What is the proper role and ambition for this mode of Cloud Polis? How should we imagine the role of a geopolitical actor with the future scale, program, and capacity of, say, Google or Apple or Alibaba, as well as the smaller players that will fill out the space cleared by similar enterprises? First, the space over which Google ’ s (limited) capacity to generate or mediate proto-citizenship and economic sovereignty is neither comprehensive nor properly pluralistic. It is derived not from some classical constitutional claims, but from the mission statement to maintain the everyday nuts and bolts of planetary computation ( “ to organize the world ’ s information, and to make it universally accessible and useful ” ) and from this the presumption of an historical mission. In the administration of these global input and output interfaces, a kind of governance over the networks and territories mediated by them does emerge, Cloud Polis taking shape not through master plan but through accumulated microtechniques of regularization. By contrast, if the modern capitol building was an architecture that symbolized a legal, jurisdictional, and geographic center from which the terms and limits of sovereign citizenship might radiate concentrically, then the data center located out of site or even in the extraterritorial, un-national plane of the open sea, draws instead a technical and symbolic mesh of uneven threads flossed through multiple territories at once. From it, smaller assemblages of economic activity emanate, and practical norms of privacy and participation are worked out by both everyday habit and deliberate predation.
Again, this is not to suggest that even this form of Cloud Polis somehow formally secedes from national interest and control, but rather that as national interest and control pivot to the Cloud, the Cloud absorbs assignments of sovereign identification. Data centers and large switches also continue to operate under some normal authority, such that each Westphalian state claims (contested) rights over data within its geographic loop. The data that any one data center might house and distribute might be globally accessible in principle but also may be filtered or unfiltered by both national and international authorities (including mass interception of all traffic, national firewalling and keyword sorting, targeted deep packet inspection, or, in the recent examples of Egypt and Syria, complete blocking of a national top-level domain). International and transnational jurisdiction are even less settled, as evidenced by US superjurisdictional enforcement episodes and by controversies at the UN International Telecommunications Union over the role of member states to control, filter, and tax entry points of data entry into and out of their recognized territories (or even to adopt locally idiosyncratic Internet addressing schemes). <sup>43</sup> The lines are unclear, dotted, smudgy, knotty, and self-contradictory, but the lines do exist and are multiplying in number. As the cat-and-mouse games of perforating and mending the membranes of national virtual borders continue, a kind of accelerated evolutionary episode is playing out, and the mutual constraint between state and extrastate actors brings strange moments of symbiosis. Instead of the simplistic schema of centers versus networks, centralization versus decentralization, elites versus the people, we observe instead states becoming networks and networks becoming states, nodes becoming more like edges and edges becoming more like nodes. The intrapenetration of Cloud geography and state geography results in another spatial-institutional model based on the logics of platforms and on platform sovereignties that don ’ t fit into those frameworks. Something like Cloud Polis is still an awkward embryonic form of governance, both for and through planetary computation, and likely will be for some time.
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Cloud Layer