Bratton 2015

Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.

"Sometime from 1995 to 1997 or so, especially in academic design programs, software seemed to displace theory as a tool for thought. “Many students interested in asking essential questions about how things work turned to software, not just to describe those things but also to make them, and not just to make them, but also to think through them. This shift came with trade-offs. Thinking with tools, and in this case, working with the fixed capital of advanced technologies, is a good thing. It is part of the genesis of our species. It is how we mediate the world and are mediated by it; we become what we are by making that which in turn makes us. This is no less true (or less complex) as software becomes a more ubiquitous feature of the whole world: in your hand, in the building, part of every supply chain, every image, every archive, every query. I am of the opinion, however, that as we quickly learn more precise and higher-resolution processes, it becomes correspondingly harder to see the whole at once. Accomplishments of analysis are paid for with a dissipation of synthesis. As such, software may need theory at least as much as theory needs software."

“Going forward, we really do need new and better models, because computation already operates in ways that have surpassed and overflowed the regular cartographies.”

“This book starts with the technologies themselves, abstracting from them a formal model that is general and comprehensive, but not complete or fixed. The model does not put technology “inside” a “society,” but sees a technological totality as the armature of the social itself.”

"Computation as governance"

"an accidental megastructure call The Stack that is not only a kind of planetary-scale computing system; it is also a new architecture for how we divide up the world into sovereign spaces"