The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

The specific vocabulary of The Stack is an important part of the complete picture. Certain terms have a distinct connotation that may require additional clarification. In some cases, if a term is also defined in the text itself, the definition here may be paraphrased.

Accidental Megastructure It was not the plan for The Stack to become the geopolitical armature that it is. The Stack itself is an accidental megastructure. Considered as one massively distributed machine, it envelops the planet, over land, under water, and in orbit. Unlike other megastructures, it is not the result of one coordinated master plan (though some of its key components were). Instead, the technologies of its layers cohere into an emergent order that is largely the result of unintended, unplanned, unpredicted, and unmanaged technical and social interactions at different scales and as part of different histories. See also The Stack.

Address Layer The fourth layer from the base in the Stack model, between the City and the Interface layers. Like a house connected to a postal system, any device that is connected to the Internet is assigned a discreet address (usually temporarily) to which information is sent and from which it is received. Assigned an address, any “ thing ” (a device, a person, a physical event, a piece of data, or some other abstraction) is, in principle, present and available for communication to any other addressee. Addressing systems are finite and so can incorporate only as many senders and receivers as their architecture allows for. Address provides identity, exchange, and recursion. See also Deep Address.

Alegal Something not recognizable as legal or illegal by the law but which contravenes the present governing order in some fundamental way. In particular, an alegal action may represent something that strongly characterizes an emergent governing order, and so may be against the logic of current governance but exemplary of the logic that may soon replace it. An example is file sharing. Originally it was neither legal or illegal because the law could not recognize it. It then became illegal in relation to current regimes in intellectual property law, but it also may be exemplary of an emergent governing logics of sharing, property, distribution, and asset commonwealths.

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Algorithmic Governance A reflexive cycle of intentions, sensation, filtering, and decision-making that can govern the social, economic and computational cycles to which it refers and is referred by. Reporting agents in such a system both send and receive information to a higherorder governing abstraction: a measured swarm in relation to how algorithmic governance feeds back to them, resensing their reactions, and so on. Users observe that cycle through Interfaces, which in turn govern User actions by delineating and filtering their options.

Ambient Interface The term has both descriptive and prescriptive connotations. It is the field of both the physical and virtual interfaces that surround a User at any given moment; or put differently, it is the user ’ s world defined as a field of interfaces (an interface being defined as any point of contact between two complex systems that governs the conditions of exchange between those systems). The prescriptive connotation refers to designing in accordance with haptic, gestural, or semiotic User interfaces that prioritize interaction between things existing at very different physical and qualitative scales at once, suggesting unusual chains of remote agency and causality.

App A small software application running on a given piece of hardware that provides a highly specific, temporary, and limited functional Interface, thereby converting the general tool into a particular machine. The App manages information in several possible ways. It may store gathered information, including sensors and direct User input, for immediate or later use; it may draw new information down from more powerful applications in the Cloud to the device interface; and it may coordinate local and Cloud-based information streams into a consolidated image. Importantly, an App platform allows for software-driven hardware modularity.

Assemblage Line The space of Logistics shifts from the spatially contiguous assembly line to the more discontiguous assemblage line linked internally through specific interfacial chains. This delinking makes the arrival of material goods (and the processes of the world of production, in general) more opaque. Interfaces draw these chains as coherent wholes, gathering multiple events and effects into a common visual frame. This conceptual gathering refers instead to how a massively discontiguous assemblage line, bound together by exceedingly complex interfacial relays linking continents, must be understood and represented as if it were a single pattern or machine. For The Stack, such apparently comprehensive interfacial images of assemblage lines, which themselves comprise interfacial relays, are, for the User, a necessary tool to manage otherwise illegibly complex chains of interaction. See also Interface Layer.

The Black Stack The generic term for The Stack-to-Come that we cannot observe, map, name, or recognize. It may describe The Stack that remains, thriving or dead, after Homo sapiens is no longer the dominant geological actor. It is a name for the “ not-blank slate ” of whatever composition The Stack will turn into. It is a composition that we know is coming, know that we will have a hand in fashioning, but don ’ t know how to recognize in advance (or cannot possibly recognize in advance because we cannot possibly ever witness it for whatever reason.) Some ante-verberations of “ this-totality-to-come ” are surely already here and now.

Camp/Enclave The camp and the bunker, detention and enclave, are inversions of the same architecture. One is an architecture of internalization and the other of externalization, but they share the same material profile. What may be an interiorizing partition ( “ enclave ” ) for one User at one moment may be an exteriorizing partition ( “ camp ” ) for another at another moment. Giorgio

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Agamben, after Carl Schmitt, identified the camp as “ the nomos of the Modern ” and sovereignty in relation to the decision to initiate the camp as a site of exception. What we may choose to identify as the nomos of the Cloud shifts that decision to the interface that causes the same architecture to oscillate between interiorization and exteriorization, camp and enclave. Here the exception is the inversion itself, and the normalization of that exception through the automation of that oscillation (by software) is one key aspect of platform sovereignty for The Stack.

Capitalist Pricing Problem Market models can confuse the emergent effects of transaction liquidity with systems planning and do so at the expense of artificially segregating and suppressing the real costs of near- and long-term “ externalities. ” This is contrasted with the socialist pricing problem for which centralized systems can be too slow to sense and calculate individual price signals. An addressing mechanism capable of identifying the true “ costs ” of a given transaction, many of which are now diverted into various externality sinks, could provide a price for that transaction that reflects an accurate signal.

City Layer The third layer from the bottom of The Stack. It includes networks of megacities situating human settlement and mobility within a single distributed urbanism that combines physical, informational, and ecological infrastructures. These present a politics of the envelope in which architectural and informational partitions both organize and subdivide access to social space. It is suggested that the generic and comprehensive quality of this condition may also afford novel forms of platform sovereignties, derived not from parliamentary universals but from a common and differential relationship to urban envelopes and interfaces.

Cloud Layer The second from the bottom of The Stack. It includes the computing and transmission hardware on which Stack software depends, such as data centers, transmission cables, geosynchronous satellites, and wireless network technologies, and so on. It also includes Cloud platforms, such as Google and Amazon, which provide services to their federated Users through the applications they directly manage or those they support. Formal differences in service models also drive strategic differences in how Cloud platforms may structure Cloud polities. These differences in turn affect geopolitical conflicts ensuing from the juxtaposition or superimposition of national geography and those Cloud services (e.g., the Google-China conflict), from the evolution of states into Cloud platforms and complicating effective claims of final sovereignty.

Cloud Feudalism One possible, but by no means inevitable, outcome of the consolidation of Cloud platforms into Cloud polities is Cloud feudalism, characterized by overly centralized capture, consolidation, and distribution of value by those platforms. In this scenario, Cloud polities realize effective if also informal sovereignty over how they use Users, such that the ratio of platform surplus value to platform user value is highly asymmetrical and dramatically weighted in favor of the former at the expense of the latter. Unlike in medieval feudalism, where serfs were tied to specific sites and plots, for Cloud feudalism, Users are untethered from specific locations and migrate from one provisional labor interaction to another. Cloud feudalism may arise in relation to automation, but automation may also lead to entirely different macroeconomic outcomes.

Cloud Polis The model provided and enacted by global Cloud platforms to cohere Users into proto-state entities. These entities may operate at the scale of a true state and may come into political geographic conflict with states accordingly. Cloud Polis is characterized by hybrid geographies, incomplete governmental apparatuses, awkward jurisdictions, new regimes of interfaciality, archaic imagined communities, group allegiances, ad hoc patriotisms, and inviolable brand loyalties: soupy mixtures both futuristic and atavistic at once. We can observe different formal models of Cloud Polis in the service architectures of contemporary Cloud platforms, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, and can deduce possible Cloud Polis by the recombination of these architectures.

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Column User connects to User by initiating a message that tunnels down through the other layers to the bottom and then back up again, and so direct communication between Users activates all six layers down The Stack and then all six layers again back up The Stack. Any one path taken down and up The Stack in a U-shaped trajectory is a column . The whole of the system is invoked and activated by all connections; the whole is folded into each single instance of activation, bending the universal and the particular into one another. Any one User will initiate vast numbers of different columns at different moments over time, thereby executing different combinations of nested positions. Any given column tracks up and down; there is no final instance of vertical or horizontal integration that would truly and ultimately resolve a User down to the Earth layer or Cloud layer for good.

“ Death of the User ” Refers to at least three separate breaks. (1) The decentering or eclipse of a utilitarian-cognitivist User commonly construed from conventional user-centered design by an evolving population of nonhuman Users with very different kinds of embodied and disembodied experiences and interactions. (2) The displacement of the soft humanism from the conceptual center of the design for the User-subject position and toward a design of the User-subject position. (3) A rhetorical function of information visualization whereby convincing diagrammatic mastery of the represented data suggests that there must be an expert User somewhere who makes use of these impressive interfaces, a figure who is in most cases only an empty or absent implication.

Deep Address While scenarios for ubiquitous computing and an Internet of Things suggest information exchange between smart natural objects, what I refer to as “ deep address ” is interested in communication between very different spatial and temporal scales, absorbing any addressees into a vast, if also fragile, communicative field that may exceed the limits of human control or literacy. Deep address is also a mechanism for the capture of what exists and a formalization of its space of juxtaposition, and so it is also a medium for the creative composition of those relations, positions, and interrelations. An Internet of haecceities refers to addressable specificities that might name particularities as they come and go, even also before and after they are recognizable for individual Users. These enumerated specificities may be things with mass or relations between things without mass, and accordingly the scope of any addressing platform might be functionally limitless compared to the number of anthropometric objects it might address, or highly limited by the ultimately abyssal scope of possibly addressable relations-of-relations-of-relations between addresses.

Earth Layer The first layer, at the bottom of The Stack. It is the point by which the planetary perch of the Earth itself is subsumed into the geographic frame of The Stack. It is the substrate from which the power necessary to operate all other layers is drawn and from where the metals and minerals that comprise platform electronics are extracted. The layer is also where the recursive contradictions of projects on behalf of computational omniscience are played out most dramatically, including by ecological surveillance metainstruments and energy optimization grids that may or may not actually represent the critical inefficiencies that they were designed to mitigate. It is where the horizontal subdivision of land by normative Westphalian state sovereignty is broken down by emergency challenges to the governance of a synthetic ecology with local causes and effects but translocal scope.

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Exit/Entrance The capacity of a User to leave the obligations of one platform (including a state perhaps) and to enter into the preferable terms, confines, contexts, or protections of another platform. For purposes of platform sovereignty, it refers less to the formal “ rights ” of Users to do so, which may be stipulated contractually but made insignificant by other mechanisms that filter exit and entrance opportunities for particular Users. This dynamic relates directly to that of the camp/enclave as its Interfaces oscillate between interiorization and exteriorization. Platform sovereignty over this oscillation, and thereby also over the practical ability of a given User to exit or enter a platform, may reside in the Interface itself, as programmed by the platform or with the User who engages the interface on their own behalf.

Geodesign The larger, ongoing, collaborate megaproject to reconfigure our ecological, geoeconomic, and geopolitical condition through an active redesign of The Stack itself. It begins from the architectural modularity of stack platforms, from the challenge of realizing a vibrant ecology and luxurious society, and from the recognition that the ultimate career of computation as core infrastructure is still embryonic. It may include the redrawing of geopolitical maps, including or excluding Westphalian forms according to different perspectives. It would include what is commonly understood as geoengineering but would not limit the project to exclusively technical problems and solutions or to Holocene natural systems as the substance to work on. It may work with the signal figure of the post-Anthropocene, pushing toward it and against it in various measure. Like The Black Stack, geodesign may stand for what cannot be said or seen at this time, but which is also inevitable.

Geography The writing or drawing of or on the Earth in order to frame its specific features, scope, face, or landscape. It is both a kind of writing of space and of expressing, communicating, politicizing, and defending compositional images of terrain as a precondition of the social and technical construction of political domains to be defended. For there to be any kind of abstract jurisdiction — secular, sacred, national, networked — there has to be a figure of space through which force can work at all. Carl Schmitt ’ s concept of the nomos is one establishment of this. Geography more broadly frames the referent over which any governing, compositional, projective frame seeks authority, not just those of modern states. Geographic inscription may range from early geoglyphs to modern agriculture to transoceanic transmission cables.

Geopolitics For The Stack, the term has at least two connotations. First, it references the more conventional history of political thought on a stable relationship between great state powers. Carl Schmitt ’ s term Grossraum, “ the Large Space, ” of a regional, supernational domain of sovereign control, like the Monroe Doctrine, is perhaps exemplary. For some, this suggests an ideal multipolar arrangement for global political entities and empires, and so as new claims on global space are made, for example, by the Cloud, the geopolitical question is how to locate them within the genealogy of modern geopolitics. Like geography, the second sense is related to Gilles Deleuze and Fe ́lix Guattari ’ s notion of geophilosophy, which suggests that thought is always tied to its planetary situation. Geopolitics then names the ways in which a society attempts to assemble itself, thinks its own terms, its own ethics, its own models of operation, its own logics of value, in relation to how it is situated on its planetary perch. This second connotation may modulate the first, and perhaps help us to understand new realities as within a longer arc of geopolitics, geography, geology, geoscopy, and so on.

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Geoscapes Maps on top of maps create the map of maps. Geoscapes are defined as a territory of territories, each competing over the right to describe the reality of location, distance, borders, and juxtaposition of the whole of territory itself. It composes and is composed of multiple contradictory mapping gestures and held in overlapping and finally incommensurate arrangements. Geoscapes are held in agonistic tension by overlapping descriptions of territories as they exist, as well as idealized territories, futuristic or atavistic, as they should be. In such utopias, idealizations continue to operate through geographic imagery, just as geographic imagery — in its fidelity, affect, comprehensiveness — continues to imply an idealized (and sometimes utopian) image of the world as it is. The ultimate quality of geoscapes is made only by the accumulation of territories that fill it by their drawings; it has no shape or presence other than by this accumulation.

Google Gosplan/ Grossraum Refers in general to the convergence of planned and market economies into computational platforms that share ideal and practical characteristics, and specifically to the genealogy of Google as inclusive of socialist and communist state attempts to use computing systems, primitive by today ’ s standards, to model and coordinate their economies, sometimes with success and sometimes with disastrous effect. The term also implies that the future evolu tion of Cloud platforms that absorb traditional functions of states (such as Google, to a degree) may realize forms of effective economic governance that are recognizable as both minimal state and maximal state at once. It strongly suggests that there is no intrinsic relationship between infrastructural scale computation and neoliberal economies as they are conventionally understood. Many socialist computing platforms were criticized as suffering insufficient information to regulate price properly, but platforms like Google may suggest that information scarcity may no longer be as strong a limitation, and in principle it implies that such platforms could also calculate the true costs of transaction externalities.

Interface Layer The fifth layer from bottom of The Stack, just below the User layer. Interfaces are the membrane through which The Stack addresses and is addressed by Users. Interfaces, as compressed into graphical or objective forms, link (or delink) Users and the Addressed entities up and down columns. The speed by which the embedded interface circulates information and physical goods contributes to the real and perceived discontiguity of chains of production and distribution of material culture for the User. The dominant contemporary genre of Interface, the graphical user interface, is an interactive visual diagram that presents a visually coherent image of otherwise discontiguous and opaque processes and flows. Some emerging technologies, such as augmented reality, superimpose interfacial elements directly into the User ’ s perceptual field, with the capability of articulating the significance of people, places, and things according to the program of different imagined communities. This collapse of the metaphorical space between perceived object and its interpretation, especially when paired with messianic political theologies, can engender forms of cognitive fundamentalism.

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Interfacial Regime/Interfacial Totalities Particular platforms support multiple touchpoints coordinating interactions across their service offering, and in doing so, they provide a coherent and complete array of interfaces at multiple scales. The coordination of this array is recognized as a key aspect of user experience design, and ultimately, that experience becomes more coherent as it becomes more complete. That coherence defines one interfacial regime in relation to another. Unlike other geographic projections, the interface is not only a visual representation of an aspirational totality; it is an image of a totality that when acted on also instrumentally affects the world. By using one regime exclusively, the User collaborates in that regime ’ s larger program. Interfacial regimes are thereby also totality machines , both describing linkages and making projective claims over them. Two alternate interfacial totalities may compete to describe the same site, User or process, and the mingling of overlapping totalities brings some degree of noise and ambiguity. Any given site in the City layer may be overcome by multiple competing perceptual totalities, systems, and sovereign geographies.

Loop Topology Geographically the modern nation-state is based on a cartographic projection of the Earth as a horizontal plane filled with allotments of land in which individual sovereign domains are circumscribed by lines derived from a now-normative topology of loops. The national boundary and its governable choke-points express and defend the model in relation to other Cloud Polis based on other geographic models, such as the transcontinental data network or the premodern regional or worldwide religious body.

Machine as State The Stack is less a new medium of governance than it is a form of governance in and of itself, less the machine of the state than the machine as the state. Its agglomeration of computing machines into platform systems not only reflects, manages, and enforces forms of sovereignty; it also generates them in the first place. States and nonstate platforms compete directly not only over the generation of Stack geographies but also for dominion over those spaces once they are mapped.

Nomos Nomos refers to the primary act of territorial inscription that gives rise to its subsequent formalization and structural logic in accordance; it is a making of a territorial order through the execution of a territorial claim and physical occupation that precedes it. It is essential for any political geographic architecture to identify the individual sites, fields, instances, and actors within its jurisdictional field, such that any of these would be communicable as part of a regular and governable flow of information through those spaces. The terms of the nomos are also the shape of that space as configured by the flows that fill it up. Nomos is described as prior to every legal, economic, and social order. It is constituted by appropriation, distribution, and production, and only through this can it move from the particular to the universal: from arbitrary territorial capture, to representations of spatial delineation, to a geopolitical order.

Nomos of the Cloud As the geography of the Cloud rotates from a two-dimensional map to a vertical, sectional stack, its topography is shaped by the multiplication and superimposition of layers of sovereign claims over the same site, person, and event. The micro-enclaves that it spawns are variously exclusive or inexclusive, a pixelated patchwork of discontiguous partial interiors. No workable distinction between ground and water, between Cloud infrastructure and Cloud interactivity as mapped across some spectrum from tangible to virtual, has yet to congeal into a stable order in the way that Schmitt characterized the modern European nomos. The spacefulness of The Stack ’ s networks, and their ongoing occupation, settlement, and doctrinal composition, overlays incommensurate physical and geographic forms without a common master plane, and accordingly no nomos of the Cloud may (need to) emerge.

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Platform All stacks are platforms, but not all platforms are stacks. Ultimately platforms can be seen as not only a technical model but also an institutional form along with states and markets. Platforms are generative mechanisms, engines that set the terms of participation according to fixed protocols (e.g., technical, discursive, formal protocols) but gain size and strength by mediating unplanned and perhaps even unplannable interactions. A platform may be defined as a standards-based technical-economic system that may simultaneously distribute interfaces into that system through their remote coordination and centralizes their integrated control through that same coordination. Platform logic refers first to the abstracted systems logic of platforms and the tendency on the part of some systems and social processes to transform themselves according to the needs of the platforms that may serve and support them, both in advance of their participation with that platform and as a result of that participation. For a more complete list of general characteristics of platforms see section 10.

Platform Sovereignty Refers to the still immature combination of legally articulated political subjectivities and an infrastructurally determined sovereignty produced in relation to the platform infrastructures, regardless of whether these are privately or publicly owned. Platform sovereignty operates within territories that are composed of intersecting lines, some physical and some virtual, and for this, deciding exceptions is no less critical. The exceptions to be decided, however, are over what geographies those lines describe and what conditions they inscribe. These forms of sovereignty may be produced by an automated normalized exception, programmed at the level of the Interface, and may coincide with formal legal norms, may transgress them, or may operate outside their supervision altogether. Exit/entrance dynamics are a key site of contestation wher different degrees of platform sovereignty cohere or filter Users in their image.

Platform Surplus Value Platforms often provide core service at no direct transaction cost to the User. Platform economics is based on absorbing value from the provision of each transaction that is ultimately greater than the cost of providing it. Platform surplus value is this differential. For example, the ultimate value for Google that Users provide in training its algorithms to anticipate future User interactions has proved much greater than Google ’ s net costs to provide its search algorithms to Users for free.

Stacks Generally stacks are platforms, but not all platforms are stacks. Stacks, like most other platforms, are generic, plastic, and extensible. They may provide for modular recombinancy of system components, but only within the bounded set of its synthetic planes. Its generative capabilities grow through an initial subdivision of technologies into planar layers and then through an autocratic consolidation and rationalization of these through internal interfaces and protocols. Key to the success of this modular model is its flexibility in absorbing future technological innovations that can be introduced at any given layer (e.g., fiber optics instead of copper wire at the physical layer, a faster router, an application with better features and security) without disrupting the existing components (so long as the new technology adheres to the protocols established by the platform model that allow it to communicate with its vertically adjacent layers, above and below; in principle, any machine could be inserted in a layer of the network if it can adhere to the necessary grammar that would allow to communicate with its most proximate neighbors). For computation, there are many different kinds of stacks with very different functions (e.g., application stacks, data structure stacks, protocol stacks). It is likely that every contemporary academic discipline relies on some form stack model as part of its ontology, epistemology, or methodology.

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The Stack Refers to a transformation in the technical infrastructure of global systems, whereby planetary-scale computation has so thoroughly and fundamentally transformed the logics of political geography in its own image that it has produced new geographies and new territories that can enforce themselves. Unlike modern political geography, which divided up horizontal maps, Stack geography also vertically layers spaces on top of one another. Instead of surveying all the various forms of planetary-scaled computation — cloud computing, smart cities, ubiquitous computing, massive addressing systems, next-generation interfaces, nonhuman users, and so on — as different genres or species of computing, each off on its own, this model locates them on layers of a consolidated metaplatform, an accidental megastructure. We observe these bottomup from the Earth layer up to the User layer. Energy drawn from planetary resources at the Earth layer drives Cloud computation, and its global platforms organize new political topologies. The City layer is animated by those Cloud platforms from within, organizing things, events, and relations at the Address layer into Interfacial regimes that provide a window into the whole system for Users. Together these sectional layers comprise the larger apparatus: The Stack. The Stack is equally a descriptive system and a design model that may point us in a different direction from its current configuration. The Stack is a model for thinking about the technical arrangement of planetary computation as a coherent totality, as well as a conceptual model for thinking the contradictory and complex spaces that have been produced in its image. It is both a schema that refers to a technical system, and a technical system that demands different kinds of interpretive schema from us. It is a work of partially accidental geodesign that demands from us further, better deliberative geodesign.

Synthetic Catallaxy Popularized by Austrian school economics, catallaxy refers to the shared values, knowledge, information, and communication of those participating in a market economy. Friedrich Hayek employed the term to describe what he saw as an essential failure of planned economies, namely, that central planners could never know or process the real information exchange within an economy in such a way as to properly set prices or govern transactions. Contemporary Cloud platforms radically complicate any strong distinction between planned and market economies, with many setting prices, planning infrastructure, and modeling demand in real time, as well as making these same tools available to Users as they plan and transact. They represent in this way a kind of synthetic catallaxy.

User Layer The top layer of The Stack and the sixth from the bottom, just above the Interface layer. This layer situates how Users (e.g., human, animal, machine) view The Stack and that initiate chains of interaction (columns) up and down its layers, from Interface to Earth and back again. It is also the position at which The Stack views those Users. As such the “ user ” has represented a contemporary technical image of the self, sometimes reduced to utilitarian frames and also sometimes allowing for unexpected new kinds of platform sovereignty. This includes both the exaggerated depiction of self that the User position may provide, as well as its equally radically fractured or dissolved reflection in multiple layers of data. The User-subject is a position that can be occupied by anything (or pluralities, multitudes, and composites) capable of initiating a column, especially anything that can do so and respond to how The Stack communicates back to it. This generic universality of the User-subject is both how it can flatten or curtail the human experience of remote interactions and how it introduces otherwise unrepresented agents into mediated contact with the whole.

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