Gray Area

In 2016 MIT Press published The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by @bratton, a book that mapped the emergence of planetary computation and imagined the next decade. It established a new kind of philosophy of technology—integrating computer science, design, and cultural theory. From chip wars to culture wars, from Carl Schmitt to cybernetics, from platforms becoming state-scale actors to states evolving into cloud platforms, from cities as software substrates to interfaces as models of reality, from addressable and tokenizable everything to the cohabitation of human and non-human users, the book showed how all these dizzying transformations actually add up to a new totality: an accidental megastructure we call The Stack. Join Antikythera for an exclusive public lecture and book signing at Gray Area to celebrate the 10th anniversary paperback edition of the book. Bratton will revisit the six layers of The Stack—Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User—and will provide a glimpse into the next decade of their development. Marek Poliks, the co-author of Exocapitalism, will introduce the author and host a Q&A. Register at link.antikythera.org/the-stack-deca…

Thanks to @vincentweisser and @PrimeIntellect for the invitation to give the opening sermon at the church of the singularity (that isnt' singular) at their stellar event today. Also... their recursive language models release is going to be 🤯