At the scale of agonistic geopolitics, the variance in strategies for governing sovereign space, between states, platforms, and their combinations, seems to do more to multiply the variables than to reduce them toward consensual maps. For the emblematic Sino-Google conflict, the productive friction is also the result of a superimposition of two incommensurate logics of territory and governance: one is a cognitive capitalist proto- polis predicated on universal information rationalization, and the other is a geographically circumscribed central command that sees the Cloud as an extension of the body and charge of the national state. In this case, the two are like unmerged layers of an image pasted onto the same canvas, each a different shape and scale, but each demanding the recognition and acquiescence of the other. In the messy practices of billion- User scale technopolitics, even this arch opposition cannot itself hold. What if instead of simply staying put or leaving China, the Google Grossraum instead evolves over time and blankets or pours down on Chinese sovereign territory in such a way that the state would be as powerless to enforce policy on it as it is on the rain? <sup>21</sup> And if we imagine this circumnavigation to be well subscribed by Chinese publics, then how divided are their loyalties and how will they identify with dual citizenships such as these? What do states become in relation to this perforation when the circumscription of land guarantees that much less? For party planners, nightmares do such things make. <sup>22</sup> Others, looking back from that virtual future in which Google (or some similar Cloud platform) more fully connects China ’ s continent of Users with or without the formal acknowledgment of the Chinese government, may have more fondness for a Cloud Polis in which multiple User identities compete, conflict, and overlay without also congealing into a tidy individual User citizen-subject. That is, the superimposition of dissensual sovereignties applies to the people as well. Toward a design of such systems, what are the real limit conditions of the Cloud layer as an actual machine?
- Cloud Infrastructure
What is the Cloud, exactly, if understood as a vast discontiguous apparatus? Like The Stack as a whole, the Cloud layer is itself a terraforming project, covering the globe in subterranean wires and switches and overhead satellite arrays, simultaneously centralizing and decentralizing computing and data storage and the social relations that depend on them (and vice versa). Cloud infrastructure ’ s energy and water appetite demands specific landscape accommodations, including putting data centers in unexpected locations (inside office towers, ice caves, underground bunkers, coal mines, carved-out mountains, dead malls, inhospitable islands, old churches) all in the name of strategies both rational and strange (cheap energy, cheap space, proximity to oceanic passage, lax regulation on data storage, earthquake and flood avoidance, perimeter security, ideal temperature control). <sup>23</sup> Above ground, Cloud infrastructure is serviced by torqued logistics networks of warehouses, roads, factories, containers, ports of call, airports, and package routing hubs that together allow it to route physical objects in the way it routes data packets. In doing so, the layer absorbs metadata about each thing and each relation of exchange, all translated by algorithmic militations of cognition, data semantics, manufacture, demand, and response optimization as it links these across continents, compressing and expanding economic rhythms and cycles.
Cloud Layer
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