- Future Cloud Polis and Platforms
The geopolitical design question for the Cloud layer of The Stack circulates around what forms different Cloud polities will take in the near future and how they will draw on alternative organizational logics in their emergence. To diagram this, it is tempting to extrapolate from existing models and to inflate and linearize their exponential development. Surely to varying degrees the models described above, as abstracted from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google, will persist, normalize, expand, and recombine in some linear fashion. But in their recombinations and in the gaps and failures, unexpected and perhaps unlikable developments are certain to shift the terms by which such models mediate power. In the span of a generation, we may be living with an ecology of competing platforms for which the models that differentiate today ’ s players are mixed differently along with new unknown functions. Only for this reason, and not for making futurist predictions about companies or stocks, the models of the current mix are a good starting point from which to sketch what might arrange alternative Cloud polities. Each of the limited sovereignties that a platform enjoys over a specific domain can be recombined. For example, instead of today ’ s division of organizational acumen as drawn above, perhaps some new Cloud platform will be based on a combination of aspects drawn from Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google at once. Perhaps one is based on individuation and display, App ecology, object logistics, and global infrastructure. Perhaps another instead draws on visual communication, hardware and physical touch, third-party cloud services, and search, while a third is based on fabricated currencies, enclave aesthetics, retail virtualization and compression, and cloud-based robotics. To date, the current major platforms have evolved as expressions of specific but not inevitable strategic decisions. There is no reason to assume that the ecology of platforms must be as it is, and very different arrangements are not only possible but inevitable. Today ’ s key Cloud platforms might evolve in the direction of these prototypical mutations, while new platforms consolidate and bifurcate, others emerge from bits and pieces of incomplete smaller players, and still others remain resolutely partial and interstitial, carving unrecognized parcels from the overlaps. It would be worthwhile to formally outline full scenarios for each set of possible recombinations from existing platforms (several others — e.g., Walmart, Alibaba, General Electric, Samsung, Unilever, Siemens, Toyota — could be included here) formalizing the gaps, unexpected synergies and conflicts, and the different agendas that drive them to cohere and diverge. The resulting diagram of this menagerie of chimeric Cloud platforms will likely include some creatures that will in time appear for real and stalk the Earth.
Cloud Layer
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