TBIT does not attempt to transform the nonperson of the migrant into a formal citizen; rather, it positions her as a User, and that User position, halfway as it is between dispossession and citizenship, may prove to be a more powerful and resilient subject agency than we might normally expect, not only for migrants but for Cloud Polis going forward. <sup>46</sup> For this User-as-sovereign, the apparatus is an interface to the territory, functionally agnostic to the User’ s formal legal identity, and so it can rewrite the geography not by rigid subdivisions of mutually hostile states and the prophylactic imperatives of national immunity, but toward another unspecified urban vocabulary of an open territorial commonwealth. Here we also get a useful glimpse of what the virtual software envelope, to extend Zaera-Polo ’ s schema, is capable of providing besides constitutional programs of control and commercial software mash-ups. The reorganization of spatial access through a new interfacial regime introduces new de facto “ rights to the city ” to those with otherwise insufficient political agency, and so it encourages alternative geographies to proliferate, not by decree but by physical occupation (as even Schmitt would have to acknowledge). As they do, they promote and enforce innovative claims over what the City layer is and does, and for whom and for what. The nativists ’ outrage was not incorrect in this sense, as the acute implications of the project are indeed catastrophic to the idea of ethnically and geographically pure polities. And so, one generative accident of this layer is the germination of such informal User “ cosmopolitanisms. ” They arrive as functions of the omnivorous neutrality — even universality — of an interfacial regime that produces a polity of User subjects that is far more inclusive than state sovereignties can manage. States often react to these by refortifying their policing of identity, even of their own “ organic citizens, ” and so, as said, we can anticipate some scenarios in which the noncitizen User may enjoy more spatial permissions than the citizen User because the City layer ’ s vision is not programmed to see and govern her. At the same time, as we ’ ll discuss further in the User chapter, this agnostic universality can extend User suffrage not just to humans, but to any agent capable of interacting with that interfacial regime as a deliberate actor (e.g., car, animal, microbe). This should alert us already to the limits of interpreting interfacial governance along an axis of individual agency versus collective interest. Instead, the design problematic is to make more explicit how plural configurations of User positions cohere across different scales and rhythms.
City Layer
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