That said, as the Cloud is planetary is scope, state control of its systems is guaranteed only to the extent that private providers continue to respect (by consent, force, joint venture, outright merger) the practical sovereignty of the national jurisdictions in which their servers are installed, where their offices are headquartered, how exactly their data structure economic exchanges, and how their monetization of those data is or is not taxed. That arrangement is both resilient and unstable in various measures and tracks the successes and failures of globalization itself. Today most Cloud service providers have constraining jurisdictions built into service plans. For example, Amazon Web Services segregates the serving of hosted data according to several geographic “ availability zones, ” allowing developers to deploy specific versions of their application to specific users in specific countries according to local laws and priorities, regardless of where Amazon might be hosting or mirroring their data. However, the sorting of state space and data space is not always so neat, and the unintended effects of innovative interconnections between Cloud publics can be calamitous. Recall the Bank of Iceland ’ s ill-fated online banking venture in the United Kingdom, where easy access to “ offshore ” digital deposits and inopportune loans help to crash both nations ’ economies and contributed to a long-term destabilization of Iceland ’ s (and Europe ’ s) solvency. Ultimately, as a design problem, the potential political economic architecture of the Cloud Polis is at best a blurry composition, and like any other form of governance, its emergence is unevenly and asymmetrically violent. <sup>44</sup> While it standardizes and flattens some symbols, geographies, and economies, it simultaneously frays and multiplies others. There is no way to guarantee either outcome in advance, and it is precisely the unforeseeable reversibility of these effects on any one location that makes the Cloud Polis central to the forms of sovereignty it mediates and which mediate it. <sup>45</sup> In other words, the increasing reliance on Cloud infrastructure produces unintended geopolitical effects precisely because its power to govern through the observation of geographies, and the calculation of strategic information in the competition over those spaces, is always in the end reversible. Government data willingly opened to the public for its edification and employment, reinforcing the bonds and identification with a particular state apparatus generating this bounty, are also a potential basis for countergovernance, resistance, revolution, and the multiplication of unpredictable microsovereignties. The opposite — oversecuritization making systems brittle — is equally risky. That any innovation may accomplish one and the other, or how it may be deployed for one agenda and also its opposite, depends to a degree on the Interfaces we use to engage them and on what they as Interfaces connect and disconnect for us and from us. This is how The Stack connects Users and Clouds, Cities and Interfaces. But even then, any one Interface (that is, any one instrumental image of the platform as it is decoding its functions to us) is enrolled by more than one imagination at the same time. Interfaces are dream worlds, however restricted. They are also the real techniques by which power in inscribed by and for the imagined communities of geopolitical intrigue. But because interfacial images, like the machines they mediate, are tools for more than one geography at once, even the semiotic specificity of any one interface is a poor guarantee against the ultimate reversibility of the Cloud Polis. Just ask Costa Rica.
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