People from nutrition geeks to philosophers are using a metaphor from software to describe the world.
The stack metaphor is today’s ‘ghost in the machine’:
“Stack,” in technological terms, can mean a few different things, but the most relevant usage grew from the start-up world: A stack is a collection of different pieces of software that are being used together to accomplish a task. A smartphone’s software stack, for instance, could be described as a layered structure: There’s the low-level code that controls the device’s hardware, and then, higher up, its basic operating system, and then, even higher, the software you use to message a friend or play a game. An individual application’s stack might include the programming languages used to build it, the services used to connect it to other apps or the service that hosts it online; a “full stack” developer would be someone proficient at working with each layer of that system, from bottom to top.
The stack isn’t just a handy concept for visualizing how technology works. For many companies, the organizing logic of the software stack becomes inseparable from the logic of the business itself. The system that powers Snapchat, for instance, sits on top of App Engine, a service owned by Google; to the extent that Snapchat even exists as a service, it is as a stack of different elements. “What you end up with is entire companies being built on a set of software tools and services,” says Yonas Beshawred, whose own company, StackShare, lets tech professionals publish their companies’ stacks and see what others are using, comparing technology the way hobbyists might compare gear. “You can think of them as Lego blocks.” A healthy stack, or a clever one, is tantamount (the thinking goes) to a well-structured company.
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As theory, the stack remains mostly a speculative exercise: What if we imagined the whole world as software? And as a popular term, it risks becoming an empty buzzword, used to refer to any collection, pile or system of different things. (What’s your dental care stack? Your spiritual stack?) But if tech start-ups continue to broaden their ambitions and challenge new industries — if, as the venture-capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz likes to say, “software is eating the world” — then the logic of the stack can’t be trailing far behind, ready to remake more and more of our economy and our culture in its image. It will also, of course, be subject to the warning with which Daugman ended his 1990 essay. “We should remember,” he wrote, “that the enthusiastically embraced metaphors of each ‘new era’ can become, like their predecessors, as much the prison house of thought as they first appeared to represent its liberation.”