Returning, with a Stack

Fri May 9 17:00:19 CDT 2014

Reads like the gibberish his most lovingly satirized characters
spout.... fur shurr.

All?

Anytime an author uses "all" I think, he's probably full of shit.

The author seems to know he's full of BS, so he uses that "perhaps"
and then the "vice versa".

So all closed systems are utopias? Maybe?

What nonsense. Pleeeeeez.

There are no utopias. The Utopias in books, from Plato to the Present,
are not closed systems, scientifically or politically.

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 7:13 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> "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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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l