It is because there is no one governance format for climates and electrons that the space for design is open at all. A communitarian integration of local techniques of measurement and mitigation into a more immediate tapestry may be an attractive vision for some, but a singing chorus to the invisible hand of flat networks is not a scalable posture of resistance to the status quo; to the contrary, programmatic localism and the democracy of means is a play for weakness. Without strong force-of-law mechanisms (and machines) in place, it is doubtful that design can possibly intervene at the superhuman scale of an planetary ecology, which, however, then leads us back to the contradictions of full-spectrum geography (but necessarily a compulsion to omniscience) with all its attendant problems, gaps, and failures intact. Moving away from an untrue position doesn ’ t make the new position truer. By way of comparison, merely inviting everything into a “ parliament ” (of all things) is to ask them to mimic and recite an old-fashioned, even reactionary, kind of political speech, but do strong computational alternatives seem any less arbitrary? <sup>71</sup> Is some currency backed by tons of carbon or gigaflops instead of US dollars (or gold or cryptocurrencies) a greater or lesser danger than the failures it would hope to ameliorate? Moreover, where is the limit to the conceptual violence of turning nature itself into a kind of permanent emergency, climate change into its final exception, and global warming into the masterwork of this ambient terrorist? Involving the planet as a ubiquitous enemy to be managed cannot end well for humans. What price is this to pay, even for a better currency? Does emergence necessarily shift from an open set available to unexpected incursions, recalling Deleuze ’ s meditation on the sands of California, to a closed loop, a synthetic landscape regulated as an objective resource? Yes and no. A synthetic landscape can also provide for new apertures in and out, especially the kinds unavailable while sitting on a beach. Within the Earth simulation machine demanded by planetary energy governance, the scalar relations between the local and global flipflop in ways that may multiply, absorb, and flatten alternative economies of energy exchange between big and little actors, and the most difficult step for geo-political design is to learn how to game the difference. In other words, the real design issues for the Earth layer are not defined by how well we can calculate risk and stage-manage disaster, but rather how well we engineer the path for one world to strategically fall apart into another. 72
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