(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Benjamin Bratton:
The Stack – On Software and Sovereignty
MIT Press, 2016
It is well known that the politics we know today are in "crisis", understood in that the confidence in the governance of parliamentary democracy and its political administrators is severely compromised, not least in the EU, where in the wake of the financial crisis 2008 experienced an ever-increasing fragmentation and political disintegration – threatening to shift with forced Grexit and voluntary Brexit. The Syrian left-wing failure of the Greek left wing towards the questionable agenda of the technocratic savings regime (carried on by the so-called Troika, a trinity of the EU, the ECB and the IMF) has been seen by many as symptomatic of the end of an era such as the winding down of modern European paradigm of politics. A tip of this thesis is found by left-wing intellectual couple Julien Coupat and Eric Hazan, who in the French newspaper Libération earlier this year interpreted Syriza's paralysis as an operative picture of "the death of politics".
It may appear to be a radical finding that politics as we know since the ancient police should have passed away at death, but it is probably not entirely wrong. At least, if the term "politics" keeps thinking of decision-making heads of state assembled in a Baroque parliament building at the center of power. If not the policy already er death, then it is at least dying, but kept alive artificially by a gigantic respiratory apparatus – a machinery so extensive, complex, and global that it seems at least anachronistic to imagine that it should be possible to locate a center. The high pinnacle of power has long been plunged into gravel, the aura of power that once surrounded political statesmen (and yes, political has, from the beginning to the end, been primarily for "men") seems to evaporate against fallen reality stars like Trump, if continued accelerating direction toward the White House – the symbolic stronghold of power – is only reinforced by the constant (and algorithmically mediated) reproduction of Trump -memes on social media.
Programming software today is far along the way of influencing political processes and exercising political sovereignty.
In the media theorist Benjamin Bratton's large and voluminous book The Stack – On Software and Sovereignty (2016) link the «crisis of politics» with the question of the functional relation of algorithms to power and sovereignty in our post-internet era, where the distinction between the virtual and the so-called «real» world no longer seems meaningful or useful. A central argument in the book is thus, «that the 'political program' is no longer only to be found in the legal consensus (or dissent) and in the admonitions of traditional 'politics' but is also found directly in machines». Thus, since World War II, the politically connoted word “program” has taken on a whole new and inevitable semantic dimension, the software-related one. Programming software today largely coincides with influencing political processes and exercising political sovereignty. But the transition from one model of sovereignty to another should not be understood as meaning that those in power have simply changed Parliament's strategy with interface-design, but rather that the way the various technological interfaces converge has crystallized in a new, far down the road randomly global monstrosity called the stack (TheStack): «The stack is a huge software / hardware formation, a proto-megastructure […] a machine that truly encloses the entire planet, not only penetrating and disrupting the Westphalian model of state territories but also creating new spaces in its own image: clouds ( clouds), networks, zones, social graphs, ecologies, megacities, formal and informal violence, strange theologies that all intrude on each other. "
The stack – that exists of six interwoven layers – Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User Is not to be understood as a machine of repression with a hidden cockpit manned by evil despots seeking to secure world domination, but is, according to Bratton, more of a decentralized platform logic describing the transition from one sovereignty paradigm to another, from the political to the infrastructural , from a sovereign government to a “algorithmic government” multiple sovereignty procedures.
Bratton's emphasis on this crucial shift – the decentralization of political power towards an impersonal cybernetic machinery living in this world's complex logistical cycle of goods, money and energies – is far from a particularly original thesis, but can clearly be traced back to post- Marxist road to Foucault over Deleuze and on to Tiqqun as well as the Invisible Committee. The latter grouping in particular – and in particular his last book À nos amis (To Our Friends) from 2014 – would otherwise have been an obvious reference for Bratton, as it focuses precisely on the emergence of cybernetic communication technologies in the wake of World War II, and on how these technological innovations uncover «a kind of governance, the act of which has almost been forgotten, but whose concepts have an underground connection to the cables that are pulled, one after the other, across the surface of the globe, as well as to the flow of information in equally seen running through biology, artificial intelligence, management or the cognitive sciences. "
Bratton explains unfortunately not very conscientious about the preceding course of the history of ideas for his own – too large – stated thesis, but instead chooses to position himself in explicit opposition to analyzes of this more negative type, which are instead written off as expressions of «perplex» and « confused melancholy ».
In contrast, Bratton stands – quite in line with the techno-avant-garde of the time – as the savior of posthumanism, designer that must stack the stack differently and fulfill the latent architectural potentials for a better world, where the various interface regimes are «more efficiently inclusive and more precisely representative». That is the vision. The design question is thus – as Bratton himself writes several times – the book's central mission. In the post-political era that is projected here as a software / hardware merger, design is simply presented as the solution model that is to cause the stack to stabilize, rather than be undermined.
According to Bratton, we are beyond all notions of "a future community" – as he writes with reference to the title of a book by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben from 2004 – and it is therefore no longer possible to be "pro- or anti-stack". », According to Bratton. With every substantial alternative thus delimited, and the reformist fixed point firmly anchored in the vertical order of the existing, the stack, «design» sounds incredibly much like a slightly smarter word for «reform». However, it is highly doubtful whether the wars, crises and disasters of the coming time – from climate change to nuclear disasters to mass flight and poverty – can be addressed as a mere "design problem"? Faced with an analysis of sovereignty like the Brattons, any capitalist-critical gesture, à la den Coupat and Hazan seem to point to with their temporal diagnosis of "the death of politics," will necessarily appear like a dog in a game of skittles. But sometimes even the most graceful dance step can assume a Klodshans' pose: No matter what, the stack must be brought down – before it all falls down on our ears.
