The Black Stack
The nomos of the horizontal loop geometry of the Modern states creaks and groans. ‘Seeing like a State’ takes leave of its initial territorial nest, both with and against the demands of planetary-scale computation, and so 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 draw jurisdiction not only by the horizontal sub-division of physical sites –by and for States–, but also by the vertical stacking of interdependent layers on top: two geometries sometimes in cahoots, sometimes completely diagonal and unrecognizable to one another. This, today, is The Stack. The Black Stack is to this what the shadow of the future is to the form of the present time. It is less the anarchist stack or the death metal stack or the utterly opaque stack than a computational totality-to-come which is defined at this moment by what is is not, by the empty content fields of its framework, as well as by its dire inevitability. It is not the platform we have but the platform that might be, defined by the productivity of accidents and by the strategy that what first appears to be most bad may ultimately be where to look for the way out; less a “possible future” than an escape from the present.
Benjamin H. Bratton is a theorist whose work spans Philosophy, Art and Design. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts and faculty coordinator of the MFA program; and Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. Starting in Summer 2014, he is also Professor at The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His research is situated at the intersections of contemporary social and political theory, computational media & infrastructure, architectural & urban design problems, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies. Current work focuses on the political geography of cloud computing, highly-granular universal addressing systems, and the His next book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is forthcoming.