A global political and geographic dynamic is demonstrated by the TBIT controversy, and that a real subjectivization is at work may also clarify some of Agamben ’ s unfortunate confusion regarding the contemporary mobile apparatus. As we consider how global geography is remade by The Stack, another lesson to glean is that whenever there is a persistent and broadly experienced mismatch between, on the one hand, a residual legal-political form (an old legal statute attempting to govern and contain what it can neither describe nor circumscribe) and, on the other hand, an emergent social-technical form (a new social condition arising from a new network condition), then we can expect the structural momentum of that emergent form to spawn various “ criminal ” connections and transferences, both amorally and asubjectively. It just does. A critical mass of such emergent connections or actions may, for good or bad, eventually overwhelm heritage lines in the sand. To be clear, this is very different from the transgression of an active code. It is less illegal than it is alegal: illegible, invisible, outside, or just incommensurate to established legal supervision. Even if the state can see it at all, it still cannot name it properly. The alegal represents an embryonic quasi agency, neither exactly inside or outside governance, nor exactly inside or outside markets, but largely generated by platforms directly, and they can also be founding figures of a preferable geopolitics that we may honestly anticipate for The Stack.
This is especially true if that future platform, that interfacial regime to come, would technically be illegal according to today ’ s statutes. Worse perhaps than the criminalization of culture is the criminalization of infrastructure. Such alegal actions and events, normative tomorrow but prohibited today (Do we call them “ postcrimes ” ?) fulfill the programs provided by new networks in an autonomic and sovereign disregard of zombie jurisdictions. Alternative geographies appear in the repetition of actions and processes that are as illegal for one jurisdictional geography as they are constitutional of another, even as the two occupy the same location. To design the City layer in the image of that emergent political geography (with the emergence, not against the emergency) also means to design, as B.A.N.G. Lab has done, through the interfacial agencies that this alternative is already formulating in its disinvestment from the geographies it overwrites. That is how to conjure it.
- Megastructure and Utopia
That ’ s no moon, it ’ s a space station.
— -Obi-Wan Kenobi
In the accidental platform sovereignty of a migrant ’ s apparatus, we may see a certain slow-burn afterimage of G ö bekli Tepe and the circling movements of its mobile admirers, and as part of that image, what some might call a virtualization of the City layer is certainly part of the design program. At the same time, those Westphalian geographies are engaged not just at the tactical level of the savvy User, but also at the scale of the Cloud platform , and their interests and intentions are very different. While Cloud platforms may capitalize interactions between any and all Users, their own designs for the City layer may be represented more by megastructural artificial geographies — formal utopias even — that allow them to program their own encapsulated territory according to more predictable plans. What kinds of cities are our major Cloud platforms actually building, and how do they choose to make architectural scale footprints on the City layer? Put differently, after the above consideration of how the City layer ’ s envelopes and interfaces might be expressed at the Cloud and User layers of The Stack, and what kinds of deliberate and accidental platform sovereignties this enables, we also need to ask how the Cloud layer expresses itself directly at the level of the City layer, and when this preserves or dissolves those platform sovereignties.
176
City Layer