My argument then is not another prophecy of the declining state withering away into the realm of pure network, but to the contrary, that the state ’ s own pressing redefinition takes place in relation to network geographies that it can neither contain nor be contained by. As cloud-based computing platforms of various scales and complexities come to absorb more and more social and economic media, and do so on a planetary scale, the threads linking one data object to one jurisdiction bound to one geographic location become that much more unraveled. It ’ s not that the state cannot follow those threads, rather that when it does it takes leave and becomes something else. Other exemplary exceptional territories, such as tax-free Special Economic Zones, also mark the visible effects of network globalization in general, but the underlying function of emergent Cloud systems to enable these demands special consideration, especially at the level of the individual User. The rights and conditions of citizenship that were to whatever degree guaranteed by the linking of information, jurisdiction, and physical location, all within the interior view of the state, now give way perhaps to the riskier prospects of a Google Grossraum, in which and for which the terms of ultimate political constitution are anything but understood.
For example, we know that the modern state is also bound to a particular set of protocological interests and generative legal codes and that the membranes of their jurisdictions are defined by them, but the transposition of juridical media from legislation to computation produces a rather different set of ground rules. Certain political positions are built already into the hardware, not allegorically but literally. For example, for many processor chips from the last few decades, “ core user ” is a sovereign figure who can generate subordinate administrative subjects — who in turn can control the calculative access of other users. <sup>20</sup> What law, passed where, could undo this polity, based not on formal constitution or really even the perfunctory end user agreement? As we have seen, states respond forcefully, sometimes by attempting to directly compete with these kinds of sovereignty and sometimes by absorbing them as their own new norms.
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Cloud Layer