It is literally impossible to experience our reality without mediation by technology. Our world is becoming reorganised into information. If this information acts as a copy of reality. Like a recording. Who or what is controlling it? Organising it? Requesting it? Or is it an accidental super network with a life of its own?
Augmented reality is already here, it's not just inserting pokemon characters with your camera. It's Australia post tracking, QR codes, passport scanning, google tracking your location, sharing wifi routers.
How did the world become a planetary-wide megastructure? What are its Capital / Media / Military protocols which have enabled the remote universal coordination of all information and action? This unnamed network is terraforming the world and datafying its inhabitants at an increasing pace, developing a new world in its own image, physically, politically and socially into a megastructure from beyond the Anthropocene. This unnamed network that extends beyond the internet and into every part of our lives needs a name.
Benjamin Bratton is a digital philosopher and sociologist. In Bratton's recent book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015) he has a developed a vocabulary for this new megastructure. Bratton uses the computational metaphor of The Stack.
Bratton applies The Stack metaphor to planetary-scale activity, identifying it as an "accidental megastructure", and its effects are already here. A new kind of geopolitics that is less interested in territories and more interested in totalities. (5) Google, Facebook, Amazon wants every man, woman and child as their citizen. Sharing their lives with non-human bots. Platforms fight for popularity, engaging in guerrilla media tactics in hopes of gaining massive amounts of data to synthesize and then reprogram the world as a virtual one.
GeoGraphics is a publication created by Monash Design Studies enrolled in the unit Digital Publishing. It is a representation of The Stack and how each student interprets each layer.
GeoGraphics, 56pp, 215 mm x 279 mm, softcover, printed on demand
$35 (+ $20 shipping)
The Stack terraforms its host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices and spitting up mobile phones. (Bratton) Planetary computation has eclipsed the carbon footprint of the airline industry tenfold and it is chewing through minerals and power.
The Stack's Cloud layer is both the rhizomatic infrastructure, funnelled through ISP exchanged points and tunnelled under the sea through cables and into the data centres hidden in mountains. It's also the corporate global internet companies who remap countries sovereignty to user guidelines. The most powerful layer in the stack in terms of reorganising the Earth and promoting new cultural, legal, and economic norms.
Think of the City layer as a Planetary Total Smart City. The smart city is populated with an Internet of Things(IoT) watching, sensing, moving, calibrating, warning etc. Often talking only to other IoT triggering another signal, saving and reporting daily actives.
Any instance singular or plural, matter, particle, wave or relation is potentially identified by massive universal addressing systems in which positions are mapped, allotted to users, identified and controlled.
The coupling of users and computers. How we interact with the stack and how it interacts with us. The tasks we ask the stack to do are so complicated we require synthetic symbols. Through a shared grammar with the stack. The subtitling of world.
Platforms as appose to the state don't care if you are an illegal immigrant or even human. They only want to know if you are an authentic user on their Platform. Users must be identified and controlled. Users are the customers, contributors, participants, human and non-human.
