But the footprint of the Cloud is measured at the scale of continents, not enterprises. Some see it as an uneven computational troposphere, others as a prototype universal Turing machine, arranged not with tape but with uneven networks of fiber optics, data centers, nested databases, terminals, and browsers. <sup>8</sup> The Cloud layer is also a geopolitical machine, erasing some geographies and producing others, forming and destabilizing territories in competitive measure. It is at this level of The Stack that the modern coherence of the state, which would produce one sort of public, and the operations of platforms, which would produce another, can come into conflict, overlapping and interlacing one another without universal jurisdiction or resolution, but it is also where they can reinforce each other with more pervasive forms of ambient governance. The geopolitics of the Cloud is everywhere and wants everything: the platform wars between Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, anonymized servers routing the angry tweets from street battles, Anonymous going up against Mexican drug cartels, WikiLeaks crowd-sourcing counterespionage, Tor users building on top of Amazon Web Services services, carriers licensing content, content providers licensing bandwidth, proprietary fiber networks connected trading centers, and on, and on. It might seem at first blush that these events, each perhaps pushing legal boundaries in its own way, should be understood as disruptive contaminations of a standing political order — acts of resistance to the system, even. Yet in their own consistency, this stockpile of exceptions is probably better interpreted as part of the constitution of another emergent order (a nomos of the Cloud even?). It is an order derived from the structural and technical protocols that locate different Users among different operations and condition the actions they take from there. As a governing nexus of The Stack, this order identifies, produces, and polices the information that can move up and down, layer to layer, fixing internal and external borders and designating passages to and from. In doing so, it generates more lines and borders, not fewer, and so its apparent universality is actually densely divided against itself.
110
Cloud Layer