Finally, a misunderstanding perhaps exists—that new technologies call for radically new forms of political organization. Needless to say, this is not the case, and the exaggeration of the role of real-time social media has justly been ridiculed.38 Instead, we want to stress the archival dimension of contemporary figures of the collective, not in the sense of a straight lineage but in the affirmation of the "will to connect" (Stuart Hall). Encouraging and sustaining a wide range of practices ofrelation, communication, and organization are part of a dynamic transcultural archive, stored and reproduced in a decentralized fashion, protected by its redundancy. We shouldnot, therefore, allow the metaphor of the cloud to be understood exclusively in terms of corporate server networks and software as service economies. We are the cloud, and in acknowledging the forces of seriality we can invent new logistical protocols to draw more widely on this archive. And as we engage in the work of cultural translation—of relating, for instance, the codes that drive the algorithmicization of our communicative practices, to the social codes that emerge across new cartographies of the political—we may already find ourselves on different terrain, ready to once again reinvent our relationships to the political.
Notes
1 For an example of such a gloomy extrapolation of contemporary trends, see Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet—And How toStop It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Needless to say, such an explicit exaggeration of contemporary trends is not meant to obscure the many creative uses to which such infrastructures have been put, or deny that corporate and military infrastructures can also provide public goods, but to counter the unbearable evangelism of decentralization-as-democratization. As Benkler notes:
For the firsttime since the industrial revolution, the most important inputs into the core economic activities of the most advanced economies are widely distributed in the population. Creativity and innovation are directly tied to the radical decentralization of the practical capability to act, on the one hand, and of the authority to act, on the other. The critical policy questions of the networked environment revolve round the battles between the decentralization of technology and the push of policy to moderate that decentralization by limiting the distribution of authority to act.
Acts of Translation
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