The Stack also contributes to a geopolitical order and is a manifest representation of that order, but what sort? The Stack does not neatly fit into Schmitt ’ s historical model or vice versa. Its appropriations of irregular territories and complications of geographical distinctions suggest more than modern political geometry outfitted with fast processors. Planetary-scale computation may need to be understood as a successor to these other modes of geographic governance — land, sea, air — each with its own logics of partition. But unlike the US Department of Defense, which also recognizes “ cyber ” as the fourth spatial domain of war but describes it as necessarily subordinate to existing forms of state jurisdiction, I suggest that other shifts are at work, perhaps even a break, that will prove more difficult to accommodate and contain. It is neither that the spaces of The Stack are enrolled into established systems or simply stamped with a new governing system of addresses all at once; rather, an accumulation of interactions between layers in an emergent structure is producing the scale, dimension, and contours of this supercomputational geography in the first place. <sup>18</sup> First and foremost, The Stack is occupying itself. Schmitt ’ s opposition of the “ land versus liquid ” logics of sovereignty ( “ Eternal Rome ” versus “ Eternal Carthage ” ) does not hold, any more than the distinction between the physical and the virtual. <sup>19</sup> For planetary-scale computation, the practical issues of addressing the world cross-divides of solid and fluid, the material and the informational, between sand and bits, between things and actions, between objects and enunciations, archived pasts and simulated futures and the structures that would govern all those exchanges as they bloom into new forms. If addressability is also some form of accountability, all this congeals toward what kind of geopolitical space?
The Nomos of the Cloud
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