on accidental megastructures, the blurring of time, and combating accelerationism
the stack
Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack” views the world as an accidental megastructure which does computation. When he discusses the Earth layer of the stack, his allusion to Turing Machines implies that he sees computation as the progression of states, but I read it instead with a different, equivalent model: lambda calculus. In lambda calculus, computation is the evaluation of functions which recieve functions as inputs and produce functions as outputs.
To Bratton, the stack consists of layers. I understand this to be less a matter of independent strata which each contain mutually exclusive sediments, but instead different spatial and temporal scales that we can view the same sediments from. In this sense, a sediment in the user layer could be a human, but a sediment in the interface layer could be that same human insofar as they function to transmit data from one user to another (as in an influencer advertising a brand to a media consumer), and then perhaps their own personal brand constitutes one address in digital-cultural space. I’m not entirely sure if they could act as a city or cloud, but then if we just consider them as a physical entity, their material existence contributes to the autophagic consumption of the earth layer. In my view, layers are similar to, but distinct from systems, as in general systems theory.
In general systems theory, systems, like the media system, operate at various sizes and speeds: they have users, as media consumers, next to interfaces as media contents, next to addresses as media platforms, next to cities as media infrastructure (I think?), next to clouds as the space that the media system inhabits in culture, ideology and logic, and then next to the earth as the material footprint of the media system. If we view the stack as consisting of horizontal layers stacked vertically (which I think is maybe not the greatest diagram, but I have no idea how I’d rather map it out) then systems would be vertical slices of associated parts of the stack.
A picture used to represent the stack reminds me of the traditional visualization for neural networks, where the neural network consists of input layers—in this case the earth layer—hidden layers, and output layers—in this case the user layer—and you can study, in the math, how the inputs flow through model and then produces some output, which reveals on a real level the ways that raw data is converted into the desired concept.
Bratton describes the stack’s construction as accidental. My vague understanding of the world from a systems theoretical perspective is that the systems which are able to propogate themselves (autopoietic) are always-already the ones that exist, so they are always-already running out of space to grow outwards, so they are always-already intertwining with each other accidentally.
accelerationism
In the introduction to his book, he introduces a term that I think deserves to sing.
blur: “this oscillation between the real-but-as-yet-unnamed, and the imagined-but-as-yet-not-real.”
To him, blurring is both a way of comprehending the stack, and a way of reprogramming it. I think that blurry thinking is like glitch thinking, taking place in the (mis)communication between layer of the stack. I’ll do my best to explain how I understand blur, and give some examples of it, but first I need to give context on accelerationism. In “The Stack,” Bratton engages with accelerationism, and in my view, confronts it.
The cutest description of accelerationist logic that I’ve encountered unsurprisingly comes from Maya Kronic and Amy Ireland’s Cute Accelerationism, where they write: “the paradox of voluntary surrender to the inevitable is not a performative contradiction or a knock-down argument against accelerationism, but the very topology of its anastrophic passion. The backwash of anticipative intensity tugs you into the current so that whatever forms downstream will always have been inevitable” (6). In an end note, they elaborate with a quote from Nick Land and Sadie Plant: “catastrophe is the past coming apart, anastrophe is the future coming together.” This logic of voluntarily surrendering to the inevitable and watching the future come together is, in my reading, basically the object of the following (long) paragraph from Bratton.
For this investigation, that compound image [blur] is articulated through the lens of computation operating at planetary scale (which it does very unevenly). But this is also exactly what makes the question of that future more difficult to ask with precision because it is also too easy to ask. To say that the future of geopolitics is a function of the future of computation is to risk saying nothing at all or, worse, to repeat everything that shouldn’t have been said in the first place. Isn’t the conflation of globalization with “digital,” under a rubric that cajoles allegiance to a computational teleology, today’s quintessential nonthought, a mere sequencing of the most obvious into something that stands for history because it renders the mundane for us at a historical scale? Yes. Yet if looking from the future at the present instead of the present for the future, we were to consider that exact situation from the virtual perspective of a world already utterly realigned, we would see plainly that a fundamental and computationally determined realignment of our world is already well underway. Where it goes is anything but settled, and today’s official futurism may have little to contribute when all is said and done. We can, however, say a few things about where it goes with some confidence. This future-antecedent revision of political geography owes itself to a calibrated repetition, a desimulation, of the blur noted above in at least two ways. First, it is realized within a tangible geographic agency of material computation, a physical information geology, that is already at work, already spoken about ad nauseam and so therefore escapes adequate description; second, it is today latent in some possible articulation that could give it formal composability in advance. We can hope that even as the blur confounds, that we designate it further so that it can design us in the course of its own articulation. It may be that our predicament is that we cannot design the next political geography of planetary computation until it more fully designs us in its own image or, in other words, that the critical dependence of the future’s futurity is that we are not yet available for it! It is less that the contemporary hyperbole for computational globalization is a lie, that it doesn’t truthfully describe what it purports to map, but that what it maps doesn’t yet exist. The difficulty in formulating a sufficient geopolity is a function of both what we think we know it has done (but don’t actually know because it hasn’t done that yet) and of what it has done and will do (but which we don’t know and actually don’t know how to know). Unfortunately, for learning how to know it, direct amplification in the intensity and resolution of our answers to the inevitably wrong questions will not help us.
In terms of style, Bratton writes using the same excessively Romantic voice that more traditional accelerationists use, and it’s oppressingly abstract, at least for my lil ADHD brain, but I think the ending makes it clear that he’s trying to avoid hyperstitions—“everything that shouldn’t have been said in the first place”—and the positive feedback loops of “direct amplification in intensity” that they create when entertained without sufficient caution.
What I find so odd about Cute Accelerationism is that it seems like a book made just for me: extremely online, queer, endlessly referential to hip theorists, and quite poetic and strangely beautiful. I’m even post-qwer, it’s embarassing how much nonsense I send my friends. I resonate with cute/acc, and it kinda totally had the opposite effect on me than what it appears to intend. They write: “we are so over the self-important seriousness of lamenting the imminent loss of what is being torn apart, or labouring under the delusion that we have a choice in how all its bits and pieces are put back together.” I understand the impulse on some level, it’s very painful watching your future disappear. Their solution to that pain is to surrender to currents of joyful abandon by becoming cute.
But its very strange, you can’t actually be Cute, you can’t actually be an anime girl or a catboy. On the back of the book, they write: “nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will no longer be remotely human.” So true bestie! although I myself am a human, (I know, ugh) i am on your side. “one of the cute ones” as some may say. btw I never noticed how kawaii your bio is till now but it would be even cuter if you followed back.
Of course, they engage with this contradiction, but not satisfyingly enough in my view, and unlike Bratton, they come out on the side of acceleration, even as they’re trying to push back against neoreactionary Unfortunate Developments. Perhaps in giving an honest and rigorous account of Cute, they overshared when they could have been myserious, unmasking the uncute in becoming-cute. I don’t think this was their goal, their end notes are way too detailed for it to be entirely post-ironic & not at all sincere, but it was their effect, for me. If acceleration works through anastrophic passion, maybe thorough analysis short circuits the short circuit.
I think understanding accelerationist logic helps how Bratton uses blur to engage with accelerationism. Let’s use e/acc, effective accelerationism as an example. e/acc postures itself as hyperstitional—that people’s belief in the inevitability of the ai god will bring it into being, so it’s the duty of young postrat ai engineers to be the first to make te ai god, so they can align it with humanity.
If we don’t engage with e/acc, this actually reinforces its hyperstitional mythos, because the question “will the ai god be aligned with us?” is too easy to ask; our silence and censorship reveals that we fear the potential of e/acc and also believe it shouldn’t have been said in the first place.
So a different approach would be to engage with it, while blurring together “the real-but-as-yet-unnamed, and the imagined-but-as-yet-not-real” which hopefully allows us to ask the right questions. In st/acc (stack accelerationism ^u^), blur-thinking involves emerging geopolitical computational forms, and whatever planetary sci-fi b rain world that you imagine is inevitable. In cute/acc, it’s the you that hurts as you objectify and are made object with the internet, consumerism, media consumption, and it’s the you that’s fully lobotomized, wireheaded, and fashioned anew at the end of “giving in to giving in (to…)”.
so What are the Right Questions to Ask?
A cute/acc example.
I’ve always hated how social media forces you to brand yourself. If you’re a woman, you’re supposed to be beautiful, so when a user curates their profile, the easy question is: “am i cute enough?”
This question takes place ontically in the gap between the user layer (social media user) and the address layer (social media profile), and temporally in the gap between the present feeling of pain in self judgment, and the hyperstitional belief that through surrender to cuting, that pain will dissipate.
So instead, I think the question which incorporates blur would be: “will i have been cute enough?”
I think this blurs together the present and the hyperstitions, and it asks the question in a future anterior, which in my view defangs the anticipative intensity that powers it. The temporality of the first question is diachronic (I’m not sure if this is a standard use of the term, but a few years ago a I half remember a professor using diachrony to mean linear sequential time, in contrast to synchrony, viewing all events at all times at once). It implies “am i cute enough (yet)?”, and I think either answer, yes or no, contains an implied (for now) demanding action.
The temporality of the second question is synchronic, implying “will i have been cute enough (just generally)?”. Here I think either answer is a lot more freeing. If you’ll never have been cute enough, then clearly some parameters of what that means to you needs to change. If you will have always been cute enough, then I view it like the nietszchean affirmation, where any single post, whether it does or doesnt conform to beauty standards, is an expression of an immanent cuteness that was there the whole time. Besides, you can always delete it later.
A st/acc example.
bratton describes a wrong question in the earth layer as: “can the stack be built fast enough to save us from the costs of building the stack?”
As Bratton illustrates with the example of computing the entire planetary climate, which would require a computer “roughly the size of paris [… consuming] so much energy that it would be the single most significant anthropogenic climate event that it itself would be modeling”, this question demands an omniscience which accidentally assembles the stack.
Instead, I think the blurry question would be: “will the stack have been built fast enough?”
You can have general vibes about the answer, informed by data or not, but I think this question makes it more clear that we can’t know until the future becomes the present. If your vibes lean no, then I think this perspective allows you to design with emergencies instead of designing for emergencies. On the other hand, if your vibes lean yes, then I think this perspective implores us to ask how the stack will have been built. As Bratton says: “the real design issues for the earth layer are not defined by how well we can calculate risk and state manage disaster, but rather how well we can engineer the path for one world to strategically fall apart into another.”
blur
To recap, I think blur is a way of looking at the hyperstitions contained in the present, where—instead of viewing the present as actual and mapping out the inevitability of the future based on the virtual processes we identify in the present—we take these processes as actual and trace them forwards and backwards, identifying the aspects of the future in the present. This is likely an abuse of terminology and may obscure this idea further. Oh well. I have to abuse jargon now so I can get it out of my system before I have any readers. And maybe a dense summary will have been a nicer ending than rambling off back into nothingness…