So where should the decision over the exceptionality, or lack thereof, of the spaces of planetary computation reside? For now, we observe the metalegal acquisition and cultivation of Cloud territory by state and nonstate platforms but understand that the depth of that territory guarantees its ongoing malleability and resistance to full capture. It ’ s true that while the contours of such spaces are composed precisely by their occupation (entered into and so made), the armature of planetary-scale computation has a determining logic that is self-reinforcing if not self-fulfilling, and which through the automation of its own infrastructural operations, exceeds any national designs even if it is also used on their behalf. The programming of inversions between its interior and exteriors is generic to the program of the structure itself. Decision is based less on an economy of scarce sovereignty than on replicable algorithms built into the partitions of vertical and horizontal landscapes. Sovereignty is not just made about infrastructural lines; it is made by infrastructural lines. This principle of platform sovereignty is where the costume changes of User into citizen and citizen into User are worked out. In that those lines are already globally crisscrossing grids, layered one on top of the other, the portrait of unipolar universality versus multipolar heterogeneity is far messier without any zero-sum tally to represent it. The Stack is not the grid but an accumulation of grids, some communicable to one another and others not, some affording one type of provisional sovereignty and others another type, some incarcerating Users and others offering lines of flight, and many of them reversible. The tangles thicken.
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The Nomos of the Cloud