Software (and hardware) stacks are technical architectures which assign inter-dependent layers to different specific clusters of technologies, and fix specific protocols for how one layer can send information up or down to adjacent layers. OSI and TCP/IP are obvious examples.
See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2006).
The reference is to James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, but the term seems to have expanded and migrated beyond his antigovernmental thesis. See also, for example, Bruno Latour’s lecture “How to Think Like A State” (“in the presence of the Queen of Holland” →). For this text, I mean to tie one thread to Scott’s connotation (how states see everything available to their schemes) and to a more Foucauldian sense of the actual optical technologies that conjure forms of governance in their own image. Today, these privileges are also enjoyed by the hardware/software platforms that manufacture such optics and leverage them as the basis of their own exo-state governmental innovations.
I mean “Cloud” in a very general sense, referring to planetary-scale software/hardware platforms, supporting data centers, physical transmission links, browser-based applications, and so forth.
My ongoing discussion on the political economy of platforms with Benedict Singleton, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams informs these last remarks.
See his “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk” in Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. Nick Bostrom and Martin Rees (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
An earlier version of this text was presented as a keynote lecture at Transmediale: Afterglow, January 31, 2014, in Berlin. Its presentation shared the stage with another keynote by Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk) and was given at the curatorial invitation of Ryan Bishop and Jussi Parikka, along with Kristoffer Gansing and Transmediale. My thanks to each of them. The title, “The Black Stack,” was coined 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 “Black Stack” as an alternative to the current system of global calculation.