Perhaps the regional amorphousness of a “ Monroe Doctrine of the Cloud ” is both the wrong nomic precedent to claim and the wrong profile of empire to be resisted. The Stack appears to be American, and as of now, it both is and is not (it is also mostly Chinese), but in the long term, this identity may actually prove far less significant than it might seem today. The Stack will also change what “ American ” means in the first place, as the identity of a geopolitical actor and as a governmental service platform, and in doing so, The Stack as a whole may resemble that new national definition les and less. If the idea of one universal grid is a ruse in the service of a particular type of unipolar economy, then exponential overlaying of incommensurate grids brings different kinds of reversals and accidents. As computational edges and nodes claim some autonomy by their programmed automation, they also possess more authority as decision-making shifts from the designer to the designed. The platform sovereign ties that emerge in turn generate their own unplanned productive accidents, layer by layer and in combination, and with them come other universal positions into which Users might dip in and out. These are not exactly cosmopolitan for reasons discussed below, but they are nevertheless not unipolar and are quite capable of bending state claims against their will. As discussed in more detail in the next chapter, another core paradox of platform sovereignty (besides its geographic illegibility and axial revers ibility) is between architectures of standardization that bring together heterogeneous projects and decentralizing effects, on the one hand, and transitory dynamic interfaces, which in the accumulation of trillions of interactions enforce the authority of that standardization, on the other. With the break from one nomos toward something else, also nomic or not, comes a change in the topology of governance, from loops on a plane to something else. Platform sovereignty is derived from the Interfacial line, surface and partition, and how its designation influences how it will Address its Users and how they Address the platform and one another through it. In this regard, the amalgamation and reorganization of interactions into verticalized planes and towers is not only an event in the world but a process of making the world. Its geography is not only the allocation of lines; but is a squaring of the line into frames and a multiplication of frames and cells into grids. As grids become volumetric, the potential interiorizing reversals of their component lines multiply exponentially, and the squaring of lines over and again leads to more grids. Grids are reversible by design and the “ sovereignty ” of their reversibility is neither extrinsic nor exceptional; it is generic to their operation. It ’ s what grids do automatically. Or to paraphrase Gordon Matta-Clark, a volumetric grid describes all the possible layers without implying any priority or preferences. This is infuriating to the Schmittian requirement for grounded, human-scale order of clear-cut antagonistic oppositions arranged in adjacent set-pieces, but oh well. Grids are bent and piled up on top of each other; multilayered images of their compound margins further convolute the situation as individual grids that were designed for one specific effect are braided into a composite infrastructure with emergent plans all their own. Some of these are expressed by standardized protocols and application interfaces, interoperable standards, and service wrappers. <sup>37</sup> With the standardization of these, the rigidity of the grid and its isolating cells lays down the generic system that gives an addressable location to every site of interest held within its honeycomb chambers. However, its geometric lines, up and down and over and across, are also avenues of regular escape and open possibilities of relation between those addressees. This is its bargain: no more innocent outside, now only a theoretically recombinant inside.
The Nomos of the Cloud
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