the black stackthe black slap

8/13/2019 The Black StackThe Black Slap

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The Black Stack

Benjamin Bratton

My own interest on the geopolitics of planetary-scale computation - and morespecifically, on how it distorts and deforms traditional Westphalian modes of politicalgeography, jurisdiction and sovereignty, and produces new territories in its image -drawsfrom Carl Schmitts later work on The nomos of the Earth , and his (albeit) flawed history of thegeometries of geopolitical architectures. Nomos, refers to the dominant and essential logic forthe political subdivisions of the earth (of land, seas and/or air, and now the domain that theUSA military simply calls cyber) and for the geopolitical order that stabilizes these

subdivisions accordingly. Today as the nomos of the horizontal loop geometry of the Modern states creaks and

groans, and as Seeing like a State takes leave of its initial territorial nest, both with andagainst the demands of planetary-scale computation. We wrestle with the chaotic de-1

lamination of (practical) sovereignty from the occupation of place, and the irregularabstractions of information, time, and territory. For this, a nomos of the Cloud would drawjurisdiction not only by the horizontal sub-division of physical sites by and for States, butalso by the vertical stacking of interdependent layers on top: two geometries sometimes incahoots, sometimes completely diagonal and unrecognizable to one another. XX

Planetary-scale computation takes different forms at different scales : energyandmineral sourcing and grids; chthonic cloud infrastructure; urban software and publicsservice privatization; massive universal addressing systems; interfaces drawn by theaugmentation of the hand, of the eye, or dissolved into objects; users both overdeterminedby self-quantification and exploded by the arrival of legions of non-human users, sensors,cars, robots. Instead of seeing the various species of contemporary computationaltechnologies as so many different genres of machines, spinning out on their own, we shouldinstead see them instead as forming the body of an accidental megastructure. Perhaps thesealign, 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 doesnot exist as such: it is a machine that serves as a schema, as much as it is a schema ofmachines. As such, the image of a totality that this conception provides wouldas theoriesof totality have before make the composition of new governmentalities and newsovereignties both more legible and more effective.

The Stack, in short, is that new nomosof a vertically thickened political geography. There are


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six layers to this Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interfaceand User . Here, rather thandemonstrating each layer of The Stack as a whole, Ill focus specifically on the Cloud andthe User layers to articulate some possible futures, even recommended designs for theselayers and for the totality (or 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 time. TheBlack Stack is less the anarchist stack, or the death metal stack, or the utterly opaque stack,and more of a computational totality-to-come, defined at this moment by what is not; by theempty content fields of its framework, as well as by its dire inevitability. It is not theplatform we have but the platform that might be. A platform defined by the productivity ofaccidents, and by a strategy where what first appears to be the worst option, may ultimatelybe the place to look for the way out. Less a possible future" than an escape from thepresent.

Cloud The platforms of the Cloud layer suggest weird, dense, plural and non-contiguousgeographies, a hyrbrid of USA superjurisdiction and the Charter Cities which would carvenew partially privatized polities from the whole cloth of de-sovereigned lands. But perhapsthere is more there. The immediate geographical drama of the Cloud layer is seen perhaps most directlyin the ongoing Sino-Google conflicts of 2008-present : China hacking Google, Googlepulling out of China, NSA hacking China, NSA hacking Google, Google ghost-writingbooks for the State Department, and Google wordlessly circumventing the last instances of

state oversight altogether, not by transgressing them but by absorbing them into their serviceoffering. Chinese router firmware bides its time. The geographies at work are quite weird. For example, Google filed a series ofpatents on offshore data centers, to be built in international waters on towers using tidalcurrents and available water to keep their servers cool. The complexities of jurisdictionsuggested by a global Cloud piped in from non-State space are fantastic, but they are lessexceptional than exemplary of a new normal. Between the Peoples Liberation Army andGoogle, there is more than a stand-off between the proxies of two State apparatuses, rathera fundamental conflict over the geometry of political geography itself, one bound by the

territorial integrity of the State and the other by the gossamer threads of the worldsinformation demanding to be organized and made useful. This is a clash between twologics of governance, two geometries of territory. One a sub-division of the horizontal, theother a stacking of vertical layers; one a state, the other a para-State; one superimposed ontop of the other at any point on the map, never resolving into some consensualcosmopolitanism but continuing to grind against the grain of each others plane. Thischaracterizes the geopolitics of our moment. (that plus, generalized succession, but the two


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are interrelated).From here we see that contemporary Cloud platforms are displacing, if not also

replacing the traditional core function of States, turning into para-State platforms anddemonstrating new spatial and temporal models of politics and publics, for good and ill.

Archaic states drew authority from the regular provision of food. Over the course ofmodernization, more was added to the intricate bargains of Leviathan: energy, infrastructure,legal identity and standing, objective and comprehensive maps, credible currencies, and flag-brand loyalties. Bit by bit, each of these and more are now provided by Cloud platforms, notnecessarily as formal replacement for the State versions but like Google ID, simply moreuseful and effective for daily life. For these platfroms, the terms of participation are notmandatory and because of this their terms are more extractive. The Cloud Polis drawsrevenue from the cognitive capital of its Users, who trade attention and microeconomiccompliance in exchange for global infrastructural services, and in turn it provides each of

them with an active discrete online identity and the license to use its infrastructure. That said, its clear that we don't have anything like a proper geopolitical theory of

these transformations. Before, the full-ambition of the USA security apparatus was, as itseems today, more plain, it was thought by many that the Cloud was a place where Stateshad no ultimate competence or maybe even a role to play: too slow, too dumb, too easilyoutwitted by using the right browser. States would be cored out, component by component,until nothing was left but a well-armed health insurance scheme with its own world cupteam. In the long-run that may still be the outcome, with modern liberal states, taking theirplace next to ceremonial monarchs, stripped of all but symbolic authority, not necessarily re-

placed but displaced and misplaced to one side. But now we hear the opposite, equally brittleconclusion: that the Cloud is only the State, equals the State, its totality (figural, potential) isintrinsically totalitarian. Despite all, I wouldnt take that bet.

Looking toward The Black Stack, we observe that new forms of governmentalityarise through new capacities to tax flows (at ports, at gates, on property, on income, onattention, on clicks, on movement, on electrons, on carbon, etc.) It is not at all clear whether,in the long run, Cloud platforms will overwhelm State control on other flows, whether States

will continue to evolve into Cloud platforms absorbing the displaced functions back intothemselves, whether both will split or rotate diagonally to one another, or how deeply what

we may now recognize as the surveillance state (USA, China, etc.) will become a universalsolvent of compulsory transparency and/or a cosmically-opaque megastructure of absoluteparanoia, or both. Between the State, the Market and the Platform, which is better designedto tax the interfaces of everyday life? A false choice to be sure, but one that raises thequestion of where to even start to locate the site of governance as such. What would wemean by the public if not that which is constituted by those interfaces, and where elseshould governance meant as the most plastic and necessary sense of deliberate


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composition of durable systems and conditions, subjects and mediations, etc. live if notthere? Not in some obtuse chain of parliamentary representation, nor in some delusionalmonadic individual unit, nor in some sad little community consensus powered by moralhectoring, but instead in the immanent, immediate, exactly present interfaces that cleave and

bind us. Where should sovereignty reside if not in what binds us and cleaves us, not derivedfrom each of us individually but drawn by what is in-between us.

For this, its critical to underscore that Cloud platforms (including sometimes Stateapparatuses) are exactly that: platforms . It is important as well to underscore that platforms

are not only a technical architecture, but also an institutional form. At once, they centralize(like states) scaffolding the terms of participation according to rigid but universal protocols,just as they decentralize (like markets) coordinating economies not through thesuperimposition of fixed plans but through interoperable interaction. Next to States andMarkets, Platforms are a third form, coordinating through fixed terms, and scattering free-

range Users watched over in loving, if also disconcertingly omniscient grace. In theplatform-as-totality, drawing the interfaces of everyday life into one another, the maximalstate and the minimal state, Red Plenty and Google Gosplan, start to look weirdly similar.

As I see it, the work of political theory (and of Design and Geopolitics) is todevelop a proper history, typology and program for platforms. Not merely a short-hand forCloud Feudalism (nor for the network politics of the multitude) but for the organization ofdurable alter-totalities commanding the force of law, if not necessarily its form andformality. From this our own subjective enrollment is less as citizens of polis nor as homoeconomicus, but positioned as Users within the platform.

User

One of the useful paradoxes of the Users position as a political subject is thecontradictory impulse directed simultaneously towards her artificial over-individuation andher ultimate pluralization, with both participating differently in the geopolitics oftransparency. For example, the Quantified Self movement (in California more a medicaltheology) is haunted by this contradiction. At first, the intensity and granularity of a new

information mirror image convinces the User of his individuated coherency and stability as asubject. He is flattered by the singular beauty of his reflection, and this is why QSelf is sopopular with those enamored by an X-Men reading of Atlas Shrugged. But as more data isadded to the diagram that quantifies his interactions with the outside world, and to theoutsides impact on his personthe health of the microbial biome in his gut, immediate andlong term environmental conditions, his various epidemiological contexts, and so onthequality of everything that is not him comes to overcode and overwhelm any notion of


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himself as a withdrawn and self-contained agent. Like Theseus Paradox, where after everycomponent of a thing has been replaced nothing original remains but a metaphysical husk,the User is confronted with the existential lesson that at any point he is only the intersectionof many streams. At first, the subject position of the User over-produces individual identity,

but in the continuance of the same mechanisms, it then succeeds in exploding it. The geopolitics of the User we have now is inadequate, including its oppositional

modes. The Oedipal discourse of privacy and transparency in relation to the evil eye of theuninvited step-father is a necessary process toward an alter-globalism , but it has real limits

worth spelling out. A geopolitics of computation predicated at its core upon on thebiopolitics of privacy , of self-immunization from any compulsory appearance in front ofpublics, of platforms, of States, of Others, can sometimes also serve a psychologicalinternalization of a now ascendant general economy of succession, castration anxiety--

whateverresulting in the pre-paranoia of withdrawal into an atomic and anomic dream of

self-mastery that elsewhere we call the neo-liberal subject. The space where there discursive formation of the subject meets well as the

technical constitution of the User as a singular or plural agent, or both, occupies a muchlarger horizon than one defined by these kinds of individuation. Consider, for example,proxy users. uProxy is a project supported by Google Ideas, a browser modification that letsusers easily pair across distances to allow someone in one location (trapped in the BadInternets), to send information unencumbered through the position of another User inanother location (enjoying the Good Internets). Recalling the proxy servers set up during

Arab Spring, one can see how Google Ideas (Jared Cohens group) might take special interest

in baking this into Chrome. For Sino-Google geopolitics, the platform could theoretically beavailable at a billion user scale to those who live in China, even if Google is not technicallyin China, because those Users, acting through and as foreign proxies, are themselves, as faras the Internet geography is concerned, both in and not in China. Developers of uProxybelieve that it would take two simultaneous and synchronized man-in-the-middle attacks tohack the link, and at population scale that should prove difficult even for the best State-actors, for now. (Metadata, as we know, is perhaps another matter.) More disconcertingperhaps is that such a framework could just as easily be used to withdraw data from a pairedsite (a paired user) that for excellent reasons should be left alone.

Now, in theory some plural User subject, conjoined by a proxy link or other means,could be composed of two humans in different countries, or a human and a sensor, a sensorand a bot, a human and a robot and a sensor, a whatever and a whatever. In principle anyone of these sub-components not only could be part of multiple conjoined / positions, butmight not know or need to always know which meta-User they contribute to, any more thanthe microbial biome in your gut needs to know your name. Spoofing with honeypotidentities, between humans and non-humans, is projected against the theoretical address


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space of IPv6, or some other massive universal addressing scheme. The quantity and rangeof things that could, in principle, participate in these pluralities includes real and fictionaladdressable persons, objects, locations, even addressable mass-less relations between things,any of which could be a sub-User in this Internet of Haeccities.

So while The Stack (and the Black Stack) stage The Death of User in one sensetheeclipse of a certain resolute Humanism- they do so because they also bring themultiplication and proliferation of other kinds of non-human Users: sensors, financialalgorithms, robots from nanometric to landscape scale, and all of which one of us mightenter into some relationship with as one part of a composite User. This is where the recentshift by major Cloud platforms into robotics may prove especially vital, as like Darwinstortoises finding their way to different Galapagos islands the Cambrian explosion inrobotics sees speciation occur in the wild, not just in the lab, and with us on their inside not

on their outsides. As robotics and Cloud hardware of all scales blend into the same categoryof things, it will be unclear in Human-Robotic Interaction whether one is encountering afully autonomous, partially autonomous or completely human-piloted synthetic intelligence.Everyday interactions replay the Turing Test over and over: is there a person behind this, andif so how much? In time, the answer will matter less, and the postulation of human (or evencarbon-based life) as the threshold measure of intelligence and as the qualifying gauge of apolitical ethics, may seem like tasteless vestigial racism, replaced by less anthropocentricframes of reference.

The position of the User then maps only very incompletely onto any one individual body.From the perspective of the platform, what looks like one is really many and what looks likemany may only be one. Elaborate schizophrenias already take hold in our early negotiationof these composite User positions. The neo-liberal subject position makes absurd demandson people, as Users, as Quantified Selves, as SysAdmins of their own psyche, and from this,paranoia and narcissism are two symptoms of the same disposition, two functions of thesame mask. For one function, the mask works to pluralize identity according to thesubjective demands of the User position as composite alloy; and for another it defends

against those demands on behalf of the illusory integrity of a self-identity fracturing aroundits existential core. Is that User Anonymous because he is dissolved into the multitude, orbecause public identification threatens individual self-mastery, sense of autonomy, socialunaccountability, etc.? The former and the latter are two very different politics at workmaking use of the same masks, same software suite, but given the schizophrenic economy ofthe User, first over-individuated and then multiplied and de-differentiated, this really isnt anunexpected or neurotic reaction at all. It is however fragile and inadequate.


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If we take 9/11 and the roll-out of the Patriot Act as Year Zero for the USAsmassive data gathering, encapsulation and digestion campaign, (one that we are only nowbeginning to comprehend, even as parallel projects from China, Russia and yes, Europe aresure to come to light in time) then we could imagine the real entirety of network

communication for the last decade the Big Haul as a single deep and wide digitalsimulation of the world (or a significant section of it). It is an archive, a library of the real.

And its existence as the purloined property of a State, just as a physical fact, is almost occult. Almost.

Its geophilosophical profile, from the energy necessary to preserve it to its governinginstrumentality understood both as a text (a very large text) and as a machine with variousutilities, overflows the traditional politics of software. Its story is much more Borges thanLawrence Lessig. Its fate is as well. Can it be destroyed? Is it possible to delete thissimulation; is it desirable to do so? Is there a trashcan big enough for the Big Delete? Even

if the plug could be pulled on all future data hauls, surely there must be a back-up as well,the identical double of the simulation, such that if we delete one, the other will be foreverhaunting history until it is rediscovered by future AI archaeologists interested in their ownpaleolithic origins. Would we bury it, even if we could? Would we need signs around it likethose designed for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site warning off unknowablefuture excavations? Those of us lucky enough to be alive during this 15 year span wouldenjoy a certain illegible immortality, curious to whatever meta-cognitive entity pieces us backtogether by our online activities, both public and private, proud and furtive, each of us risingback centuries from now, each of us a little Ozymandius of cat videos and Pornhub.

In light of this, the Black Stack could come to mean very different things. On theone hand it would imply that this simulation is opaque and unmappable, not disappeared butthat the whole thing is ultimately redacted . It could imply that from the ruined fragments ofthis history another coherent totality can be carved against the grain, even from the deeprecombinancy at and below the Earth layer. Its blackness is the surface of a world that canno longer be composed by addition because it is so absolutely full, overwritten andoverdetermined, that to add more is just so much ink onto the ocean. Instead of tabula rasa this tabula plenus,allows for creativity and figuration only by subtraction, like scratching paintfrom the canvas, by carving away, by death, by replacement.

The structural logic of The Stack allows for the replacement of whatever occupiesone layer with something else, and for the rest of the architecture to continue to function

without pause. For example, the content of any one layer, Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface,User , could be replaced including the masochistic hysterical fiction of the individual User,neo-liberal and neo-otherthings, while the rest of the layers remain as a viable armature forglobal infrastructure. The Stack is designed to be remade. That is its technical form, butunlike replacing copper wire with fiber optics in the transmission layer of TCP/IP, replacing


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one kind of User with another is more difficult. Today we are doing it by adding more andmore different kinds of things into the User position, as described above. We shouldhowever, allow also for more comprehensive displacements, not just by elevating things tothe status of political subjects or technical agents, but making way for genuinely posthuman

and ahuman positions.In time, perhaps at the eclipse of the Anthropocene, the historical phase of Google

Gosplan will give way to State-less platforms for multiple strata of synthetic intelligenceand biocommunication to settle into new continents of cyborg symbiosis. Or perhapsinstead, if nothing else, the carbon and energy appetite of this embryonic ecology will starveits host.

For some dramas, but hopefully not for the fabrication of The Stack-to-come, Blackor otherwise, a certain humanism and humanity still presumes its place in the center of theframe. The demand always made is that the sentient AI must care deeply about humanity, us

specifically , as the subject and object of its knowing and its desire. The nightmare, worse thanthat the big machine wants to kill you, is that it sees you as irrelevant or not even as adiscrete thing to know about at all. Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen atall. (As Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it, the AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but youare made out of atoms which it can use for something else.) 2

One of the integral accidents of The Stack may an anthrocidal trauma that shifts usfrom a design career as the authors of the Anthropocene to the role of supporting actors inthe arrival of the Post-Anthropocene. The Black Stack may also be black because we cannotsee our own reflection in it. Its Accelerationist Geopolitics is, I believe, drawn by this

inhuman and inhumanist molecular cosmopolitanism: pre-cambrian flora changed into peatoil changed into childrens toys, dinosaurs changed into birds changed into ceremonial head-dresses, computation itself inverted into whatever meta-machine comes next, Stack intoBlack Stack.

The reference is to James Scotts Seeing Like a State (citation) but the term seems to1

have expanded and migrated beyond his anti-governmental thesis, see also Latourslecture to the Queen of Netherlands, Being like a State (citation) for example. Here I

mean to tie one thread to Scotts connotation (how States see everything available to theirschemes) and to a more Foucauldian sense of the actual optical technologies that conjureforms of governance in their own image. Today those privileges are also enjoyed by thehardware/software platforms which manufacture such optics and leverage them as the

basis of their own exo-State governmental innovations.

Citation from somewhere, I will find. Global Catastrophic Risk, I think.2

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