- Cloud Polis
In tracing the outlines of our current Cloud-based polities, we see that platforms have assumed and absorbed several core political functions of the modern state and innovated new modes of governance besides. Cartography , for example, has long been a core competence of states, particularly when they are busy expanding their empires, naming locations, planting flags in them, and rendering these on their own maps for the first time. Throughout the colonial era of globalization, the basic description of a “ new ” territory over which a state might wish to internalize into its jurisdiction, and over which it contests control, may be legally precedent to whatever private strategies are subsequently put in motion, or they may come later as decorative legitimation of earlier speculative adventures. <sup>32</sup> Either way, sovereigns have long claimed and enforced the right to name and objectively represent the territories they govern. Today contested lines on maps still symbolize geopolitical tensions over sovereign influence, as the many intrigues over islands in the South China Sea attest. Consider then the curious episode in 2010 when Google Maps slightly shifted the line marking the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Troops were summoned and war over the ambiguous territory seemed possible. The naming and measuring of the ground over which and into which politics might maneuver was, however unintentionally, remade not by either of these states but by a Californian software company. The situation was defused, but a new precedent was made. In the US context, compare this to Lewis and Clark ’ s westward excursion, or the cartographic corps sent out during the New Deal to expand and reinforce federal territorial vision and the right of final say-so over what parcel is where. More recently, Google made news by formally recognizing Palestine as a delineated nation, well ahead of its eventual full status at the United Nations, <sup>33</sup> and between the two institutions, it ’ s not altogether obvious which recognition will prove with the benefit of historical hindsight to be the more efficacious. These episodes hint at a potential swap in the relative positions between the cloud and the states in the definition of a last-instance geography that is now also described to states by Cloud platforms instead of the other way around. The ambiguities of the rotation in priority, and perhaps of which institution finally underwrites which, persist in differing models of Cloud Polis. For one, the state shape-shifts into a Cloud platform, and for the other, Cloud platforms functionally displace states by assuming their functions.
Cloud Layer
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