None of this gleaming promise screens out a reality determined by vastly inequitable relations to the wealth of the Fresno that we have and the Fresno toward which we slouch. In time, cities such as these may not need so many people but will have them nevertheless. They may not really be cities so much as city-shaped refugee camps, and like all other camps, they are the inverse image of the enclaves that spawn them. Those employed “ in ” Fresno may not even be inside city limits. If we follow the thread of Alex Rivera ’ s Sleep Dealer (2008), a film in which California ’ s agriculture is served by drone pilot/robot fruit pickers working remotely from behind the sovereign wall separating the United States and Mexico, it is not unreasonable to imagine a further logistic dehumanization of Fresno ’ s on-site population. <sup>21</sup> Perhaps the costs of piloting agricultural labor will be held down by global wage arbitrage, pickers in Tijuana competing with pickers in Jakarta and Juneau to provide fast and cheap results. That is, formal national jurisdiction may have far less to do with the economics of Cloud feudalism than with whichever Cloud Polis, enclave platform, or urban camp happens to counts a given worker as one of its Users. The elevation of labor systems like Amazon ’ s Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit, and Uber to infrastructural scale suggests several paradoxical and even contradictory outcomes, both positive and negative. One of these is well summarized as: “ I ’ m really looking forward to a future in which service employees are leased Google Glass so they can complete courses in for-profit trade schools while simultaneously earning health care vouchers instead of actual currency and Soylent instead of actual food. ” <sup>22</sup> We should add, however, that the lease terms on that Glass set are conditional on whether the User actually won the bid to pilot-pick avocados.
Cloud feudalism can be understood as a particular distribution of power between central and commanding platform servers and quasi-autonomous, if relatively powerless, network clients as applied to human economic geography. Others have articulated the problems associated with these sorts of arrangements, their deflationary impact on demand-side growth, and their ultimate macroeconomic instability. Under such regimes, platform economics works to monopolize power and wealth into centripetal consolidations of extracted value, such that the ratio of value realized by those Users who collaborate with the platform commons ( User platform value) to those who own claims on infrastructural profits (platform surplus value) is grotesquely misaligned. For political dispositions across the ideological spectrum, the supposed solution is making freedom of personal autonomy from platforms more absolute, up to and including generalized secession. From one side, “ the main achievement of the nation-state in the last century has been the establishment of a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers across the world. … Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would collapse. ” <sup>23</sup> From another side, “ If you value freedom, then I think that ‘ exit ’ comes out way ahead of ‘ voice ’ as a mechanism by which people can express their preferences. ” <sup>24</sup> Under some real-world situations, the hard partition keeping people in or keeping people out is itself given sovereign status, with its surface imbued with maximal gateway intelligence, and in others the “ elective ” coordination of free market actors and agents is seen in a proliferation of modular desiring machines, like a North Korean stadium pageant without an actual country behind it, all decisions linked by an ontological proletariat writing the rules of proprietary semantic webs. If everyone (in principle) has the right of exit and to opt out of their citizenship end user agreement for another offered elsewhere, but all the good spots have already be taken by high-end Cloud polities that feature strong exclusionary membership bylaws keeping the plurality of humans at bay, then the differences between state violence on the border and posted rules of the gated community, between positive and negative freedom essentially, are dark and bitter comedy.
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The Stack to Come