (perhaps) must arrive before we can properly articulate the question. For the darker scenarios, macroeconomics completes its metamorphosis into ecophagy, as the discovery of market failures becomes simultaneously the discovery of limits of planetary sinks (e.g., carbon, heat, waste, entropy, populist politics) and vice versa; The Stack becomes our dakhma. ⁷ The shared condition, if there is one, is the mutual unspeakability and unrecognizability that occupies the seat once reserved for Kantian cosmopolitanism, now just a pre-event reception for a collective death that we will actually be able to witness and experience. We shuffle along, soggy-footed. For the brighter scenario, Shanzhai nanotechnologies may save us from the gray goo of the landfills, putting them back to work, allowing us to make and buy unnamable assemblages with no relation to our needs or wants, forcing the world ’ s supply chain algorithms to go haywire, not knowing how to model this or that impulse, or what to stock on shelf interfaces, putting dog food next to hex wrenches with peach syrup on top, and for this, the logistical absolute would careen toward universal molecular flux. ⁸ Put another way, The Stack ’ s infrastructure failure interdependencies include the provision of secure potable water. While many platform states may exercise monopoly control over interfacial exception within their gardened walls, they have no monopoly on monopolies, and so, opt out to where? The Apollo program ’ s Apollonian planetary photography may have rendered an eco-calculative interiority, but the outside didn ’ t end there on that day; for both left and right politics, that outside was always an illusion of geocentric ideological habits.

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Design (in fact, the real subject of this book) here means the structuring of the world in reaction to an accelerated decay and in projective anticipation of a condition that is now only the ghostliest of a virtual present tense. This is a design for accommodating (or refusing to accommodate) the post-whatever-is-melting-into-air and prototyping for pre-what-comes-next: a strategic, groping navigation (however helpless) of the punctuations that bridge between these two. This geodesign— the work of the blur and for the emergence within the emergency — is the congealing and uncongealing of the equilibria-that-were from the equilibria-to-come. If so, what enforces design when “ sovereignty and territory increasingly lead separate lives ” ? ⁹ Lodged here is not just political design or politically intelligent design, but rather the redesign of the geopolitical, including the possible conclusion to scrap it outright as an operational concept. While the objectivity of our common planetary position is far more self-evident than in the eighteenth century when the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, we should also be far less certain that it can serve as the determining model of metajurisdictional scale. As platforms grow, they diverge and converge with equal ease, and as regional differences are absorbed by them, primordial social distinctions are globalized and revitalized by those very same platforms, just as new forces also appear and evolve from novelty to norm. These may be constitutive of new social-systemic realities, but only because they can occupy multiple scales simultaneously, at once subpolitical and suprapolitical. They seem to sit still for Russian doll jurisdictions and equidistant equatorial-cylindrical projection maps only when we transpose them through filters full of errors. They are not well described by the partitioning of public from private sectors, of civil from martial societies, progressive from oppressive policies, or even finally humans from nonhumans, atoms from bits. In response, our geodesign still draws from (and into) its specific planetary situatedness, but does so by overwriting itself again and again in the same space. When there are no single fixed conditions of inclusion and exclusion, it may not even be proper to refer to its deliverables as territories and geographies as such. What then? Can planetarity still be at once a cartographic image and a pregnant machine, both less and more than a single backdrop? We do know that in the interfacial calculability of sensations and events, borders do everything but vanish, but that in their simultaneous proliferation and dissipation, liquefaction and fortification, their interfaces become pervasive. If counterterrorism discourse can dare to even say “ imagine no lines, ” thinking that “ the front ” is everywhere, then it is because already everywhere is skin and geopolitics is epidermal . This makes the design of the conditional interfacial exception, drawing the interior versus the interior over again many times a second, into both the icy calculation and the bloody siege for any platform that hopes to persist for very long.

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1. The Stack and Its Others

Ideally, design ’ s setting of norms is active, not responsive; it should produce more than it accommodates. What is today most legal and most explicitly protected by the formal apparatus of law is what may be the most dangerous. Meanwhile many forms of connection and interfaciality that are technically illegal — or alegal — adapt to emergent conditions in ways that formal securitarian urbanism could never preprogram, and also represent some of the most secure public policy paths available. In the repetition as facts on the ground, these translegal forms (software or hardware)

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