---
title: "An Update on The Stack"
description: "In this October 2018 lecture for projekt bauhaus's Datatopia workshop in Berlin, Benjamin Bratton revisits The Stack two and a half years after publication, \"mid-Trump and pre-who-knows-what.\" The…"
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Benjamin Bratton"
published: "2018-10-08"
original_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuEO-iTf4C4"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/lecture-update-on-the-stack-2018"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/media/lecture-update-on-the-stack-2018"
last_updated: "2026-09-02"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# An Update on The Stack

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Benjamin Bratton
- **Published:** 2018-10-08
- **Kind:** Essays, talks & interviews · Talk
- **Venue:** YouTube · projekt bauhaus
- **Original:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuEO-iTf4C4
- **Length:** 13k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/lecture-update-on-the-stack-2018
- **Notes generated:** 2026-09-02

## Summary

In this October 2018 lecture for projekt bauhaus's Datatopia workshop in Berlin, [Benjamin Bratton](https://antikythera.wiki/people/benjamin-bratton) revisits The Stack two and a half years after publication, "mid-Trump and pre-who-knows-what." The book's two claims stand, but the emphasis has moved: new territory is now produced as much by states remaking themselves as stacks as by platforms absorbing state functions, and the one global stack has undergone "a mitosis" into multipolar hemispherical stacks, each sovereign over the data it can sense and model. He surveys the Chinese, Euro-American, and Russian versions, faults the post-Facebook "take back our data" politics for rebuilding on the individual, refuses the word "proto-fascist" as Eurocentric, and closes with oil and deep time as the model of a Copernican disenchantment that damages what it discovers.

## The argument

Bratton opens by answering the host's suggestion that software has replaced theory: the relation has inverted, technology is ahead of the concepts, and philosophy has to catch up. He dates the talk to the summer of 2016, when he, Olga Tenisheva, and Nicolay Boyadzhiev were planning Strelka's The New Normal program during the American election. His text from then predicted that where a viable future should be, "something insufferably backwards fills it in," and he adds, unattributed in the talk, Donald Trump's line that "the whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what's going on." Ethnonationalist populism is a global phenomenon with global causes, yet each country credits or blames itself; the voting pattern from Manila to Milwaukee is the same, urban cosmopolitans against rural monoculturalists, and the city becomes the target, as for the residents of District 13 in a real Hunger Games. Populism's harm, he argues, is that it narrows political articulation to the remedial vocabularies it can speak.

Against this he sets a method. Presentism and shallow futurism conspire to validate a sense of cause and effect scaled to a human biography; 2050 is not the future for serious systems design, because 2050 is already being designed, badly, today. He proposes a Copernican turn in design that treats intelligence as an emergent effect of material technologies and the world as "a model open to design and designation," not through mastery but because the planet uses humans and other things to know and remake itself: "we are the medium, not the message." He will play "Satan's lawyer," a Chinese journalist's phrase for devil's advocate.

The book, "one picture and 500 pages of caption," argued that planetary-scale computation deforms Westphalian geography and creates territories in its own image, and that its genres form one accidental megastructure. The update is that the state is now the more interesting party and that the megastructure has split along hemispheres, which he reads through Schmitt's Grossraum rather than as spheres or a neo-cameralist patchwork. The hemispheres fill the middle of the talk; the close argues that the reactionary turn is transitional and that design must scale up to the real rather than down to the intuitive.

## Section by section

### Layers revisited

The secondary literature and the design projects the book inspired concentrated on the Cloud layer, producing speculative passports, currencies, and citizenships that confuse "the semiotic accoutrements of sovereign systems with those systems themselves." The inverse movement, states becoming cloud platforms, meets narratives of surveillance and withdrawal; tape over the webcam is both counter-design and a warding spell, "like Ash Wednesday." At the Earth layer the technologies for carbon capture, carbon pricing, fourth-generation nuclear, and rewilding exist and the institutions to deploy them do not. Quasi-sovereign city-states hold their national hosts at arm's length, while the countryside, in Rem Koolhaas's phrase, is where the cloud lives, in data centres unoccupied by hominids. The Interface layer is also "the layer through which the world looks at itself."

### Multipolar hemispherical stacks

Three stacks are clearly drawn: China's BAT stack (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) behind the firewall; a Euro-American GAFA stack that also takes in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel; and a Russian stack across the CIS. Each is sovereign over the data available to it to sense and model, and each now issues an AI white paper, China's, Macron's, Putin's, and eventually Trump's, naming AI as its organizing strategy.

"Take back our data" is a slogan he supports while pressing its terms: who is "we," and what is this data? Data is not picked "like strawberries"; modelling produces it, and the valuable data is the derivative models about it. On the Facebook hearings he calls "community" the worst of the crashing metaphors and locates Facebook's "original sin" in a social network built on the individual and the presentation of self, which led directly to "recursive narcissism and apophenia." GDPR draws "literal dotted lines from data center to data center" and may acquire a gravity like the euro's, or make the EU "a Galapagos jurisdiction," a dark area on the planetary archive. His reservation is again the unit: "citizen data for citizens" raises the question citizens of what, when cities are full of non-citizens whom algorithmic governance must include. Calls for state oversight in North America are not dumb, but weighing them as if the Chinese stack were not an available comparison is "myopically Western."

### China and Russia

Drawing on The New Normal's trip to Shenzhen and Hong Kong, he describes the BAT stack as a prescribed interoperability that keeps others out: Skype blocked in China, LinkedIn in Russia, Huawei phones unavailable in the US. QR codes are an evolutionary response of the city's synthetic environment to a new species, the camera. Social credit and facial recognition make the city itself a medium of the stack, an ambient urban AI, and the Chinese stack is above all logistics, software driving swarms of hardware. The Belt and Road Initiative, like Superstudio's Continuous Monument, is "both real and not real": as one meta-machine it would be the largest work of design to date, and its narrative mobilises the capital that builds it, which he calls state-scale speculative design.

Russia's case is carried by the site across the river from Strelka: the Palace of the Soviets, its cathedral demolished, its foundation a public swimming pool for most of the century, and the cathedral rebuilt larger under Putin, a "great leap backwards." Russian stack rhetoric runs on contamination and immunology, with an occult streak he illustrates by Anton Vaino's Nooscope. Where China built choke points for deep packet inspection from the start, Russia is building "a retroactive firewall": the attempt to shut down Telegram chased it from Google's servers to Amazon's, took down Google Docs as collateral, and taught the country to install VPNs, whose use quadrupled in two weeks.

### Potemkin ontologies and empty states

Hemispherical stacks are a reterritorialization of bounded, non-contiguous hemispheres whose borders track what each can sense, index, model, and simulate. The danger is that any control system at this scale reduces reality to the complexity it can think with, so each stack governs through a Potemkin ontology. A Snowden deck published by Der Spiegel shows the NSA has a stack theory of its own. Borders, like interfaces, are generative; membranes incorporate as well as exclude. Near-term forms include states depopulated of people, robotic Arctic port cities, and Syria, where Assad has found he does not need a population to have a country; their corollary is the shadow economy, a social economy without a state. UBI funded by Pigouvian taxes risks welfare chauvinism, as in the Five Star Movement's "Italians first" version.

### Against rehumanization

Confusion about AI and robotics should inspire fewer calls for "normative rehumanization" and more recognition of non-anthropomorphic agency; the loudest replacement panic comes from male critics, while feminists already know we have always been cyborgs. "Team human" journalism turns human rights toward species privilege. He rejects "proto-fascist" as imprecise and Eurocentric, taking Europe's past as everyone else's future, and asks for a real provincialization of Europe. He hopes the consolidation around legacy territories is a transitional interruption of a longer arc toward plural planetary polities, in which humans remain "an unapologetically migratory species": "another episode of anthropogenic integration, not its meltdown."

### Oil and deep time

The conclusion sets him against an unnamed colleague who blames hyperobjects and wants design to re-render systems at a phenomenologically intuitive scale; design should instead be scaled to the real, not downsampled to the digestible. But disenchantment is not innocent. Climate change is known through sensing apparatuses representative of the industrial system causing it, and the search for oil drove the excavation that produced the evidence of deep time. Mining made geology possible, and burning what was mined, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, made ecological time run on social clocks: "we dig for oil because we think the planet runs on our time, but because we did we learned that this is not true, but by doing so we made it true." Whether the Faustian bargain was worth it split his students; the better question is what would make it worth it, and the answer must be designed.

### Q&A

Asked who the designer is, Bratton argues for design that includes evolutionary processes, means designation rather than decoration, and sets the terms by which systems unfold, a position he shares with Keller Easterling. Models have more agency than designers; he distinguishes descriptive models valued by correspondence, predictive models that need only work ("screwdrivers aren't true"), and projective models that enforce what should be. Asked whether the user is a subject, he answers that the user is a position, not an identity, available to "animal, vegetable, mineral." The stack is a theory of totality, not an enclosure; there is always an outside.

## Key concepts

- **[Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/hemispherical-stacks)** — the mitosis of the one stack into multipolar, non-contiguous regimes (BAT, GAFA, Russian) sovereign over the data each can sense, index, model, and simulate; modelled here on Schmitt's Grossraum.
- **Potemkin ontology** — the world-picture a control system governs through when it reduces reality to the complexity it can think with; every hemispherical stack has one.
- **Individual as unit** — Facebook's "original sin" and the shared flaw of GDPR-style protection and "citizen data" programs: algorithmic governance rebuilt on the Lockean individual rather than disindividuated user positions.
- **[Accidental Megastructure](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/accidental-megastructure)** — the book's figure, restated as "one picture and 500 pages of caption."
- **[Agency Precedes Subjectivity](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/agency-precedes-subjectivity)** — the Q&A claim that models have more agency than designers and that design is designation, not authorship.
- **Copernican turn in design** — intelligence as an emergent effect of material technologies, the planet knowing itself through humans; the later program's [Copernican Trauma](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/copernican-trauma) names its cost.

## Connections

The talk sits between [The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-stack) and its 2026 sequel material. The book hoped that a stack no sovereign could claim across all six layers would be "a totality resistant to totalitarianism"; here, in agreement with the book's structure but against that hope, Bratton already treats splitting into hemispherical stacks as the operative condition. His list of BAT, GAFA, and Russian stacks, the Grossraum framing, and sovereignty defined as rights over data are the earliest full statement of what [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks) and the [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) program present as settled in 2025, down to the claim that multipolar computation and multipolar geopolitics are the same thing and the prediction of "Galapagos effects." The GDPR "Galapagos jurisdiction" remark is the seed of [The Myth of Blurope](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks/blurope) and its [Self-Depresentation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/self-depresentation).

[Computation in Motion](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/mitpress-reader-computation-in-motion), adapted from the tenth-anniversary edition, opens with the same Trump line, now attributed and dated, confirms the 2018 diagnosis of multiplication, and adds a shift the lecture does not anticipate, the replacement of the classical stack by an AI stack; its QR-code and countryside observations repeat this talk almost verbatim. The lecture's suspicion of data localization is qualified in [Is European AI A Lost Cause? Not Necessarily.](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-is-european-ai-a-lost-cause-not-necessarily), which argues for a European stack while agreeing that populism and cultural determinism are the wrong remedy.

The closing argument on the apparatus that both causes and measures climate change is developed in [Planetary Sapience](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-planetary-sapience) and [A New Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-a-new-philosophy-of-planetary-computation), where the Anthropocene is a second-order concept derived from computation, and in [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere), which agrees that awareness of the damage had to be earned by the damaging system. The attack on "team human" is continued in [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) under the name reflectionism, and the Q&A's account of the agency of models anticipates [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc), where computation is governance in an immanent sense.


## Terms used

- [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/hemispherical-stacks)