Computation is training governance to see the world as it does and to be blind like it is. If, over time, something sees for the state, on behalf of the state and in place of the state, it does so by seeing as a state, or by seeing as something the state has not yet become but would become once it ’ s trained by these same new tools of perception and blindness. As the state involves new techniques into itself, those techniques also absorb, displace, and diminish the state by controlling access to unique jurisdictions that the state cannot otherwise possibly comprehend without their help. While it extends jurisdictionality, The Stack also confiscates and multiplies it. It doesn ’ t merely accelerate or open up governance as currently configured; it invents substitutions as alternate jurisdictions appear, linking cellular biology to computational geopolitics, some enduring for seconds, others perhaps for many centuries. Macroscopic platforms such as Planetary Skin frame Earth as a competitive archive sorted into a quantifiable past, an atemporal surficial now, and predictive virtualizations of its futures from which models and simulations, its preferred instruments of governance, can be derived. Through these, opacity and privacy are redefined by a spectacle of transparency, as the platform ’ s authority is based on the quantity and quality of its data and from the means to translate that stash into simulations of error-corrected pasts, presents, and futures. From Cisco, NASA, Google, and others, data are available for free or on a subscription basis and provided with an invitation to innovate vertical markets with their tools, because geoepidermal megastructures such as these realize their political value through the immediate and potential events they can sense and their economic value through the currencies they can verify for their Users, and so they are themselves dependent on enabling Users to actively engage platform interfaces and to act back on the materials they represent. Platforms are machines as well as maps (an “ engine, not a camera ” ). <sup>47</sup> They are media with which to compose things not just to measure them, and so the slogan “ You can ’ t monitor what you can ’ t measure ” may need to be revised to include the Foucauldian line, “ You can ’ t modify what you can ’ t monitor, ” or even, “ You can ’ t not modify whatever it is that you sense. ”
Today this and other geoscopic situations are provided to us by Stack infrastructures of orbiting satellites — artificial constellations — connected to terrestrial networks. Instrumenting the planet in this way has not only allowed for a more finely grained geography; it has also physically altered the very scale of the Earth ’ s gradient body, altering what it measures as the Holocene atmospheric membrane has been augmented by a crust of smart satellites and dumb garbage. The planet ’ s natural equatorial diameter is roughly 12,756 kilometers, and if one were to include the celestial atmospheric firmament, that would be nearer to 13,000 kilometers. However the ring of communications technologies, in geosynchronous orbit every twenty-four hours, linking points on Earth ’ s surface to one another and self-locating the whole sphere in its lonely void, forms another outer membrane extending the measurement to 36,000 kilometers. Are they not also part of Earth ’ s body? As a whole, satellite observation technology has vastly inflated the physical geometrics of the observed planet, but it has compressed the conceptual spaces of relative distance as well. As surely as The Stack generates new spaces, does it also ensure a certain erasure of other worlds ? This is, as noted, a common refrain for critiques of modernity, from both Right and Left, and Virilio has written scores of texts providing a negative apologetics of globalization and the subsumption of the continuity of the Earth into the omnivorous universalisms of cyberinfrastructure. For his eschatology, the “ world ” is a tragic casualty of its appearance in digital images of itself. <sup>48</sup> It cannot survive this manner of testimony. It is shrunken, eaten, defamed by its reduction to a plateau of digitalized time. Whereas difference and analogy are naturally functions of distance, in the instantaneousness of global information the landscape of distances has collapsed, and so for Virilio digital space is dark matter, one that instead of expanding and elongating real distances instead flattens the space of analogy into the simultaneity of network time. There are other, and better, judgments of these accelerations, displacements, elongations, migrations, vectors, lines, and links. Can they be drawn without replicating the terms of reduction that any truly living image would need to escape? Is this what is most starkly absent from Google Earth ’ s transformation of the map into the Interface? In that the diagrams and visualizations of the networked totality are also, to varying degrees, cosmograms (figures of the whole of the universe and Earthly situation), what intrinsic violence does the speed of interactivity do to the depth or depthlessness of the global space that it models? What can we do with these pictures of the data that the world secretes, and what do they want from us ultimately? These questions are themselves some of the productive accidents of the Earth layer of The Stack.
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Earth Layer