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This chapter discusses a case study of the outsourcing arrangement between British Aerospace (BAe) and Computer Science Corporation (CSC). The case study presents an example of a total outsourcing contract, where the client company has successfully manoeuvred itself into a win situation, and by doing so is slowly improving the suppliers' economic situation in the venture through additional and new areas of business. This case highlights the importance of a detailed contract in a long-term exchange-based relationship, and especially the important role of the contract in providing a continuing governance structure for the relationship. Because of the centrality of the contract, it was recognized that realignment procedures needed to be mutually implemented to ensure the contract properly represented BAe's business and technological changes, but also the shifting basis on which CSC could provide services at a reasonable profit.

This chapter examines the telecommunications sector in Myanmar. Strict adherence to ideology and commercial self-interest, in the guises of “national security” and military-controlled state-enterprises, has confined access to telecommunications to a few. A World Bank report of 1995 notes the general lack of private access to physical infrastructure, including telecommunications, and how this skews foreign investment towards joint ventures with the state. Public telecom facilities, fixed and wireless, continue to be state-owned and controlled by Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). Under the 1989 State-Owned Economic Enterprise Law, part of the Open Door policy, telecommunication facilities and services were the sole right of the government, but government-private sector joint ventures were permitted. Other laws which impact the telecom sector are the Computer Science Development Law enacted in 1996 and the Electronic Transaction Law which took effect in April 2004.

Computational thinking is a way of solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior that draws on concepts fundamental to computer science. The advanced placement course, AP Computer Science Principles, introduces students to basic concepts and challenges them to explore how computing and technology impact the world. Computational thinking across the K–12 curriculum compliments, rather than competes with, efforts to expand computer science education. Computer science courses include algorithmic thinking, logic, abstraction, decomposition, and debugging. Computational and mathematical thinking have much in common. The book In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations that Changed the World is an excellent introduction to mathematical thinking by describing the impact of equations.

Stack architectures are designed to be remade. Each modular layer can contain any technology able to communicate with the layer above and below it. This chapter examines not the Stack-we-have but the Stack-to-come. It considers possible futures for each of the six layers, recognizing both the potential and the risks that each may bring. As each layer is considered in relation to its own potential accidents, as The Stack as a whole is a composite accident. Some scenarios suggest further ecological calamity, Cloud Feudalism, and revitalized political theological fundamentalisms. Others may suggest instead robust ecological polities, rationalized algorithmic governance, and a vibrant proliferation of human and non-human agents. Whether the latter wins out over the former depends on how well we cope with the Copernican traumas of planetary-scale computation.

This introductory chapter discusses a new model of geopolitics that is better suited to understanding, designing and governing planetary-scale computation, here understood as both as a calculative process and as global infrastructure. It argues that contemporary computing technologies can be understood not as separate and autonomous but rather as forming into a coherent whole, an accidental megastructure called “The Stack.” Modelling these technologies as a whole allows for both a more comprehensive perspective and the ability to re-design them as an integrated platform. To formulate the “design brief” for that project, as this book does, requires a perspective that blends philosophical, geopolitical and technological understandings and methods.