User Platform Value Platform economics provide for at least two forms of “ surpluses ” : platform surplus value and User platform value, which is characterized by how information entered into a platform is made more valuable for the User at little or no direct cost to that User. As an ideal model, Users will make tactical use of platform Interfaces to link existing systems (e.g., social, technical, informational, biological) and in doing so are incentivized to incorporate more of their own interests. Subsequent Users are incentivized to link their systems to benefit from the network effects set in motion by earlier Users, who in turn enjoy increasing network benefits as more User systems are incorporated over time. In principle, the platform itself realizes platform surplus value from this cycle.
Westphalian State The political model of sovereignty defined by the horizontal projection and loop topology of the modern nation-state political geography. “ Westphalian ” refers to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, symbolizing the formal consolidation of this sovereign geographic model. The model provided the modern unit of state sovereignty as interior to that geographic loop, and a geopolitics that would variously identify a balance of conflict between these units and a federalization of them into a particular form of cosmopolitanism. The nomos of the Cloud is characterized partially by a “ delamination ” of practical sovereignty from this grounding.
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