- Exposure and Control
Touchpoint by touchpoint, the City layer is perhaps where the birth pangs of Stack geopolitics are felt most viscerally. The arrival of any political constitution is accompanied by a corresponding foundational violence, and this is no less true of planetary computation and the jurisdictions emerging in its interfacial networks. But unlike modern political states that may have exploded into being by the breaching or establishment of specific symbolic centers, the constitutional violence of planetary computation ’ s platform sovereignties occurs at the surface of the entire city, in and on every object seemingly all at once, as ubiquitous and convergent as it is partial and partitional. The City layer rests on residue of this violence, so where into its shallow surfaces can we dig? The urban interface was not always conceptualized in terms of its manifest spatial, political performance, but two essays, written in the Paleolithic years of the digital era, still clarify some of what is at stake for the City layer in particular. First, Virilio ’ s essay, “ The Overexposed City ” (1985), synthesizes many of his ideas on the mediatization of the city by focusing on the airport, as both a security environment and a model for the city ’ s compression through command, communication, speed, and inertia. Long ago, the ceremonial interface to a city may have been a gate or a bridge, which, when closed, also shut off the city from the movement of goods, people, ideas, microbes, and more. These orifices between city and periphery were where the martial risk and complexity of contact were modulated, but now the airport is that interface into the city and to the nation-state, regardless of the global point of departure, and regardless of how close the airport is from any actual formal border. Airports, even in the deep national interior, contain within them legal international borders, safe zones, duty-free zones, security screens, unsafe and quarantine zones, and other liminal jurisdictions and complementary policing programs. Looking at airports as a model for intermodal information exchange, we see that the global mobility of people and things is possible in part because of the protocological standardization of an interfacial network of airports and cities, arranged by increments of first-person travel time, hub-and-spoke econometrics, and its flattening affectless provisionality of boarding lounge culture. Movement through the airport ’ s multistage rituals of filtering and sorting paces the User through densely juxtaposed police and leisure zones. Security agents examine and handle your person in ways usually reserved for criminals and sans-papiers as you pose in the midst of the leisure corridors where summary versions of human culture have been miniaturized into inspirational magazines and the unchallenging solicitations of snack food.
City Layer
155