The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

Chicago) to help fix the economy, they would recommend “ free market ” policies that resemble in some ways the libertarian economic ethos of some aspects of Silicon Valley culture, where cutting-edge information networks are now hatched.

1. The biological metaphor is important for a diverse range of social-theoretical perspectives. These range from Emile Durkheim ’ s cultural integration, to Fascist nationalist organicism, to Edward O. Wilson ’ s sociobiology, to Talcott Parsons ’ s structural-functionalism and Niklas Luhmann ’ s systems theory to Donna Haraway ’ s cyborg feminism and Giorgio Agamben ’ s biopolitics, and so on.

1. See T-Engine Forum, http://www.t-engine.org/; TRONweb, http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/ itron.html; “ Japan ’ s Homegrown Operating System TRON Competes for the Info-Appliance Market, ” Trends in Japan, May 22, 2003, http://web-japan.org/trends/science/sci030522.html.

1. Jan Krikke, “ The Most Popular Operating System in the World, ” Linux Insider, October 3,

2003, http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/31855.html.

1. “ Asking the Project Leader: Where’s TRON Headed in the Future? ” 1996, http://tronweb .super-nova.co.jp/sakamurainterview\_tw42.html. Images of TRON diagrams can be found most easily on Wikipedia, but are also on this book ’ s companion website, thestack.org. See http:// tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/tronlogo.html; http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON\_Project.

1. As discussed, the four-layer TCP/IP “ won, ” but for purposes of explication, the open systems interconnection (OSI) seven-layer model provides a more detailed profile. As indicated, the OSI model is a standardized subdivision of component zones and functions of information networks into logical discrete layers, each of which provides specific “ services ” to the layer just beneath in the stack and receives services from the layer just above it. In this, it is a classic tiered stack architecture, both as a functional distributed machine and its abstract model, and worth some detail. At the base of the OSI stack is the physical layer of copper wire, electronic switches, antennas, or other hardware. Above this in the OSI model is the data-link layer, which transmits information directly between two networked entities and corrects for errors at the physical layer level. The Ethernet port and cable on your computer are examples. The network layer addresses individual senders and receivers of messages. Your IP address is a network layer protocol, as is the border gateway protocol. One level above this, the transport layer polices byte traffic, flow, and reliability and delivers it safe to the right application process. For example, TCP (transmission control protocol) is used for HTTP. Above this, the session layer manages the opening and closing sessions between end user applications and keeping different data streams in proper sync. The presentation layer above is responsible for translating information between the application layer above it, the one you and I interact with most directly, and the session layer and other network layers below. The renderings of ASCII text or XML data into and from binary strings are examples. That application layer contains a multitude of protocols, interfaces, and application programming interfaces that allow end users, you and me, to query and access network resources as if they were part of our local system. “ Above ” these “ base ” seven layers are individual operating systems — applications like browsers, image editors, word processors, and so forth that, to the extent that each is pulling information from the network beneath it and pushing information toward it, are themselves interfaces with and into the strata of network depths, and as visual, imagistic interfaces, they are diagrams of what these networks do.

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1. Cerf is now chief scientist at Google and hard at work on, among other things, the embryonic “ interplanetary Internet, ” which seeks to account for the unique network design problems posed by slow lunar orbits, message delays due to interstellar lag in the speed of light, and so forth. As discussed in the Address chapter, the specification and implementation of IP version 6 addressing systems, with which he is also deeply involved, plays a crucial role in the material future of The Stack.

1. Andrew L. Russell, “ OSI: The Internet That Wasn ’ t, ” IEEE Spectrum, June 30, 2013, http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt.

1. The model platform Stack is not a perfect correlation with the “ real stacks ” that cohere the global Internet, nor is it meant to be. It is a heuristic, a diagram that is only as useful as what work it is asked to do. This leeway allows for considering how it could function in different ways. Unlike some models, such as OSI, which allow the passage of information only between adjacent layers, up and down or between sibling layers at the same level in adjacent stacks, the inexhaustibility of any layer suggests that The Stack might extend a conditional and exceptional promiscuity of direct communication between nonadjacent layers (e.g., Address directly to Cloud, User to Earth). It need not necessarily evolve into this kind of open totality, but potential contact between the technologies gathered in remote layers is a contingency continuously provoked by the persistent exception of the reversible border (usually most visible in the flip-flops of in and out at the Interface layer). We can speculate that the filtering, codifying, and governing of this eccentric splicing between layers of the platform not only implies very different design agenda but perhaps an as-yet-to-be-articulated geopolitics and geophilosophy as well.

1. This parallels in many ways Jussi Parrika, The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

Earth Layer

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time and energy, would be capable of calculating any “ computable ” problem. In that paper, “ On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs Problem, ” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Ser. 2 42 (1937), Turing demonstrates the range of problems that in fact are not computable. The figure of the Turing machine, as a philosophical and machinic hypothesis, stands for the technology of universal computation and for the ultimate limits of computation within mathematics.

1. Nicholas Gane and Stephen Sale, “ Interview with Friedrich Kittler and Mark Hansen, ” Theory, Culture, and Society 24 (2007): 323 – 329.

1. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 1 B.C., in Lucretius on the Nature of the Universe, ed. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin Books, 1951):

We wish thee also well aware of this:

The atoms, as their own weight bears them down

Plumb through the void, at scarce determined times,

In scarce determined places, from their course

Decline a little — call it, so to speak,

Mere changed trend. For were it not their wont

Thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one,

Like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void;

And then collisions ne’er could be nor blows

Among the primal elements; and thus

Nature would never have created aught …

… For whatsoever through the waters fall,

Or through thin air, must quicken their descent,

Each after its weight — on this account, because

Both bulk of water and the subtle air

By no means can retard each thing alike.

1. The implications continue to play out in contemporary debates from artificial intelligence to the philosophy of physics (e.g., if emergent calculative form is universal, then not only is “ human thought ” no longer a necessary referent model for artificial intelligence, but its own ideas about deterministic rationality do very little to guarantee the regime of computational processing, and the other way around). Computing machines do not differentiate “ rational ” instructions from irrational ones, and we needn ’ t even know what is going on within a computer that makes computation interesting. Computation takes place outside any direct reliance on necessary reason, or “ regimes of knowledge primarily associated with the laws of thought — [it] does things outside of it. ” See Robert Jackson, “ Negarastani, Computing and Knowledge, ” Algorithm and Contingency, December 2, 2012, http://robertjackson.info/index/2012/12/negarestani-computing -and-knowledge/.

1. Turing himself began to address the theoretical foundations of biological systems, with “ The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, ” published in 1952 in   Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 237 (641): 37 – 72.

1. Once again, I am not qualified to offer even an implied opinion on whether matter is fundamentally discrete or continuous, or related questions. For a general account on behalf of the strong digital physics position, see, for example, Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe: A Quantum

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Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos (New York: Vintage, 2006). Craig Hogan ’ s research into discrete matter is certainly of interest. A general reader can turn to Michael Moyer, “ Is Space Digital? ” S cientific American (February 2012), http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-space -digital/. Reza Negarastani approaches this rather differently and has offered both incisive critiques of computationalism (see his “ Abducting the Outside, ” http://blog.urbanomic.com/ cyclon/archives/2012/11/abducting\_the\_o.html), as well as impassioned defenses of a Turing centric version (see his “ The Revolution Is Back (Turing, Functional Realization and Computational Description), ” http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/Turing-Revolution.pdf).

1. Apparently there are something like 700 terabytes of potential storage in a gram of DNA. Be that as it may, the rush to collapse fragile metaphors between biological-machinic and computational-machinic processes is unnecessary. Sebastian Anthony, “ Harvard Cracks DNA Storage, Crams 700 Terabytes of Data into a Single Gram, ” ExtremeTech, August 17, 2012, http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes -of-data-into-a-single-gram.

1. The “ next machine ” after computation is a favorite motif of mathematician Giuseppe Longo. See, for example, Longo and Francis Baily, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life (London: Imperial College Press, 2011).

1. Again bioinformational systems (such as how bacteria encode messages) provide a rich source of speculation on the postsilicon future of artificial computation, but in the meantime, more prosaic (but still remarkable) engineering at the scale by which physical matter and information directly interface may prove more fruitful.

1. This tendency can also lead toward unlikely speculative convergences between advanced science and technology and singularity-inflected “ God in/of the gaps. ” See Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregerson, Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Peter Watts, Echopraxia (New York: Tor Books, 2015), tinkers with this inflection quite effectively.

1. Or consider instead Friedrich Kittler ’ s association of film, the gramophone, and the typewriter with three distinct modes of modern thought.

1. The ideological position is made in Alexander Galloway, “ The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism, ” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 347 – 366. Aesthetic suspicion of digital systems couched in political suspicion (perhaps also couched in professional anxiety) has also led to awkward schisms in art. See Clare Bishop, “ The Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media, ” Artforum (September 2012).

1. Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

1. See my editorial “ Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing Test, ” New York Times, February 23, 2015.

1. To me this is the purchase of the Promethean accelerationism of Reza Negarastani and Ray Brassier. See Brassier ’ s “ Prometheanism and Real Abstraction ” in Speculative Aesthetics, ed. Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, James Trafford (Urbanomic Press: Falmouth, 2014), and Negarastani ’ “ Labor of the Inhuman, Part 1: Human, ” e-flux journal #52, 02/2014, and “ The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II: The Inhuman, ” e-flux journal #53, 03/2014.

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1. See Matteo Pasquinelli, “ Machinic Capitalism and Network Surplus Value: Notes on the Political Economy of the Turing Machine, ” 2011, http://matteopasquinelli.com/docs/ Pasquinelli\_Machinic\_Capitalism.pdf.

1. With great care and skill, Jussi Parikka explores the deep materiality of our media technology hardware in A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

1. See USGS survey at http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/niobium/myb1 -2009-niobi.pdf and Philippa Velhinho, “ Corporate Coltan Rush Fuels Congolese Violence, ” Green Left Weekly, September 24, 2012, https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/52337.

1. See Conrad Taylor, “ The Curse of Congo ’ s Mineral Wealth, ” Conradiator, November 11, 2008, https://conradiator.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/the-curse-of-congos-mineral-wealth.

1. After KONY2012, the ill-fated social media campaign, we could define a “ Konyism ” as a selfcongratulatory Africa-themed social cause, invested in by well-meaning but naive Westerners, that ultimately has little effect other than wasting the concern of benefactors, or worse.

1. Chiara Frazzoli and Orish E. Orisakwe, “ Electronic Revolution and Electronic Wasteland: The West/Waste Africa Experience, ” Journal of Natural and Environmental Sciences, October 2, 2010, http://www.academyjournal.net/asj/index.php/NES/article/viewFile/27/ORISAKWE.

1. E. A. Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 17.

1. Andrew Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy (New York: Continuum Press, 2001), is a particularly interesting study of these various forms of the line. Deleuze and Guattari ’ s typology in the chapter “ On the Line ” is an essential definition. Gilles Deleuze and F é lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980).

1. Stuart Elden ’ s work on the history of the notion of territory is instructive here. See his The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

1. Remember that within the Western European philosophical tradition, Georges Bataille defined architecture as the “ physiognomy of power, ” an actual anatomy of the social, and Walter Benjamin referred to history as “ a state of siege, ” a capturing and binding behind the fortifying wall (Holier, 1990, Benjamin, 1986). Today it is almost axiomatic in contemporary architectural theory to cite the partition, the very verb and noun of cleaving space and of instantiating that gesture with a solid plane as perhaps the fundamental grammar of territory and enclosure (Andrew Benjamin on this). The central importance of “ partition ” is a scarce point of agreement on ontological matters between those associated with the deconstructive turn (Wigley, 1995) and the Deleuzian program that displaced it in architectural curricula. See Bernard Cache, Earth

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1. “ Google Earth is the end of the world. … All you have to do is press to zoom in, and you can almost see a car ’ s license plate. We need the bigness of the world, the rotundity and immensity of the globe. But we are exhausting that, just as we have exhausted its resources. We are exhausting its extent, and its temporal distance. ” Paul Virilio in Raymond Depardon and Paul Virilio, Native Land, Stop Eject (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2008).

1. Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in the Age of War (London: Verso,

2009).

1. Its terminological origins are not obscure. Geo from the Greek γαια ( “ Earth ” ) refers to our planet, and specifically to the land, the ground, the land as ground, and when paired with “ to describe, ” as geography, γεωγραφία (as for Eratosthenes, who first calculated the circumference of the Earth around 240 B.C.E.) to literally measure and give exact scale to the ground, and to spaces themselves, one smaller and larger than another. So for our virtual political geography, where the Earth is rerotated again from another center of a space in which it was located, there is an implicit correspondence between geography and cosmology, the scientific conception of the universe as well then to cosmograph, the “ writing-describing of the universe ” and to cosmogram, the “ writingimage of the universe. ” As a foundation for political science, a diagram of the universe with the Earth as the center throne is qualitatively different from one that locates it askew among billions of other illuminated dots. The two diagrams present unlike polities and would require different rationales to correlate world and image to their logics of governance, and we see the dynamics of that distinction played out in centuries-long culture wars. Any relationship between geography and cosmography is also then a relationship between Earth and universe as interrelated domains and of the boundary distinction between the two, as one contains, delineates, or corrugates the other. But that boundary between the geographic and the cosmographic is really less a final partition of jurisdictions than a reversible figure-ground interdependence. For an interesting selection of recent works and commentaries on cosmogrammatic images, see Melik O ’ Hanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux, Cosmograms (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2005).

1. Maurice Ronai ’ s semiotics of landscape, “ face of the fatherland, ” is discussed in Gilles Deleuze and F é lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980).

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1. See Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013).

1. I discuss this convoluted relationship between scenographic cosmopolitanism and Google Earth in my “ On Geoscapes and the Google Caliphate: Reflections on the Mumbai Attacks, ” Theory, Culture and Society 26 (2009): 329 – 342.

1. Consider, for example, Usman Haque ’ s Sky Ear: “ Sky Ear is a non-rigid carbon-fibre ‘ cloud, ’ embedded with one thousand glowing helium balloons and several dozen mobile phones. The balloons contain miniature sensor circuits that respond to electromagnetic fields, particularly those of mobile phones. When activated, the sensor circuits co-ordinate to cause ultra-bright colored LEDs to illuminate. The 30m cloud glows and flickers brightly as it floats across the sky. ” http://www.haque.co.uk/skyear.php.

1. Mark Dorrian, “ On Google Earth, ” in New Geographies, 4: Scales of the Earth, ed. El Hadi Jazairy and Melissa Vaughn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2011), 164 – 170.

1. The question of skin shows up in cultural theory in a variety of ways. In addition to the obvious connotations for theories of race and racism, see also Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Nicholas de Monchaux, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); and Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, vol. 1: Spheres (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).

1. Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

1. Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio and Simon Willis, “ Planetary Skin: A Global Platform for a New Era of Collaboration, ” Cisco internal white paper, March 2009 (no longer online). See now http:// www.planetaryskin.org/.

1. Some descriptive detail from the Planetary Skin website: “ It is supported by joint policy programs that extend the model of planetary instrumentalization to the political realm through open and collaborative, if also expert-piloted, forums. These include theconnectedrepublic.org, connectedcommons.org and connectedurbandevelopment.org, and it also extends to include tools for the integration of actors into common parliamentarian media, largely identical to those in development and deployment under the rubric of E-Government (digitalization of governmental processes) and Government 2.0 (employment of open social media channels and tools to support self-governance). ” The white paper continues, “ The Planetary Skin platform can be thought of as a globally pervasive ‘ nervous system, ’ assimilating disparate and siloed data sets held in public and private enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. It also analyzes data originating from airborne and terrestrial sensor networks located around the world ( SensorSpaces). These, in turn, are connected to a Web 2.0 mashup of decision-support tools ( DecisionSpaces). These tools facilitate proactive management of resources, risks, and new environmental markets, enabling innovation by private sector entrepreneurs, next-generation regulatory agencies, and social entrepreneurs ( CommonSpaces). ”

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1. See Pete Foster, “ Cloud Computing — a Green Opportunity or Climate Change Risk? ” Guardian, August 18, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/cloud-computing-climate -change.

1. On smart grids and data ownership, see Jon Bruner, “ Two Crucial Questions for the Smart Grid, ” O ’ Reilly Radar, November 5, 2012, http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/11/two-crucial-questions -for-the-smart-grid.html.

1. See Sally Daultrey, “ Adaptation on the Roof of the World, ” December 30, 2010, http://designgeopolitics.org/blog/2010/12/adapatation-on-the-roof-of-the-world/.

1. On the Chinese embassy air monitoring issue, see Steven Jiang and Alexis Lai, “ China: Haze Isn ’ t Foreign Embassies ’ Business, ” CNN, June 6, 2012. http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/06/world/ asia/china-foreign-embassy-pollution-monitor/index.html.

1. See “ Byzantine Perspective on Climate Justice, ” New Scientist, May 11, 2011, http:// www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028124.400-byzantine-perspective-on-climate-justice.html.

1. See David G. Victor, Global Warming Gridlock: Creating More Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

1. See David Basulto, “ Roadmap 2050: A Practical Guide to a Prosperous, Low-Carbon Europe, ” ArchDaily, April 13, 2010, http://www.archdaily.com/56229/roadmap-2050-a-practical-guide-to -a-prosperous-low-carbon-europe/.

1. See Paul Chapman, “ Entire Nation of Kiribati to Be Relocated over Rising Sea Level Threat, ” Telegraph, March 7, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/ kiribati/9127576/Entire-nation-of-Kiribati-to-be-relocated-over-rising-sea-level-threat.html. I had the pleasure of seeing Michael Gerrard present this work to an eager audience of architects at Columbia University ’ s XLab at an event I helped to organize with Geoff Manaugh and Ed Keller, Google/Arctic/Mars. At this event we examined how each of the three complicates normative sovereign geographies and how each might directly compare and inform the others. The event also hosted Gerrard of the Columbia University Climate Law Center, who represents the interests of drowning island nations as director of the Sabin Center for Climate Law. http://web.law.columbia.edu/climate-change.

1. Brian Massumi, “ National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers, ” Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 6 (November 2009): 153. He writes, “ Dampening accident-amplification is not enough. An alternate growth pattern must be planted on the proto-territory. Fullspectrum power preempts threat by counter-producing its own systemic effects in its stead, in a supplanting of incipience. Its business is to induce potentially systemic counter-effects through an alter-emergent incursion of a change-conditioning force of nature. Preemptive power is the cuckoo in the nest of naturing nature. ”

1. See my “ Undesigning the Emergency: Against Prophylactic Urban Membranes ” (lecture at O ’ Reilly ETech 2009, San Jose, CA, March 11, 2009). Williams ’ s point was that this is precisely why nanocomputing technologies are absolutely necessary to engineer that computer, not that comprehensive models are a waste of time.

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1. For example, Architecture for Humanity and its book, with perhaps the most self-satisfied title ever: Kate Stohr, Design like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises (New York: Metropolis Books, 2006).

1. I ’ m referring here to the work of Bruno Latour to rethink the logics of political inclusion and exclusion for a modern social theory. In particular, see his address, “ Toward a Compositionist Manifesto, ” http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/140. Tom Cohen, Theory in the Era of Climate Change (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), is an excellent appraisal of the complicity and failure of cultural theory to understand its situation within the historical arc of ecological deterioration and potential catastrophe.

1. A designer at SAP suggested to me that 22 percent of the world ’ s water is managed by its software on a daily basis. Warren B. Causey, “ Important Issues Water Utilities Face, ” February 2, 2011, http://www.sap.com/bin/sapcom/en\_us/downloadasset.2011-02-feb-01-08.important -issues-water-utilities-face-pdf.htm.

1. “ The state loves climate change because a schizophrenic nature is the ultimate terrorist and — as became apparent in New Orleans — militarized police will be needed. ” See Massumi, “ National Enterprise Emergency. ”

1. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 — 1979 (New York: Picador, 2010).

1. Freeman J. Dyson, “ Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation, ” Science, June 3,

1960, 1667 – 1668, doi:10.1126/science.131.3414.166.

1. Charles Stross, Accelerando (New York: Penguin Group, 2005). See also Robert J. Bradbury, “ Matrioshka Brains, ” working paper, 1999, http://www.gwern.net/docs/1999-bradbury -matrioshkabrains.pdf.

1. Nick Bostrom of the Oxford Institute for the Future of Humanity imagines that computational megastructures of this scale and capacity would even be capable of supporting full-scale simulations of entire worlds and if that is so, perhaps our reality is already being powered by such a machine. Bostrom, “ Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? ” Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003).

Cloud Layer

1. Alexandre Koj è ve, “ Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy, ” 1945, Paris, https://www .marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve2.htm.

1. Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1950).

1. Aristophanes, The Clouds, trans. William Arrowsmith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962).

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