For The Stack, we recognize how our contemporary territorial and epidermal lines are multiplied, dashed, and cross-hatched as they overlap jurisdictions, and in relation to them there is no cardinal outside or outdoors per se. Their framings seem at once cacophonous and practical to the management of everyday life. To Schmitt, the “ free soil ” of an undernamed and undermeasured land is not the same as the sterility of abstracted global space for which he claimed to feel such horror vacui. It is not something that hollows out the discipline of sovereign decision, but rather something that demands it to act. So where Schmitt ’ s original notion of sovereign exception spoke to the suspension of an internal law and its spatial imprints, it now moves to the adjudication of external geography, of the free soil of planetary-scale computation that for all its mathematics is not sterile, and of the lines that mark its starting points. In this, the sovereign decision shifts focus from the judgment of the enemy toward the design of active walls and partitions, and as it does, the figure – ground relationship between the law and the line, each framing the other, starts to wobble and oscillate. The design of what executes the interiorization or the exteriorization of any boundary, exemplified by the reversibility of the fence that defines the exceptional space of the camp/bunker, is not only controversial but essential. In an even partially multipolar world, the effects of these accumulating reversals are that much more complex, but not without their own governable rhythms. The ground begins to fall out from beneath Schmitt ’ s bottom-line prioritization of geographic lines of durable jurisdictional settlement over promiscuous geometric grids and our ability to tell which is which. When the sovereign was revealed by and through his decision over the state of emergency, its identity was fixed into relief by this action, but now we are without clarity as to where sovereign arises from which decision. Is it from the decision over interiority/exteriority, or is it their irresolvable reversibility, or is it the line itself deciding the polis rather than other way around, or is it the programming of the line to flip-flop the open and closed according to some generative script? If we also sense that mechanisms of exception are becoming somehow increasingly normalized (and even infrastructural) by their further modernization, then it is because they are now embedded in the actual lines, envelopes, and interfaces that mediate the reversibility of the camp/enclave machine itself. Platform sovereignty may not only accommodate but require this embedding of decision-making interfaces. As technologies more than discourses, theirs is a captured decision over a now less ambiguous interior and exterior limitation of where the outside starts and on which side of the line it sits, drawing us in or drawing us out (but even once decided, by automation or not, the active abstraction of physical geography takes over as lines reverse polarity all over again). It is here, in the automation of the exception, that infrastructural and platform sovereignties begin. As the provisional decision over the exception is designed into the technology of the line, the automated envelope and the Interface influences not only how the platform will address its Users, but also how Users will program the platform, and so another foundation of the Stack ’ s political geography is established: the machine.
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The Nomos of the Cloud