Stack: On Software And Sovereignty

In The Stack, Benjamin H Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/stack

Drew Austin's notes on Stacks & Megastructures

• The Stack, Benjamin Bratton's masterful and wildly ambitious effort to describe a comprehensive model of the world that the internet has wrought. The Stack comprises six layers that Bratton explains in detail: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User

• Bratton introduces the "accidental MegaStructure" as a description of the Stack itself, "one massively distributed machine" that envelops the planet.

• he extends this characterization to the urbanized world: The Earth is wrapped in a single continuous city more than it's dotted by individual, separate cities, as it once was.

• Bratton observes that platforms like Facebook and Google are best understood as massive megastructural Utopias that house their own territory and make that territory conform to their own rules.

• Megastructures invert everything we think we know about Urbanism. They anchor a society with no commons, one in which we each just need to pick a megastructure (an institution, a platform, or an actual building) to be safe inside of, while everyone locked out fends for themselves in the chaotic wilderness. (Virtual State?)