One of the most important ways it does this is by seeing them in particular ways, and we might say that governance in general evolves in relation to what it is technically possible for it to see at any historical moment. If new means for perception and surveillance are made available (to see new spaces, new scales, new traces, new crimes), then governance — and the state in particular — will conform itself to the vacuum opened up by new vision machines and to the demands of whatever is now available to observe and control. What James Scott calls “ seeing like a state ” is then not just a way to imagine the world as something demanding state governance through the intervention of reason and interference of planning; it is also the ultimate effect of how increasingly powerful technologies of perception, sensing, detection, parsing, and processing all react together to enforce design and retrain governance in their own images. <sup>8</sup> States and nonstate actors of all types compete directly not only over the invention of vision machines that produce new spaces to claim (air space, electromagnetic spectrum, exabytes of mass-intercept data), but also dominion over those spaces once they are mapped. The emergence of The Stack may represent this historical logic taken to an extreme new maturity. It is not the “ state as a machine ” (Weber) or the “ state machine ” (Althusser) or really even (only) the technologies of governance (Foucault) as much as it is the machine as the state. Its agglomeration of computing machines into platform systems not only reflects, manages, and enforces forms of sovereignty; it also generates them in the first place. Just as for Foucault ’ s technologies, its mechanics are not representative of governance; they are governance. But unlike for Foucault ’ s archaeology, its primary means and interests are not human discourse and human bodies but, rather, the calculation of all the world ’ s information and of the world itself as information. We, the humans, while included in this mix, are not necessarily its essential agents, and our well-being is not its primary goal. After billions of years of evolution, complicated heaps of carbon-based molecules (that includes us) have figured out some ways to subcontract intelligence to complicated heaps of silicon-based molecules (that includes our computers). In the long run, this may be for the better — and maybe not.
- An Accidental Megastructure
This accidental megastructure, this machine that is also a “ state, ” is not the result of some master plan, revolutionary event, or constitutional order. It is the accumulative residue of contradictions and oppositions that arose to address other more local problems of computing systems design. In the success and failure of those attempts, The Stack congeals, but do we know where and how? Contemporary geopolitics, and the largely confused commentary on it with which we muddle along, are knotted through and through. We see it in a politics of radial transparency aligned with another politics of radical privacy, in journalists ’ self-congratulation at the use of social media in the Arab Spring as supposedly outlining an anterior stratum of crowds and power (absent in their coverage of the shock economies of Haiti, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Louisiana, for example), in how Wikipedia formalizes taxonomic consensus from a heteroglossia of interests and how WikiLeaks inverted the ocular and occult body of the state, or in how Google cloud services both circumvent and circumscribe state authority in China and in how much of China ’ s direct perception of computational supply chains is invisible to Californian search engines. Both events and pseudoevents are plentiful and it ’ s hard to know what signals a new situation and what is trivial: the Google Earth standoff between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Prism and Data.Gov, hyperbolic packet-routing topologies, Dot-P2P and OpenDNS, net neutrality and the golden shield, downloadable guns 3D printed out of synthetic biopolymers paid for with Bitcoins, the National Security Agency (NSA) versus Unit 6139, NSA versus Anonymous, Anonymous versus Syrian Electronic Army, NSA versus Syrian Electronic Army versus ISIL versus FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) versus North Korea versus Samsung versus Apple versus European Parliament, and on and on. Which of these situations scales well into a general lesson and which actually obscures the critical junctures? What will be the long-term ramifications of the privatization of the common intellect by search and social network platforms on our ability to self-govern, or toward what form of governance do they already serve us up? The tangle of these questions is not exclusive to what is historically new. Emergent secular geographies (such as cloud computing, ubiquitous computing, emergent ethnoscapes, minoritarian psychogeographies of user-interfaces) may appear in the guise of archaic sacred geographies (such as Dar al-Islam, Christendom, Greater Judea) against which the domain of secular states was formulated. These compete with states not only for claims over legitimate violence, but also claims over legitimate citizenship and the capacity to delineate borders. Sometimes the emergent defines the archaic by opposition, and sometimes it is an essential collaborator.
8
Introduction