The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 312 页

When it was first built Dr. Pila was an open community. But early one November morning in 1994, two years after a private firm had taken over its management, three helicopters carrying national guards and police descended upon the project, officially occupying it. Operation Centurion, popularly known as Mano Dura Contra el Crimen (Strong Arm Against Crime), had dictated that the largest, presumably most dangerous public housing projects should be gated in order to reduce crime. Over the course of four years, nearly a quarter of Puerto Rico ’ s 337 public housing developments were “ rescued ” or “ occupied, ” leading to arrests of residents, the establishment of police outposts, and the erection of fences to control movement. Dr. Pila became a gated public housing development.

The opportunity to live behind walls and under armed guard is available anywhere, it seems. It may even be true that in some circumstances, Users of a city-shaped camp (its autochthonous refugees), may have their clean water supply turned off if service fees are overdue. ³⁰ What remains persistent, however, is that the mutualizing interiority/exteriority of every enclave/camp condition is reversible, even if movement between one zone and another and the right of exit is not. ³¹ The geodesign problems of generalizable secession are now dominated by the artificially narrowed interest of capital transactions (and transactors) to protect themselves from direct contact with their own externalities, not by the general interest to seek out viable access to that capital. This is neither a necessary or conclusive situation, and increasing the delamination of sovereignty from territory and the emergence of computational platform infrastructures may be both the means and the ends to better alternatives. The impetus toward secession and an activist stance on platform sovereignty (which are not the same things) is obviously not limited to building borders and, as this book argues, The Stack ’ s delinking of infrastructural systems from place also relinks them again in new ways. Two operations interweave legacy megacities with the Cloud and allow Interface layers to spin out new media at multiple scales. A new medium brings new noise and new noise brings new music. Unlike the zero-sum subdivision of a land behind walls, requiring Users to vote with their personal presence, the Cloud Polis (in principle) comes to you wherever you are. Many of those who engineer these platforms are not only well aware of these architectures of proto-sovereignty; they evangelize them, sometimes ingeniously, sometimes anxiously, and sometimes idiotically.

Demonstrating all three of these in various measure, venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan summarized the rationale of secession in his Internet-famous speech “ Silicon Valley ’ s Ultimate Exit. ” ³² His address is worth examining for what it clarifies about the current state of the popular discourse on Cloud Polis, how that discourse is so strikingly inadequate, and how it is received and misunderstood. Srinivasan ’ s key point was that as the loci of twentieth-century American power (in governance, media, finance, entertainment, education, military) are giving way to a new economic system based on Silicon Valley software, that the old order will inevitably defend its flagging legitimacy by blaming software macroeconomics for the world ’ s problems. He argues that the best remedy is to allow for “ free zones ” in which the “ world run by Silicon Valley ” could be tried, tested, and demonstrated without interference for all to observe. “ We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like without affecting anyone who wants to live under the Paper Belt, ” he implores. The inevitable success of this new polity will make it obvious that it is the sovereign platform of choice for anyone clear-minded enough to care. For this, he argues, the essential criterion of liberty is the right to withdraw from unworkable regimes. Without naming the source, he draws on the thesis of Albert Hirschman ’ s Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970), which addresses the remedies available to consumers and citizens in the face of deteriorating quality of goods and services (including, for example, a failed or repressive state). ³³ “ Voice ” is the right to petition or reform institutions to which one belongs, and “ exit ” is the right to get up and go, to emigrate, to change teams, to start anew. Addressing the diverse audience, Srinivasan says, “ I would bet that exit is a reason why half of this audience is alive. Many of us have our ancestors who came from China, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, places where there ’ s war or famine, economic basket cases. Exit is something that I believe we need to preserve, and exit is what this talk is about. ” He compares states and Cloud platforms directly and quickly asks us to evaluate one like the other. “ Is the United States the Microsoft of nations? ” he asks an audience for whom Microsoft represents everything old, inflexible, arbitrary, poorly designed, coercive, monolithic, and unfortunate about large platforms. Just as progress in the Cloud depends on Users’ ability to opt out of one platform and opt in to another that provides more robust, trustworthy, and well-designed services, he asks, doesn ’ t the same apply to governing platforms called states? Leaving iOS for Android does not involve navigating the armed guards at the Berlin Wall, or walking across the Sonoran desert (as of this writing), so why can ’ t movement between platforms of political sovereignty work the same way? We note that he does not specify the convergence of Cloud platforms absorbing traditional functions of the state with states rotating and evolving into Cloud platforms. That convergence may confirm or undermine the argument about the necessary superiority of one form over the other.

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The Stack to Come