Networks make space and take space, and like any other architecture, by their inscriptions into a given location, they exclude other possibilities from being there. Networks dwell differently than buildings do, however, and they exceed what a bipedal hominid would recognize as a single location, but they are nevertheless placeful. Network edges and lines produce interiors and exteriors, and so networks are not just superimposed on a given territory, they also produce a real territory by striating it. Consider the Montana East Line Telephone Association of the 1920s. <sup>23</sup> Before the federal universalization of telephone line service across the vast rural areas of the United States, farm collectives made use of a network of land demarcation and domain interiorization already in place: the miles of barbed wire that segmented the prairie. Using barbed wire fences, they fashioned crude but effective telephony using the steel lines as a signal relay channel. This network did what networks always do. The same network that links and integrates locations, house to house, in a disembodied conversation, is the same network that demarcates the distance and separation of each area by bordering them into a series of continuous positions. The same network of wire that virtualizes the presence of voice also establishes the territorial coherency of homesteads, each job easily folding into and on the other without fuss (farms, you see, are not allergic to disembodied inscriptions of informational geography). One line links across inhuman distance, and one line separates place into space, but no real line ever does one without the other and each allows the other to work. But any line cannot by itself constitute its own political efficacy and make its own decision about what is inside and what is outside. Schmitt is not wrong when he argues that “ the political works not by founding or composing, but by settling and dividing. ” <sup>24</sup> But when the ground itself is indeterminate, when the air and the Cloud are both so heavy with mass, then the composition of settlement and the division of founding crossover into one another, and so the sovereign decision over that inversion is always in play.
The Nomos of the Cloud
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