---
title: "Hemispherical Stacks"
description: "Bratton's term, from a 2018 essay following The Stack, for the fragmentation of planetary computation into a few alliance-scale sovereign computational systems: an American-platform stack delinking from a Chinese one, with India, the Gulf, Russia and Europe charting their own courses."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/hemispherical-stacks"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/hemispherical-stacks"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Hemispherical Stacks

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/hemispherical-stacks), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Bratton's term, from a 2018 essay following The Stack, for the fragmentation of planetary computation into a few alliance-scale sovereign computational systems: an American-platform stack delinking from a Chinese one, with India, the Gulf, Russia and Europe charting their own courses. Each bundles the book's layers, from mineral sourcing through cloud platforms to a politics of the user. The term's claim is an identity, not a correlation: multipolar geopolitics and multipolar computation are one phenomenon. The reasoning runs through governance in the cybernetic sense, a society sensing and modeling itself; since that capacity now lives in computational infrastructure, building a society means building its stack, so chip manufacturing becomes national security and data the substance of sovereignty. The Stack had foreseen "Stack-versus-Stack warfare"; the compendium adds that AI-era stacks differ in kind. The term presupposes the Accidental Megastructure and Platform Sovereignty; Self-Depresentation names its refusal limit.

## Appears in

- [Benjamin Bratton on Planetary Computation’s Next Phase](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/mitpress-reader-computation-in-motion) (2026-02-05)
- [Rendering Scenario Fiction](https://antikythera.wiki/work/substack/2026-01-20-rendering-scenario-fiction) (2026-01-20)
- [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks) (2025-11-21)
- [Is European AI A Lost Cause? Not Necessarily.](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-is-european-ai-a-lost-cause-not-necessarily) (2025-09-30)
- [57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra-film) (2025-05-10)
- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) (2025-05-10)
- [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) (2025-05-10)
- [An Update on The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/lecture-update-on-the-stack-2018) (2018-10-08)
- [The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-stack) (2016-02-19)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._