Click and drag to rotate the sides.
Right-click and drag to rotate the cube.
Benjamin H. Bratton describes The Stack as follows:
“The development of planetary-scale computation
– this accidental megastructure that I call The Stack –
has both deformed and distorted
the 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.”
This megastructure is comprised
of six interdependent layers –
Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User –
that are reliant on, and in some ways, produce each other.
By putting these layers in direct relationship,
one can begin to understand and observe
the system of reliance
that in turn sets the parameters
for the type of political geographies that are produced.
For example, the Cloud Layer
– the place of global User-Citizenship
in which people interact across borders
through various interfacial regimes –
is not itself placeless or omnipresent,
because its physical infrastructure
(fibre optic cables and server farms)
exists physically within
(and in the case of fibre optic cables, between)
multiple political sovereignties,
in which the Earth Layer of that land
provides resources to fuel and make the infrastructure
that not only takes/occupies physical space,
but creates the digital space in turn.
By mapping this complex system
of reliance and production that striates the earth,
we are able to better understand
the types of political geographies
that are produced as a result.
I have attempted to visualise The Stack
in a way that illustrates the interdependent
and enmeshed layers.
Each face of the cube
represents one of the six layers of The Stack.
Once scrambled, the faces of the cube
could be symbolically read as the political geographies
that emerge as a result
of the system of reliance,
interdependence and production between each layer.
On the inside of the cube is a cross-section
of undersea fibre optic cabling.
In this model, The Stack reconfigures
in form and direction
according to each layers’ tides and fluctuations,
not only in a fixed vertical hierarchy.
This proposition of a modular Stack
might not represent The Stack we have,
but perhaps The Stack(s) to come.