The Black Stack — Benjamin H. Bratton
This was a pretty densely written piece of speculative-critical-design-science-fiction-political-commentary-something-something which I don’t fully understand. So I’m just going to pull out some quotes, and put them alongisde some definitiions to try and understand what’s going on. I liked it though.
For this, a nomos of the Cloud would, for example, draw jurisdiction not only according to the horizontal subdivision of physical sites by and for states, but also according to the vertical stacking of interdependent layers on top of one another: two geometries sometimes in cahoots, sometimes completely diagonal and unrecognizable to one another.
Sovereignty — Sovereignty is the full right and power of a governing body over itself, without any interference from outside sources or bodies.
Westphalian Sovereignty — Or state sovereignty, is the principle in international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory.
Google filed a series of patents on offshore data centers, to be built in international waters on towers using tidal currents and available water to keep the servers cool. The complexities of jurisdiction suggested by a global Cloud piped in from non-state space are fantastic, but they are now less exceptional than exemplary of a new normal.
Polis — Polis literally means city in Greek. It can also mean a body of citizens. In modern historiography, polis is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, like Classical Athens and its contemporaries, and thus is often translated as “city-state”.
The Cloud Polis draws revenue from the cognitive capital of its Users, who trade attention and microeconomic compliance 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 this infrastructure.
Some of what Bratton is talking about is around this idea that the world of “planetary scale computing”, ie: cloud computing, is adding a new layer of citizenship, government, involvement and a space in which to exist as a citizen, or: User. And this space provide unique and new ways in which to exist. As he says a user need not necessarily be one single person, or indeed a human at all. This User, and the environment too, is not bound to phyiscal spaces or boundaries like the it’s equivalent in the real world. And this crossovers of these two worlds manifest in the offshore data centres (as above) which are physical places and spaces which try to exist in cross border zones.
Feudalism — Feudalism is a system of land ownership and duties. It was used in the Middle Ages. With feudalism, all the land in a kingdom was the king’s. However, the king would give some of the land to the lords or nobles who fought for him. These gifts of land were called manors.
So while the Stack (and the Black Stack) stage the death of the User in one sense—the eclipse of a certain resolute humanism—they do so because they also bring the multiplication and proliferation of other kinds of nonhuman Users (including sensors, financial algorithms, and robots from nanometric to landscape scale), any combination of which one might enter into a relationship with as part of a composite User.
This is where the recent shift by major Cloud platforms into robotics may prove especially vital, because—like Darwin’s tortoises finding their way to different Galapagos islands—the Cambrian explosion in robotics sees speciation occur in the wild, not just in the lab, and with “us” on “their” inside, not on the outside. As robotics and Cloud hardware of all scales blend into a common category of machine, it will be unclear in general human-robotic interaction whether one is encountering a fully autonomous, partially autonomous, or completely human-piloted synthetic intelligence.
…something like a Digital Bill of Rights for Users, despite its cosmopolitan optimism, becomes a much more complicated, fragile, and limited solution when the discrete identification of a User is both so heterogeneous and so fluid. Are all proxy composite users one User? Is anything with an IP address a User? If not, why not? If this throne is reserved for one species—humans—when is any one animal of that species being a User, and when is it not? Is it a User anytime that it is generating information?
The world in which Bratton speaks is one which is born of the utter complexities of the current world. One which is a weaving of many different financial markets, broken democracies, black-box technologies, public + augmented online avatars, bots, medieval social structures, ancient cultures and so on. The meshing of all these does not happen easily, and so creates the multilayerd and obscured world.
From the complexities emerge new and unusual everything. Things which we don’t currently have a language for, an understanding of, or an expectation of. But it’s all new. New governements, new economies, new cultures, new societies. The spaces in between all of these are where things breakdown and the lack of understanding shows, but also where the interesting stuff happens. Perhaps.
Josh