We describe this by a consolidation of cultural and technical systems, a realignment of institutions and discourses, and attempts to recognize and engineer their effects and accidents. That is, the design horizon for each layer of this Stack must be considered in terms of both what it accomplishes as an ideal technology and, perhaps more important, how its undesigned accidents characterize its real outcomes. For example, in the slippery redefinitions of citizenship and sovereignty in a cloud computing era, what referent of last resort can we rely on? Human rights? End-user agreements? Are we obligated to every service embedded in every software-enabled object or surface we might encounter? Is there a hierarchy of these? What if effective citizenship in a polity were granted not according to categorical juridical identity, but as a shifting status derived from any user ’ s generic relationship to the machinic systems that bind that polity to itself? In other words, if the interfaces of the city itself address everyone as a “ user, ” then perhaps one ’ s status as a user is what really counts. The right to address and be addressed by the polity would be understood as some shared and portable relationship to common infrastructure. Properly scaled and codified, this by itself would be a significant (if also accidental) accomplishment of ubiquitous computing. From this perhaps we see less the articulation of citizenship for any one city, enclosed behind its walls, but of a “ citizen ” (Is that even still the right word?) of the global aggregate urban condition, a “ citizen-user ” of the vast, discontiguous city that striates Earth, built not only of buildings and roads but also of perplexing grids and dense, fast data archipelagos. Could this aggregate “ city ” wrapping the planet serve as the condition, the grounded legitimate referent, from which another, more plasmic, universal suffrage can be derived and designed? Could this composite city-machine, based on the terms of mobility and immobility, a public ethics of energy and electrons, and unforeseeable manifestations of data sovereignty (various parts looking like chora, demos, agora, polis, dromos, and technics) provide for some kind of ambient homeland? If so, for whom and for what? If it could, or if it already is in some way, then our regular categories and criteria are not describing it very well for us. This is perhaps because it is not planned but an accident of the process. Adding processing power to legacy models of political sovereignty first inflates them grotesquely and then, in time, as the generative infrastructure of another geography fills up different frames and replaces them with irregular new forms and formats, all those legacy models start to look Greek to us.
Introduction
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