Interfacial Regime/Interfacial Totalities Particular platforms support multiple touchpoints coordinating interactions across their service offering, and in doing so, they provide a coherent and complete array of interfaces at multiple scales. The coordination of this array is recognized as a key aspect of user experience design, and ultimately, that experience becomes more coherent as it becomes more complete. That coherence defines one interfacial regime in relation to another. Unlike other geographic projections, the interface is not only a visual representation of an aspirational totality; it is an image of a totality that when acted on also instrumentally affects the world. By using one regime exclusively, the User collaborates in that regime ’ s larger program. Interfacial regimes are thereby also totality machines , both describing linkages and making projective claims over them. Two alternate interfacial totalities may compete to describe the same site, User or process, and the mingling of overlapping totalities brings some degree of noise and ambiguity. Any given site in the City layer may be overcome by multiple competing perceptual totalities, systems, and sovereign geographies.
Loop Topology Geographically the modern nation-state is based on a cartographic projection of the Earth as a horizontal plane filled with allotments of land in which individual sovereign domains are circumscribed by lines derived from a now-normative topology of loops. The national boundary and its governable choke-points express and defend the model in relation to other Cloud Polis based on other geographic models, such as the transcontinental data network or the premodern regional or worldwide religious body.
Machine as State The Stack is less a new medium of governance than it is a form of governance in and of itself, less the machine of the state than the machine as the state. Its agglomeration of computing machines into platform systems not only reflects, manages, and enforces forms of sovereignty; it also generates them in the first place. States and nonstate platforms compete directly not only over the generation of Stack geographies but also for dominion over those spaces once they are mapped.
Nomos Nomos refers to the primary act of territorial inscription that gives rise to its subsequent formalization and structural logic in accordance; it is a making of a territorial order through the execution of a territorial claim and physical occupation that precedes it. It is essential for any political geographic architecture to identify the individual sites, fields, instances, and actors within its jurisdictional field, such that any of these would be communicable as part of a regular and governable flow of information through those spaces. The terms of the nomos are also the shape of that space as configured by the flows that fill it up. Nomos is described as prior to every legal, economic, and social order. It is constituted by appropriation, distribution, and production, and only through this can it move from the particular to the universal: from arbitrary territorial capture, to representations of spatial delineation, to a geopolitical order.
Nomos of the Cloud As the geography of the Cloud rotates from a two-dimensional map to a vertical, sectional stack, its topography is shaped by the multiplication and superimposition of layers of sovereign claims over the same site, person, and event. The micro-enclaves that it spawns are variously exclusive or inexclusive, a pixelated patchwork of discontiguous partial interiors. No workable distinction between ground and water, between Cloud infrastructure and Cloud interactivity as mapped across some spectrum from tangible to virtual, has yet to congeal into a stable order in the way that Schmitt characterized the modern European nomos. The spacefulness of The Stack ’ s networks, and their ongoing occupation, settlement, and doctrinal composition, overlays incommensurate physical and geographic forms without a common master plane, and accordingly no nomos of the Cloud may (need to) emerge.
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