Clearly any discussion of the suspension or superseding of political norms that have grown up around the horizontal subdivisions of space, from national laws to human rights to currencies, will raise more questions that it can answer. We don ’ t know as much about what kinds of geopolitical effects vertical lines bring. We don ’ t know how to conceive of force and justice through them, and we barely know how to image the Earth through them. How is verticality similar and different in practice than horizontal? Does it mean first and foremost just so many horizontal lines overlapping and thickening such that they now have height, or are they a qualitatively different order? Regarding The Stack, I argue that they do represent a different order, but that this order is not given in advance. We need to design what that order is and will be. We start from what we know about what layering does to horizontal lines and what layers of vertical lines and sheets of horizontal lines pierced by slopes of diagonal and oblique lines do to political geography. Drawing from the sections already presented, we can make a summary. First, they perforate horizontal lines, making their ability to contain and conceal, as camp or bunker, more uncertain. As we ’ ve seen of late, this provokes states to mercilessly refortify their topographic contours. They normalize the exception of reversibility, making the movement between inside and outside into a programmed function of infrastructural surfaces and interfaces. They multiply the quantity of lines, making dense and unresolved grids. Some grids are filled with uniform and monochromatic cells and others with hierarchical patterns, but all afford some kind of social posture and position. Their proliferation doesn ’ t only close off space into smaller units; it also produces new territories that are equally physical and abstract, heavy and virtual. In turn, this space is motivating a new land grab among state and nonstate actors alike; it is also forcing transformations in how geography is held, conceptualized, modeled, and defended. The order of those transformations occupies a similar location in our architectures of sovereignty as nomos, but because it involves grids of land, air, and sea all at once, dedifferentiating their relative weight and liquidities, the logics of this new arrangement are also perhaps very different. <sup>42</sup> Because these transformations are both driven by planetary-scale computation and mediated through it, any strong distinctions between a political geography supported by technical systems and technological systems spread through agonistic geographic space are undermined.
The Nomos of the Cloud
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