Returning, with a Stack

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Wow, thank you! Had never heard of the guy but was already looking if 
there's someone taking Schmitt's Nomos of the Earth to our digital days:

Benjamin Bratton


  "The Black Stack

Planetary-scale computation takes different forms at different scales: 
energy grids and mineral sourcing; chthonic cloud infrastructure; urban 
software and public service privatization; massive universal addressing 
systems; interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand, of the eye, 
or dissolved into objects; users both overdetermined by 
self-quantification and exploded by the arrival of legions of nonhuman 
users (sensors, cars, robots). Instead of seeing the various species of 
contemporary computational technologies as so many different genres of 
machines, spinning out on their own, we should instead see them as 
forming the body of an accidental megastructure. Perhaps these parts 
align, layer by layer, into something not unlike a vast (if also 
incomplete), pervasive (if also irregular) software and hardware 
/Stack/. This model is of a Stack that both does and does not exist as 
such: it is a machine that serves as a schema, as much as it is a schema 
of machines.^1 <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-black-stack/#_ftn1> As 
such, perhaps the image of a totality that this conception provides 
would—as theories of totality have before—make the composition of new 
governmentalities and new sovereignties both more legible and more 
effective.


__The façade of Inntel Hotel Amsterdam-Zaandam, Holland, is designed by 
WAM architects.

My interest in the geopolitics of planetary-scale computation focuses 
less on issues of personal privacy and state surveillance than on how it 
distorts and deforms traditional Westphalian modes of political 
geography, jurisdiction, and sovereignty, and produces new territories 
in its image. It draws from (and against) Carl Schmitt’s later work on 
/The Nomos of the Earth/, and from his (albeit) flawed history of the 
geometries of geopolitical architectures.^2 
<http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-black-stack/#_ftn2> “Nomos” refers to 
the dominant and essential logic to the political subdivisions of the 
earth (of land, seas, and/or air, and now also of the domain that the US 
military simply calls “cyber”) and to the geopolitical order that 
stabilizes these subdivisions accordingly. Today, as the /nomos/ that 
was defined by the horizontal loop geometry of the modern state system 
creaks and groans, and as “Seeing like a State” takes leave of that 
initial territorial nest—both with and against the demands of 
planetary-scale computation^3 
<http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-black-stack/#_ftn3> —we wrestle with 
the irregular abstractions of information, time, and territory, and the 
chaotic de-lamination of (practical) sovereignty from the occupation of 
place. For this, a /nomos/ of the Cloud would, for example, draw 
jurisdiction not only according to the horizontal subdivision of 
physical sites by and for states, but also according to the vertical 
stacking of interdependent layers on top of one another: two geometries 
sometimes in cahoots, sometimes completely diagonal and unrecognizable 
to one another.^4 <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-black-stack/#_ftn4>

The Stack, in short, is that new /nomos /rendered now as vertically 
thickened political geography.//In my analysis, there are six layers to 
this Stack: /Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, /and/User/. Rather 
than demonstrating each layer of the Stack as a whole, I’ll focus 
specifically on the Cloud and the User layers, and articulate some 
alternative designs for these layers and for the totality (or even 
better, for the next totality, the /nomos/ to come). /The Black Stack,/ 
then, is to the Stack what the shadow of the future is to the form of 
the present. The Black Stack is less the anarchist stack, or the 
death-metal stack, or the utterly opaque stack, than the computational 
totality-to-come, defined at this moment by what it is not, by the empty 
content fields of its framework, and by its dire inevitability. It is 
not the platform we have, but the platform that might be. 
That platform would be defined by the productivity of its accidents, and 
by the strategy for which whatever may appear at first as the worst 
option (even evil) may ultimately be where to look for the best way 
out. It is less a “possible future” than an escape from the present."

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-black-stack/

And here's an interesting interview passage:

"... The key point is this: Facebook, Apple, and Google all represent, 
embody, and are enacting different geopolitical futures. The 
architecture of their brands and their software platforms are not only 
representative of geopolitical interests; they are geopolitics. The more 
difficult question for these very global technologies is less how they 
extend U.S. foreign policy than how they constitute three different and 
incomplete options for what comes next, both as actual privately held 
companies and, as Eco pointed out years before in “The Holy War: Mac Vs. 
DOS,” different political-theological programs.

Metahaven: To what extent do these brands/standards assert U.S. power or 
extend cultural and political influence abroad?

Benjamin Bratton: Allow me to speculate a bit improvisationally on what 
each of them might mean as an imminent geopolitical form in its own 
right. It goes without saying that they should be challenged by a range 
of other standards that are more open and more available to multiple 
cultural interests.
Facebook, it seems to me, explicitly and emphatically does not wish to 
foster open information infrastructures, and may prove in time to be 
critically hostile to the very idea. As for user freedom and the larger 
picture of digital civil society, the default mind-set of Facebook’s 
core leadership is not so totally unlike that of the Chinese central 
government in certain respects. Both are interested in enforcing control 
and profit over the domain they exercise as a monopoly, and each looks 
at the other—state versus internet—as an ambiguous but indispensable 
variable in its own schemes. Facebook (perhaps like China itself) is 
underestimated, at the moment at least, as a technology-infrastructure 
player. It understands the cloud in ways that Apple can’t, and it has 
its pick of whatever scraps will be left of Microsoft (Office, Skype, 
Azure, etc.). Facebook’s goal is a private internet. Not Facebook 
online, but Facebook as the line. Here, too, China’s total policy is 
broadly analogous.

Apple has taken the mantle from Disney in its expertise over 
closed-system experience design and operates, by comparison to Facebook 
or China, much more with carrot than stick. Apple bases its 
market-sector dominance in enforcing a total-design seamlessness into 
which individual consumers can effectively invest their most utopian 
desires. All utopias are closed systems, and perhaps vice versa. In a 
future of nation-size gated communities, that utopian desire (yes, in 
Fredric Jameson’s sense) may lead Apple well out of consumer electronics 
as we conventionally understand it, and into the wider envelopes of 
everyday life. Peter Sloterdijk’s landscape of “spheres” is Apple’s 
long-term horizon and program.
Google believes itself to have a much more cosmopolitan and 
reason-driven mission. This week, it bid against Apple and Microsoft for 
a series of patents from Nortel, with sums representing sometimes 
obscure mathematical strings. For example, they bid $3.14159 billion, or 
Pi multiplied by a billion, for the bundle. They had bid numbers that 
were Brun’s constant and the Meissel-Mertens constant, which relate to 
prime numbers. This I take as an emphatic symbolic statement by Google 
that ultimately the immutable, ecumenical, and universal laws of 
mathematics, which are by their nature uninterested in the human folly 
of political hierarchies, will win out over the hysterical mere 
“numbers” of the financial market. There are asymmetric echoes of Badiou 
in this, though he would choke on the suggestion. Google recently dumped 
PowerMeter but still has its license to sell energy; and I think, in the 
longer term, Google Energy will be a key player in the retail and 
wholesaling of renewables and the management of both consumer and 
municipality-facing smart grids. It sees the pairing of bits and 
electrons as part of its vocation in ways that other companies cannot: 
Google Space. Google AI. Google Caliphate.

Twitter is too new and too one-dimensional to compare the others’ more 
grandiose geopolitical potentials. It may be better compared to a 
critical insect species in a larger ecology, moving memes from place to 
place, like bees pollen from flowers. It never builds more than simple 
clusters on its own, but without it, other more complex architectures 
would decay. It’s hard to say. For some time I’ve argued (directly to 
Twitter, in fact) that it mustn’t overlook the nonhuman user base, and 
that its potential as a universal platform for the internet of things 
may prove an equally important function as human-human threads. Twitter 
could be very important in the deeply addressable space of the “IPv6 
universe.” Who knows? It’s purely speculation on my part. However, right 
now I see Twitter operating more in terms of epidemiology than 
geopolitics, though obviously one involves the other."

http://www.bratton.info/projects/texts/interview-by-metahaven/

That Bratton connects Sloterdijk's spherology to Apple and Badiou's take 
on math to Google seems rather plausible to me.


On 09.05.2014 10:25, matthew cissell wrote:
> Hi everybody. I'm back, had some Yahoo trouble. So I've gone Gmail. 
> I've been listless without the list fix for too long.
>
> Instead of commenting on Heidegger or assuring Lemuel that it's 
> perfectly fine to be less than enthused by Zizek, I would like to 
> throw out a mention of someone who has some to my attention: Benjamin 
> Bratton.
>
> I heard of him some months ago (in a TED talk that critiques TED 
> talks) and I think some of you may find his work interesting; there 
> are several of his lectures on the net. His forthcoming book is called 
> the "The Stack: Of Software and of Sovereignty".
>
> Ciao
> MC Otis

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l