In 2016 MIT Press published The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, a book that clearly mapped the emergence of planetary computation and imagined the next decade with rigor, humor and precision. It established a new kind of philosophy of technology, integrating computer science, design, and cultural theory into a deeply influential new synthesis.

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 author, Benjamin Bratton, Director of Antikythera, for an exclusive public lecture and book signing to celebrate the 10th anniversary paperback edition of the book. He 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, co-author of Exocapitalism, will introduce the author and host a Q&A.