“Yes, you are a battery.” This phrase reflects his exploration of how individuals are integrated into global systems of computation and governance, often compared to being mere components within a vast technological infrastructure. It draws on themes of agency, power, and the role of human beings in large-scale digital systems. This idea is also reminiscent of the metaphor in The Matrix (1999), where humans are literally used as batteries to power machines, though Bratton uses the concept in a broader philosophical and technological context.
“As the shape of political geography and the architecture of planetary-scale computation as a whole, The Stack is an accidental megastructure, one that we are building both deliberately and unwittingly and is in turn building us in its own image.” Bratton asserts that this structure has emerged unintentionally, driven by human actions, technologies, and systems like cloud computing, data networks, and algorithms. While we deliberately contribute to building this system, much of its growth happens unintentionally. In turn, this megastructure influences and reshapes human behaviors, societies, and identities, reflecting its logic and design back onto us. It highlights the reciprocal relationship between humanity and the technological systems we create, emphasizing their role in shaping our world and ourselves.
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. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image?
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. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us.
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. 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. 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.
The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds.
thestack.org
