Benjamin bratton the stack pdf

Software Studies Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, editors

Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 2009 Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, 2011 Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2011 Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression, Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, 2012 10 PRINT CHR$(205.S+RND(1));: GOTO 10, Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, 2012 The Imaginary App, Paul D. Miller and Svitlana Matviyenko, 2014 The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Benjamin H. Bratton, 2015

The Stack

On Software and Sovereignty

Benjamin H. Bratton

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

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40 The Nomos of the Cloud

cells and others with hierarchical patterns, but all afford some kind of social posture and position. Their proliferation doesn't only close off space into smaller units; it also produces new territories that are equally physical and abstract, heavy and virtual. In turn, this space is motivating a new land grab among state and nonstate actors alike; it is also forcing transformations in how geography is held, conceptualized, modeled, and defended. The order of those transformations occupies a similar location in our architectures of sovereignty as nomos, but because it involves grids of land, air, and sea all at once, dedifferentiating their relative weight and liquidities, the logics of this new arrangement are also perhaps very different.42 Because these transformations are both driven by planetary-scale computation and mediated through it, any strong distinc- tions between a political geography supported by technical systems and technological systems spread through agonistic geographic space are undermined.

The state takes on the armature of a machine, because the machine, The Stack, has already taken on the roles and register of the state. While the proliferation of lines has normalized a certain kind of reversibility, the early geopolitics of The Stack also sees the fortification of intentional camps and bunkers, with some populations excluded from movement and transaction and others stationed in networks of enclaves absorbing capital by centripetal force. To design up and away from this outcome does not mean a reestablishment of ground for an upright primate perspective of natural place or pre- maturely freezing in place The Stack's most preliminary new geographies as the only options. An emergent alternative to archaic and recidivist geopolitics must be based on something more scalable than settler colonialism, legacy genomes, and Bronze Age myths and the maps of nations that have resulted from these. 43 The discussion of the layers of The Stack, and the productive accidents of each, is an outline platform sover- eignty, a term that will appear explicitly in some parts of the following chapters but lurks underneath almost every paragraph in some way. But first, what exactly is a plat- form, and how do the layers of The Stack constitute one?

Platform and Stack, Model and Machine

The goal of future wars is already established: control over the network and the flows of informa- tion running through its architecture. It seems to me that the quest for global totalitarian power is not behind us but is a true promise of the future. If the network architecture culminates in one global building then there must be one power that controls it. The central political question of our time is the nature of this future power. -Boris Groys1

The essence of datagram is connectionless. That means you have no relationship established between sender and receiver. Things just go separately, one by one, like photons.

-Louis Pouzin2

9. Platforms

Platforms are what platforms do. They pull things together into temporary higher- order aggregations and, in principle, add value both to what is brought into the plat- form and to the platform itself. They can be a physical technical apparatus or an alphanumeric system; they can be software or hardware, or various combinations. As of now, there are some organizational and technical of platforms avail- able, but considering the ubiquity of platforms and their power in our lives, they are not nearly robust enough. Perhaps one reason for the lack of sufficient theories about them is that platforms are simultaneously organizational forms that are highly technical, and technical forms that provide extraordinary organizational complexity to emerge, and so as hybrids they are not well suited to conventional research pro- grams. As organizations, they can also take on a powerful institutional role, solidi- fying economies and cultures in their image over time. For The Stack, this is their most important characteristic but perhaps also the hardest to fully appreciate. Plat- forms possess an institutional logic that is not reducible to those of states or markets or machines, as we normally think of them. They are a different but possibly equally powerful and important form. Many different kinds of systems can be understood as