The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 97 页

1. Sensing and Sovereignty; Polities of Supply and Effect

This risk is not equally shared, and political geography is also redrawn in the image of that unevenness, as sensor and sensed and cause and effect each become leverageable sovereign positions. In that governance is bound and determined by how its means allow it to see, measure, and organize its domains, the systems that mediate governance bind them to it just as it is bound by them. Nowhere is this truer than in the computational governance of ecologies, particularly for computational megaprojects such as Planetary Skin, but with the adoption of new media of observation and measurement come new complications. Is sovereignty primarily for the measurement or for the measured? The referent or the referred to? Who owns the data that all these nodes will be generating about themselves and their $U s e r s ? ^ { 6 1 }$ The answer will not only reflect sovereign claims; it can also generate them. For example, between the Himalayas and the Karakoram, near the slippery boundary between India and Pakistan, both governments as well as nongovernmental organizations, have planted a sizable number of sensors to detect ice temperatures, water flow, and other telltale effects of climate change. In these areas, formal and informal borders are unclear and move as the landscape shifts. Fresh water pathways vital to down-mountain settlements also shift, and flows that start on one side of the line may flow into the other. As development researcher, Sally Daultrey, observes the inscription of sensor grids and the flows of data they generate become active participants in these shifts. ⁶² India and Pakistan are largely unwilling to share the data they capture with one another and thus create a secondary border between their data sets. The very placement of sensors in certain locations and the control of the data generated by them become a way to claim some of the always shifting terrain from their rival, not only through the installation outpost sensor hardware, but in the claiming of the virtual profile of water or air that a sensor can sense. In other words, it is not only that when the sensor drifts with the ice pack into the sovereign territory of one of the countries, then the data it produces now belong to that country, but also that wherever one country ’ s sensor drifts into an ambiguous or contested new location, producing data about that location, then that location itself becomes that country ’ s own because its sensor is measuring and enumerating that site. Here the state “ takes ” the territory that it is capable of sensing, as the data generate and guarantee a sovereign claim as much as (in this case, more than) the sovereign claim guarantees the right to install a sensor and capture data.

Sensing begets sovereignty over the site that is sensed, except of course when it is does not. Recently China asked foreign embassies in Beijing and consulates in Shanghai to stop taking and reporting their own weather and air quality readings and asserted an exclusive right to acquire and report that information. ⁶³ In this case, while the site of a diplomatic embassy might be recognized as the sovereign satellite domain of another country, the Earth on which and in which it is situated is not; and neither is the weather that pours down on it. Similarly in the United States, particularly in dry western states, the issue of “ rainwater harvesting ” by individual parties is extremely contentious. State and federal authorities intervene to protect the interests of downstream residents who rely on access to a legally guaranteed flow versus upstream ranchers who wish to cap ture the water that falls on their land for their own use. Those upstream claim that “ the state is stealing the rain, ” while downstreamers claim that those living upstream are “ privatizing the weather. ” Under certain conditions, state management of an ecology might be seen as an injustice, whereas in others, the injustice is the absence of governmental intervention, though sometimes the terms of that ungovernance take unexpected forms. James Hansen, the former director of NASA ’ s Goddard Institute, who has done as much as anyone else to clarify our climatic precariousness, also helped guide a lawsuit based on the public trust doctrine, and inspired in part by the sixth-century Byzantine rule of Justinian I. That doctrine stipulates “ that common resources like water and air are held in trust by the government for future generations ” and that they must make good on this charge. ⁶⁴ The claim of the suit is that the federal government ’ s failure to suppress climate change is a dereliction of its essential sovereign duty and must be corrected as such. Another speculative alternative is Amy Balkin ’ s Public Smog project, which seeks to transform discrete volumes of the air above into new public parks through the issuance of emissions offsets. Maneuvers and innovations such as these may seem odd, but they may also represent a critical path of design intervention into the unstable geopolitical architectures of the Earth layer of The Stack. Wilsonian internationalist mechanisms have had a far too limited ability to enact and enforce effective solutions, as Hu and Obama ’ s flimsy “ compromise ” at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) talks in Copenhagen in 2008 exemplify. Planetary Skin ’ s central bank for carbon could not rush in and save that particular day, as the essential problems of measuring a carbon economy (Who, how, when, where, why?) would require the most powerful national economies to disclose and share sovereign information about their industrial empires in ways that interested neither of the two most powerful prisoners in this particular dilemma. ⁶⁵ We are left knowing both that impending ecological calamity represents perhaps the most significant challenge to the very premise of governance that we face today, and also that the Westphalian-looped state is a dangerously awkward sovereign unit with which to assemble an effective quo rum. The Stack ’ s own mitigation program must also look elsewhere.

Earth Layer

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