SoLiXG:Stack
Stack
What’s a stack? Colloquially, the terms denotes a vertical pile of self-same objects. A stack is neat, tidy and stable. A “Stack“ is also a model to conceptualize digital infrastructures as consisting of multiple technological layers, stacked on top of each other. Political and technological sovereignty is increasingly imagined in the same fashion: India’s attempts to create a unified software infrastructure for digital services terms itself the “India Stack”. European policy advisors have recently called for building a „EuroStack”. A model akin to a layer cake guides the distribution of EU funding and regulation into technology sectors, all with the goal to reduce technological dependencies, enhance autonomy and encourage innovation (Bria et al., 2025)
The layered model of digital infrastructure results from the attempts to standardize the diverse landscape of networking practices that existed before the 1980s. Today’s “Internet” was predated by multiple, parallel existing digital networks, including the US-American ARPANET, the French CYCLADES network or the British NPL network, as well as networks of various private companies. The “Open Systems Model” (OSI-Model) as well as the “Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol” (TCP/IP Model) attempted to create blueprints and guidelines that developers and regulators of digital networks could draw on (Russel 2013). Both figured digital networks as stacked layers of infrastructure, suggesting a movement through increasing levels of abstraction: lower layers organize the transmission of physical signals, such as photons through fiber optic cables. Above them lie layers that organize the distribution of data packets to their designated addressees and optimize their routes, reassemble the data packets into their intended sequence, and, at the very top, manage the interaction with user applications such as email clients or messaging services. This model allowed, among other things, to split up and modularize networking practices into differentiated sections, as well as construct relations of dependency between them.
The actual term “stack” for network infrastructures becomes popular throughout the 80s and 90s, increasingly also losing its specificity: In current industry jargon, for example, a “full-stack developer” connotes somebody who can program both on the users’ front-end, as well as on the back-end, pointing towards servers and databases – disregarding “lower levels” of signal transmission or packet distribution (Amazon). The term is picked up in media and political theory, where it attempts to capture the new, disruptive role of technological infrastructure in shaping current political power – sometimes with a totalizing tendency to speak of a singular stack as planetary superstructure (Bratton, critically Lovink and Rossiter). In the context of the geopoliticization of digital infrastructure, the idea of a stack is increasingly popular with policy experts. The resulting models bear little resemblance to the technical specificities of the OSI or the TCP/IP stacks. The layers of the India Stack include the “contactless layer” or the “cashless layer”. The EuroStack’s lower layers include “Raw Materials” and “Chips”, the upper crust is “data and artificial intelligence”.
Digital Networks are not as orderly as the stack suggests. Networks are messy, in the sense that their sometimes-haphazard construction violates the neat ideas of standardization attempts. Actual networking practices do not abide by the borders and dependencies outlined in models. Some protocols violate layers, cut across or tunnel through them. Networks are also messy in the sense that they are dirtied by the non-technical stuff of soil, of human labor, of society and of history. The idea of the stack itself is a discursive object hailing from the field of computer science (Solomon 2013). It serves to paint networks as isolated from ongoing human activity, maintenance, development and political contestation.
Concepts such as the India Stack, EuroStack or the China Stack could indicate two things: that “stacks” indeed provide a model in which (supra)national delineations and power are currently conceptualized and potentially reconfigured. Or, that the jargon of technologists has become so pervasive in the political rhetoric of the current moment, that it is simply the latest tool for lending protectionist geopolitics an innovative sound.
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Barros, Bryce, Nathan Kohlenberg, und Etienne Soula. 2022. China and the Digital Information Stack in the Global South. Washington, DC: The Alliance for Securing Democracy at The German Marshall Fund.
Bria, Francesca, Paul Timmers, und Fausto Gernone. 2025. „EuroStack – A European Alternative for Digital Sovereignty“. 127 p. doi: 10.11586/2025006.
Lovink, Geert. 2019. Sad By Design. On Platform Nihilism. London, UK: Pluto Press.
Lovink, Geert. 2020. „Principles of Stacktivism“. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 18(2):716–24. doi: 10.31269/triplec.v18i2.1231.
Rossiter, Ned. 2019. „Uneven Distribution: An Interview with Ned Rossiter“. Public Seminar. Abgerufen 11. Oktober 2024 (https://publicseminar.org/2019/05/uneven-distribution-an-interview-with-ned-rossiter/).
Russell, A. L. 2006. „‚Rough Consensus and Running Code‘ and the Internet-OSI Standards War“. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28(3):48–61. doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2006.42. Solomon, Rory. 2013. „Last in, First out. Network Archaeology of/as the Stack“. Amodern 2.