- Platform Wars
For The Stack, Cloud Polis represents an extremely complex design problem, because while it may determine so much, it guarantees little about the predictability of outcomes. Renewal and innovation or totalitarian dystopia: neither is assured or foreclosed. While we can survey the landscape of Cloud platform empires as they exist today, we can ’ t presume that the current arrangement of stakeholders and their positions will continue without dramatic unforeseen disruptions to the status quo . It is also possible (even probable) that the most decisive and geopolitical Cloud formations are still some years off. While Google, the specific company headquartered in Mountain View, California, is its most obvious exemplar of today ’ s platforms, my argument concerns something far less immediate than the product and service road map of any single corporation. The figure of The Stack is that of a politico-geographic-technological framework that does not yet exist, and may very well never exist, but serves as a conceptual-technical structure to think with and against as we compose what does emerge. For this, what makes the Cloud layer of The Stack so important is that today each of the major USbased ventures — Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon (plus Walmart, Oracle, IBM, FedEx, UPS, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Cloudera, Dropbox, and others) — embody and enact, each one differently, a prototype (a “ prototypology ” ) for our Cloud geopolitical futures. The architecture of their brands and their software platforms is not only representative of geopolitical interests; each one in its way is a geopolitical model. To be clear, the more relevant questions for us are less how they might extend US superjurisdiction than how each constitutes different and incomplete options for what emerges around it and in spite of it. They perform this role both as privately held corporations and also, as Umberto Eco pointed out years before (1994) in his prescient satirical essay, “ The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS, ” even as exemplars of alternative techno-theological programs. <sup>46</sup> In sequence, we ’ ll examine the models posed by Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and perhaps the most significant for this stage of the argument, Google. <sup>47</sup>
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Cloud Layer