Benjamin Bratton The Black Stack

8/17/2019 Benjamin Bratton The Black Stack

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Benjamin Bratton

The Black Stack

Planetary-scale computation takes differentforms at different scales: energy grids andmineral sourcing; chthonic cloud infrastructure;urban software and public service privatization;massive universal addressing systems;interfaces drawn by the augmentation of thehand, of the eye, or dissolved into objects; usersboth overdetermined by self-quantification andexploded by the arrival of legions of nonhuman

users (sensors, cars, robots). Instead of seeingthe various species of contemporarycomputational technologies as so many differentgenres of machines, spinning out on their own,we should instead see them as forming the bodyof an accidental megastructure. Perhaps theseparts align, layer by layer, into something notunlike a vast (if also incomplete), pervasive (ifalso irregular) software and hardware Stack. Thismodel is of a Stack that both does and does notexist as such: it is a machine that serves as aschema, as much as it is a schema of machines.1

As such, perhaps the image of a totality that thisconception provides would – as theories oftotality have before – make the composition ofnew governmentalities and new sovereigntiesboth more legible and more effective. My interest in the geopolitics of planetary-scale computation focuses less on issues ofpersonal privacy and state surveillance than onhow it distorts and deforms traditionalWestphalian modes of political geography,

jurisdiction, and sovereignty, and produces newterritories in its image. It draws from (andagainst) Carl Schmitt’s later work on The Nomosof the Earth, and from his (albeit) flawed historyof the geometries of geopolitical architectures.2

“Nomos” refers to the dominant and essentiallogic to the political subdivisions of the earth (ofland, seas, and/or air, and now also of thedomain that the US military simply calls “cyber”)and to the geopolitical order that stabilizes thesesubdivisions accordingly. Today, as the nomosthat was defined by the horizontal loop geometryof the modern state system creaks and groans,and as “Seeing like a State” takes leave of thatinitial territorial nest – both with and against the

demands of planetary-scale computation3 – wewrestle with the irregular abstractions ofinformation, time, and territory, and the chaoticde-lamination of (practical) sovereignty from theoccupation of place. For this, a nomos of theCloud would, for example, draw jurisdiction notonly according to the horizontal subdivision ofphysical sites by and for states, but alsoaccording to the vertical stacking ofinterdependent layers on top of one another: twogeometries sometimes in cahoots, sometimescompletely diagonal and unrecognizable to one

another.4

The Stack, in short, is that new nomos

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a r c h 2 0 1 4 B e n j a m i n B r a t t o n

T h e B l a c k S t a c k

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The façade of Inntel HotelAmsterdam-Zaandam, Holland,

is designed by WAM architects.

rendered now as vertically thickened politicalgeography. In my analysis, there are six layers tothis Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface,and User . Rather than demonstrating each layerof the Stack as a whole, I’ll focus specifically onthe Cloud and the User layers, and articulatesome alternative designs for these layers and forthe totality (or even 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 theform of the present. The Black Stack is less theanarchist stack, or the death-metal stack, or theutterly opaque stack, than the computationaltotality-to-come, defined at this moment bywhat it is not, by the empty content fields of itsframework, and by its dire inevitability. It is notthe platform we have, but the platform thatmight be. That platform would be defined by theproductivity of its accidents, and by the strategyfor which whatever may appear at first as theworst option (even evil) may ultimately be where

to look for the

best

way out.

It is less a “possiblefuture” than an escape from the present.

Cloud

The platforms of the Cloud layer of the Stack arestructured by dense, plural, and noncontiguousgeographies, a hybrid of US super-jurisdiction

and Charter Cities, which have carved newpartially privatized polities from the whole clothof de-sovereigned lands. But perhaps there ismore there. The immediate geographical drama of theCloud layer is seen most directly in the ongoingSino-Google conflicts of 2008 to the present:China hacking Google, Google pulling out ofChina, the NSA hacking China, the NSA hacking

Google, Google ghostwriting books for the StateDepartment, and Google wordlesslycircumventing the last instances of stateoversight altogether, not by transgressing thembut by absorbing them into its service offering.Meanwhile, Chinese router firmware bides itstime. The geographies at work are often weird.For example, Google filed a series of patents onoffshore data centers, to be built in internationalwaters on towers using tidal currents andavailable water to keep the servers cool. The

complexities of jurisdiction suggested by a globalCloud piped in from non-state space arefantastic, but they are now less exceptional thanexemplary of a new normal. Between the“hackers” of the People’s Liberation Army andGoogle there exists more than a standoffbetween the proxies of two state apparatuses.

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Above: The militaristic tower of the new Mac Pro descends on the assembly line in a factory in Austin, Texas. Below: Manganese nodules contain rare-earthminerals used in disk drives, fluorescent lamps, and rechargeable batteries, among other things. Photo: Charles D. Winters.

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There is rather a fundamental conflict over thegeometry of political geography itself, with oneside bound by the territorial integrity of the state,and the other by the gossamer threads of theworld’s information demanding to be “organizedand made useful.” This is a clash between twologics of governance, two geometries of territory:one a subdivision of the horizontal, the other astacking of vertical layers; one a state, the other

a para-state; one superimposed on top of theother at any point on the map, and neverresolving into some consensualcosmopolitanism, but rather continuing to grindagainst the grain of one another’s planes. Thischaracterizes the geopolitics of our moment(this, plus the gravity of generalized succession,but the two are interrelated). From here we see that contemporary Cloudplatforms are displacing, if not also replacing,traditional core functions of states, anddemonstrating, for both good and ill, new spatial

and temporal models of politics and publics.Archaic states drew their authority from theregular provision of food. Over the course ofmodernization, more was added to the intricatebargains of Leviathan: energy, infrastructure,legal identity and standing, objective andcomprehensive maps, credible currencies, andflag-brand loyalties. Bit by bit, each of these andmore are now provided by Cloud platforms, notnecessarily as formal replacements for the stateversions but, like Google ID, simply more usefuland effective for daily life. For these platforms,the terms of participation are not mandatory, andbecause of this, their social contracts are moreextractive than constitutional. The Cloud Polisdraws revenue from the cognitive capital of itsUsers, who trade attention and microeconomiccompliance in exchange for global infrastructuralservices, and in turn, it provides each of themwith an active discrete online identity and thelicense to use this infrastructure. That said, it is clear that we don’t haveanything like a proper geopolitical theory ofthese transformations. Before the full ambitionof the US security apparatus was so evident, it

was thought by many that the Cloud was a placewhere states had no ultimate competence, normaybe even a role to play: too slow, too dumb,too easily outwitted by using the right browser.States would be cored out, component bycomponent, until nothing was left but a well-armed health insurance scheme with its ownWorld Cup team. In the long run, that may still bethe outcome, with modern liberal states takingtheir place next to ceremonial monarchs andstripped of all but symbolic authority, notnecessarily replaced but displaced and

misplaced to one side. But now we are hearingthe opposite, equally brittle conclusion: that the

Cloud is only the state, that it equals the state,and that its totality (figural, potential) isintrinsically totalitarian. Despite all, I wouldn’ttake that bet.

Early personal computer advertisement promises an easy way out of afuture technological swamp.

Looking toward the Black Stack, we observethat new forms of governmentality arise throughnew capacities to tax flows (at ports, at gates, onproperty, on income, on attention, on clicks, onmovement, on electrons, on carbon, and soforth). It is not at all clear whether, in the longrun, Cloud platforms will overwhelm statecontrol on such flows, or whether states willcontinue to evolve into Cloud platforms,absorbing the displaced functions back intothemselves, or whether both will split or rotatediagonally to one another, or how deeply what we

may now recognize as the surveillance state (US,China, and so forth) will become a universalsolvent of compulsory transparency and/or acosmically opaque megastructure of absoluteparanoia, or all of the above, or none of theabove. Between the state, the market, and theplatform, which is better designed to tax theinterfaces of everyday life and draw sovereigntythereby? It is a false choice to be sure, but onethat raises the question of where to locate theproper site of governance as such. What would

we mean by “the public” if not that which isconstituted by such interfaces, and where else

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should “governance” – meant here as thenecessary, deliberate, and enforceablecomposition of durable political subjects andtheir mediations – live if not there? Not in someobtuse chain of parliamentary representation,nor in some delusional monadic individual unit,nor in some sad little community consensuspowered by moral hectoring, but instead in theimmanent, immediate, and exactly present

interfaces that cleave and bind us. Where shouldsovereignty reside if not in what is in-between us– derived not from each of us individually butfrom what draws the world through us? For this, it’s critical to underscore thatCloud platforms (including sometimes stateapparatuses) are exactly that: platforms. It isimportant as well to recognize that “platforms”are not only a technical architecture; they arealso an institutional form. They centralize (likestates), scaffolding the terms of participationaccording to rigid but universal protocols, even

as they decentralize (like markets), coordinatingeconomies not through the superimposition offixed plans but through interoperable andemergent interaction. Next to states andmarkets, platforms are a third form, coordinatingthrough fixed protocols while scattering free-range Users watched over in loving, if alsodisconcertingly omniscient, grace. In theplatform-as-totality, drawing the interfaces ofeveryday life into one another, the maximal stateand the minimal state, Red Plenty and GoogleGosplan, start to look weirdly similar. Our own subjective enrollment in this is lessas citizens of a

polis or as homo economicuswithin a market, but rather as Users of aplatform. As I see it, the work of geopoliticaltheory is to develop a proper history, typology,and program for such platforms. These would notbe a shorthand for Cloud Feudalism (nor for thenetwork politics of the “multitude”) but modelsfor the organization of durable alter-totalitieswhich command the force of law, if notnecessarily its forms and formality. Ourunderstanding of the political economy ofplatforms demands its own Hobbes, Marx,

Hayek, and Keynes.5

User

One of the useful paradoxes of the User’sposition as a political subject is thecontradictory impulse directed simultaneouslytoward his artificial over-individuation and hisultimate pluralization, with both participatingdifferently in the geopolitics of transparency. Forexample, the Quantified Self movement (a truemedical theology in California) is haunted by thiscontradiction. At first, the intensity and

granularity of a new informational mirror imageconvinces the User of his individuated coherency

and stability as a subject. He is flattered by thesingular beauty of his reflection, and this is whyQSelf is so popular with those inspired by an X-Men reading of Atlas Shrugged. But as more datais added to the diagram that quantifies theoutside world’s impact on his person – the healthof the microbial biome in his gut, immediate andlong-term environmental conditions, his variousepidemiological contexts, and so on – the quality

of everything that is “not him” comes to overcodeand overwhelm any notion of himself as awithdrawn and self-contained agent. LikeTheseus’s Paradox – where after everycomponent of a thing has been replaced, nothingoriginal remains but a metaphysical husk – theUser is confronted with the existential lessonthat at any point he is only the intersection ofmany streams. At first, the subject position ofthe User overproduces individual identity, but inthe continuance of the same mechanisms, itthen succeeds in exploding it.

The geopolitics of the User we have now isinadequate, including its oppositional modes.The Oedipal discourse of privacy andtransparency in relation to the Evil Eye of theuninvited stepfather is a necessary processtoward an alterglobalism, but it has real limitsworth spelling out. A geopolitics of computationpredicated at its core upon the biopolitics of

privacy , of self-immunization from anycompulsory appearance in front of publics, ofplatforms, of states, of Others, can sometimesalso serve a psychological internalization of anow-ascendant general economy of succession,castration anxiety – whatever. The result is thepre-paranoia of withdrawal into an atomic andanomic dream of self-mastery that elsewhere wecall the “neoliberal subject.”

This smart data-collecting onesie for babies monitors heart activityand basic functions. It also activates other baby-gadgets according tothe signals detected in the child.

The space in which the discursive formationof the subject meets the technical constitution

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Lady Liberty is on the go.Regram courtesy of the passerby

Eva Franch i Gilabert.

of the User enjoys a much larger horizon than theone defined by these kinds of individuation.Consider, for example, proxy users. uProxy, aproject supported by Google Ideas, is a browsermodification that lets users easily pair up acrossdistances to allow someone in one location(trapped in the Bad Internets) to sendinformation unencumbered through the virtualposition of another User in another location

(enjoying the Good Internets). Recalling the proxyservers set up during the Arab Spring, one cansee how Google Ideas (Jared Cohen’s group)might take special interest in baking this intoChrome. For Sino-Google geopolitics, theplatform could theoretically be available at abillion-user scale to those who live in China, evenif Google is not technically “in China,” becausethose Users, acting through and as foreignproxies, are themselves, as far as internetgeography is concerned, both in and not in China.Developers of uProxy believe that it would take

two simultaneous and synchronized man-in-the-middle attacks to hack the link, and at apopulation scale that would prove difficult evenfor the best state actors, for now. Moredisconcerting perhaps is that such a frameworkcould just as easily be used to withdraw datafrom a paired site – a paired “user” – which for

good reasons should be left alone. Some plural User subject that is conjoinedby a proxy link or other means could becomposed of different types of addressablesubjects: two humans in different countries, or ahuman and a sensor, a sensor and a bot, ahuman and a robot and a sensor, a whatever anda whatever. In principle, any one of thesesubcomponents could not only be part of

multiple conjoined positions, but might not evenknow or need to know which meta-User theycontribute to, any more than the microbial biomein your gut needs to know your name. Spoofingwith honeypot identities, between humans andnonhumans, is measured against the theoreticaladdress space of IPv6 (roughly 1023 addressesper person) or some other massive universaladdressing scheme. The abyssal quantity andrange of “things” that could, in principle,participate in these vast pluralities includes realand fictional addressable persons, objects, and

locations, and even addressable mass-lessrelations between things, any of which could be asub-User in this Internet of Haeccities. So while the Stack (and the Black Stack)stage the death of the User in one sense – theeclipse of a certain resolute humanism – they doso because they also bring the multiplication and

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proliferation of other kinds of nonhuman Users(including sensors, financial algorithms, androbots from nanometric to landscape scale), anycombination of which one might enter into arelationship with as part of a composite User.This is where the recent shift by major Cloudplatforms into robotics may prove especiallyvital, because – like Darwin’s tortoises findingtheir way to different Galapagos islands – the

Cambrian explosion in robotics sees speciationoccur in the wild, not just in the lab, and with“us” on “their” inside, not on the outside. Asrobotics and Cloud hardware of all scales blendinto a common category of machine, it will beunclear in general human-robotic interactionwhether one is encountering a fully autonomous,partially autonomous, or completely human-piloted synthetic intelligence. Everydayinteractions replay the Turing Test over and over.Is there a person behind this machine, and if so,how much? In time, the answer will matter less,

and the postulation of human (or even carbon-based life) as the threshold measure ofintelligence and as the qualifying gauge of apolitical ethics may seem like tasteless vestigialracism, replaced by less anthropocentric framesof reference. The position of the User then maps only veryincompletely onto any one individual body. Fromthe perspective of the platform, what looks likeone is really many, and what looks like many mayonly be one. Elaborate schizophrenias alreadytake hold in our early negotiation of thesecomposite User positions. The neoliberal subjectposition makes absurd demands on people asUsers, as Quantified Selves, as SysAdmins oftheir own psyche, and from this, paranoia andnarcissism are two symptoms of the samedisposition, two functions of the same mask. Forone, the mask works to pluralize identityaccording to the subjective demands of the Userposition as composite alloy; and for another, itdefends against those same demands on behalfof the illusory integrity of a self-identityfracturing around its existential core. Askyourself: Is that User “Anonymous” because he is

dissolved into a vital machinic plurality, orbecause public identification threatensindividual self-mastery, sense of autonomy,social unaccountability, and so forth? The formerand the latter are two very different politics, yetthey use the same masks and the same softwaresuite. Given the schizophrenic economy of theUser – first over-individuated and thenmultiplied and de-differentiated – this reallyisn’t an unexpected or neurotic reaction at all. Itis, however, fragile and inadequate. In the construction of the User as an

aggregate profile that both is and is not specificto any one entity, there is no identity to deduce

other than the pattern of interaction betweenpartial actors. We may find, perhaps ironically,that the User position of the Stack actually hasfar less in common with the neoliberal form ofthe subject than some of today’s oppositionalistformats for political subjectivity that hope (quiterightly) to challenge, reform, and resist the StateStack as it is currently configuring itself.However, something like a Digital Bill of Rights

for Users, despite its cosmopolitan optimism,becomes a much more complicated, fragile, andlimited solution when the discrete identificationof a User is both so heterogeneous and so fluid.Are all proxy composite users one User? Isanything with an IP address a User? If not, whynot? If this throne is reserved for one species –humans – when is any one animal of that speciesbeing a User, and when is it not? Is it a Useranytime that it is generating information? If so,that policy would in practice crisscross andtrespass some of our most basic concepts of the

political, and for that reason alone it may be agood place to start. In addition to the fortification of the User asa geopolitical subject, we also require aredefinition of the political subject in relation tothe real operations of the User, one that is basednot on homo economicus, nor on parliamentaryliberalism, nor on post-structuralist linguisticreduction, nor on the will to secede into themoral safety of individual privacy and withdrawfrom coercion. Instead, this definition shouldfocus on composing and elevating sites ofgovernance from the immediate, suturing,interfacial material between subjects, in thestitches and the traces and the folds ofinteraction between bodies and things at adistance, congealing into different networksdemanding very different kinds of platformsovereignty.

The Black Stacks

I will conclude with some thoughts on the Stack-we-have and on the Black Stack, the genericfigure for its alternative totalities: the Stack-to-come. The Stack-we-have is defined not only by

its form, its layers, its platforms, and theirinterrelations, but also by its content. As leakafter leak has made painfully clear, its content isalso the content of our daily communications,now weaponized against us. If the panopticoneffect is when you don’t know if you are beingwatched or not, and so you behave as if you are,then the inverse panopticon effect is when youknow you are being watched but act as if youaren’t. This is today’s surveillance culture:exhibitionism in bad faith. The emergence ofStack platforms doesn’t promise any solution, or

even any distinctions between friend and enemywithin this optical geopolitics. At some dark day

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in the future, when considered versus the GoogleCaliphate, the NSA may even come to be seen bysome as the “public option.” “At least it isaccountable in principle to some parliamentarylimits,” they will say, “rather than merelystockholder avarice and flimsy user agreements.” If we take 9/11 and the rollout of the PatriotAct as Year Zero for the USA’s massive datagathering, encapsulation, and digestion

campaign (one that we are only now beginning tocomprehend, even as parallel projects fromChina, Russia, and Europe are sure to come tolight in time), then we can imagine the entirety ofnetwork communication for the last decade – theBig Haul – as a single, deep-and-wide digitalsimulation of the world (or a significant sectionof it). It is an archive, a library of the real. Itsexistence as the purloined property of a state,

just as a physical fact, is almost occult. Almost. The geophilosophical profile of the Big Haul,from the energy necessary to preserve it to its

governing instrumentality understood as both atext (a very large text) and as a machine withvarious utilities, overflows the traditional politicsof software. Its story is much more Borges thanLawrence Lessig. As is its fate. Can it bedestroyed? Is it possible to delete thissimulation, and is it desirable to do so? Is there atrash can big enough for the Big Delete? Even ifthe plug could be pulled on all future data hauls,surely there must be a backup somewhere, theidentical double of the simulation, such that ifwe delete one, the other will forever haunthistory until it is rediscovered by future AIarchaeologists interested in their own Paleolithicorigins. Would we bury it, even if we could?Would we need signs around it like thosedesigned for the Yucca Mountain nuclear wastedisposal site that warn off unknowable futureexcavations? Those of us “lucky” enough to bealive during this fifteen-year span would enjoy acertain illegible immortality, curiosities towhatever meta-cognitive entity pieces us backtogether using our online activities, both publicand private, proud and furtive, each of us risingagain centuries from now, each of us a little

Ozymandias of cat videos and Pornhub. In light of this, the Black Stack could cometo mean very different things. On the one hand, itwould imply that this simulation is opaque andunmappable – not disappeared, but ultimatelyredacted entirely. It could imply that, from theruined fragments of this history, anothercoherent totality can be carved against the grain,even from the deep recombinancy at and belowthe Earth layer of the Stack. Its blackness is thesurface of a world that can no longer becomposed by addition because it is so absolutely

full, overwritten, and overdetermined, that toadd more is just so much ink in the ocean.

Instead of tabula rasa, this tabula plenus allowsfor creativity and figuration only by subtraction,like scratching paint from a canvas – only bycarving away, by death, by replacement. The structural logic of any Stack systemallows for the replacement of whatever occupiesone layer with something else, and for the rest ofthe architecture to continue to function withoutpause. For example, the content of any one layer

– Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User –could be replaced (including the masochistichysterical fiction of the individual User, bothneoliberal and neo-other-things), while the restof the layers remain a viable armature for globalinfrastructure. The Stack is designed to beremade. That is its technical form, but unlikereplacing copper wire with fiber optics in thetransmission layer of TCP/IP, replacing one kindof User with another is more difficult. Today, weare doing it by adding more and different kinds ofthings into the User position, as described

above. We should, however, also allow for morecomprehensive displacements, not just byelevating things to the status of politicalsubjects or technical agents, but by making wayfor genuinely posthuman and ahuman positions. In time, perhaps at the eclipse of theAnthropocene, the historical phase of GoogleGosplan will give way to stateless platforms formultiple strata of synthetic intelligence andbiocommunication to settle into new continentsof cyborg symbiosis. Or perhaps instead, ifnothing else, the carbon and energy appetite ofthis ambitious embryonic ecology will starve itshost. For some dramas, but hopefully not for thefabrication of the Stack-to-come (Black orotherwise), a certain humanism and companionfigure of humanity still presumes its traditionalplace in the center of the frame. We must let goof the demand that any Artificial Intelligencearriving at sentience or sapience must caredeeply about humanity – us specifically – as thesubject and object of its knowing and its desire.The real nightmare, worse than the one in whichthe big machine wants to kill you, is the one in

which it sees you as irrelevant, or as

not even adiscrete thing to know. Worse than being seen asan enemy is not being seen at all. As EliezerYudkowsky puts it, “The AI does not hate you, nordoes it love you, but you are made out of atomswhich it can use for something else.”6

One of the integral accidents of the Stackmay be an anthrocidal trauma that shifts us froma design career as the authors of theAnthropocene, to the role of supporting actors inthe arrival of the Post-Anthropocene. The BlackStack may also be black because we cannot see

our own reflection in it. In the last instance, itsaccelerationist geopolitics is less eschatological

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than chemical, because its grounding of time isbased less on the promise of historical dialecticsthan on the rot of isotope decay. It is drawn, Ibelieve, by an inhuman and inhumanistmolecular form-finding: pre-Cambrian florachanged into peat oil changed into children’stoys, dinosaurs changed into birds changed intoceremonial headdresses, computation itselfconverted into whatever meta-machine comes

next, and Stack into Black Stack. !

An earlier version of this text was presented as a keynotelecture at Transmediale: Afterglow, January 31, 2014, inBerlin. Its presentation shared the stage with another keynoteby Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk) and was

given at the curatorial invitation of Ryan Bishop and JussiParikka, along with Kristoffer Gansing and Transmediale. My thanks to each of them. The title, “The Black Stack,” wascoined by Metahaven and I to conjoin two current projects: my forthcoming book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty(MIT Press) and Metahaven’s book Black Transparency(Sternberg Press). I chose to take up the figure of the “BlackStack” as an alternative to the current system of globalcalculation.

Benjamin H. Bratton is a theorist whose work spansphilosophy, art, and design. He is Associate Professorof Visual Arts and Director of D:GP, The Center forDesign and Geopolitics at the University of California,San Diego. His research is situated at the intersectionsof contemporary social and political theory,computational media and infrastructure, architecturaland urban design problems, and the politics ofsynthetic ecologies and biologies. Current workfocuses on the political geography of cloud computing,massively granular universal addressing systems, and

alternate models of ecological governance. His nextbook, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, isforthcoming.

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1Software (and hardware) stacksare technical architectureswhich assign inter-dependentlayers to different specificclusters of technologies, and fixspecific protocols for how onelayer can send information up ordown to adjacent layers. OSI andTCP/IP are obvious examples.

2See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International

Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum,trans. G. L. Ulmen (Candor, NY:Telos Press, 2006).

3The reference is to JamesScott’s Seeing Like a State, butthe term seems to haveexpanded and migrated beyondhis antigovernmental thesis. Seealso, for example, Bruno Latour’slecture “How to Think Like AState” (“in the presence of theQueen of Holland”http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/357). For this text, I mean totie one thread to Scott’sconnotation (how states seeeverything available to their

schemes) and to a moreFoucauldian sense of the actualoptical technologies that conjureforms of governance in their ownimage. Today, these privilegesare also enjoyed by thehardware/software platformsthat manufacture such opticsand leverage them as the basisof their own exo-stategovernmental innovations.

4I mean “Cloud” in a very generalsense, referring to planetary-scale software/hardwareplatforms, supporting datacenters, physical transmissionlinks, browser-based

applications, and so forth.

5My ongoing discussion on thepolitical economy of platformswith Benedict Singleton, NickSrnicek, and Alex Williamsinforms these last remarks.

6See his “Artificial Intelligence asa Positive and Negative Factor inGlobal Risk” in GlobalCatastrophic Risks, eds. NickBostrom and Martin Rees (NewYork: Oxford University Press,2008).

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Benjamin Bratton The Black Stack