Week 14

Benjamin Bratton in his book proposes a model which is geographically designed according to the current circumstances of global computation. He defines the stack as ‘a portrait of the system we have but perhaps do not recognize, and an antecedent of a future territory’. He uses this as a concept to understand present geopolitics.

The stack is the highly differentiated global computing structure. it generates its own accidents and it generates its own forms of sovereignty because that is the machine which functions like a state.

Our usual understanding of geopolitics has to change because we've got this infrastructure in place and it is an accidental infrastructure. Nobody prepared for it;  it was unpredictable, undetermined, and unprecedented . Its taking on a certain shape and form and there is governance, it's an infrastructure in which the state form is struggling against alternative forms of sovereignty. An example of such an accidental structures is "Baidu". China banned Google which led to the formation of an alternate search engine called Baidu, a parallel structure added to the mega structure of the stack.

Usually when we think about the internet we think about it as this free and open space which is uncontrolled but for governance we think about actual governments. The idea that is emerging over here is that the stack is a non-anthropocenic infrastructure which is governable and that there is this battle underway to determine how it's going to be governed. This battle in some places is being fought between nation states but in other places like between the vectoralist class and the hacker class. Benjamin Bratton is writing this book because he's talking about the stack to come. He talks about how the planetary computing infrastructure that has been developed which is in place, it's an accidental infrastructure but in any case its usually influential and it has to be dismantled and replaced by another structure- a structure in which we've got more possibilities of cosmopolitan forms of governance and justice as well as awareness of the planet and its limits. The current infrastructure that is in place is following a trajectory of growth and development that is very corrosive for what we regard as the natural world and the environment.