As the following section on the City layer-to-come will explore, we are not lacking utopian visions; we are instead drowning in their surplus. It is increasingly unlikely that for each and every state, each layer of The Stack would somehow resolve inside of each national boundary, which would then, as similar units, cooperate in a universal and global constitutional federal order. “ The right of the state ” to “ control the Internet inside its borders ” is very difficult to enforce when its borders are on the Internet and are themselves, in one of several ways, outside their own terrestrial geography. Today this option is nevertheless floated by regimes (some if not most authoritarian) hoping to fix themselves against the tides, withdrawing into national islands, while disallowing entrance and exit to their own Users and citizens (the state monopoly turns ugliest when its ability to cohere citizens is challenged and undermined). We assume that not only is there no conventionally cosmopolitan resolution forthcoming around the bend but perhaps that there cannot be, and should not be. Isn ’ t the “ state condition ” of software and sovereignty going forward one in which each of us is already claimed by multiple jurisdictions at the same time, and in which we already manage multiple formal claims on our social identities and economic agency? Geodesign must draw on that entanglement, not problematize it as a “ contradiction ” to be solved. The outgoing Secretary of State Clinton was right in this regard: the Cloud polities to come — State into Cloud platforms and platforms into states — do need new architectures. <sup>41</sup>
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The Stack to Come