Planetary-scale computation presents a fundamental challenge to Modern geopolitical architectures. As calculative reason and as global infrastructure, it not only deforms and distorts Westphalian political geography it creates new territories in its own image, ones that don’t necessarily replace the old but which are superimposed on them, each grinding against the other. These thickened and noisy jurisdictions are our new normal. They are the scaffolds through which our cultures evolve through them, and they represent our most difficult and important design challenge. Computation is changing n ... More

Planetary-scale computation presents a fundamental challenge to Modern geopolitical architectures. As calculative reason and as global infrastructure, it not only deforms and distorts Westphalian political geography it creates new territories in its own image, ones that don’t necessarily replace the old but which are superimposed on them, each grinding against the other. These thickened and noisy jurisdictions are our new normal. They are the scaffolds through which our cultures evolve through them, and they represent our most difficult and important design challenge. Computation is changing not only how governments govern, but what government even is in the first place: less governance of computation than computation as governance. Global cloud platforms take on roles that have traditionally been the domain of States, cities become hardware/software platforms organized by physical and virtual interfaces, and strange new political subjects (some not even human) gain unforeseen sovereignties as the users of those interfaces. To understand (and to design) these transformations, we need to see them as part of a whole, an accidental megastructure called The Stack. This book examines each layer of The Stack–Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User—as a dynamic technology that is re-structuring some part of our world at its particular scale and as part of the whole. The Stack is a platform, and so combines logics of both States and Markets, and produces forms of sovereignty that are unique to this technical and institutional form. Fortunately, stack platforms are made to be re-made. How the Stack-we-have becomes the Stack-to-come depends on how well we understand it as a totality, By seeing the whole we stand a better chance of designing a system we will want to inhabit. To formulate the “design brief” for that project, as this book does, requires a perspective that blends philosophical, geopolitical and technological understandings and methods.