So truly, with Foster ’ s other commission to design printed structures on the Moon, should we decide to categorize the Apple Cloud Polis as part of that collection of megastructural Earth bases? The question remains, however, per Crystal Island, whether this design is properly suited to post- Apollo logics of geographic scale and the recognition of any project ’ s expanded planetary situation. Is it instead another ark built for paranoid withdrawal, a design to sustain life on a hostile alien planet even if that planet is our Anthropocenic Earth? There are surely many ways to characterize how the megastructure works at the City layer and from these to draw out different implications. Unlike a real moon base or Buckminster Fuller ’ s Domed City, for example, many such structures are not designed only for the permanent or even semipermanent housing of humans in settled encampments. Like the temple at G ö bekli Tepe, they may also be monumental landscape switching stations through which we might pass on our way. Their scale and centrality demand this passage, and the arcs of our movements are composed in their bending toward the gigantic nodes. We don ’ t reside in Foster ’ s Beijing Airport, but we must pass through its digestive system if we are to reach the next level of our passage in or out of China. Other megastructures are not only impermanent, they are also not designed for the mediation of humans at all. Most of the very largest buildings in the world accommodate and express the algorithmic resorting and distribution of inanimate objects, commodities, and cargo from sites of extraction, to assembly, to consumption, and back into landfills or the production cycle. As already noted, the relative freedom of objects to cross borders and gather global materials into themselves is far less restricted than the passage of people, bound as we are to the rights and restrictions of formal political citizenship. The physical object becomes the exemplary noncitizen User of the City layer, as the most intensive impact of algorithmic capital into the physical realm of The Stack is in the molecular reassemblage of standardized matter, its global redistribution as manufactured objects, and the computational optimization of their itineraries through supply chains. All of these enjoy their own kinds of megastructural theater. At the City layer, this object-oriented economy of molecular logistics is expressed in “ planetary supersurfaces ” such as warehouses that are so large that their floors have been laser-leveled against the curvature of the Earth. Instead of walls and windows, these spaces are programmed by bar codes, RFID chips, and scanners and populated by robotic platforms, shelves, and stockers that can easily lift over a ton of goods at once. <sup>72</sup> From the perspective of The Stack looking out at the Earth, these architectures of and for things are perhaps even more essential than those rendered for the benefit of human appreciation (as discussed in more detail in the User chapter).
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