The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 189 页

Taken as a whole, these Cloud platform megastructures concentrate the City layer by drawing economies of flesh, information, energy, and symbolization into a web of settlement and displacement as vast as it is uneven and asymmetrical. Often a megastructure will have a special interdependent relationship with another, such that its own enveloping closure belies dependence on a doppelg ä nger megastructure, one perhaps a continent away, for its own energy, purpose, and support. For example, as said, Apple ’ s spaceship in Cupertino, California, where design and strategy live, cannot possibly exist without the Foxconn factory campus in Langua, Shenzen, where Apple ’ s products are assembled from parts into the perfected slabs that tether its Users to its Cloud platform. ⁷³ Even as they occupy different corners of the globe and remain selectively ignorant of what goes on in the other site, the two megastructures are intimately paired. They share a unique bond across the strange distances of the City layer binding them together in ways that penetrate the total closure of their envelopes by doubling and mimicking one totality into the other. Foxconn ’ s fences sit next to suicide nets as Apple ’ s sit next to apricot fields, Foxconn ’ s dorms occupy Apple ’ s subterranean parking, and Foxconn ’ s massive assembly lines tag along with Apple ’ s customer service training programs. Together these megastructures, along with the network of mall-based retail embassies, constitute the terrestrial urbanity of the Apple Cloud platform, but their symbiotic relationship may prove to be more fragile than it may seem. Like the Eloi and Morlock from H. G. Wells ’ s The Time Machine, the megastructures ’ two paired populations share the same world but inhabit different spaces, one above ground and the other underneath. One lives in the perpetual innocence of play and leisure, experience, design, and innovation, staying strategically distanced, oblivious, or uninterested in how it all appears every morning for them, while the other runs the machine underneath, toiling against the Earth, forcing it to produce the bounty over and again. It is perhaps a bad omen for Cupertino that the bargain between the subterranean world of the Morlocks and the surface world of the Eloi is maintained only because the Morlocks periodically harvest Eloi like cattle and eat them. ⁷⁴ Lesson: for better and for worse in various measures, the cannibal economies between networks of megastructures at the City layer of The Stack are actually not always what they first appear to be, and almost always reversible. ⁷⁵

City Layer

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