Hemispherical Stacks

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.