#2: Stacks & Megastructures
I've been hacking my way through The Stack, Benjamin Bratton's masterful and wildly ambitious effort to describe a comprehensive model of the world that the internet has wrought. The Stack comprises six layers that Bratton explains in detail: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User. I meant to do a Kneeling Bus "book club" (like I did for Delirious New York) and write a post on each layer, but it's taken me too long just to read the damn book. Which is well worth it.
Lately, The Stack has got me thinking a lot about megastructures. Bratton introduces the "accidental megastructure" as a description of the Stack itself, "one massively distributed machine" that envelops the planet. Later, he extends this characterization to the urbanized world: The Earth is wrapped in a single continuous city more than it's dotted by individual, separate cities, as it once was. Eventually, Bratton observes that platforms like Facebook and Google are best understood as massive megastructural utopias that house their own territory and make that territory conform to their own rules. Funny enough, the same companies design literal megastructures for their corporate headquarters, which act as physical metaphors for their platforms' logic (see Norman Foster's Apple HQ or Frank Gehry's Facebook campus).
Megastructures invert everything we think we know about urbanism. They anchor a society with no commons, one in which we each just need to pick a megastructure (an institution, a platform, or an actual building) to be safe inside of, while everyone locked out fends for themselves in the chaotic wilderness. Sounds like late capitalism to me!
Reads:
Elon Musk is actually starting to drill the tunnels he thinks will solve LA's traffic problem. It seems foolish but on the other hand, he's Elon Musk...
Computers are dreaming about fake stars and galaxies. Hopefully the output is less boring than No Man's Sky.
Fun fact, megastructure edition: Eight of the nine largest stadiums in the world are college football stadiums in the United States but the other one (the world's largest) is in North Korea.
This week on the blog I wrote about enclaves, megastructures, and navigating the urban wilderness using iPhone apps.
Until next time,
Drew