God moves the player, and the player, the piece.
What god behind God the plot begins
Of dust and time and sue or and agonies?
—— Chess, J.L. Borges
God moves the chess player, the chess player moves the pieces.
And which god behind God opened this game
A conspiracy of dust, time, sleep, and pain?
— Borges, Chess
Classical nostalgia is an exclusive experience of the ancients. Today, when we say that we can't go back to our hometown, we don't mean that the road back to our hometown is long, but that our hometown is falling apart rapidly. Hometown is far away from us.
Hometown may even be just a cyberpunk settlement, and it is difficult to produce any homesickness. This may be the case for Chinese youth born in this century. There is no doubt that with the deepening of urbanization, more and more people are born in modern cities: in towns, in cities, in the metropolis. These words also mean very differently today than they did in the past. In the 19th century they meant marble, brick and wood structures, in the 20th century they meant concrete, glass, and in the 21st century they meant carbon fiber, silicon crystals or unnamed materials. If we gaze deeper into the earth, it is not matter that makes up our dwelling place today, but data. Our field, the weathered earth under our feet, the camp in the desert, and the lonely boat in the vast sea are all a stream of information. We live on a grain of sand, knowing very well that it will go with the wind tomorrow, floating somewhere in the infinite Book of Sand. Badio says that both Rabid bin Rabia's poems and Malami's The Roll of the Dice imply that we cannot find certainty in the contingencies of the flow, but can only look for new chances again and again, because "the former bustling places, the empty places, abandoned in the morning", "the obsolete camps of the day and the day", "all the realities based on this are dissolved".[1] So we don't have a homeland, we live in the 0/1 of the rheology. The visible hometown is only made by the concept of 0/1, and it is a part that can be disassembled, replaced, and reorganized.
What will our cities be today and in the future?
In 2016, Benjamin Bratton published Stacks: On Software and Sovereignty. He believes that the automation factory, the Internet, mobile applications, cloud platforms, the Internet of Things, smart cities, and a series of lifestyles that have been driven by the increasing computing power of computers have produced a new global ecology and governance structure (the public can clearly feel this change from the global epidemic governance, and Bratton also reiterated his views on the direction of global politics in "True Revenge: The Politics of the Post-pandemic World"[3]). Subsequently, he also proposed the 2022 Terraforming 2022 Program[4], borrowing the idea of "terraforming" that originally colonized terrestrial planets and created human habitat ecosystems, and used this idea to redesign and produce the earth's mother star to alleviate the conflict between the current ecological environment and human habitat needs.
Bratton's "data civilization" model architecture is based on the multi-layered structural logic of the protocol stack. This type of computer language protocol can transmit data to the destination through radio waves, network cables, and wireless networks with accurate, high speed, and high quality. It is like the grammar of natural language developed by linguists, that is, grammar, such as the "subject-verb-object structure": as long as children learn this set of language protocols, they can learn to use sentences to deploy their own expression of thought. Similarly, people can deploy other things with similar protocols, such as places. Bratton divides the blue planet into six levels: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User, which are distributed in the form of "stacks." In the era of global computing consciousness and algorithmic governance, Bratton used computer language to reinterpret urban planning and political philosophy, and interpreted the "Anthropocene Earth Civilization".
How to understand "stack"? Let's leave Bratton for a while and go back to the source. In the Java language, the stack represents a data structure in which data items are arranged in order, which is a temporary storage area that is automatically allocated by the system. It is characterized by: a) automation: the system is automatically assigned, without human application, nor can it be operated by humans; b) modular: if there is enough space, the system allocates the standardized needs one by one, and vice versa; c) high speed: the distribution speed is fast. Conversely, there is another distribution method, called heap, which has the opposite characteristics: manual, non-standard, low speed. Analogously, the stack area is like a set box lunch, all of which are distributed to 500 staff members in the same way; the stack area is like a chef cooking specifically for an important task (or person). The two words originally had the same meaning: in English, stack refers to a stack of things, and so does heap; in Chinese, "stack" is a storage area, inside a fence, and where things are piled, and "pile" is also a form and place where things are stacked. The two are no different, like "poly" or "set", just different usage habits, but computer terms give them a unique meaning. Bratton borrows the concept of "stack" to express the unique generation ability brought about by the modular and vertical operation of information technology (at this time, stack is also translated as stack, stacking, but it is confused with heap), providing a new perspective on infrastructure construction and a new way of building a platform city.
But back to computer language, the heap/stack divide of thinking can also be used to understand the generation of cities. Where did the original "heap" come from? In French, the historical evolution of the word agglomération also expresses the idea of "accumulation of cities": it initially means a clump, a pile, a pile, figuratively a lump of sand, a snow pile, and then a bond, and then a combination, a unity, and finally a settlement, a settlement, a settlement, a general term for a city and its suburbs. A few examples: ancient Athens, the typical heap, people built the city around the acropolis on the hill (highland city state); Ronda, Hemingway's most suitable town for eloping with people, built against the cliff, is also a typical heap; many cities built around the port and river channel, such as Piraeus, Alexandria, Hong Kong, Shanghai; other cities or entrenched lakes, fertile fields, mines, markets, temples, or the key to curbing north-south traffic, behind which is people's natural gathering consciousness. The "stack" of the city is a kind of planned and designed replicable module, like building with Lego bricks. The city of Beijing (and various capitals) founded in the Yuan and Ming dynasties had the earliest urban planning, with wide and standard roads that made it easy to move troops, and the courtyards on the side of the road were like modules; the model of modern urban planning, the "Ottoman Plan" of 1853-1873, also contained the same idea; and later, the Manhattan Island and Barcelona New Town in New York, as well as similar urban rules began to spread around the world. Heaps are aggregations formed by various accidental purposes, and stacks are aimless reproductions for the purpose of speed and quantity itself. The stack is an extension, so it does not contain authenticity.
The passageways connecting these cities are also like "information superhighways" (30 years ago we used highways as an analogy for computer communication networks, and today the Internet is already a more familiar thing, so we have to make the other analogy). Highways are like information streams, and cars are like clusters of information that assign us to cities. There's a spectacular highway intersection in Inglewood, Los Angeles County, where many Californians drive missed lanes. A similar thing happens every day around the world: When I drive the highways of Baoshan and Pudong at night, I feel exactly like I do in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Tokyo or Paris— the highways of every city are exactly the same, like the clouds of civilization automatically assigned to each city's "stack" . The crooked paths of the old town are "piled up". The "heap" is the utopian other of the "stack", the heterotopia space[6].
When we were assigned to the city, so did the buildings we lived in. Habitat 67 in Montreal, The Silver Capsule Tower in Tokyo, the Pompidou Center in Paris, cosco two bays in Shanghai, the Naka Naka Hotel in Phuket, like the molecular structure of adenosine triphosphate, barbarism, metabolism, high technology or Chicago School, these immortal reinforced concrete are like sleeping silicon-based lifeforms, embedded in our cities. Heidegger must have been furious that we lived in standardized cement matchboxes and were proud of it! [7] Unfortunately, our food, clothing, housing, and even all daily lives are like this: FMCG food (canteen box lunch, Coke, Hungry), FMCG clothing (Taobao store, UNIQLO) is distributed and deployed through distribution centers (Yiwu, Alibaba), and our knowledge and friends are also deployed by Baidu and Tencent. The needs of the masses in modern cities are all distributed in a stacked manner through the city's "will to expand" (the will to expand makes the city appear as an insatiable beast). Stacks are like pieces of compressed biscuits, and if you've had the luck to taste it, you'll know what it tastes like. The only remaining "heap" of life and dwelling is every footstep left by people in the old town (la cité), or the forest hut that the Meskilhis built for themselves in the Tottenau Mountains.
This is the mapping of heaps/stacks in the cloud, cities, and addresses, which represent two types of urban growth: subjectivity and unconsciousness. Anthropologically, people have a gathering need for the purpose of social division of labor, cooperation, exchange, etc., creating natural markets and settlements, and becoming the prototype of an unrelated city, which is "urban subjectivity"; and the planning of the sovereign machine and the planning of the "philosophical king" seem to be the will of a few people, but it is actually the collective "urban unconscious" promoted by everyone in the city (because democracy acquiesces in the implementation of expansion plans by totalitarian groups, otherwise the latter will collapse or lose population). When urban planning did not yet exist, cities formed in the form of heaps; when urban planning appeared, stacks appeared. Heaps, seemingly unconsciously formed bazaars and city-states, but behind them are the collective subjects of the gatherers, and form the urban temperament (ethos). The stack, which seems to be deliberately planned by the authorities, is behind the unconscious desire of society to expand, representing the will of the city (Wille). As Borges said, behind those creators there is an inexplicable mysterious force.
Today, each of these forces drives the generation of cities, but we find that after the advent of the "computational society"[9], the collective unconscious power of the "stack" is far greater than the power of the "heap". Today, the collective unconsciousness of global capitalism has instructed democracy, which in turn has acquiesced to the rapid expansion of cities by the sovereign machine, which has implemented stack agreements, quickly packing, distributing, and deploying people into urban stacks, forming a "huge irreversible political geographic reshaping".[10] So, Velillo would say, logistics represent modernity. Logistics (logistics), financial flow (finance), and information flow (information science) are all the tools that the sovereign machine is most concerned about. Badio would call this the misuse of "numbers" and the evil of calculations. Bratton believes that "stack" is liberation and "heap" is sinking, but it may be the opposite. If the "stack" has symptoms, when it sinks, don't forget the "pile", don't forget the authenticity.
The two are stacked together, and this is the world we have now. We now call the world superimposed by this heap/stack "metaverse", or metaverse, a reality (stack) superimposed on the virtual reality (heap), that is, the dual life of superimposing our subjective appeal and daily unconscious existence. This is no stranger to Platonists, the "heap" is the world of ideas.
bibliography
[1] Badiou A., Petit Manuel d'inesthétique, Seuil, 1998
[2] Bratton B., The Stack：On Software and Sovereignty, The MIT Press, 2016
[3] Bratton B., The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World, Verso, 2021
[4] Bratton B., The Terraforming, Strelka, 2019
[5] Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of Works of Art," in Middle of the Forest Road, The Commercial Press, 2018
[6] Foucault M., Dits et écrits. 1954-1988, Gallimard, 2001.
[7] Martin Heidegger, "Tsukihito Jussi", in Collected Speeches and Essays, p. 152-171, Triptych Books, 2005
[8] Borges J., Selected Poems, Penguin, 1999
[9] Bourdieu P., Economic Anthropology: Courses at the Collège de France (1992-1993), Seuil, 2017
[10] Lu Xinghua, The Anthropocene and platform cities: Urban Philosophy 1, Nanjing University Press, 2022
[11] Bratton B., Introduction to Virilio’s Speed and Politics, Semiotext(e), 2007
[12] Badiou A., Un, multiple, multiplicité(s), Multitudes 2000/1, n° 1, p. 195-211.
(This article is the author's speech at the "Yuancheng" workshop of the Tongji French Ideological and Cultural Research Center, originally titled "Heaps and Stacks: Generating the Subjectivity and Unconsciousness of cities")