“The development of planetary scale computation –this accidental megastructure that I call The Stack – has both deformed and distorted this traditional Westphalian model. And so The Stack is understood as both an actual massively distributed technological infrastructure, in which, and on which, and with which, we organise our cultures, economies and societies, but also as a kind of abstract model for how it is that we could conceptualise subdivisions of political geography that are not just about horizontal adjacencies, but actually about vertical layers where one site, and one person, and one event, and one network, may be part of the jurisdiction of multiple forms of political sovereignty at the same time, one on top of another.” - Benjamin H. Bratton on The Stack

The Rubiks Cube formulates some possible configurations of The Stack – a complex set of layers, events and materialities that are put in direct relationship with one another, not only in a discernible and differentiated vertical orientation, but one that reconfigures its direction and form all the time; a set of enmeshed relational geographies.

This bringing together and scrambling of seemingly inconsequential and geographically separate events not only conceptualises new political geographies, but also brings into focus the fundamental reliance, repression and expenditure of natural resources in order to make planetary scale computation possible. Whilst planetary scale computation facilitates the networked world and the blurring of political and geographic sovereignty through which we organise our cultures, economies and societies, it also functions as a sensing apparatus that has allowed us to observe the effects of global warming and climate change, but whose current physical infrastructure is contributing in a big way to the exhaustion of natural resources. Take for example, server farms: the natural resource-hungry physical infrastructure of cloud computing built in the peripheries of our societies.

In fact there is a connection to be made between the infrastructure and function of the most common and evil type of capitalist agriculture, factory farms, and the infrastructure that houses most of our digital networks that have helped connect the world, server ‘farms’. I find the use of the word ‘farm’ in the latter structure curious and telling, especially in relation to its predecessor. Their eerie similarity should not be ignored.

They both continuously produce without rest, they occupy windowless warehouses in the peripheries of our societies, they deplete natural resources, their primary goals remain profit, they’re exploitative and both facilitate the spread of viruses. I don’t think it would be far-fetched to then come to the hypothesis that factory farms have informed both the form and function of server farms, except server farms harvest humans. Both are examples of human-exclusion zones: highly securitised spaces whose priority is to protect from breach what is being kept inside in a way that is unfairly disproportionate to the efforts made to protect literally the world on the ‘outside’ from the lethal matter that might leak from these prohibited zones, be it digital or biological viruses. In both server and factory farms, the ecological principle of trophic cascades is dangerously at play, which is that, as Benjamin Bratton puts it, “...the agency of one form of life sets in motions changes with an outsize effect”, he continues by saying “This conclusion to be drawn is not that global interconnection is a bad idea (or a good idea), but that it is intrinsic and runs deeper than conventionally realised…our thinking and our interventions must be based on a higher resolution understanding of cyclical interrelations and physical economies, from scales of viral infection to intercontinental circulation and back again.”