Agamben, after Carl Schmitt, identified the camp as “ the nomos of the Modern ” and sovereignty in relation to the decision to initiate the camp as a site of exception. What we may choose to identify as the nomos of the Cloud shifts that decision to the interface that causes the same architecture to oscillate between interiorization and exteriorization, camp and enclave. Here the exception is the inversion itself, and the normalization of that exception through the automation of that oscillation (by software) is one key aspect of platform sovereignty for The Stack.
Capitalist Pricing Problem Market models can confuse the emergent effects of transaction liquidity with systems planning and do so at the expense of artificially segregating and suppressing the real costs of near- and long-term “ externalities. ” This is contrasted with the socialist pricing problem for which centralized systems can be too slow to sense and calculate individual price signals. An addressing mechanism capable of identifying the true “ costs ” of a given transaction, many of which are now diverted into various externality sinks, could provide a price for that transaction that reflects an accurate signal.
City Layer The third layer from the bottom of The Stack. It includes networks of megacities situating human settlement and mobility within a single distributed urbanism that combines physical, informational, and ecological infrastructures. These present a politics of the envelope in which architectural and informational partitions both organize and subdivide access to social space. It is suggested that the generic and comprehensive quality of this condition may also afford novel forms of platform sovereignties, derived not from parliamentary universals but from a common and differential relationship to urban envelopes and interfaces.
Cloud Layer The second from the bottom of The Stack. It includes the computing and transmission hardware on which Stack software depends, such as data centers, transmission cables, geosynchronous satellites, and wireless network technologies, and so on. It also includes Cloud platforms, such as Google and Amazon, which provide services to their federated Users through the applications they directly manage or those they support. Formal differences in service models also drive strategic differences in how Cloud platforms may structure Cloud polities. These differences in turn affect geopolitical conflicts ensuing from the juxtaposition or superimposition of national geography and those Cloud services (e.g., the Google-China conflict), from the evolution of states into Cloud platforms and complicating effective claims of final sovereignty.
Cloud Feudalism One possible, but by no means inevitable, outcome of the consolidation of Cloud platforms into Cloud polities is Cloud feudalism, characterized by overly centralized capture, consolidation, and distribution of value by those platforms. In this scenario, Cloud polities realize effective if also informal sovereignty over how they use Users, such that the ratio of platform surplus value to platform user value is highly asymmetrical and dramatically weighted in favor of the former at the expense of the latter. Unlike in medieval feudalism, where serfs were tied to specific sites and plots, for Cloud feudalism, Users are untethered from specific locations and migrate from one provisional labor interaction to another. Cloud feudalism may arise in relation to automation, but automation may also lead to entirely different macroeconomic outcomes.
Cloud Polis The model provided and enacted by global Cloud platforms to cohere Users into proto-state entities. These entities may operate at the scale of a true state and may come into political geographic conflict with states accordingly. Cloud Polis is characterized by hybrid geographies, incomplete governmental apparatuses, awkward jurisdictions, new regimes of interfaciality, archaic imagined communities, group allegiances, ad hoc patriotisms, and inviolable brand loyalties: soupy mixtures both futuristic and atavistic at once. We can observe different formal models of Cloud Polis in the service architectures of contemporary Cloud platforms, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, and can deduce possible Cloud Polis by the recombination of these architectures.
Glossary
369