Returning, with a Stack

Fri May 9 06:13:27 CDT 2014

"All utopias are closed systems, and perhaps vice versa."

Well, if *that* isn't resonant for Pynchonians, I don't know what would
be...

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 5:53 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de
> wrote:

>
> 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/?listpynchon-l
>
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