Group, and many other global cloud platforms, less by some Lockean right of ownership underwritten by cultivation than by the strategic articulation of the contours of a plastic territory. Its spaces are bent, inflated, and folded, and mapped accordingly. Inherited political orders are both circumvented and reinforced as the worlds they once described are disenchanted. That is, whereas states may be agents doing the taking and formulating of worlds, they cannot do so without transforming the anatomy of their own sovereignty at the same moment. The Stack space is not an already given vessel into which states intervene or markets mediate or political theologies invest with myths; rather it is generated in the confluence of platform logics that will recalculate the fate of all of these. On their own, the flexible terms of occupation might warrant Schmitt ’ s warning against the permission that technical universality gives to total war (or what Virilio later called “ pure war ” ). Unrestricted by the brakes of proper nomos, the absolute motivation for capture extends up and down from molecular to atmospheric scales. But for The Stack, these terms are not operating on their own untethered; they are instead as bound by their planetary situation as any other form of occupation. Even in the absence of a proper nomos, they congeal layer by layer into a metastructural order of a different governing order: a machine that is a state held together by deciding the spaces of technical exceptions as much as legal ones.
- A Google Grossraum?
The machine that is a state is not engineered without conflict and controversy. Today the specter of Google Grossraum hangs over (and under and in between) The Stack. Google ’ s armatures, its internal and external interfaces, operate all up and down the spectra opened up by universalist computational geographies. Especially since Google is, to date, so deeply associated with the US and its interests, to what extent has the global space of planetary computation been occupied by its particular ambitions and strategies, and already established a certain claim on an embryonic political geography? Does “ Google ” (literally the cloud platform and the geography defined by it) represent something like a Monroe Doctrine of the Cloud, filling out and supervising a domain extended well beyond the North American continental shelf, across a more comprehensive composite spectrum? For Schmitt, the first Monroe Doctrine represented a break with an older order, and perhaps the new one (if it so exists) does too, but just as the first lost its validity for him by its transformation from an upright territorial claim into deterritorializing universalization, then at least, to this extent, it is possible to consider a it new doctrine because the first was itself already also so nebular? <sup>34</sup> The UScentricity of planetary computational space is even built into the infrastructure ’ s own autocartography. Not only was ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the Internet addressing authority, established in California and its relationship with the US federal authorities long controversial, but today the United States is still (and may remain) the unnamed, unmarked center of addressable Internet space (US websites are usually “ .com ” not “ .co.us ” as they would be without this infrastructural exceptionalism). It is in this context that the National Security Agency ’ s (NSA) comprehensive data capture, surveillance, storage, and metadata analysis programs as disclosed by Edward Snowden and colleagues are understood to represent a strong American state maneuver of sovereign control over (or, at the very least, of policing of) the spectral spaces of planetary-scale computation. The willing and unwilling complicity of major commercial Cloud platforms in this endeavor associates them directly with the reach of that claim, and so the Monroe Doctrine of the Cloud and the Google Grossraum are seen by some to conceal only one another. This conflation may simplify things for those who prefer easy plots, but it actually does not explain the situation very well. This decisive appropriation of “ free soil ” by US security services was met, of course, with outrage, including calls for alternative non-US Internets that could circumvent this capture (and in some cases also to ensure local and often authoritarian control by political, economic, and religious authorities). <sup>35</sup> We also know that the NSA ’ s acquisitive line-drawing is not unique and that Russian and Chinese agencies are at least as acquisitive, if not much more, and it is also unlikely that European agencies do not manage similar if less hegemonic operations as well. Still, the unipolarity of this still unmarked universality already overflows the normal legal geography, and its militarized brokerage does more than just draw a new territory. It also occupies it. Provisional omniscience comes from making policing the primary technique of spatial approximation, such that the geographic delineations are the result of the search for criminality and transgression, and so the friend-enemy distinction between mutually suspicious states is augmented by a User-hacker distinction between the rights and abuses of platform sovereignty.
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The Nomos of the Cloud