The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 111 页

1. Platform Geography

In mountainous regions, trees above the cloud line are sometimes invisible from the vantage point of cities in the valley below. Sometimes it looks as if the gray sky has decapitated the peaks. But for the Cloud layer, what is invisible is less what is above than what is below the point where the computation touches the ground. Unseen but not placeless, the trans-urbanism of the Cloud layer is defined not just by the distribution of terrestrial borders, but also by the terraforming recentralization of nodes — urban, financial, logistical, political — in the service and purpose of its networks (e.g., former Siberian missile command bunkers are turned into icy data centers, and entire skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles are turned into massive, stacked switching hubs for every major telco by CoreSite/Carlyle Group). Above ground, the Cloud makes its own kind of temporary logistics plantations at exurban perimeters or near, or indeed inside, regional airports. The warehouse and supply chain centers that turn commands in databases into the traffic of real goods constitute a shadow network of itinerant packages and only slightly less itinerant laborers. Amazon and Walmart ’ s fulfillment centers in places like Hebron, Kentucky, Goodyear, Arizona, and Fernley, Nevada, are staffed by a multitiered outsourced and re-outsourced population of sorters, packers, and movers. During Christmas, when demand for short-term labor is acute, Amazon will make use of “ workampers, ” often senior citizens moving in large recreational vehicles from one fulfillment center to another, coming and going from Amazon towns as demand dictates. Guest workers of the algorithms: Grandpa, the Wandering Morlock of The Cloud. ⁹ Here we glimpse the prototype of a future Cloud feudalism.

A constitutional geography is at work. As the nomos of the Cloud rotates from a twodimensional map to a vertical, sectional stack, its topography is shaped by the multiplication and superimposition of layers of sovereign claims over the same site, person, and event. The microenclaves that it spawns are a pixelated patchwork of discontiguous partial interiors and enclaves. Their double exposures are the exceptions that constitute a new rule. Strategic networks of data centers, fiber-optics cables, energy pipelines, freeways, warehouses, and shipping ports magnetize other geographies around themselves, generating legal exceptions, economies of monetized cognition, and platform wars for expanding populations of Users, both human and nonhuman. So through the Cloud layer, it is less that The Stack emerges in the service of or in opposition to world governance than that it dissolves computational governance into the very fabric of things — platform immanence — and perhaps the productive accident of the Cloud layer is exactly this rotation and interweaving of regular and irregular sovereign geographies into still largely unmapped configurations. ¹⁰ Its everyday lived geopolitics is like that of Bes źel and Ul Qoma in China Mi é ville ’ s novel The City and the City, twin cities only partially visible to one another even as they occupy the same location, each dependent on enforcing a willed ignorance of the other ’ s presence, constantly policing one another ’ s breaching. ¹¹

Cloud Layer

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