Hemispheral Stacks
Description
Benjamin Bratton:
"Hemispherical Stacks examines the implications of multipolar computation and multipolar geopolitics, one in terms of the other. It considers the competitive and cooperative dynamics of computational supply chains and both adversarial and reciprocal relations between states, platforms, and regional bodies. Multiple scenarios are composed about diverse areas of focus, including chip wars, foundational models, data sovereignty, and astropolitics."
(https://research.antikythera.org/)
Discussion
Benjamin Bratton:
"Planetary computation refers to the interlocking cognitive infrastructures that structure knowledge, geopolitics, and ecologies. Its touch extends from the global to the intimate, from the nanoscale to the edge of the atmosphere and back again. It is not a single totality demanding transparency but instead a highly uneven, long-emerging blending of biosphere and technosphere.
As you stare at the glass slab in your hand, you are, as a user, connected to a planetary technology that both evolved and was planned in irregular steps over time, each component making use of others: an accidental, discontiguous megastructure. Instead of a single megamachine, planetary computation can be understood as being composed of modular, interdependent, functionally defined layers, not unlike a network protocol stack. These layers compose The Stack: the Earth layer, Cloud layer, City layer, Address layer, Interface layer, and User layer.
Earthly ecological flows become sites of intensive sensing, quantification, and governance. Cloud computing spurs platform economics and creates virtual geographies in its own image. Cities form vast discontiguous networks as they weave their borders into enclaves or escape routes. Virtual address systems locate billions of entities and events onto unfamiliar maps. Interfaces present vibrant augmentations of reality, standing in for extended cognition. Users, both human and nonhuman, populate this tangled apparatus. Every time you click on an icon, you send a relay all the way down the paths of connection and back again, activating (and being activated by) the entire planetary infrastructure hundreds of times a day.
The emergence of planetary computation in the late twentieth century shifted not only the lines on the map but also the maps themselves. It distorted and reformed Westphalian political geography and created new territories in its own image. Large cloud platforms took on roles traditionally assumed by nation-states (identity, maps, commerce, etc.). At the same time, nation-states increasingly evolved into large cloud platforms (state services, surveillance, smart cities, etc.). In the last few decades, the division of the Earth into jurisdictions defined by land and sea has given way to a more irregular, unstable, and contradictory amalgam of overlapping sovereign claims to data, people, processes, and places defined instead by bandwidth, simulation, and hardware and software choke points.
In recent years, these stacks have been decisively fragmenting into multipolar hemispherical stacks defined by geopolitical competition and confrontation. A North Atlantic–Pacific stack based on American platforms has been delinking from a Chinese stack based on Chinese platforms, while India, the Gulf countries, Russia, and Europe have charted courses based on citizenship identification, protection, and information filtering
From the Chip Wars to EU’s AI decrees, this marks a shift toward a more multipolar architecture and hemispheres of influence, and the multipolarization of planetary-scale computation into “hemispherical stacks.” These segment and divide the planet into sovereign computational systems extending from energy and mineral sourcing, intercontinental transmission, and cloud platforms to address systems, interface cultures, and different politics of the “user.”
This is both exciting and dangerous. It implies Galapagos effects of regional cultural diversity and artificially encapsulated information cultures. For geotechnology, just as for geopolitics, “digital sovereignty” is an idea beloved by both democracies and authoritarian regimes.
The ascendance of high-end chip manufacturing to the pinnacle of strategic plans—in the US and in the China Strait—is exemplary and corresponds with the removal of Chinese equipment from Western networks, the removal of Western platforms from Chinese mobile phones, and so on. Economies are defined by interoperability and delinking. But the situation extends further up the stack. The militarization of financial networks in the form of sanctions, the data-driven weaponization of populism, and the reformulation of “citizen” as a “private user with personal data” all testify to deeper shifts. In some ways, these parallel historical shift how new technologies alter societal institutions in their image, and yet the near-term and long-term future of planetary computation as a political technology is uncertain. Antikythera seeks to model these futures preemptively, drawing maps of otherwise uncharted waters.
Hemispherical Stacks describes how the shift toward a more multipolar geopolitics over the last five years and the shift toward a more multipolar planetary computation not only track one another but are, in many respects, the same thing."