Planetary-scale computation both distorts and reforms modern jurisdiction and political geography and produces new forms of these in its own image. It perforates and transcends some borders while introducing and re-thickening others at new scales and in greater quantity. While this inaugurates new design problems, it does not represent the introduction of design into political geography as such: design is always already there. The frame of the nation-state as the core jurisdiction is a design — deliberate and otherwise — of a geopolitical architecture derived from the partitioning of planar geography, separating and containing sovereign domains as discrete, adjacent units among a linear and horizontal surface. That one particular modern model is a specific and durable compositional lamination of territorial and governmental layers into one, but today as a design logic for political geography, it is less a monopoly platform than it once was. It leaned on a consensus that was always a bit tenuous and today demands attention and revisitation. We could trace this design back to, among other defining events, the 1648 Peace Treaty of Westphalia, which formalized this particularly flattened political-cartographic diagram and set some terms for its subsequent normalization and partial universalization throughout the world. The effects of this design extended not just to how political space would be formally represented and enforced but also how the content of “ the political ” as a unique domain of human action and ethics would be known. Some decades after Westphalia, Immanuel Kant codified and expanded on the implications of its arrangements and gave it deeper philosophical leverage. He articulated “ cosmopolitanism ” as the polity of those who share the surface of the earth ’ s crust as their locale and as a moral and legal federation of the landed national units and of their citizens. The formal system of Westphalian states did not resolve once and for all conflicts over law, land, and identity into this global and self-encapsulated legal architecture, but instead invested in the state the standing of the legitimate instrument of those conflicts (and, as importantly, over exceptions to that legitimacy as well).
Introduction
5