The Stack (again) by Benjamin Bratton

“The Stack discussed in the following chapters is a vast software/hardware formation, a proto-megastructure built of crisscrossed oceans, layered concrete and fiber optics, urban metal and fleshy fingers, abstract identities and the fortified skins of oversubscribed national sovereignty. it is a machine literally circumscribing the planet, which not only pierces and distorts Westphalian models of state territory but also produces new spaces in its own image: clouds, networks, zones, social graphs, ecologies, megacities, formal and informal violence, weird theologies all superimposed one on the other. This aggregate machine becomes a systematic technology according to the properties and limitations of that very spatial order. The layers of The Stack, some continental in scale and others microscopic, work in specific relation to the layer above and below it. As I have suggested, the fragile complementarity between the layers composing The Stack is discussed both as an idealized model for how platforms may be designed and as a description of some of the ways that they already work now. The metaphor and the machine are diagrams made real in the megastructure.”
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”the smooth skin of the device demands gore to feed its gloss…”
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”the blur is a high-resolution image of what is actually happening, which itself is blurry. To design with the blur instead of against it requires comfort with ambiguity.”
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”we are not lacking utopian visions; we are instead drowning in their surplus.”

-Benjamin Bratton