As is to be expected, global opinion dramatizes this in contradictory ways. With significant exceptions, the web has largely been developed through technologies and protocols of British, European, and American origin, with many of the most powerful governmental and economic players still located there (though it is certain that Chinese and Indian counterparts are at least as important in engineering The Stack that most people will ultimately inhabit). Its global growth could be read then as the creeping spread of cyber-empire and part of a larger superpower monocultural campaign, starting in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, and spreading to world capitals like an invasive machinic species. Some European activists, on both the left and the right, describe it this way. Alternatively, the contested terrain in question, both above and below ground and across the plateaus of scale, could be seen as one that was always there but only recently activated and given shape by available technology, like the electromagnetic spectrum was before industrialization. Or instead, as seen through the slits of a Guy Fawkes mask, it should be defined as a global commons, a messy and truant public sphere for the common intellect, private speech, and social expression that retains, and continuously regenerates, its own sovereign autonomies, and over which no security apparatus should ever claim to guarantee final jurisdiction. Or rather, for the view from Beijing (and from some of Washington, DC), sovereignty remains by right of modern national borders to retain (somehow) full control of the data that sit inside their Westphalian loop by engineering increasingly deep packet filtering at key transnational chokepoints. <sup>36</sup> Propositions for alternative Internets that would secede from the totality in order to retain relative political, cultural, or economic autonomy could be based on a more autonomous physical layer, regional encryption systems, or even unique addressing protocols. All of these are theoretically possible, and for some military and financial sectors, they already exist and thrive. But other proposals come from Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Schengen Area, and others that would require new platforms to process local data only on servers that physically reside inside the territorial borders of each state. Their data would be therefore (it is thought) subject to provincial policing and supposedly unavailable to other state actors (the NSA or Google, perhaps). In some cases, this may be technically possible in limited ways, but as a general politico-geographic principle on which to scale the nomos of the Cloud, it is a reactionary counter-policing that is of dubious value in the long run. Data do not really have a national career unless they are forced to produce one. Yes, information is just as bound to local and specific contexts as it is to global ones, but the idea that its transactional flows could be filtered into national flavors and pinned down in accordance with the coherent order of a fixed imagined community and its ethnic, legal, or linguistic forms invites the sort of nationalism that always ends in tears. That so many feel the design choice is between this secret police, that secret police, and cryptoanarchism shows just how dangerously immature our geopolitical theory of planetary-scale computation is at this point.
The Nomos of the Cloud
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