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The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
A comprehensive political and design theory of planetary-scale computation proposing that The Stack—an accidental megastructure—is both a technological apparatus and a model for a new geopolitical architecture.What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image?
In The Stack, Benjamin 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 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.
In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention.
The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds.
thestack.org
In The Stack, Benjamin 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 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.
In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention.
The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds.
thestack.org
778 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 18, 2015
138 people are currently reading
1977 people want to read
About the author
Benjamin H. Bratton
30 books112 followersBenjamin H. Bratton is a theorist whose work spans philosophy, computer science, and design. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. He is also Visiting Professor of Critical Studies at SCI-Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture) and Professor of Digital Design at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
March 21, 2022
This book is insanely good. But this review will barely scratch the surface. And this book is very long, with ideas that explode off every page – so much so that it can make you a bit dizzy – especially if by ‘you’ I mean ‘me’.
This is a book of political geography for today’s world. Now, political geography in yesterday’s world started in the 1640s with the Treaty of Westphalia. Geography literally means writing on the world – so, drawing lines that separate this bit from that bit. And the Treaty of Westphalia did literally that – a boundary became a border and everything that happens within that bounded area was at the discretion of the ruler. And thus, the birth of nation states. That is, the recognition of the state as the sole authorised user of violence. And this meant geography could be understood as, even if contested, lines drawn on maps.
Today we both live in and don’t live in that world any more. Geography needs to recognise that space isn’t really just ‘space’ any longer. And although I know it is old-fashioned to call it ‘cyber space’ now, I can’t think of a better name. The author here refers to it as ‘The Stack’. The stack is the multilayered ‘geography’ of our new world. So let’s start by naming the layers, even if I don’t do much more than that. It’s important to remember that the stack isn’t just one thing – so, that the layers exist across all possible stacks, that there are more than one stack and that these stacks only exist when activated. He calls these activated stacks ‘columns’.
The stack’s layers are earth, cloud, city, address, interface, and user. The book gets broken up into chapters according to these layers. I found the earth layer particularly interesting, mostly because it is not the layer we generally associate with cyberspace – in fact, if is pretty well the exact opposite of what we think of when we think of cyber space. The earth layer contains all of the environmental inputs needed for world-wide computing to be possible. There is a lovely example given of a thought experiment in which a computer is designed that might be needed to predict the climate with a certain level of accuracy. Someone worked out how many layers of silicon chips this computer would need and how much processing power that would produce – and then how much energy would be needed to power such a huge computer. It ended up that this imaginary computer would be the largest single user of energy on the planet, and would, in fact, use so much energy that it would itself be a major contributing force to climate change. I think we forget how much energy our networked computers require – and rare earth metals they need, and god knows what else. Cyber space seems quite ephemeral to us, but it has large real-world consequences.
The address chapter was also seriously interesting. He speaks of the difference between western and Japanese street addresses, with western addresses running from the individual to the universal (person’s name, street number, street, city etc) – while Japanese addresses often start from a major intersection and then are numbered from there. I remember when I was in London speaking to a woman from the States and told her how strange it was when I’d called a taxi and the driver asked me for the postcode of where I was standing. I said to her, he might as well have asked me what aftershave I would be wearing, it seemed as useful in tracking me down… except, English postcodes are amazing – not at all like Australian postcodes. The numbers and letters would have directed him right to me.
The point with the address chapter is really how to address things not just in the physical world, but also in the cyber world. We already do this with tins of corn and so on in supermarkets, but only for the brand and size of the tin, that is, for the particular item, not the individual can. Some performance artist ‘buys’ the same can of corn at various supermarkets – having brought it with him, he then scans it as he leaves, so that the can of corn ends up costing hundreds of dollars. In our hyper-surveillance society facilitated by the ability to place an individual address on every user/item, this may well change at some stage so that every item in every store will have its own individual number.
Some nation states seek to have control over cyber space in much the same way as they have control over what happens within the physical boundaries of their country. But it isn’t clear that this will be sustainable, or even ultimately desirable, even for those states seeking authoritarian domination over their citizens – that is, almost all states.
I think if I was printing this book, I would have put the glossary at the front of the book, perhaps as the first chapter. I say this because it would have really helped to have had the definitions of things like stack and cloud and user at my fingertips from the get-go. And it would have been nice to have been able to flick back to the start occasionally to scratch my head over what was meant by some of the terms that otherwise seemed obvious until it was clear they weren’t.
I want to end with something he says about economics. Socialism is criticised by neoliberal economists (think Hayek) due to the planning problem – that is, that you can never have enough information to plan for demand and supply issues and that this is the great benefit of a free market. However, free markets are criticised because they fail to price in ‘externalities’ or what Friedman referred to as ‘neighbourhood effects’. This book suggests that the further development of the computation of everything may be on the cusp of solving both of these problems. Certainly, it is hard to argue that the Walmart-isation of the economy isn’t leading to a planned economy, even if not one that a Marxist would necessarily be particularly excited about. Presumably too, externalities will increasingly become easier to identify and to create policies around that will structure their prices so that these externalities will be ‘marketised’ too.
I really did find this book utterly fascinating. A lot of it seeks to tackle the issues that our world is presenting us – particularly in terms of the ‘post-human’ and the collapse of our common sense notions of how the world ‘ought to’ work ‘naturally’. I want to quote something I found particularly fascinating.
“We are those who have wrapped the planet in wire. This is the significant achievement of our time. Our pyramids are gossamer shaped.” Page 178
This is a book of political geography for today’s world. Now, political geography in yesterday’s world started in the 1640s with the Treaty of Westphalia. Geography literally means writing on the world – so, drawing lines that separate this bit from that bit. And the Treaty of Westphalia did literally that – a boundary became a border and everything that happens within that bounded area was at the discretion of the ruler. And thus, the birth of nation states. That is, the recognition of the state as the sole authorised user of violence. And this meant geography could be understood as, even if contested, lines drawn on maps.
Today we both live in and don’t live in that world any more. Geography needs to recognise that space isn’t really just ‘space’ any longer. And although I know it is old-fashioned to call it ‘cyber space’ now, I can’t think of a better name. The author here refers to it as ‘The Stack’. The stack is the multilayered ‘geography’ of our new world. So let’s start by naming the layers, even if I don’t do much more than that. It’s important to remember that the stack isn’t just one thing – so, that the layers exist across all possible stacks, that there are more than one stack and that these stacks only exist when activated. He calls these activated stacks ‘columns’.
The stack’s layers are earth, cloud, city, address, interface, and user. The book gets broken up into chapters according to these layers. I found the earth layer particularly interesting, mostly because it is not the layer we generally associate with cyberspace – in fact, if is pretty well the exact opposite of what we think of when we think of cyber space. The earth layer contains all of the environmental inputs needed for world-wide computing to be possible. There is a lovely example given of a thought experiment in which a computer is designed that might be needed to predict the climate with a certain level of accuracy. Someone worked out how many layers of silicon chips this computer would need and how much processing power that would produce – and then how much energy would be needed to power such a huge computer. It ended up that this imaginary computer would be the largest single user of energy on the planet, and would, in fact, use so much energy that it would itself be a major contributing force to climate change. I think we forget how much energy our networked computers require – and rare earth metals they need, and god knows what else. Cyber space seems quite ephemeral to us, but it has large real-world consequences.
The address chapter was also seriously interesting. He speaks of the difference between western and Japanese street addresses, with western addresses running from the individual to the universal (person’s name, street number, street, city etc) – while Japanese addresses often start from a major intersection and then are numbered from there. I remember when I was in London speaking to a woman from the States and told her how strange it was when I’d called a taxi and the driver asked me for the postcode of where I was standing. I said to her, he might as well have asked me what aftershave I would be wearing, it seemed as useful in tracking me down… except, English postcodes are amazing – not at all like Australian postcodes. The numbers and letters would have directed him right to me.
The point with the address chapter is really how to address things not just in the physical world, but also in the cyber world. We already do this with tins of corn and so on in supermarkets, but only for the brand and size of the tin, that is, for the particular item, not the individual can. Some performance artist ‘buys’ the same can of corn at various supermarkets – having brought it with him, he then scans it as he leaves, so that the can of corn ends up costing hundreds of dollars. In our hyper-surveillance society facilitated by the ability to place an individual address on every user/item, this may well change at some stage so that every item in every store will have its own individual number.
Some nation states seek to have control over cyber space in much the same way as they have control over what happens within the physical boundaries of their country. But it isn’t clear that this will be sustainable, or even ultimately desirable, even for those states seeking authoritarian domination over their citizens – that is, almost all states.
I think if I was printing this book, I would have put the glossary at the front of the book, perhaps as the first chapter. I say this because it would have really helped to have had the definitions of things like stack and cloud and user at my fingertips from the get-go. And it would have been nice to have been able to flick back to the start occasionally to scratch my head over what was meant by some of the terms that otherwise seemed obvious until it was clear they weren’t.
I want to end with something he says about economics. Socialism is criticised by neoliberal economists (think Hayek) due to the planning problem – that is, that you can never have enough information to plan for demand and supply issues and that this is the great benefit of a free market. However, free markets are criticised because they fail to price in ‘externalities’ or what Friedman referred to as ‘neighbourhood effects’. This book suggests that the further development of the computation of everything may be on the cusp of solving both of these problems. Certainly, it is hard to argue that the Walmart-isation of the economy isn’t leading to a planned economy, even if not one that a Marxist would necessarily be particularly excited about. Presumably too, externalities will increasingly become easier to identify and to create policies around that will structure their prices so that these externalities will be ‘marketised’ too.
I really did find this book utterly fascinating. A lot of it seeks to tackle the issues that our world is presenting us – particularly in terms of the ‘post-human’ and the collapse of our common sense notions of how the world ‘ought to’ work ‘naturally’. I want to quote something I found particularly fascinating.
“We are those who have wrapped the planet in wire. This is the significant achievement of our time. Our pyramids are gossamer shaped.” Page 178
September 5, 2016
This book was a big disappointment. I was intrigued by the idea of a book that would examine how planetary scale computing can displace and change government by taking over or developing parallel competing systems for things that have traditionally been exclusively the role of government, such as currency and identity management, and how software gives government new roles and capabilities and changes the idea of what government is and does. But despite the title and cover copy suggesting that this is what the book is about, this book does not deliver on this promise. It is more a philosophical examination of the relationship of planetary level computing to human society, but that's OK because I would also have found a well executed book on that theme to be interesting. The big problem that I had with this book is it is written in a style that is very dense, but its insights are not deep enough to warrant the effort that is required to figure out what the heck the guy is saying. It's not that Bratton's ideas are bad or wrong; it's just that they are buried under a dense layer of jargon, sometimes obscure cultural references and unnecessarily complicated sentence structure, that combine to make it very hard to get to the substance of what the book is about. Sometimes Bratton's writing can be beautiful in the way that he uses alliteration, metaphor, imagery, juxtaposition and other poetic devices. About a third of the way through, I decided that I would like it better if I just read it as poetry and let the sound and rhythm of the words flow over me instead of trying to parse every sentence for substantive meaning. That helped. It occurred to me that the writing style might be intended as a reflection of the subject matter of the book, so that it was written with lists, cross references, and a nested, interconnected sentences to reflect the structure of the Stack. At the moment I had this insight, I briefly thought that the book was brilliant, but I couldn't sustain it. I am all for stylistically clever non-fiction writing which is able to use the manner of writing to fit with the subject matter and elucidate it, but here the writing style ultimately just makes the book difficult, and makes it seem like it is saying things that are deeper and more important than it is actually saying. Bratton's does have some good insights, like the idea that the success of a computing platform should be measured by the number of unintended accidental results that it enables or the idea that a computing platform should treat all users with equal dignity whether or not they are human. But the whole thing could have been boiled down to 150 pages without all of the stylistic fireworks, and it would have been a much better book.
December 2, 2019
One thing that's certainly impressive with this book is the sheer mass of interdisciplinary synthesis required to understand this book. If you are looking for an encyclopedia of work on the relationship of everything to the "agent" this is your book.
That said, there's no way to justify half of this book as being reasonable theory. Mostly the author speaks in prose, with little thought to justification outside of outdated news and popular interdisciplinary design and Continental philosophy references. I had much higher hopes for this work. In terms of the structure proposed, the "brief" was around 250 pages. It could have been done in 50. Also, it could have been done without half of the creative prose and anecdotal references. It seemed as though the author was going for breadth in references and didn't actually use them except for a surface claim. This was a strange academic read!
UPDATE (June 28, 2019): After a second read of this book, I moved my review of it from 2 to 3 stars. The reason for this is somewhat simple. Firstly, all of the above still applies. However, now having more of a background in theories of information, technology, design, and continental philosophy have shown me that with the required reading, this book shines a little more.
That said, the average reader must be patient than almost any reader should ever have to be in order to understand the details of this theoretical romp. There were so many better ways to condense this argument without losing anything. There's a lot of pretentiousness here. He does warn you in the first few pages that he will be unapologetically interdisciplinary. What he means is he will cite everything without clear explanation of most things or choices in citation. For example, he never makes it clear why he chooses his form of Sovereignty that he critiques. He just does, and uses it extensively without much clarity on what it means.
As much of a Goliath as this book is, you will have to use a search engine a good bit in order to understand it, making it even more laborious. That's not a mark of a good book usually, but I'm coming to realize this book has something crucially important to say, it just doesn't say it easily when it could have. Bratton could take from Galloway's writing in _Protocol_ in his future writing. As much as I love the subject matter here (and his choices are growing on me as I see the alternatives) I don't have it in me to read another book like this. The subject matter here is becoming too obvious to be this complex. It will eventually be the norm to think this way, but this book will have been read by essentially nobody by then. This is not going to be as academically productive of a read as such comparably dense writing as Hegel, Marx, or the like even if it is just as revolutionary.
So instead, because I see this book as important but near impenetrable, I will suggest you do some homework first. Read the following before you begin:
-Marx's _Capital_
-Deleuze, as much as you can stand, particularly his work with Guattari and _Difference & Repetition_
-Foucault: _Discipline and Punish_
-Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" and _The Road to Serfdom_
-Galloway's _Protocol_
-Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto
-Latour's _Reassembling the Social_ (or Mike Michaels' book _Actor-Network Theory_)
-Some kind of introduction of Speculative Realism/Materialism
If you have this down, then you will have a much more steady grasp of the speculative materialist perspective provisioned here.
That said, there's no way to justify half of this book as being reasonable theory. Mostly the author speaks in prose, with little thought to justification outside of outdated news and popular interdisciplinary design and Continental philosophy references. I had much higher hopes for this work. In terms of the structure proposed, the "brief" was around 250 pages. It could have been done in 50. Also, it could have been done without half of the creative prose and anecdotal references. It seemed as though the author was going for breadth in references and didn't actually use them except for a surface claim. This was a strange academic read!
UPDATE (June 28, 2019): After a second read of this book, I moved my review of it from 2 to 3 stars. The reason for this is somewhat simple. Firstly, all of the above still applies. However, now having more of a background in theories of information, technology, design, and continental philosophy have shown me that with the required reading, this book shines a little more.
That said, the average reader must be patient than almost any reader should ever have to be in order to understand the details of this theoretical romp. There were so many better ways to condense this argument without losing anything. There's a lot of pretentiousness here. He does warn you in the first few pages that he will be unapologetically interdisciplinary. What he means is he will cite everything without clear explanation of most things or choices in citation. For example, he never makes it clear why he chooses his form of Sovereignty that he critiques. He just does, and uses it extensively without much clarity on what it means.
As much of a Goliath as this book is, you will have to use a search engine a good bit in order to understand it, making it even more laborious. That's not a mark of a good book usually, but I'm coming to realize this book has something crucially important to say, it just doesn't say it easily when it could have. Bratton could take from Galloway's writing in _Protocol_ in his future writing. As much as I love the subject matter here (and his choices are growing on me as I see the alternatives) I don't have it in me to read another book like this. The subject matter here is becoming too obvious to be this complex. It will eventually be the norm to think this way, but this book will have been read by essentially nobody by then. This is not going to be as academically productive of a read as such comparably dense writing as Hegel, Marx, or the like even if it is just as revolutionary.
So instead, because I see this book as important but near impenetrable, I will suggest you do some homework first. Read the following before you begin:
-Marx's _Capital_
-Deleuze, as much as you can stand, particularly his work with Guattari and _Difference & Repetition_
-Foucault: _Discipline and Punish_
-Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" and _The Road to Serfdom_
-Galloway's _Protocol_
-Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto
-Latour's _Reassembling the Social_ (or Mike Michaels' book _Actor-Network Theory_)
-Some kind of introduction of Speculative Realism/Materialism
If you have this down, then you will have a much more steady grasp of the speculative materialist perspective provisioned here.
June 6, 2017
Not unlike many in the contemporary academia, Bratton is too weary and careful to advocate for a new vision of the order of things. He goes on and on and on without really hitting the bull's eye.
The idea of the Stack is a very powerful one. However, Bratton fails to deliver a strong argument and takes the reader into a foray of descriptive statements and rhetorical questions. The book will certainly disappoint the genuinely interested reader.
The idea of the Stack is a very powerful one. However, Bratton fails to deliver a strong argument and takes the reader into a foray of descriptive statements and rhetorical questions. The book will certainly disappoint the genuinely interested reader.
December 8, 2019
It is an intriguing read, but oh boy, finishing it feels like such an epic achievement. Bratton comes up with an unique perspective and great observations organized into a neat model. He has a very specific style of writing, at times poetic and mindblowing but a one that easily gets annonying. That makes the book self-servingly arcane, which is a pity, beacause it raises substanstiansial questions, which should not be acessible only to unicorns with ironclad focus or borderline masochists.
December 1, 2024
good. too long.
February 17, 2020
One hopes, or even assumes, that those on the inside of the paywall-averse surveillance capitalist cloud-polises - the empires of Google, New Microsoft, Facebook and their ilk, possibly to include the author's distaff-destroyed birthplace, Yahoo! - are reading this book, as though it were some sort of cult-classic and they the elect insiders.
Probably not though, as they are more akin to Snowden or Assange, whose bit-parts betray a kind of classification which exceeds imprisonment, within whatever particular layer or micro-layer of Bratton's metaphorical Stack they labor on.
I do wonder who does read this kind of stuff. I confess that while I have finished the layers, I still have the denouement to go, to which I look forward as an exercise in relative leisure. This book is tough going! Bratton chooses his words for precision, and deploys them in the direction of Faulknerian convolution and interminability.
Still, in the end as it were, I suspect that he is caught up in something which will appear benighted in retrospect, and as localized as phrenology or eugenics. Interestingly, it may well be retrograde Charles Murray with his pathetic and misguided deployments of the scientific method - misplacing him among the eugenicists - who sees clearly what has happened to our post-Westphalian polity, once reified statistical artifacts like IQ become the apology for merit. Ignoring ambition, sociopathy, and overall celebration of the "Me" among us, as the main things which enable entrance to Middlebury, where you may be excused for acting part of a hive mind. The horror!
Bratton is that far abstracted from popular culture - a least in this edition of him - that he fails to notice that when the Chinese see their "other" beyond the Great Wall it is a hive mind where one need only kill the queen. Likewise our Independence Day, Resurgence where it is only a tiny stretch to see China as the hive. These are not films worth watching, apparently.
Those for whom the pinnacle of human agency is the hand on gunstock or steering wheel; those fattened up for slaughter by cybermediated foodstuffs engendered by the life-force of money and oil and absent any human agency at all; those left behind by the remove to cosmopolis of nearly all the lucky-born (where was the merit in that, oh Mister Accident?); those who still do believe in spiritual agency; these will hardly go quietly into the night for reason of healthcare bankruptcy.
Put another way, there is no ontology of accident here, only a careful inscribing of inexplicable fate to what we only think we have designed, but which is, in fact, designing us. What happens, in other words, when enthusiasm flags and people turn back to one another, carving lives out of wood and leather with grit and determination.
These layers revert instantly to dust, and there were no longer enough oil in the ground to resurrect them. The highly calculated alternative, as proven sufficiently within these (to me virtual) pages, is meltdown.
We might still choose nature as our designer, human, post-human, or otherwise; go along with the flow, and leave these other worlds behind. There is a social evolution invisible to those on the inside, for those who remain where identity is tangible. And heart embodied.
Probably not though, as they are more akin to Snowden or Assange, whose bit-parts betray a kind of classification which exceeds imprisonment, within whatever particular layer or micro-layer of Bratton's metaphorical Stack they labor on.
I do wonder who does read this kind of stuff. I confess that while I have finished the layers, I still have the denouement to go, to which I look forward as an exercise in relative leisure. This book is tough going! Bratton chooses his words for precision, and deploys them in the direction of Faulknerian convolution and interminability.
Still, in the end as it were, I suspect that he is caught up in something which will appear benighted in retrospect, and as localized as phrenology or eugenics. Interestingly, it may well be retrograde Charles Murray with his pathetic and misguided deployments of the scientific method - misplacing him among the eugenicists - who sees clearly what has happened to our post-Westphalian polity, once reified statistical artifacts like IQ become the apology for merit. Ignoring ambition, sociopathy, and overall celebration of the "Me" among us, as the main things which enable entrance to Middlebury, where you may be excused for acting part of a hive mind. The horror!
Bratton is that far abstracted from popular culture - a least in this edition of him - that he fails to notice that when the Chinese see their "other" beyond the Great Wall it is a hive mind where one need only kill the queen. Likewise our Independence Day, Resurgence where it is only a tiny stretch to see China as the hive. These are not films worth watching, apparently.
Those for whom the pinnacle of human agency is the hand on gunstock or steering wheel; those fattened up for slaughter by cybermediated foodstuffs engendered by the life-force of money and oil and absent any human agency at all; those left behind by the remove to cosmopolis of nearly all the lucky-born (where was the merit in that, oh Mister Accident?); those who still do believe in spiritual agency; these will hardly go quietly into the night for reason of healthcare bankruptcy.
Put another way, there is no ontology of accident here, only a careful inscribing of inexplicable fate to what we only think we have designed, but which is, in fact, designing us. What happens, in other words, when enthusiasm flags and people turn back to one another, carving lives out of wood and leather with grit and determination.
These layers revert instantly to dust, and there were no longer enough oil in the ground to resurrect them. The highly calculated alternative, as proven sufficiently within these (to me virtual) pages, is meltdown.
We might still choose nature as our designer, human, post-human, or otherwise; go along with the flow, and leave these other worlds behind. There is a social evolution invisible to those on the inside, for those who remain where identity is tangible. And heart embodied.
June 12, 2019
Extremely dense and pretentious prose covers up what could have been an enlightening read on one of the most important issues in the modern world. The occasional clear spell demonstrates that Bratton can write well when he wants to, but one gets the impression his main goal is to impress sociologists (and word counters) rather than communicate genuinely with non-academic readers. That said, even by academic standards this is a verbose and poorly-written text that would benefit from significant editing.
I'll leave you with this quote to demonstrate:
"The Stack sees us, and so the platform sovereignties that it is most disposed to support are those that align with how the other layers organize their own intersecting interfacial regimes. The Earth layer spins out polities of the electron and emergency, the Cloud layer enrolls proto-citizens in global platform totalities, the City chapter maps out spaces of filtering control and accidental alegal access, the Address layer discloses a landscape in reserve filled with things and events available for interaction, and the Interface layer diagrams reductive images of all of these processes, served up as total or tactical instrumental regimes. All these are put in motion for Users , as Users are put in motion for them. This singular-generic User pinpoints where proto-cosmopolitanisms overlap and contradict the acquisitive platforms of cognitive capitalism and its blurry alternatives."
I'll leave you with this quote to demonstrate:
"The Stack sees us, and so the platform sovereignties that it is most disposed to support are those that align with how the other layers organize their own intersecting interfacial regimes. The Earth layer spins out polities of the electron and emergency, the Cloud layer enrolls proto-citizens in global platform totalities, the City chapter maps out spaces of filtering control and accidental alegal access, the Address layer discloses a landscape in reserve filled with things and events available for interaction, and the Interface layer diagrams reductive images of all of these processes, served up as total or tactical instrumental regimes. All these are put in motion for Users , as Users are put in motion for them. This singular-generic User pinpoints where proto-cosmopolitanisms overlap and contradict the acquisitive platforms of cognitive capitalism and its blurry alternatives."
April 3, 2018
There are some interesting ideas here, but they are buried among somewhat confused writing and language that is arcane to the extent that it decidedly detracts from the arguments being made. While there is something Fulleresque about the scope of this work, it falls much short of a book like "Critical Path" and ultimately feels to be less than the sum of its parts.
March 25, 2021
Probably the most important work of design / theory / computation out there right now. My brain hasn't processed its implications yet, and it may never do so — maybe something else is processing my brain through this book. I'll write more when things are more clear.
April 4, 2021
An elaborate design brief for how planetary communications and computing infrastructure not only is currently deconstructing but also offers the hope of reconstructing the form and concept of sovereignty.
The prose is, um, ambitious — an auto-nostalgia for the High Theory of the late 20th century. Sample: “A geopolitics of computation predicated at its core on the biopolitics of privacy, of self-immunization from any compulsory appearance in front of publics, of platforms, of states, of others, can sometimes also serve a psychological internalization of a now ascendant general economy of succession, castration anxiety — more besides — resulting in the preparanoia of withdrawal into an atomic and anomic dream of self-mastery that elsewhere one might call ‘neoliberal subject.’” (360)
The prose is, um, ambitious — an auto-nostalgia for the High Theory of the late 20th century. Sample: “A geopolitics of computation predicated at its core on the biopolitics of privacy, of self-immunization from any compulsory appearance in front of publics, of platforms, of states, of others, can sometimes also serve a psychological internalization of a now ascendant general economy of succession, castration anxiety — more besides — resulting in the preparanoia of withdrawal into an atomic and anomic dream of self-mastery that elsewhere one might call ‘neoliberal subject.’” (360)
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June 18, 2025".. we observe that “ computation ” does not just
denote machinery; it is planetary-scale infrastructure that is changing not only how
governments govern, but also what governance even is in the first place. Computation
is a logic of culture, and so also a logic of design. It is both how our culture designs
and is itself that which we need to design better, but to do that we need to take a step
back and view an emerging big picture that is different from what has been predicted.
We may glimpse that another model of political geography is cohering before our eyes.
What can we do with it? What does it want from us? The answers depend on our theories
and tools, on our models and codes."
denote machinery; it is planetary-scale infrastructure that is changing not only how
governments govern, but also what governance even is in the first place. Computation
is a logic of culture, and so also a logic of design. It is both how our culture designs
and is itself that which we need to design better, but to do that we need to take a step
back and view an emerging big picture that is different from what has been predicted.
We may glimpse that another model of political geography is cohering before our eyes.
What can we do with it? What does it want from us? The answers depend on our theories
and tools, on our models and codes."
Read
June 23, 2025academics really don't know how to write, at this point I'm pretty sure it's just a status symbol to create the most dense phrase to communicate a fairly simple idea. the book does have some ideas that are not so simple, mainly because of the sheer amount of different fields that it involves, and some really good ones at that, but they are mostly hidden under a fuck ton of jargon and arbitrary categories he creates. also for how much he talks about it i'm pretty sure this man has not written a single line of code in his life. still liked it and think he is mostly right in his analysis. tbh i skipped around after reading the first quarter but i think i got the gist of it
July 26, 2024
"As far as geodesign is concerned, that blur between one stack and another is not a sympton to be clarified and cured;rather, the blur is a high-resolution image of what is actually happening, which itself is blurry. To design whit the blur instead of against it requires comfort with ambiguity."
June 7, 2017
Would give 4.5 if I could. An excellent book that could use a better editor, or just more editing.
April 23, 2018
McLuhan meets Mackinder.
November 15, 2018
Uno de los mejores libros sobre teoría contemporánea y futura del espacio.
April 15, 2021
I found this book fascinating, but too slow and long to put up with, so gave up before finishing.
June 19, 2021
I love a good critical analysis but this was the driest and most stylistically excessive book I’ve ever read.
May 26, 2023
Buzzwords, buzzwords everywhere. Sorely disappointing.
February 1, 2025
Dense as hell but conceptually massive. If you ever wondered what a cybernetic theory of geopolitics looks like, this is it. Bratton thinks like a machine.
April 26, 2016
I found this book flat out scary and terrifying. Bratton truly understands on several levels how technology works for and against society. Rarely the term sovereignty is treated the right way. I would say that to talk politics today, this book is a must. I've never read anything at this level before. It goes to detail and does not limit itself to theory. This book requires to read Marcuse's "One Dimensional Mind" before hand, at least. Basic knowledge of data bases also helps to understand better the ideas presented here.
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