The Stack Quotes

“The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know.”
― Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

“Yes, you are a battery.”
― Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

“... the Belgians took ivory, the Americans cobalt, and now billions of Earthlings carry little bits of Africa around with them in their pockets.
... Extraction and export of minerals, both legal and illegal, have been controlled and taxed by competing militias and organized crime; away from the relative stability of the cities, thest groups continue to terrorize local populations and use the proceeds of this export trade to finance ongoing wars over local populations and use the proceeds of this export trade to finance ongoing wars over local territorial positions. The smoldering conflict is a war partially financed with the manufacturing capital of smart phones and laptops; inevitably, the smooth skin of the device demands gore to feed its gloss.

... The most heinous circumstances are the most allegorically rich, but even absent the anarchic brutality of these wars and the Conradian odor of campaigns against them, the lesson is more global: there is no Stack without a vast immolation and involution the Earth's mineral cavities. The Stack terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices and spitting up mobile phones.”
― Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

“Airports are not simulations of cities; rather cities are simulations of airports.”
― Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

“The Stack terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices and spitting up mobile phones.”
― Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

“Platforms don't look like how they work and don't work like how they look.”
― Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

“In the worldliness of migrant labor, migrant capital, migrant information, migrant cultures, migrant languages, migrant standards of legal rights and itinerant universalisms, the specific standards of (national) citizenship (jus sanguinis, “right of blood,” and jus soil, “right of soil”) cannot carry the same guarantee of determination as they may have under different regimes of relative motility operated by nations tied to land and states woven to nations.”
― Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

“Tomorrow, may I have your yesterday?”
― Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

“As the shape of political geography and the architecture of planetary-scale computation as a whole, The Stack is an accidental megastructure, one that we are building both deliberately and unwittingly and is in turn building us in its own image.”
― Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty