A Sign of Things to Come

Dear reader, you are getting this email because you at some point, possibly enticed by a book I'm sharing, signed up for my email-list. Let me say that you are all dear to me (my finger slipped just then, and I first wrote "dead to me", which is a very different thing), and I appreciate you. That said, I am considering folding this private email-list into my Substack (the Creative Class Contrarian) for a couple of reasons. One, doing two newsletters (by any other name) does still take some time (or, if I'm brutally honest, they take more bandwidth and worry than actual time). Two, I'm thinking about porting my website to a new system, and to fold the two into one would fit well with that move. But I don't know, maybe I have rabid fans out there who love this format and don't want to touch Substack? If you feel strongly about this email-list, or Substack, or just want to tell me off, please let me know what you think. Anyway, today's email is a simple one. It's an essay I've written for the Substack that you now will get first dibs at. It isn't quite finished, as I want to put in some links and stuff, but here's the essay for your delectation, before it goes public. Stay classy, Alf 

The Stack Stack, or, How Bodybuilding and The Who Changed the World

It is now some time ago that I first started to note the oddity that is the stack. Not stacks of books or stacks of paper, as for someone like me these are as natural as air and water, but the manner in which people talked of a new, almost mythical notion called "the stack". This stack was for many a source of immense pride, as I noticed a number of people starting to refer to themselves as "full-stack developers" or "full-stack marketers". At conferences, I noticed that people's "stacks" became a topic of discussion, and as I started to note that academics (who always tend to be the latest to anything novel) also started talking about "stacks" as a novel new category in social theory, the term had clearly stuck. Today, it isn't considered sociopathic to ask someone about their "AI stack", and otherwise normal politicians can speak of "democracy stacks" without getting committed. The use of the term is rarely very consistent, and seems mostly to be a handy way of using a tech-adjacent word where you would otherwise have to reach for French-derived philosophy (such as actor-network theory or Deleuze's agencement). It can also be scaled in ways of no little ridiculousness, such as in Benjamin Bratton's The Stack (2016), where the entire world as we know it is recast as a six-layered megastructure, doing planetary-scale computation. What is going on here? And how did a word that simply means "some things, more or less similar, put on top of each other in a somewhat ordered pile" become a term so ridiculously universal?

So I got interested. I knew some things, such as the fact that I had heard of the term long before it became popular in the tech scene, but at the same time I was unsure about the timing of things. So here is my tentative genealogy of "the stack", but I will focus mostly on three key fields and how their use seems to have been formational for the contemporary use of the term. Now, there is of course a pre-history. The term is quite old, and can be found in more or less modern form as early as around 1300. It can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European, with terms such as 'steg- (stick) and 'stog- (pile), and turns up in Proto-Germanic as 'stakon-, but the modern form seems to have been brought into English through the Old Norse stakkr, meaning… stack. Like haystack. So by 1300 we had stak and stakken, and by the 17th century, the term was used for more things than haystacks – it was used for buildings, chimneys, and, possibly, other things. By the early 19th century, it can be used metaphorically, as in "stack the deck". It is, already, a useful word, one that contains multitudes.

Now, most people assume that today's "the stack" is a creation purely of computer science, but this is only partly true. Yes, it turns up early in this field, but in a very specific, ordered manner. We can find the notion (but not the word) in Alan Turing's work, including in the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine)-report fom 1946 (incidentally also the first time modern AI was hinted at). Now, from what I've gathered, and I have to admit not having gone through all of Turing's papers, he didn't yet use the word "stack", but he did suggest something like it with operators such as "bury" and "unbury". Close to a decade later, in the works of Samuelson and Bauer (1955), the structure Turing suggested is proposed in a more formal manner, but even then the term used is "Operationskeller" (a cellar for operations), not stack. In fact, from what I've been able to trace, the term comes into general data science parlance around 1960, when it takes off as a standardized term. Two things are important to note here. The field of data science at the time was tiny, so there is little chance that the term would have entered general language until much later. Further, the term here refers to a very ordered thing, a layering that can be queried. A possible reason for the use of the term is a quite material one – much of programming at the time is done on punchcards, that form natural stacks.

Another influence, which as far as I can tell has absolutely nothing to do with computers, is rock music. More precisely, loud rock music. Around 1965, the guitarist Pete Townshend, recently famous thanks to the breakthrough of The Who with "My Generation", wants to become known for his raw, driving sound. He goes to the legendary Jim Marshall, who has founded Marshall Amplification in 1962, and is already famous for having made the JTM45 guitar amplifier. Townshend asks for a monster speaker, a cabinet with eight 12-inch speakers, but this turns out to be a very impractical setup. In a flash of genius, Marshall splits this into two cabinets, each with four 12-inch speakers and attached a "head" (i.e. an amplifier (both pre- and power)) on top of the cabinets, creating what became known as the "Marshall stack" or the "full stack". Just about everyone in the rock scene wants in on the action, and by the late 1960's "stack" and "full stack" has become general parlance in the rock scene. Again, two things stand out. At the time this happens, computer science is basically unknown to everyone not directly involved, and there are signs that music professionals used the term stack before this even became codified in the former field. By the late 1960's, if you discussed a "full stack", the likelihood was around 100% that you were talking about a music setup. The second thing is that the meaning here was markedly different. The stack was a modular system, with the full stack creating a synergic effect, something greater than the sum of the parts. This was something more than a pile of cards and functions, this was the building of actual systems, power made material.

Now, this alone is intersting enough, but there is a third dimension to the term and its use today, and this one comes from a most unusual place. Even though there had been a culture around muscular development that preceded it, most people would agree that Sandow aside, modern bodybuilding started in the 1950's, grew in the 1960's, and became a global phenomenon in the 1970's. Steroid use can be traced back to the late 1950's, where it became a big thing among weightlifters, and during the 1960's it was more or less normalized in bodybuilding. What is interesting from our perspective is that in the early years of the 1970's, pharmacological know-how had advanced in the bodybuilding community to the level where one no longer just took one steroid, but tried to find perfect combinations of steroids and other enhancers (some more common (like vitamins) than others (like actual drugs)). In locker-room culture and some underground zines, one started to talk about one's "stack", now referring to a combination of substances that supposedly created the greatest effect for muscular development. Now, we cannot know where the term came to gym slang from, but most people would suggest it wasn't from a deep love of computer science. The music track seems more likely, not least as California had both the biggest bodybuilding scene and a big rock scene, but it is also possible that the term emerged on its own in the steroid scene. What is notable here is that now a "stack" referred not to an abstract idea of programming, or a special set of speakers and amplifiers, but was far more general. The bodybuilder's "stack" was a recipe of components that could be shared, developed, mutated. It was a formula, but one that a serious bodybuilder would aim to optimize for themselves. Some "stacks" became fetish objects, admired for their structure, but the true beauty lay in how everyone could aim to do their own.

It would thus seem that today's use of the term, derived from the notion of a "tech stack", draws on all these ancestries! It is easy to see that the term comes to contemporary tech culture from the computer science-side of things, and some of these elements are still present – the architecture and the dependencies. However, the music term also affects how the term is used, as that was the use of the term that emphasized modularity and assemblage. Yet I would claim that the most important, if least understood, is the legacy of bodybuilding culture, where the very notion of synergistic recipes became the core logic of the term. It was bodybuilders who started believing in the magic of a special combination, and the culture of debating and sharing these recipes. So, there might be a very special psycho-historical irony at play here, one where the assumedly rational logic of "tech stacks" and "the democracy stack" in fact owes much of its thinking to not just gymbros, but actual muscleheads. In other words, while the term might have gotten its contemporary cachet from being connected to technology, the actual understanding is far more subcultural, feeding off of the "Lord of Loud" and Gold's Gym just as much as it does of Turing. Who, truth be told, probably would have found all this quite funny, as he according to his biographers had an offbeat sense of humor that enjoyed a bit of absurdity.

So, when social theorists and various philosophers preen and prance with the term "stack", please remember that it has a far more interesting, and far more controversial, history than is usually discussed. This of course in no way belittles the term, and in my thinking only makes it more interesting. A term that draws on things as far apart as loud rock, computer science, and leg-day? That's creativity, right there. Oh, and the title of this essay? It is of course a reference how I wanted to use meanings from disparate worlds, layered together to form a new argument. I am, after all, still an academic, enthralled and surrounded by stacks.