From Beijing to Brussels, from Washington, DC to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, and from the Bay Area to lithium deposits in the Andes, geopolitics is evolving before our eyes. Computation is no longer a mere “factor” or “aspect” of international relations; instead, it is the bedrock on which the global order sits. Cloud platforms subsume the roles traditionally performed by modern states as their power transcends national borders and moves over oceans in a split second. States are morphing into cloud platforms, marking a shift toward a new geopolitics of planetary computation.

This shift is far from seamless. In some cases, it boils down to supranational jurisdictions, such as the European Union, taming “big tech.” Meanwhile, China leverages homegrown digital platforms and relies on the diffusion of AI into everyday use to strengthen its sovereignty, with other BRICS countries following in its footsteps. North America remains, for now, the symbolic center of digital innovation, while the legions of graphics processing units (GPUs) and energy infrastructure necessary to run the large language models have spread across the world, as have the supply chains of frontier computing.

The unifying thread in this emergent architecture of geopolitical power is the rotation toward a model based on the hemispheres of influence that segment and divide the planet into sovereign computational systems. These Hemispherical Stacks encompass energy and mineral sourcing, intercontinental logistics, cloud platforms, address systems, interface cultures, and different politics of the user. Ultimately, the shift toward multipolar geopolitics and the segmentation of planetary computation into Hemispherical Stacks are the same phenomenon.

Over the past ten years, the term Stack, referencing geopolitically delineated computational infrastructures, has moved from speculative philosophy to a new common sense in mainstream political thought. It became clear that Stacks are not just something for states to govern, but that governance itself is fundamentally and inextricably tied to the ability to build and scale stack systems. In The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Bratton 2016), the argument is twofold: First, the emergence of planetary computation bends and distorts the modern Westphalian political geography, defined by territorially circumscribed nation-states, and also produces forms of territory in its own image, such as the realm of “the Cloud,” over which the geopolitics of the future will be contested. Second, such Stacks are not a single undifferentiated megamachine but a discontiguous accidental megastructure composed of mutually interdependent, functionally defined layers, just like in a network architecture stack. In the book’s schema, these are Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User layers, each of which can be occupied in different ways without disturbing the integration of the whole.

The argument holds that many of the core functions of the modern state are now regularly fulfilled by cloud platforms—identity, cartography, currency, etc. This does not mean that states are withering away, fully replaced by postnational networks. To the contrary, states always evolve in the direction of new capabilities for sensing and modeling a society. They have always been information-gathering entities. Today, we see a US Stack, a China Stack, an India Stack, a Gulf Stack, and perhaps a Eurostack. But even before this historical process is complete, another has begun that is potentially far more radical.

If the first two decades of the twenty-first century saw “software eating the world,” the accelerating emergence of AI sees AI eating software. This implies and demands very different kinds of Stacks than those built for procedural software. They imply different relationships between center and periphery, user and platform, artifact and model, composer and composition, and so much more. Geopolitical competition over GPUs, raw materials, bandwidth, training data, and total inference capacity may have once seemed like an exotic concern but is now regular front-page news. Professional foreign policy experts who may not know a gradient descent from a loss function now regularly offer their opinions on the matter. Everyone seems convinced such changes will define the geopolitics of the near future, as foretold, but there are precious few vivid and provocative visions of what the geopolitical landscape we are quickly entering actually looks like.

What is needed are good scenarios as tools to think with. Unfortunately, traditional think tanks who pioneered scenario planning are—ironically—largely caught off guard by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Their instincts lean heavily toward incumbent-institution protection and risk-to-normalcy mitigation. Science fiction provides another, probably better avenue for robust speculation. However, it has two clear problems for our purpose. It is beholden to plot- and protagonist-driven narratives, circling conflict-resolution formulas that obscure the counterfactual world-building as much as they illuminate it. It is also settling into an increasingly stark contrast between utopian and dystopian visions, with the latter currently dominating the bookshelves.

The kinds of scenarios we need to think creatively and critically about the future of Hemispherical Stacks require an open and more fearless approach than the traditional think tanks offer. They do not require heroes and villains and car chases. They should also be neither really utopian nor dystopian but rather a bit of both, more ambivalent than activist.

Scenario fictions are a literary and intellectual frontier that emerges at the intersection of future studies, systems thinking, and narrative art. Unlike traditional science fiction, which often pivots around compelling characters confronting spectacular technologies or societal shifts, scenario fictions intentionally depersonalize the future. They shift the spotlight from individual psychology to vast systemic forces, exploring the intricate trophic cascades across technology, ecology, economics, and geopolitics. They are provocations, not prescriptions; they do not chart optimal futures but illuminate the counterintuitive logics embedded in today’s choices.

Where classic sci-fi might ask, “How does this new AI technology change one person’s life?”, scenario fiction inquires, “What are the cascading institutional, cultural, and geopolitical reverberations of this AI technology across continents and decades?” They minimize psychology to maximize sociology, offering a bird’s-eye view of the world in motion. For example, instead of a story following a lone hacker in a climate-ravaged Shenzhen, a scenario fiction might sketch a tightly wrought vignette of supply chain relocalization, shifts in global currency hegemony, and informal urban governance structures emerging in the Pearl River Delta.

That is what we hope to inaugurate with this project and this ever-growing series of contributions. Over time, the scenarios will multiply, and as they do, the composite metascenario will get richer and richer.

You are invited not to read each scenario as a self-contained work of fictionalized nonfiction (though that is what they are), but rather to read them as pieces of a larger mosaic. The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts, and it is so by design.