The Stack itself may or may not exist, but it's left everything that came before it in a state of rubble.When I was a child, the grownup books in my house were arranged according to two principles. Benjamin Bratton's The Stack breaks more new ground than a carpet bombing. This political geography of computation is a strange, marvelous text of great conceptual beauty. Keller Easterling, Professor, Yale School of Architecture author of Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space The Stack imagines a design brief for the whole world while floating or falling through all the ever-efflorescent plasmas and atmospheres of digital information. Natalie Jeremijenko, Associate Professor of Art, Computer Science, and Environmental Studies, New York University It is more than just philosophy of technology, software studies, or design criticism it analyzes and guides our thinking in a baffling Anthropocenic era when computation works at the planetary scale and constitutes governance. McKenzie Wark, author of Molecular Red: Theory for the AnthropoceneĮndlessly thought-provoking, this amazing book is both cognitive mapping and a projective geometry of the new dimensions of technological reality we live in. He cuts through many received ideas about technology, globalization, and so forth and presents a fresh vision of the architecture of the world. In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton shows, with brilliant insight and imagination, what the world is coming to look like in an era of planetary-scale computing. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds. The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling-not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation-smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation-can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image? What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales-from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self-quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. If you can’t find the resource you need here, visit our contact page to get in touch.Įstablished in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.Ī comprehensive political and design theory of planetary-scale computation proposing that The Stack-an accidental megastructure-is both a technological apparatus and a model for a new geopolitical architecture. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.Ĭollaborating with authors, instructors, booksellers, librarians, and the media is at the heart of what we do as a scholarly publisher. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. International Affairs, History, & Political Science.MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide.
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