{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":10,"pdf_page":28,"physical_index":28,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"9c9940e4da16f842cf91cabb1e12d4484ebfa1d4058d6696acef00f5cfc2c48c"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"These “ accidents ” form the basis of many of our current geopolitical conflicts and conundrums. The first Sino-Google conflict of 2009, during which Google “ pulled out ” of the world ’ s largest Internet market in response to demands for state monitoring and control of search results as well as the hacking of its servers by Chinese state-sponsored teams, may well be the opening crack in new kind of war over who or what governs society in the first place. That war is less between two superpowers (or proxies for them) than between two irreconcilable logics of how polities and publics are convened according to what sovereign spaces. One of these sees “ the Internet ” as an extension of the body of the state (or subservient to it) and another sees “ the Internet ” as a living, quasi-autonomous (if privately controlled and profited) transterritorial civil society that produces, defends, and demands rights on its own. For this, Google is a nonstate actor operating with the force of a state, but unlike modern states, it is not defined by a single specific territorial contiguity. It is a US-headquartered corporation but also a transnational actor that has taken on many traditional functions of nation-states. While Google is as reliant on real physical infrastructure — its data centers are by no means virtual — that physicality is more dispersed and distributed than partitioned and circumscribed. But this opposition is not simply states versus markets, or West versus East. The implication is not another prophecy of the declining state withering away into the realm of pure network, but to the contrary: the state ’ s ongoing redefinition is now undertaken in relation to network geographies that it can neither contain nor be contained by. From here, the practical geopolitical design issues only get more, not less, complex. What, really, are to be the national rights of mobile subjects in a cloudbased society? Can you be bound to the data laws of your passport country no matter where you go? Or can your cloud platform follow you, and you follow it such that your platform constitutes your primary sovereign “ territory ” no matter where you go? Should it? Or should individual servers fly the flag of a certain state and disseminate data according to those laws, even if the server may be across the world? Or, instead, should the particular data laws of any one particular geographic site try to construct and contain the laws of flow on one particular spot, regardless of the sovereign origins of sender or receiver? The last mile trumps all? All of these options are counterintuitive, so what are the alternatives? What if the server farms are outside territorial waters altogether, like Google ’ s patented offshore data centers, which for sensible energy-conservation reasons would also put the physical infrastructure of the global cloud outside regular territorial jurisdiction (discussed in more detail in the Cloud chapter). It is not my hypothesis that planetary computation will bring the accidental of alien political geography, because it already has. The design problems require speculation but are not hypothetical. They demand that we engage a response that is as inventive as it is ineluctable.\n\n10\n\nIntroduction","previous_page":9,"next_page":11}