Resource
The surface is an interface upon and through which we think. Thinking has always had its surfaces — tablets, pages, maps, screens — but never have they formed such a vast continuum.
Usually we oppose surfaces to the depths that lie beneath, the foundations, substrates, ὑπομνήματα upon which thinking is built. But today, faced with this overwhelming expanse of surface and the machine intelligences that traverse it in fractions of a second, we might wonder why we bother with depth at all if what we call depth can be flattened and unflattened at will. The reversibility of the these procedures suggests that the depth in question is less a spatial reality than a virtualization of the time it takes to search and access a given item.
We believe that the nuance and ambiguity attributed to depth becomes more expressive and extensible once flattened. Once flattened, depth become stackable. Once stacked, levels, domains and contexts can be compressed and superimposed as quickly as they can be expanded and projected.
Regardless of the state they happen to occupy at the moment, stacks remain an open network of nodes and relationships. They are not limited to a single source or fixed axis of expansion (e.g. hierarchies, genealogies, trees). It is perhaps more accurate to think of the flattening and unflattening of stacks as n-dimensional since it is only a choice of perspective that dictates whether we are compressing depth, height, width, or even time. Because the most prodigious stacks do not limit themselves to a final state, they animate its generation, corruption and mutation, breathing life into the the gestation of the idea.1
Footnotes
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Cf. Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty ↩