- Blur and Accident
We start with questions that are as slippery as what they interrogate. In an age of planetary-scale computation, what is “ sovereignty ” and what is the future political geography, especially as the former is separated from the latter? How would the answers influence how we draw and divide up who and what goes where, and what shape the maps are that could do this? When geography becomes geolocation, who or what truly occupies any given place? Its owner, its user, the platform that makes it useful to either? Again, how is one person governed when platforms of governance see her as a User at a particular layer of a whole more than as a formal citizen? What freedoms of movement and freedoms from movement can she claim? What constitutes a constitution when the terms of engagement with other publics, near and far, both human and nonhuman, are codified into visual interfaces— images that are also tools? How can these platforms be redesigned to organize alternative economics, geopolitics, ecologies, philosophies, and even models of historical time? As it is conditioned by globalization, localization, and intermediate zonal regionalisms, by spaces absorbed by networks and networks absorbed by citadels, will some other, unknown political geometry come to enact and enforce the necessary partitions and brackets (border, wall, law, identity) that could program the world according to its alternative plan and plan it according to its program? Who and what gets to be the citizen-subject- User-agent of that program? Finally, to Clinton ’ s half-formed question, what is the architecture of the emergent geopolitics of this software society? What alignments, components, foundations, and apertures?
Introduction
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