The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 174 页

The notion of a “ right to the city, ” for anyone to move and navigate freely through urban space and to engage with it on his or her own terms, is a rallying truth for critical urbanism, but its exact terms are as uncertain as the convoluted control structures of the City layer against which the notion maneuvers. In addition to a right to general passage through urban interfaces, it also includes some right to use these for one ’ s open-ended creative purposes, not only for closed-loop consumption. ⁴² For its part, the TBIT device elegantly unknots several governments of mobility at once, including the mobility of the handset, enabling a territorial mobility of the person, in turn enabling a mobility of his position within political networks. ⁴³ Perhaps part of the reason that TBIT, even just as a poetic prototype, drew such seething anger from some quarters is that how it obliquely but unambiguously signals a structural shift in the agency of excluded Users to access the regional interfaces-networks-territories. ⁴⁴ The alegal status of the migrant shifts between two modes of the biopolitical: that which is banished and left to die and that which can be killed with impunity. ⁴⁵ The migrant is not only outside the walled protection of human settlement but sentenced to the vast unwalled “ camp ” of the desert, both inside the law of national border and outside the confines of the societal. Drifting, she is cast into a zone of ungovernable nature, further animalized by xenophobic paramilitaries on the prowl, themselves acting both outside the law but also in the name of a jurisdictional border, defending the arbitrary line itself as the true sovereign. In the nativist view, it is not the migrant ’ s right to passage or employment that is or is not legal, but that she herself, her very person, is illegal. It is less that the migrant commits the felony of entering the country without permission and is therefore a person who has committed a felony (like tax evasion, securities fraud or animal cruelty, for example). Rather, by a strange inversion of habeas corpus , it is more that her very body and its presence on the land is a felony, and so to arrest her mobility is not just to stop the movement of a person, rightly or wrongly; rather, the capture of her biological person is to police a crime that is embodied therein.

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City Layer