When you click on the Buy button, you trigger this whole process again. One fewer unit on the shelf means one more is assembled elsewhere to replace it as “ choice ” activates the supply chain as surely as turning a key in a car makes it start. Amazon ’ s is the state-of-the-art model platform for this Cloud Polis of things. Amazon ’ s central demands for that polity ’ s prototypical future are object logistics, retail compression and virtualization, procedural individuation, as well as third-party hosting, the provision of wholesale Cloud hosting at global scale. Amazon ’ s eminent retail position leverages the just-intime global delivery networks born in the 1970s that enabled overnight links between the East and West coasts of the US through central hubs in the Southeast, namely, UPS and FedEx. <sup>60</sup> Tracking the growth of planetary-scale computation to synchronize and accelerate flows of data and metadata, these package delivery networks have evolved from expensive supplementary services for high-priority clients into general platforms for the distribution of objects to and fro. Their efficiencies threaten federal postal systems, which offer universal service even to remote locations but comparatively slow delivery options (more on the postal ontology of the state in the Address chapter). Through megaoutlets like Amazon, these delivery platforms not only grease the flow of goods from warehouse to shelf, they virtualize the shelf and alter the relative advantages and disadvantages of local businesses. The velocity of object flow tracks to exponential increases in the computational capacity of individual processors, which are also the switching gateways of real packages coordinated by them in aggregated multiples. As each switch in the landscape of logistical infrastructures increases in its ability to route bits, it also increases its ability to route the real objects that those bits represent. Amazon (and others — e.g., Walmart, Carrefour, Alibaba) aggregate and centralize those routes, feeding on efficiencies of scale, the competitive supervision of these networks, and the leverage over smaller actors in the cycle that these both guarantee.
The Amazon model demonstrates (as does Google ’ s) how the microtargeting of content to individual Users based on previous search-and-click history allows unique terms of engagement with diverse subpublics without needing to put one User on display to the other. This technology of procedural individuation-without-identity is in contrast with Facebook ’ s, which defines the individuation of the User largely through the visual display of identity. For Amazon, the long tail is a model of objective tendencies, not subjectively performed gestures. The platform does not care about your name or who you really are deep down, but only in the likelihood that the next presentation of object X, Y, or Z will motivate your One-Clicking and the subsequent activation of supply chain cascades that ensue. For this, Amazon does not even necessarily have to provide the User-facing front end for Cloud services. Just as UPS and FedEx moved into high-margin logistics consulting businesses, Amazon Web Services is a major provider of large-scale Cloud hosting and e-commerce for third parties (including states and their intelligence agencies). In addition to finding customers for its suppliers, Amazon also rents the pick-axes for the Cloud rush. This superterranean platform-of-platforms (from servers to warehouse to inventory delivery) allows both small and large affiliate actors to engage multiple overlapping and even opposed publics on the same shared hosting infrastructures.
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Cloud Layer