Hemispherical Stacks

Summary#

Hemispherical Stacks is a collection of eighteen short scenario fictions, edited by Benjamin Bratton, Stanley Qiufan Chen, and Lukáš Likavčan and published in the Antikythera journal in November 2025. Its premise is that the fragmentation of planetary computation into a few continental-scale blocs and the arrival of a multipolar geopolitics are one development, not two. Each piece imagines a consequence of that premise, written as reportage, press release, UN resolution, or retrospective rather than as a story with protagonists, and the editors ask that they be read as tiles of one mosaic.

The argument#

The introduction restates the thesis of The Stack in the present tense. Cloud platforms now perform functions that states once monopolised, including identity, cartography, and currency, while states remodel themselves as platforms. The editors reject the inference that states are withering away; states have always been information-gathering entities and evolve toward new capacities for sensing their societies. The result is a set of named stacks, a US Stack, a China Stack, an India Stack, a Gulf Stack, perhaps a Eurostack, each bundling minerals, logistics, cloud, addressing, interface culture, and a politics of the user. The central claim is that this segmentation and the turn to multipolar geopolitics "are the same phenomenon."

A second shift is layered on the first. AI is now eating software, the editors write, and stacks built for trained models differ from those built for procedural code in how they relate centre to periphery and user to platform. Competition over GPUs, minerals, bandwidth, and inference capacity is ordinary foreign-policy news; what is missing is vivid description of the landscape this produces.

The method answers that gap. Think tanks, the editors argue, instinctively protect incumbent institutions; science fiction is bound to plot and protagonist and has polarised into utopia and dystopia. Scenario Fiction, as they define it, "minimizes psychology to maximize sociology": it depersonalises the future, follows cascades across technology, ecology, economics, and geopolitics, and is ambivalent rather than activist. The pieces are "provocations, not prescriptions." The whole is meant to accumulate into a composite metascenario richer than any one piece.

Section by section#

The eighteen pieces group loosely by the layer of the stack they stress. A first cluster concerns the blocs themselves and what it costs to belong to, or refuse, one: Bratton's Blurope, where a Europe that legislates itself out of the models becomes a "low-resolution society"; Gilman's Climate Leviathan, where China wins the Global South with a turnkey package of green energy and surveillance; You's SEAoEU, which pairs a museumified Europe with an integrated ASEAN; Dreyer's Holy Land, where a Chinese-built Gulf caliphate lives indoors; and Lee's Garden Empires, where intelligence is metered and traded like water.

A second cluster follows the financial and legal instruments that replace territorial sovereignty. Shemakov's Fundable Earth turns Ukraine's minerals into a Delaware limited partnership; Lucien Bratton's Great Taiwan Freeze has corporate Credit Unions halt a war by switching off two economies; Malik's Actionable Strategies tracks a business lobby through three press releases as pricing systems fail.

A third cluster is about substrates and the physics of computation: Lu's Ouroboros, in which chips and models design each other until thermodynamics redraws alliances; Likavčan's Organoid Nation, where orbit-grown brain organoids make Scotland independent; Long's Underground Intelligence, where accelerators begin to generate their own theories; Xu's Martian Rovers, a small-data robot justified by Mars's scarcity. Carver's Telos Project, a CCRU persona writing about RAND scenario design, is the collection's reflection on its own method.

The remainder moves off-planet and to the oceans: Tran's lunar archive, Barcay's UN declaration of war on a satellite cartel, and three Pacific pieces by Quicho, Fujii, and Chen in which sinking islands defend themselves with reef sensors, underwater domes, and an engineered consumer island.

Key concepts#

• Hemispherical Stacks — continental or alliance-scale computational systems, each with its own energy, logistics, cloud, address, and interface layers; sovereignty within them is the right to produce data about flows in a domain.
• Scenario Fiction — depersonalised speculative writing that follows systemic cascades rather than characters, neither utopian nor dystopian, intended to be read as pieces of a composite.
• Accidental Megastructure — the editors' summary of The Stack's model: a discontiguous set of interdependent layers rather than a single megamachine.
• Platform Sovereignty — the condition, assumed throughout, in which cloud platforms perform state functions and states rebuild themselves as platforms.

Connections#

The introduction is an explicit sequel to The Stack, which supplied the six-layer model and the claim that computation produces its own territory. Rendering Scenario Fiction is the newsletter excerpt of this collection and describes the genre from the design side. Bratton's Noema essay Is European AI A Lost Cause? Not Necessarily. makes the Blurope argument without the fiction. Hemispherical Stacks is one of the program's named research areas, described in Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation.

The scenarios: The Myth of Blurope, The Telos Project, The Architectures of Intelligence and Garden Empires, Climate Leviathan, Fundable Earth: The Mineral Sovereignty Regime, SEAoEU, Holy Land, Hardware–Software Ouroboros, Actionable Strategies for Securing Price Stability amid Uncharted Economic Risks, The Great Taiwan Freeze, Underground Intelligence, Donkey-Like Martian Rovers Are About to Enter Service!, Look at the Moon, The Satellite Alliance, Organoid Nation, Bioprospecting Under the Crown of Thorns, Haven for the Future, Emerald Isle: A Beacon of Hope Amid Climate Crisis?.