The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 317 页

can be developed without the restraints of collective regulation. The economist Robin Hansen wonders aloud about the impending likelihood of individual human trillionaires, people who have encircled so much monetary wealth that they each control more than the GDP of any but the top twenty or so nation-states (as of 2015). ³⁶ For Hansen, this development might be welcome because it would allow for a scale of privately sovereign capital previously unknown to highly technological societies, which could be risked on behalf of globally beneficial megaprojects that would be otherwise impossible. Yes, perhaps. It may bring instead (or also) psychotic, incestuous autocracies, which generally have a poor track record. For some, the prospects of running the world through a “ Sky Club ” suite of sovereign private lounge services may feel like a tidy substitute for the messy state of things, but Users without the means to purchase their way in, or whose cognitive labor and attention is deemed not valuable enough to support adequate platform services, are left exposed to the wilderness beyond the bad walls. ³⁷ Unless it is designed in another direction, this Cloud Polis model may tend to lead away from a heterogeneity of dynamic alternatives and toward a strongly differentiated hierarchy of lived experiences and isolated economies. That scenario casts a vast cognitive biomass, heaving and wheezing, clicking on things, with no privacy or support, curtailed into restricted channels of menial online work, training search and advertising algorithms with their frustrated queries, naming things, captcha-ing blurry images until mealtime. In other words, under the terms of this scenario, the differential capacity of mobility for some is proportional to the immobility of others. For some the right of “ exit ” is paired with a right (or ability) of “ entrance ” to the island platform of their choosing, whereas for others, “ exit ” is a dead option because they are denied “ entrance ” into the closed enclaves that they would choose if they were allowed. Without entrance, exit is not a right; it is a privilege (or product). When exit becomes a privilege, one defined by the suppression of entrance, it stops being a philosophical principle and starts being a weapon. ³⁸

What does design learn from this consideration of Cloud feudalism? ³⁹ Or, what do we learn about design by examining the logistics of this numinous demolition derby? First, violence over the terms and conditions of political geography has moved to society ’ s interfaces (airports, stations, itinerant websites, terminals, shipping ports, disposable cell phones, buses, embassies, financial hubs, hotels, SIM cards, interactive maps). The mobilization of what Walter Benjamin called the “ constituent ” power of extralegal violence is normally thought to prefer targeting the centers of grounded contiguous institutions (capitols, towers, obelisks, sacred books, and personas), but instead, we see another strategic tendency to go after crossroads, points of convergence, dilation, expansion — interfaces — that are as often diffuse, civilian, urban, and algorithmic. Perhaps this is because the center is now diffused, or because in the interfacial image of totality, the center is already represented and available anywhere. The uncertainty of The Stack ’ s social repercussions are thereby on display. As we evaluate its potential for a future geopolitical rotation, we recognize that this is possible only because The Stack cannot guarantee in advance that its Cloud polities will not degrade into caricature dystopias (and no one can guarantee that they will). To repeat the point already made, modernity is an open platform for the design and development of antimodern briefs. Not only does modernity disembed and reembed traditional social forms, traditional and fundamentalist social forms also disembed and reembed modernity. It is the proximity and adjacency of premodernist fundamentalist projects with the burrowing ubiquity of hypermodernist platforms that is most telling. It is instructive of what we do not know: how to describe and theorize this atemporal jumble of projective geographies, and what happens to states and the guarantees of modern sovereignty when they must compete to defend so directly for their monopoly on legitimate citizenship? What we haven ’ t figured out, haven ’ t designed, are the appropriate ways for such an assemblage to compose itself. In the figure of the Cloud Polis we have, as it stands today, no idea what the terms and limits of a Cloud-based citizenship of the Google Grossraum will or would entail and curtail: Some amalgam of postsecular cosmopolitanism, agonistic radical democracy, and rational actor microeconomics, largely driven by intersecting petabyte at-hand data sets and mutant strains of Abrahamic monotheism? But specifically, what is governance (let alone government) within that amalgamation? ⁴⁰ Working by subtraction, we can say that it may be neither the annulment of dissensus nor the wholesale transposition of political will into systems optimization, nor is it the synthesizing the political as a metaphysical operation undertaken perhaps with technology but never as technology. In the absence of well-drawn alternative futures, the proliferation of unredeemable programs means that the primary positions of utopian dissent end up being those of the secessionist, the fundamentalist, and the misanthrope. That is an unsustainable trinity.

The Stack to Come

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