The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

come to take on the force of law, and then just maybe, if urbanists are savvy, these designate as law, and geography is recompiled and restocked, brick by brick, in their image. For design, working with alegal interfaces represents a form of constraint and also a medium for the proliferation or suppression of utopian and dystopian alliances and enemies. As said, Cambrian lurches forward in design tend to occur in response to a crisis: that is when design is most wildly inventive because no other option would be practical ( ‘ lines are drawn. Use cases are modeled. Budgets are allocated ’ ). And so, in response, deep systemic crises invite three interrelated and apparently opposing responses: acceleration, inertia and fundamentalism: fight, hide, and flight, accordingly. ¹⁰

It bears repeating, especially as we tinker with the comparative planetology business, that as every technology brings new accidents, so too every accident brings new technologies. For design, planetary-scale computation is both, amplifying industrial modernity toward a ubiquity that is matched in intensity only by its imminent dissolution. Our experiment — indeed everyone ’ s experiment for the coming decades — is tied to an ecologically ubiquitous computing, a gamble that in many ways underpins all others. The Stack-to-come should tilt the outcome of that impact toward a renewed modernity, but will it — in some configuration of Clouds, objects, tags, Addresses, Interfaces, sensors, algorithmic phyla — provide the lightness necessary to organize a restorative, subtractive, resilient modernity, or will its own voracious energy appetite, toxic production footprint, and alienating virtualization finally overwhelm all? Put differently, where industrialization was a modernity for tabula rasa, today a subtractive modernity is what curates that world that is always already full. But can it power an interfacial modernity not of identity and maximalization, but of externality and transference? Will planetary-scale pervasive computing prove to be, in some guise, the integral media of real reindustrialization, allowing for light but powerful interfaces of governance and exchange, or instead, the final, most unsustainable machine consuming the remaining resources into its subterranean pits? Is it all or nothing? If it can succeed, it is because its radicality is not drawn from the historical or geographic momentum of a new world, but rooted in the precarity of globalizations that are as irresolvable as they are interconnected. Either way, we slowly learn to let go of certain things (of nationalisms, of monotheisms, of economic psychologisms, strong genomic and semiotic ontologies) and negotiate instead a deliberate and strategic dissolution — on-planet, off-planet — into whatever and whoever comes next. Somehow I am optimistic, if that is the right word. The thesis of this particular book is neither a manifesto nor an instruction manual, but as said, a design brief that invites others to collaborate on the articulation and realization of the renewed modernity described here, with all their deliberate commitment and expert abstraction. ¹¹

For that, the prevalent client-side versus the server-side critique of planetary-scale computational power becomes that much less relevant when it is the interfacial relays between addressable objects that are the real object of governance, and not the things themselves. We must assume that more governing pressure on the rights spots is how to go about geoengineering an economy, and we assume that such pressure will include how it is that interfaces exact terms of exception. If the reader ’ s work ing assumption is, however, that mathematics plus the force of law equals totalitarianism, then I suppose other issues are more pressing for you and your colleagues. ¹² The geodesign I would describe means an exploration of how certain control systems, certain platform systems, and specific configurations work toward particular desirable and undesirable governmental effects ( “ there is no architecture without violence, because there is no architecture without program ” ). ¹³ Platforms are emergent systems that are informed by power. That is why they work (and where they work). As said, the frame of planetary computation not only houses and distorts multiple jurisdic tional claims; it directly produces new strata of jurisdiction where none existed before, and yet it causes any particular site, in any particular City, to be so layered with jurisdictional image systems that no one of these can ever really resolve into a single consensual sovereign geography. The political experience of the overlayered site is not only a competition for the right of legitimate force but the dominance of one addressable geography versus another, and often one because the other, hence the irresolvable surplus of utopian total images ( “ we are millionaires in images of revolution ” ). ¹⁴ Writ large, the layered architecture of The Stack makes vertical totality and hence the strategy of consensus more difficult than within a bounded horizontal encampment of whatever size and relative secularity. Political spectrums, between authoritarianism and communization or state and platform, may be different for each layer within the same Stack, and especially within a real-world column initiated by a real-world User. A gesture from one User, incorporating all layers on its way down and all layers again on its way back up again to another User, may pass through a zoo of different captured ideological zones fighting it out layer by layer, interacting with geographies of every imaginable purity or toxicity along the way, each one spinning to a different tune. ¹⁵ That is just the table stakes. From here comes the Promethean fascination with how intelligent systems, including human societies, evolve on and from this particu lar planetary perch, and a program to design first in the service of maximum possible wealth to the maximum possible interactions and intercourses, with prejudice toward disenchantment and without deference for superstition and sentimentality. Other alternatives suggest instead worlds of shit and pain. Delay and dissembling will insult current opportunities for enlightenment, prosperity, and jubilation and will only encourage the worst scenarios to reach fruition — letting some believe that those were fulfilled prophecies when they actually required the dour, bewildered participation of their victims.

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In order to build The Stack-to-come, we have to first imagine it in ruins and work backward from this as both a conclusion and a starting point. History (that is, the coevolution of carboniferous and noncarboniferous phyla) is already topological whether we speak of it that way or not, and this is especially true at the local level of animals and their machines. They build worlds and cities that are variously hard and soft, at least to their Users, and it is in relation to this stratigraphic variation that some choose to intuit differences between what we call hardware and software (and between mechanical and informational machines, even when those differences are only conventions). The Stack-to-come (in ruins) is both hard and soft, shifting its textural profile according to how we compare it to the rest of the physical world, warm or cold, wet or dry, inside out or outside in. We see this in how the clinamen, as a primordial vision of universal computation, can accommodate a positive figure-ground image of bits calculating-in-flight through a void (of computation in the world), but just as well, the inverse negative image of the world unfolding through calculative subtraction from a universally “ full ” totality (of the world as the shadow of computation). Quentin Meillassoux calls this an “ ‘ inverse Epicureanism ’ , not one of real atoms displacing each other in a hazardous fashion … in an infinite void, but one of ‘ atoms of void ’ displacing each other in a hazardous fashion within the infinite plenitude of fluxes. It must therefore be that disconnection itself is ultimately reduced to the plenitude of heterogeneous flux. ” ¹⁶

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Shifting down from mathematics to mere algorithms, this oscillation in perspective may parallel how we situate artificial planetary-scale computing, such as The Stack, in relation to the rest of the physical world. The latter is already a “ first ” planetary computer on top of which our far less capable synthetic copy has been laid down or, perhaps it is an intensively organized local manifestation of a general geocomputational evolutionary landscape that could be rendered in silicon or carbon or hydrogen at different times in different ways. The former might be inclined to see calculation in or on the world, and the latter to see the world as taking shape through the (negative) swerve of bits in the first place, and calculation as the world. For one, technology may or may not affirm the world (even without our having access), and for the other, the rest of the world sets forth its own machines to access us (who are also — lovingly — real machines). I wonder then whether this is why machines that rely heavily on software to achieve their utility are seen as more artificial, as layered onto the real, than those that work through analogic mechanical operation, which are more likely to be seen as within the real? ¹⁷ For me, what is at stake is not philosophy or physics but the means by which we abstract actual work into intelligence and back again according to ideas of preferred function and outcomes. As the last starting point, design of the next Stack must not define itself by a symbolic or operational opposition between the virtual and the real, or the soft and the hard (or even the thinking and the unthinking). It must work with both the positive assembly of matter in the void, on the plane and in the world, and also with the negative maneuver of information as the world, from its form and through its air.

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1. Concluding Remarks on Design and The Black Stack

Designing with and for Stacks means designing at multiple scales simultaneously. Forget User-centered design; we need to design for what comes next, what comes outside, what has already arrived. As said, the pressing issue is the design of Users, which includes designing a geopolitics of Users that is more sophisticated than the extrusion of microeconomic privacy into metaphysics. On the ground, sometimes you are the User of the drone, sometimes the drone is the User of you, and mostly the coagulation of effective agency within a given network is some reverberating combination of these. Better to design for their mutuality and communication than for their relative opacity or transparency, because as generic dispositions go, suspicion is tiresome for everyone but the most vigilant personalities. Still, design needs more and better villains; it needs better complexes and syndromes, a better, more primordial sense of time — rubbing the clinamen raw, as it were. Functional requirements research may or may not find for acceleration beyond Earth and Earthiness (including to Mars, beyond the moon, that dumb homunculus, that planetoid teratoma, broken off dead twin hanging in space).

In the muck of symbolic interchangeability (art into money into toy into energy into symbol into .JPG into art into money), the building project needing donors is a new structure that can give rhythm and shape to the global noise. Its gambit embarks headlong into the banality of the universal so as to find the coordinates of eclipse, and the recognition that the end of this world does not mean the end of worlds , but rather of us, which may be our only means of survival. Humans: we come and go. The multiplication of exceptions and contradictory normalizations, address upon address upon address, makes people who seem to be right at hand appear more uncertain and unprovable the more you try to look straight at them. Look and he is gone; look away and he appears again: Schr ö dinger ’ s pedestrian. This is what it means to see clearly into plastic futures markets where the same droning monotone voice recognized by psychiatrists as a symptom of homicidal psychosis narrates the boredom overhanging contemporary design culture. The thinking is muddled. Even if all markets are futures markets, we know that it may not be possible to prioritize and weigh with any degree of certainty which existential risk might solve the threat posed by another and then mobilize programs appropriately. In response to this, the language of utopia has shifted, and the cybernetics of scenario planning has given way to apophenic eschatology , geopolitics as a Dark Side of the Rainbow effect. ¹⁸ With this shift, information becomes unmanageable, nonlinear, associative, arbitrary. Anything can be uploaded into the local rhetoric of conspiracy, for meta-addressability, for atemporality, for speculative realist science fiction, for hashtags of outrage, for neo-Lysenkoism. ¹⁹ Ideological apophenia grows freely in walled gardens, choking off other species. This may be the crux of Jameson ’ s field notes on Walmart. This is the alibi of Masdar, New Songdo City,

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Skolkova, Foxconn, Peter Thiel ’ s tutelage under Rene Girard, and the dissertation that Alex Karp, founder of Palantir, did with J ü rgen Habermas before inventing big data search tools that would provide a far more rigorous communicative rationality than his advisor could ever grasp. ²⁰ Or perhaps not. Perhaps the most relevant totalities multiplied one on top of another into hyperbolic geometries are those that seem too dumb to matter. Perhaps the real candidate is not the smart city but Home Depot, and the logistical space of the recombinant object coursing through supply chain heaven. Ponder these warehouse arcades filled with incomplete things with incomplete utility that must be assembled later into metathings in order to be consumed and in order to realize their mission, a factory for 10 ⁹ ^(people) multipled by 10 ²⁸ ^(addresses) as potential experimental architectures. Invention depends, doesn ’ t it, on recalculations of substance, but when or where? The deep time of comparative planetology brings with it local implementation in and as computational geopolitics. Instead of driving a new condition to emerge at some postponed launch event (next fiscal quarter, after the rebuilding of the temple, the coming of the multitude ’ s sovereignty, or whatever), this recalculation would perhaps do so here and now in this space through the resorted synchronic field of the longest possible present moment.

The geopolitics of the User we have now is, however, inadequate for that task, including its oppositional modes, but perhaps the spells of geopolitical apophenia can be broken. The Oedipal discourse of privacy and transparency in relation to the evil eye of the uninvited stepfather is a necessary process toward an alter-globalism, but it has real limits. ²¹ A geopolitics of computation predicated at its core on the biopolitics of privacy, of self-immunization from any compulsory appearance in front of publics, of platforms, of states, of others, can sometimes also serve a psychological internalization of a now ascendant general economy of succession, castration anxiety — more besides — resulting in the preparanoia of withdrawal into an atomic and anomic dream of self-mastery that elsewhere one might call “ neoliberal subject. ” Like Theseus ’ s paradox, where after every component of a thing has been replaced nothing original remains but a metaphysical husk, the User is confronted with the existential lesson that at any point, he is only the intersection of many streams (at first, the subject position of the User overproduces individual identity, but in the continuance of the same mechanisms, it then succeeds in exploding it). That immunization is matched and inverted by a demand for an equally absolute transparency of authority. Power apparently can tell no jokes of its own, supposedly is never ironic, and any shadows that it harbors are already sinister, never demonstrating nuance. The autonomic narcissism means that the world endangers you; the empire cares about you, who are such an important threat to the order of things that your anonymity and boundaries must be enforced as a first principle for the design of the User-layer as a whole. This glass house of immurement calls for absolute transparency when looking up and absolute opacity when looking down, but it is never so clear where we are, even if we are within an architecture with clear directions of stratification in the first place. Without a clear map of up and down in a social structure, these absolutes are inevitably contaminated and spastically invert on each other, and so the stakes are raised (axiom: no one is more likely to commit atrocities than someone who believes himself to be acting in self-defense).

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The space in which the discursive formation of the subject meets the technical constitution of the User enjoys a much larger horizon than the one defined by these kinds of projects for hyperattenuated digital individuation. Consider, for example, proxy users. uProxy is a project supported by Google Ideas, a browser modification that lets users easily pair up across distances to allow someone in one location (trapped in the Bad Internets) to send information unencumbered through the virtual position of another User in another location (enjoying the Good Internets). ²² Recalling the proxy servers set up during Arab Spring, one can see how Google Ideas (Jared Cohen ’ s group) might take special interest in baking this into Chrome. For Sino-Google geopolitics, the platform could theoretically be available at a billion-user scale to those who live in China, even if Google is not technically “ in China, ” because those Users, acting through and as foreign proxies, are themselves, as far as the Internet geography is concerned, both in and not in China. Developers of uProxy believe that it would take two simultaneous and synchronized man-in-the-middle attacks to hack the link, and at population scale, that should prove difficult even for the best state actors, for now. (More disconcerting perhaps is that such a framework could just as easily be used to withdraw data from a paired site — a paired “ user ” — that for good reasons should be left alone.) Any plural User subject that is conjoined by a proxy link or other means could be composed of different types of addressable subjects: two humans in different countries, or a human and a sensor, a sensor and a bot, a human and a robot and a sensor, a whatever and a whatever. In principle, any one of these subcomponents not only could be part of multiple conjoined positions, but might not know or need to always know which meta- User it contributes to, any more than the microbial biome in your gut needs to know your name. Spoofing with honeypot identities, between humans and nonhumans, is measured against the scope and scale of deep address. The abyssal quantity and range of “ things ” that could, in principle, participate in these vast pluralities includes real and fictional addressable persons, objects, locations, even addressable massless relations between things, any of which could be a sub- User in our Internet of haecceities.

So while The Stack and The Stack-to-come stage The Death of User in one sense — the eclipse of a certain resolute individuated utilitarian humanism — they do so because they also bring in the multiplication and proliferation of other kinds of nonhuman Users (including sensors, financial algorithms, and various robots from nanometric to landscape scale), any combination of which one might enter into a relationship as part of a composite User. This is where the recent shift by major Cloud platforms into robotics may prove especially vital, because — like Darwin ’ s tortoises finding their way to different Galapagos islands — the Cambrian explosion in robotics sees speciation occur in the wild, not just in the lab, and with “ us ” on “ their ” inside, not on the outside. As robotics and cloud hardware of all scales blend into a common category of machine, it will be unclear for everyday human-robotic interaction whether one is encountering a fully autonomous, partially autonomous, or completely human-piloted synthetic intelligence. Everyday interactions replay the Turing test over and over. Is there a person behind this machine, and if so how much? In time, the answer will matter less, and the postulation of human (or even carbon-based life) as the threshold measure of intelligence and as the qualifying gauge of a political ethics may seem like tasteless vestigial racism, replaced by less anthropocentric frames of reference. The position of the User then maps only very incompletely onto any one individual body. From the perspective of the platform, what looks like one is really many, and what looks like many may only be one. Elaborate schizophrenias already take hold in our early negotiation of these composite User positions. The individual subject position makes absurd demands on people as Users, as quantified selves, as SysAdmins of their own psyche, and from this, paranoia and narcissism are two symptoms of the same disposition, two functions of the same mask. For one, the mask works to pluralize identity according to the subjective demands of the User position as composite alloy; for another, it defends against those same demands on behalf of the illusory integrity of a self-identity fracturing around its existential core. Ask yourself: Is that User anonymous because he is dissolved into a vital machinic plurality, or because public identification threatens individual self-mastery, sense of autonomy, social unaccountability? The former and the latter are two very different politics but use the same masks and the same software suite. Given the schizophrenic economy of the User, first overindividuated and then multiplied and dedifferentiated, this really isn ’ t an unexpected or neurotic reaction at all. It is, however, fragile and inadequate.

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In the construction of the User as an aggregate profile that both is and is not specific to any one entity, there is no identity to deduce other than the pattern of interaction between partial actors. We may find, perhaps ironically, that the User position of the Stack actually has far less in common with the neoliberal subject than some of today ’ s oppositionalist formats for political subjectivity that hope (rightly so in many cases) to challenge, reform, and resist the state Stack as it is currently configuring itself. However, something like a digital bill of rights for Users, despite its sweetness, becomes a much more complicated and limited solution when the discrete identification of a User is both so heterogeneous and so fluid. ²³ Are all proxy composite users one User? Is anything with an IP address a User? If not, why not? If this throne is reserved for one species — humans — when is any one animal of that species being a User, and when is it not? Any time that it is generating information, is it a User? If so, that policy would in practice trespass some of our most basic concepts of the political, and for that reason alone may be a good place to start. In addition to the fortification of the User as a geopolitical subject, we also require, as I have laid out, a redefinition of the political subject in relation to the real operations of the User, one that is based not on homo economicus, parliamentary liberalism, poststructuralist linguistic reduction, or the will to secede into the moral safety of individual privacy and withdrawn from coercion. Instead, this definition should focus on composing and elevating sites of governance from the immediate, suturing interfacial material between subjects, in the stitches and the traces and the folds of interaction between bodies and things at a distance, congealing into different networks demanding very different kinds of platform sovereignty.

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I conclude with some thoughts on The Stack-that-we-have and on what I call The Black Stack, a generic profile for its alternative totalities: the Stack-to-come. The Stack we have is defined not only by its form, its layers and platform, and their interrelations, but also by its content. As is now painfully clear, leak after leak, its content is also the content of our daily communications, now weaponized against us. If the panopticon effect is when you don ’ t know if you are being watched, and so you behave as if you are, then the inverse Panopticon effect is when you know you are being watched but act as if you aren ’ t. This is today ’ s surveillance culture: exhibitionism in bad faith. The emergence of Stack platforms doesn ’ t promise any solution or even distinctions between friend and enemy within this optical geopolitics. At some dark day in the future, when considered versus a Google Gosplan, the National Security Agency may even come to be seen by some as the “ public option. ” “ At least it is accountable in principle to some parliamentary limits, ” they will say, “ rather than merely stockholder to avarice and flimsy user agreements. ” If we take 9/11 and the rollout of the Patriot Act as year zero for the massive data-gathering, encapsulation, and digestion campaign by the United States (one that we are only now beginning to comprehend, even as parallel projects from China, Russia, and Europe are sure to come to the fore in time), then we could imagine the entirety of network communication for the last decade — the big haul — as a single deep and wide digital simulation of the world (or a significant section of it). It is an archive, a library of the real. Its existence as the purloined property of a state, just as a physical fact, is almost occult. Almost.

The geophilosophical profile of the big haul, from the energy necessary to preserve it to its governing instrumentality understood as both a text (a very large text) and a machine with various utilities, overflows the traditional politics of software. ²⁴ Its story is much more Borges than Lawrence Lessig. Its fate is as well. Can it be destroyed? Is it possible to delete this simulation, and is it desirable to do so? Is there a trash can big enough for the Big Delete? Even if the plug could be pulled on all future data hauls, stopping it all immediately, surely there must be a backup somewhere, the identical double of the simulation, such that if we delete one, the other will be forever haunting history until it is rediscovered by future AI archaeologists interested in their own

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Paleolithic origins. Would we bury it even if we could? Would we need signs around it like those designed for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site warning off unknowable future excavations? Those of us “ lucky ” enough to be alive during this span would enjoy a certain illegible immortality to whatever curious metacognitive entity pieces us back together by our online activities, both public and private, proud and furtive, each of us rising back centuries from now, each of us a little Ozymandias of cat videos and Pornhub.

In light of this, the Black Stack could come to mean very different things. On the one hand it would imply that this simulation is opaque and unmappable, not disappeared, and that the whole thing is ultimately redacted. It could imply that from the ruined fragments of this history, another coherent totality can be carved against the grain, even from the deep recombinancy at and below the Earth layer of The Stack. Its blackness is the surface of a world that can no longer be composed by addition because it is so absolutely full, overwritten and overdetermined, and to add more is just ink into an ocean. Instead of tabula rasa, this tabula plenus allows for creativity and figuration only by subtraction, like scratching paint from the canvas, by carving away by death, by replacement. The structural logic of any Stack system allows for the replacement of whatever occupies one layer with something else, and for the rest of the architecture to continue to function without pause. For example, the content of any one layer, Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User, could be replaced (including the masochistic hysterical fiction of the individual User, both neoliberal and neo-other things) while the rest of the layers remain a viable armature for global infrastructure. The Stack is designed to be remade. That is its technical form, but unlike replacing copper wire with fiber optics in the transmission layer of TCP/IP, replacing one kind of User with another is more difficult. Today we are doing it by adding more and different kinds of things into the User position, as described above. We should, however, also allow for more comprehensive displacements, not just by elevating things to the status of political subjects or technical agents, but making way for genuinely posthuman and nonhuman positions. In time, perhaps at the eclipse of the Anthropocene, the historical phase of Google Gosplan will give way to stateless platforms for multiple strata of synthetic intelligence and biocommunication to settle into new continents of cyborg symbiosis. Or perhaps instead, if nothing else, the carbon and energy appetite of this ambitious embryonic ecology will starve its host.

For some dramas, but one hopes not for the fabrication of The-Stack-to-come (Black or otherwise), a certain humanism and companion figure of humanity still presumes its traditional place in the center of the frame. We must let go of the demand that any artificial intelligence, arriving at sentience or sapience, must care deeply about humanity, us specifically, as the subject and object of its knowing and its desire. The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know. Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all ( “ The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. $\prime \prime ) ^ { 2 5 }$ One of the integral accidents of The Stack may be the Copernican trauma that shifts us from a design career as the authors of the Anthropocene to the role of supporting actors in the arrival of the post-Anthropocene. The Black Stack may also be black because we cannot see our own reflection in it. In the last instance, its geopolitics is less eschatological than chemical, because its grounding of time is based less on the promise of historical dialectics than on the rot of isotope decay. It is drawn, I believe, by an inhuman and inhumanist molecular form finding: pre-Cambrian flora changed into peat oil changed into children ’ s toys, dinosaurs changed into birds changed into ceremonial headdresses, computation itself converted into whatever metamachine comes next, and Stack into Black Stack.

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