Clouds become de facto states. “ Platform as governance, ” the inverse of “ government as of platform, ” is suggested just as strongly by today ’ s Cloud Polis. The structures and limits of a global Cloud platform cannot not reorient the contexts in which the fragility of state sovereignty is contested. Like charter cities, we see specific Cloud platforms absorbing forms of sovereign differentiation between people and places that used to be the exclusive domain of the state and can only imagine what kinds of “ sovereignty services ” this may lead to. How will the Cloud-based delineation (or absence of delineation) of land, identity, energy, value, territorial interiority and exteriority, and so on, come to mutate the overlapping layers of everyday law and life? It is less that Cloud platforms ultimately replace states than that two domains become dramatically less distinct from one another, interlacing and folding up in new ways, producing emergent institutional forms not reducible to the direct combination of the two. The ability of the Cloud to achieve this is based not only on the networking of information between locations, but on its interdependent position in the larger Stack, linking energy economies, Cities, Interfaces, and Users into a global but wholly uneven platform. That governing logic, privileging the Cloud layer as timekeeper and space maker, is built into the technical architecture of The Stack and imposes itself on states and traditional geopolitics as much as the inverse. <sup>41</sup> That is, Cloud platforms not only have geopolitical ramifications and implications; they are a geopolitical condition and constitution in their own right. Cloud Polis is populated by hybrid new geographies, new governmentalities, awkward jurisdictions, new regimes of interfaciality, and so new (and old) imaginary communities, group allegiances, ad hoc patriotisms, and inviolable brand loyalties will inevitably follow. Some of these may be archaic fundamentalisms now given a new mission; others are more novel and progressive, or soupy mixtures both futuristic and atavistic at once. The assignment claimed by planetary-scale computation is then not only to challenge the state ’ s monopoly on legitimate violence (the force of material as well as of material force) but also its monopoly on legitimate citizenships. As discussed, the fate of every location, and person and User, is overlayered with multiple, asymmetric, and irreconcilable platform allegiances, rights bequeathed and values extracted. That layered patchwork is the result of both the global circulations of “ citizens, ” understood as a mixture of people and things, as well as of the fractured ability of any one imagined community to incorporate the lives of its adherents when it must share space (and Users) with multiple simultaneous alternatives. <sup>42</sup>
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