The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 120 页

States move into the Cloud. We see this in guises from the benign to the sinister, from progressive gestures of information democratization like data.gov to the troubling surveillance armatures associated with the National Security Agency, the Patriot Act, and superjurisdiction over international Cloud data. ³⁴ From the prosaic gathering and reportage of information to its citizens, on the one hand, to the clandestine hoarding of massive troves of data about its citizens (and other countries ’ citizens), on the other, states in the cloud transform what states can see, and what “ seeing like a state ” (and listening and sensing like a state) actually entails. ³⁵ With this shift in perceptual techniques, habits, and dispositions, states are inspired to look for some things and not others. The work of contemporary governance is transformed toward the management of multiple, irregular, asymmetric layers of Cloud platforms, and as the “ eyes ” of the state evolve, its bones and blood will follow. ³⁶

Much has been made in recent years about a reinvention of government through the more intensive and intelligent strategizing of its institutions as public data-generating, -sorting, and -disseminating systems, and their optimization along the lines of any other large peer-to-peer information service. The sunny ethos of “ government as a platform ” imagines Users accessing democratic states in the same way that a private Cloud platform allows Users to retrieve and program structured data for their own secondary purposes. ³⁷ It sees platforms spawning new clients, developing economies and microtargeted utilities, and it asks then, “ If states are conceived as platforms, wouldn ’ t they work the same? ” One version of this presumes a general inversion of government ’ s data-capturing mission now outward toward the exterior-facing world of active constituents. This might lead to a greater modularization and even outsourcing of governmental services to constituents interested in providing and innovating these. ³⁸ However, the PRISM/Snowden affair and the general revelation of the core role that consultants like Booz-Allen Hamilton and Palantir play in the federal information complex demonstrate that this disintermediation of the work of the Cloud-based state is not only well underway, and that the more individualistic-entrepreneurial story of “ government as a platform, ” as told by publisher, Tim O ’ Reilly and others, is at most a supplemental augmentation of a well-established apparatus. In fact, one shudders at the thought of what a more individually distributed subcontracting of state Cloud surveillance might look like. At the same time, the most far-reaching visions of the open government movement might still represent a transformation of the state itself into something unknown — perhaps an apps-based queryable megamachine like Planetary Skin or Google Earth, but with obvious and significant differences. ³⁹ The optical positions of a state — how it sees the world and its constituents and how its citizens see themselves reflected through the ambient quantitative commons — might bear all the benefits and bankruptcies of earlier forms of communicative reason. As these try to reform technocratic media into humanist channels, they are not necessarily predicated on an overcentralization of expertise; rather, we see how some core mechanisms of governance on the ground become less like a central command machine and more like an ambient, generalized utility at hand for anyone interested in parsing the databases and spreadsheets and deploying them toward new designs. Here the maximal state and

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Cloud Layer