Recognizing this paradox raises more questions and possibly provides some leads. What might account for its complexities and what topological imaginations might allow us to reform it? At stake is more than a new way for states to operate or a new set of technologies requiring governance; rather, it is a scale of technology that comes to absorb functions of the state and the work of governance. Toward an answer, The Stack model suggests both the means and ends of a specific kind of platform sovereignty. It demands that we understand the designability of geography in relation to the designability of computation and to see the state (and other sovereign institutions) in relation to both at once. This differs from how other political philosophies of technology have understood governance and machines. Max Weber ’ s sociological theories of bureaucracy also described the state as a kind of machine, a vast apparatus for which the instrumental rationality of inputs and outputs should guarantee predetermined outcomes. Platforms, however, don ’ t operate according to such guarantees; they feed on the indeterminacy of outcomes. Louis Althusser and other Western Marxists spoke of the “ state machine, ” a more amorphously distributed ideological mechanism that interpolated its subjects through their internalization of the time of capital. Platforms, however, have much more varied relationships to nonstate forms of authority and noncapitalist economies. As we ’ ll see, their totality is always adjacent to other totalities. Michel Foucault located “ governmentality ” more directly as the immanent discourses, techniques, and architectures that constitute the objectivity of the modern subject. <sup>6</sup> For Foucault, the state, as such, is only one site of governance among many others and by no means the most central for understanding economies of power. Platforms are similar in this regard. Equally important for Foucault were scientific laboratories, daily routines in prisons, hospital quarantine protocols, psychiatric textbooks, the design of dormitories according to particular lines of sight, the shape of a surgical device according to an invented idea of a standard body, “ the angle between two walls and its happy ending. ” <sup>7</sup> Here governance itself is articulated and configured through the specific technologies and techniques with which it produces its own subjects and objects. It may justify enforcement according to the content of laws, but for Foucault, that governance is itself just as much invented by those techniques as the things that it governs. It is an effect as much as it is a cause of how certain machines and mechanics organize bodies over time.
Introduction
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