Taking as his starting point “the emergence of computation as global infrastructure” (14), in The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Benjamin H. Bratton sees an opportunity to reconsider state formation and sovereignty as it was constituted in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, a common origin moment where political historians situate the emergence of the nation-state out of the conflicts among European proto-colonial global powers.  Rather than the cartographic imaginary of the Westphalian system, Bratton posits a vertical model, based on the platform as a technology and a concept, of layers which he identifies as The Stack and ties to sedimentary patterns found variously in geology, architectural futurism, utopian political formation whether socialist or neo-liberal capitalist, and urban planning.  Central to his formulation of The Stack as “less the machine of the state than the machine as state” (373), “an engine for thinking and building” (64), are the six layers he offers as model (in descending order, User, Interface, Address, City, Cloud, Earth [Fig. 3.1]) which both function “semiautonomously” (67) and in “a vertical-sectional relationship” (ibid).  Spanning “computational substrates” like silica (Earth) and “server archipelagos” (Cloud), the meganetworks of City and layers that hail and interpellate the top layer of User (ie Address and Interface), Bratton’s Stack acknowledges that “computation as core infrastructure is still embryonic” (371) and yet argues that it is already present and can serve as a glimpse into geopolitical planetary futures that can be or are already being designed.

1. The Stack as stack. How essential is it that the Stack be conceived of as an (actual) (literal) stack?

2. User/Citizen/Subject position. What do you think of Bratton’s formulation of the User in his six-part structure? How is the User constituted and what pressures does this “User-subject” put on your own concepts of the human and humanism in Digital Humanities?

3. Infrastructure and the accidental.  Bratton often refers to the Stack as “an accidental megastructure.” How does this notion of the accidental in the production of infrastructure, particularly on a “planetary-scale,” affect our understandings or discussions of infrastructure from this semester?

Bonus question:

4.  New vocabularies: the rhetorical argument.  “Today we lack adequate vocabularies to properly engage the operations of planetary-scale computation, and we make use of those at hand regardless of how poorly they serve us.” Part of Bratton’s project seems to be to provide a new vocabulary for the phenomenon of computation as governance: how helpful do you find the particulars of his glossary?  What terms seem to allow a new understanding, theorization, or ability to “map. . . interpret . . . and redesign” what he identifies as “this computational and geopolitical condition”?  Do you find his particular rhetorical tropes—eg: chiasmus: —useful as analytic tools? (See for example, p. 57: “As a platform to be read and interpreted, The Stack clearly sits on both sides of this coupling of culture and technology.  It relies on software as both a kind of language and a kind of technology, of algorithms of expression and the expressions of algorithms, . . . .”)