If the basic ingredients from which those might be combined to develop global proto-state platforms seem dangerously inadequate then my point about the necessity of tuning our design attention here has been made. That designable future of Cloud Polis will not evolve on its own, as if determined by some autonomous space of calculative variables. It will appear in coevolution, sometimes complementary and sometimes violent, with other existing modes of political imagination and organization, including the Westphalian state and its inept adaption to global ecological governance. This is complicated by how the future of the state will also develop through its incorporation of the Cloud as its own field of vision, domain, and jurisdiction, in parallel with the Cloud further incorporating state functions. What, if anything, finally grounds these counterclaims? In one sense, the practical locus of governmental control is over the capacity to structure, police, and, especially, tax flows: flows of people, money, data, energy. Through the control of the interfaces of input and output, be that a port city, a great firewall, or a superjurisdictional seizure, the taxation of flows is both the means by which states execute the right to exact capital and the result of sovereignty. In turn, that sovereignty over flows of value is translated into the right to issue standard guaranteed currencies, through which those flows are measured and which symbolize the sovereignty that legitimizes that claim in the first place. Money is also a way to identify the content of flows through abstracted equivalencies and, through the Address layer, to enforce territorial claims over identification itself. But as Cloud platforms have perhaps more direct means to validate them, competing claims for unforceable identifications of taxable flows may be where critical conflicts for the coevolutions of Cloud governance also rest.
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Cloud Layer