Synthetic computation shifts what can be sensed, measured, calculated, communicated, or stored and performs feats of organizational cognition at a scale and speed previously unknown. There is a productive and generous cannibalism in this. For some, the friend-enemy distinction is rationalized by the ambiance of vast indoor airport cities, thousands of them each supporting hundreds of millions of people, most skirted by lethal security prophylactics. <sup>5</sup> Recall that the Biosphere 2 experiment did have a winner. It was the ants that beat back the cockroaches that made the humans go insane. <sup>6</sup> The lesson is that inside a domed totality, massively distributed single-mindedness may be a better evolutionary adaptation than individuated nuanced thinking, and so Google charter cities may be drawn more by stigmergic chemical communication than by glassy formal algorithms. Ants organize their war machine by epidermal secretion and sensation, and our own satellite-dependent relays do as well, staging the query, the result, the visualization of the result, the metadata about the query, the call and response. States involve these prostheses and are involved by them; they are confiscated by their own mechanisms, and for them the interface is very literally skin. As spaces opened up and closed off by computation are defined not just by what governance chooses to see and not see, but by what it chooses to sense and not sense, the distributed naming of what is and is not sensible expresses that epidermal mode of sovereignty, where securing in place and securing in motion guarantee the field of relations that anything might enter into. The abstracted granularity of things and the wetness of their membranes are both preconditions for how they sense the world and how the world senses them, how they are designed in place, how they are secured and provide security. In other words, the designability of skin is already also food by other means, and thereby also the state by other means. For geopolitics within comparative planetology, chemistry always wins.
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The Black Stack