In practical terms, two different Users may make use of the same Interfaces and Addresses within the same City, but each may have very different privileges and limitations at the Cloud layer. As that may be the layer on which it is most decisively perched, a state may see what the Cloud layer can see (and not what it can ’ t see) in the recursive path up and down the columns that are visible to that particular layer ’ s techniques of perception and its own dispositions of looking. At the top layer, because no two Users have the same level of privilege and access within the space of possibilities in which a particular column might form, political tension pulls tight around that difference. Perhaps then the ultimate identity of any one User within The Stack could be calculated by those limitations that contrast one User to its neighbors plus the patterned aggregation of the columns it has activated over time (not unlike how today ’ s commercial Cloud platforms track and model their subscribers). For any User a particular position on one layer might guarantee a corresponding position on another layer, or might disqualify it altogether; not only are layers technically interdependent, but their social effects are as well. Attention to this leverage between layers is essential because the possible designable distribution of such positions in relation to one another may also drive the contested governance of the Cloud and of any alternative geopolitics it might engender. Even so, for the Stack platform to work, each layer still reserves its own limits, rules, and concreteness that is never finally reducible to the terms and jurisdictions of another. On the one hand, the layer ’ s modularity within the whole means that its effects are never exclusive or exhaustible, and on the other, the rigid simplicity of the total platform apparatus demands that its direct functions remain encapsulated. <sup>33</sup> Even as any one layer ’ s operations unfold in relation to those of adjacent layers, and so may also affect events that fall well outside the entire platform ’ s borders, the movement of hard and soft information must always pass through the protocols that divide and bind that layer ’ s work from the others.
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Platform and Stack, Model and Machine