(final of series) Lu Xinghua again (from The Anthropocene and Platform Cities)(SMART CITIES or INTELLIGENT CITIES) (I am reduced to backtranslating Bratton)
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Please refer to first of series: Another attempt at Lu Xinghua (from The Anthropocene and Platform Cities) / schematic translation - translation as reading guide - (first of series: SMART CITIES or INTELLIGENT CITIES).
(I think this will be my last translation from this book. I was disappointed to find that Lu Xinghua takes paragraphs from Benjamin Bratton work with minimal or no modifications. This is not an ethical issue. If done correctly, it would be excusable. Unfortunately, it makes for a text that doesn’t flow particularly well. The samples are not chopped correctly. Bratton is dropped in without knowing he is meant to be in conversation with the immediately preceding exploration of Barthes and Deleuze. It also makes the text difficult or tedious to translate. )
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And the urban layer on the Stack [duīzhàn 堆栈] may require a great deal of this kind of fiction [xūgòu 虚构].1 The clearest example of this is Los Angeles, or perhaps Shenzhen. This might be some official creative [xūgòu 虚构] branding, using some sort of utopian logic, telling stories about the city itself: the Stack plus fiction [xūgòu 虚构] (the city is fiction [xiǎoshuō 小说]; urban planning is fiction). We can see that in the case of Los Angeles that its story [jiǎngshù 讲述] is about the future, as if the city is always waiting for what is to come, as if the city we see at present does not matter as much as the one that is being created. Maybe it's because of its amazing Hollywood storytelling machine—you will note that New York is incapable of telling its own story in the same way, incapable of following its own narrative logic, and incapable of constantly coming up with new designs and new assemblies. Hollywood allows Los Angeles to constantly reassemble itself, to use itself as a film set, as the philosopher Deleuze does in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image.
Of course, Los Angeles is a city with a major problem. One way to put it is that Los Angeles is both a utopia and heterotopia, much like a Hollywood film, where both sides are inseparable. The good Los Angeles is always struggling against the bad Los Angeles because both occupy the same domain and share the same plot, within which both create their own stories, one dark and the other light, one black and the other white. So, will the Anthropocene urban society that this book talks about be a Los Angeles-ized globalized city? Or, once they become platform cities, will all cities be Los Angeles-ized? And before that happens, will they become Shenzhen-ized, with the story deciding reality, letting the future dictate the present? Whichever way things develop, globalized urban society will overlap with the Anthropocene urban platform. In this way, they will certainly be like Los Angeles or Shanghai.
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin says that the history of the city is inextricably tied to the history of theology and prophecy. Utopia and heterotopia wear the cloak of the city, come among us, and take us under their command. Manhattan for Koolhaas, for example, is a human lair [yuānsǒu 渊薮] beyond redemption, which must be circumvented with an elevated globe structure [quánqiú kōngjiān 全球空间], in order to build his delirious New York.② But for Toni Negri, although Manhattan is a paradise for the rich and slums for the poor, it remains a nursery in which to nurture all manner of visions for the future, and artistic material for new human inventions.2 In eyes of mankind, the city always possesses this dual nature because it is a assemblage of mankind, which has no end and no final stage, and which can only continue to open wide and be written. The city remains the thing that it writes for itself, even if what we see is already not what is composed there. The deep structure [shēncéng yǔfǎ 深层语法; "deep grammar"] of the Anthropocene urban platform is the Stack and its six interdependent layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User. Each layer can be understood independently, but they remain dependent on other layers. And each layer is part of the planetary-scale computer in which we are creating our city-machine, which we call the Anthropocene urban platform computer. Each layer must be seen as emerging from a distinct technology, whose operation [yùnxíng 运行] will trigger accidents caused by its own logic, forcing us, counterintuitively, to update the program [xiūgǎi chéngxù 修改程序] in a way that binds it to a more stable architecture (transforming away from human nature), more closely linked to the system's standards and rules [tiáokuǎn 条款], the scale of the urban grid, the embedded system, and the universal address form.③
At the same time, the Stack is composed of social, human, and concrete forces (energy sources, gestures, effects, self-interested operations, dashboards, cities, streets, rooms, and other physical and virtual envelopes, ambivalent parties and enemies). These hard and soft systems intermingle and swap roles, some becoming relatively harder or softer according to seemingly arcane conditions that are subject to change.3
What kind of urban governance framework will the Stack provide us with in the future? It will arrange human and nonhuman Users in relation to Interfaces that will provide them with an addressed landscape and a general image of the Grid to facilitate navigation. These interfaces include the physical and virtual envelopes of the city, the data archipelago of the cloud, and the autophagic consumption of the planet's minerals, electrons, and climates. The complex paths through these layers may displace established forms of human-machine-infrastructure interactions. Without a doubt, this subversion will reach the point where entire cities are designed to accommodate them. This may proceed further to a scenario in which every point of the platform will be put under algorithmic and machine control control, consequently amplifying or shifting human control over machines, and creating a cybernetic scenario.4
For example, it appears that an integrated design for driverless cars would include navigation interfaces, and a stack [duīdié 堆叠] of computationally intensive and environmentally aware rolling hardware. It must be noted that this would require building a street system that could stage the network effects of hundreds of thousands of speeding robots at once. It is certainly not as simple as the mass media tells us it would be to build the driverless car. Furthermore, the next stable form of the car maybe be as a mobile cloud platform, inside of which Users navigate according to augmented scenery interfacial overlays and powered by grids of electrons as well as bits,5 and possibly also by quantum computing technology that remains mythic at present. Regarding the latter, we can now only sketch the outlines. Google's driverless project started to get stuck in 2019. Where is the road forward? The least we can say is that it lies beyond driverless cars. The reality of driverless cars is closely related to the future Anthropocene urban society that this book explores.
On the Stack, the planet's autophagic consumption of minerals, electrons, and climates forms clouds. The chemicals and massive amounts of electricity that sustain the Stack and consequently feed us will also compel us to acknowledge the heavy energy burden that touches off geopolitical disputes and causes new ecological pressures.⑤ Will this energy politics lead humanity to a new stage of geopolitical crisis, as happened during the age of petroleum? What would the concrete political consequences be?
With the Stack will come not one totality but multiple and incongruous totalities, some of which are interfacial regimes, some are imposed landscapes of Addresses, and others are interwoven cloud and state assemblages. These assemblages may drag us to the peak of Anthropocene hyperindustrialism, provide us with the larval scripts for a post-Anthropocene hyperindustrialism, or perhaps do both.6 Is it possible that the climate crisis, the ultimate enemy of humanity, might be defeated by forcing stakeholders to proactively seek global synergy through planetary computing? In the interests of globalized urban society, should we keep proceeding on the platform or withdraw from this path?
① Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: L'image-mouvement, Minuit, 1983, pp. 50 - 61.
② In his view, Manhattan, or New York itself, already has a fixed form and can only have structures added to it, by, for example, building on top of it. His so-called globe space cannot enter its autoimmune system. Pleading the case for his elevated design plan, he says:
Since Manhattan is finite and the number of its blocks forever fixed, the city cannot grow in any conventional manner.
Its planning therefore can never describe a specific built configuration that is to remain static through the ages; it can only predict that whatever happens, it will have to happen somewhere within the 2,028 blocks of the Grid.
It follows that one form of human occupancy can only be established at the expense of another. The city becomes a mosaic of episodes, each with its own particular life span, that contest each other through the medium of the grid. (Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, op. Monacelli Press, 1974, p. 21.)
③ Benjamin Bratton, op. cit., p. 153. Ubiquitous planetary computation also creates its own accidents, and it is in these new accidents that new technologies are produced. This subtractive modernity is what curates a world that is always already full. Supercomputing allows the visualization of the Planetary Skin and the territorialization of the address. But the Borges Chinese encyclopedia problem remains. There will always be more than two Address layers on the Stack (ibid., p. 451).
④ To protect itself from Russian cyber attacks, Estonia has put most of its data in the cloud. All of the data will be stored in "digital embassies" in foreign countries. See: https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2015/03/05/how-to-back-up-a-country7
⑤ In order to support planetary computing and not drain completely the planet's energy resources, we might need to design a new planet, with a planetary mind structured like a Russian nesting doll, which can take in solar energy and also achieve planetary computing. But who is this for? If we can't decide who will survive in the Anthropocene, the first step in design must be political: determining new concepts of sovereignty and citizenship (Benjamin Bratton, The Stack, op. cit., p. 107). For example, on a phone screen, as sensors take over, they pierce national borders, so that we take part in not only the sovereignty of the city on the platform, but also the sovereignty of the Planetary Skin (serving as the Stack's globalized urban society). This new distribution of rights must be finalized before unfolding a new sovereignty landscape within the design of the Stack.
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The idea of the Stack comes from Benjamin Bratton and is capitalized after his own stylization. Lu Xinghua offers his own takes on the idea in an earlier section, but he will return to it later in this section. As you will see, much of this section turns out to be drawn almost directly from The Stack.
This does not receive a note from Lu Xinghua, but he must be referring to this 2009 Negri essay: “On Rem Koolhaas.”
This section gets bogged down as Lu Xinghua tediously recounts Bratton’s ideas, without convincingly tying them into what has come so far. It’s disappointing to come across this paragraph that lifted almost directly from The Stack. Look at the two paragraphs one after the other:
堆栈同时是由社会、人和具体的力量(能源、姿势、效应、为自己的利益服务的操纵者、仪表板、城市、街道、房间和其他物理和虚拟的外壳,三心二意者和敌人)构成。 这些硬系统和软系统互相混合,互换角色,有时变得相对柔软,有时就变得相对强硬,往往是基于秘而不宣的条件来定夺,后者又是可修改的。
The Stack is also composed of social, human, and concrete forces (energy sources, gestures, effects, self-interested maneuvers, dashboards, cities and streets, rooms and buildings, physical and virtual envelopes, empathies and enemies). These hard and soft systems intermingle and swap roles, some becoming relatively “harder” or “softer” according to seemingly arcane conditions.
Once again, this is pulled almost directly from The Stack:
堆栈将在未来提供我们一种什么样的城市治理框架呢?它将把用户、人类的和非人类的用户,都妥帖地安排在界面上,而界面则向它们提供有地址的风景,和整体的网架之总体图像,供它们在其中驰骋时参照。些界面包括城市的物理和虚拟外壳、云的数据群岛和地球的矿物质、电子和气候的自吞式消费现场等。 这些层面上的那些复杂线路,很有可能会进一步颠覆那些已被安排好的人—机器—基础结构之间的互动形式。这种颠覆在未来将是确定无疑的, 以至于到那时,整个城市都将为应对它而被重新设计。有可能会进一步导致在平台的每一点上都将由程序和机器来控制,因而也将放大或转移人对机器的控制,进入一种控制论式场景。
The scenario described in the chapters to follow, and appearing before us in the real world, can be summarized as one in which Users, human or nonhuman, are cohered in relation to Interfaces, which provide synthetic total images of the Addressed landscapes and networks of the whole, from the physical and virtual envelopes of the City, to the geographic archipelagos of the Cloud and the autophagic consumption of Earth's minerals, electrons, and climates that power all of the above. The most complex paths through these layers may displace well-established forms of human–machine-infrastructure interaction, perhaps so well established that entire cities were designed to accommodate them. This may insert machine control at almost any point, amplifying or diverting human control over any machine in which the User happens to be installed, or even of the whole infrastructural landscape in which those machines swarm together.
Again, this takes significantly from Bratton:
比如,在看起来,对无人驾驶汽车的整合性设计,会包括导航界面、强计算和关怀式环境的滚动硬件的堆叠。须知,这是要建立够同时承载成千上万高速开动的机器的网络效应的街道系统,哪里是像大众媒体宣传的那样,只是造一辆无人驾驶的车那么简单的事。而且,下一代稳定感应的汽车格式,也许就只会是一个移动的云平台,驾驶它的用户,是在根据增强的感应界面轮(augmented scenery interfacial overlays)来行动,由能源网格电子或比特网格,来提供动力,而且还要借用今天还只是一些传说的量子计算技术。对于后者,我们今天只能说出它的轮廓而已。谷歌的无人驾驶项目终于在2019年开始陷入困顿 。路在何方?至少是在无人驾驶汽车之外。无人驾驶汽车这一现实,与本书所要讨论的人类世城市社会的未来紧密相关。
For example, the integrated design of driverless cars includes navigation interfaces, computationally intensive and environmentally aware rolling hardware, and street systems that can stage the network effects of hundreds of thousands speeding robots at once. The next stable form of the “automobile” (a description that will become perhaps more and more accurate) may be as a mobile Cloud platform inside of which Users navigate the City layer of a larger Stack according to augmented scenery Interfacial overlays and powered by grids of electrons as well as bits.
Believe it or not, this is also mostly Bratton:
随着堆栈而来的,将不是一个总体,而是多个不协调的总体,而有些是界面政权,有些是被强加的地址风景,其他的,则是云计算平台与国家集合之间的种种混合物。而这些加在一起,会进一步将我们拖上人类世超级工业开发的险峰,但这也许也能为我们布排出后一人类世的超工业的初期脚本,也许还能同时提供这两者。
In the figure of The Stack, we see not one totality but the production of multiple and incongruous totalities, some of which are “interfacial regimes,” some are superimposed landscapes of Addresses, and others are interwoven Cloud and state geometries. These geometries both draw and draw on the vertical platform of The Stack, and in doing so may also displace existing geographies with several alternatives at once. Perhaps these culminate in the apotheosis of Anthropocenic industrialism and perhaps they provide larval scripts for a post-Anthropocenic alternative, or both, or perhaps something much less decisive and dramatic.
This is another lift from Bratton. His note reads:
We see this transposition of the state into the Cloud quite literally in Estonia's efforts to secure a full “back-up” of the country's data, in case of (Russian) cyberattack. The plan calls for the distribution of “data embassies” in different parts of the world so that if the country's systems were compromised or erased that could be restored from a comprehensive remote backup. See http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21645505-protect-itself-attack-estonia-finding-ways-back-up-its-data-how.