Mobility along the grid is also the writing of another line, and as these accumulate, they wear grooves into the landscape forming new channels. This is not best described however, as lighting a path of autopoietic “ freedom, ” if only because the lines of the grid and lines of mobilization through the grid are always reversible. Movement away is another mode of capture. Mobility is only one part of an economy of motility, from capture to camouflage, that holds no happy absolutes; as forms, these grids are the diagram of forces frozen, just as its forces are the form of the diagram made. <sup>38</sup> Immobilization is not what counteracts the drawing of the line of acceleration; it is what demonstrates its reversibility as a matter of normal course. For this, the decision over the regularity and regulation of slowing down or speeding up, over passage from or into the cells of the grids, can be programmed into the actual partitions of the world, and in the end it is their programmability, not their ideal geometry or geography, that affords platform sovereignty to their User. The geometries at work don ’ t simply reflect governance; they perform it: from line into frame into topos into something else situated where we might once have put nomos. Whether deliberately or accidentally designed, a geopolitical architecture is cast. Information is transformed into shape, drawing an arc of algorithmic governance along braided topoi built of asymmetrical superimpositions; less modus vivendi than the mutual invisibility of overlapping sovereignties. All of that.
Even as the sovereignty of designation over the “ exceptions ” of interiority and motility are unevenly embedded into the programs (e.g., architectural programs, algorithmic programs, software programs, political programs, economic programs) of the partition, the design of its automation remains part of the ongoing assignment for the design of The Stack as a whole. Topology is still the design problem, and as ever, the drawing of the line is both inscriptive and descriptive, both immanent and projective, both a writing of an immediate site and a determination of whatever might be there instead. The drawing can mark a surface, frame a site or event, or prototype how lines, frames, and grids should be engaged in the future or elsewhere. This is how worlds remake themselves even as they intersect and unravel. As contemporary philosophy bemoans the preeminence of “ digital ” technologies and how they ensure an erasure of worlds and a profanation of solidarity, some posit world-making (mondialization) as the antithesis of globalization with its “ atonal ” quantification and banalization of affective experience. <sup>39</sup> For some writers (as for Schmitt), the loss of a special coherence of articulation is also loss of all inceptive self-renewal. <sup>40</sup> For them, computation has smothered the possibility of radical breaks with the present condition, leaving us all to wander about in a virtual haze, having confused the entropy of ubiquity with the space of creation. However, I am not convinced that the end is upon us or that perplexed melancholy is wisdom. <sup>41</sup> I remain deeply curious as to how sensible oceans of planetary computation will evolve, making available a colossus deluge of connections within and across people, things, and traces, not necessarily according to the doctrines of the Google Gro ß raum, but in the collateral accidents of wonderfully inhuman machines (including us) running about, in and out. I suppose that for both of these positions, universal computation does destroy the “ world, ” and while for the former this is a dishonorable apocalypse, for the latter, it is a good starting point. But stepping back from this too-stark opposition, we do continue to understand framing (by lines, by grids) as the presentation of some part of the world to itself (or to another part of another world). That frame is a device for saying something new or to say something about what is and is not new. The design of that frame itself and its capacity to enforce its own presentation is how the sense of a full world is approximated.
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The Nomos of the Cloud