{"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":112,"pdf_page":128,"physical_index":128,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"02d3f20fd61982f45a371225f749a9b7724f30bb514014a94d3715c83ade3254"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"The Google-China conflict is exemplary of this interweaving. It can be interpreted reasonably as geopolitical conflict between empires, both leveraging their different state-corporate-military-information network systems to claim the free soil of planetary computational territory. It is more fundamental than that between two megastate actors; it was and is a conflict not only over the right to control search engine results, but indeed over the predominance of two different modes of sovereignty. The conflict pits a state that would dominate and determine the network sovereignty of information and energy flows versus a platform that would, by assembling users into another real network and imagined community, exceed, in deed if not letter, the last-instance sovereignty of the state and determine an alternate polity in its own image. <sup>12</sup> The alternative that the platform poses is perhaps both too big for the state to control (the platform connects people and things and banks of data across planets) and too small to control ( Users ultimately could access the constitutive data packets of the latter regardless of any Great Maginot Firewall). The Stack itself coheres from conflicts such as these not by masterplan but by the accumulation of tactical solutions into a massively distributed inscription, one not circumscribed by a single stretch of land but spread across multiple layers in vast sectional landscapes. To understand how to design and engineer that inscription differently, we first consider in more detail how its conflicts are articulated.\n\n25. The First Sino-Google War of 2009\n\nThe First Sino-Google War of 2009 may well be the opening crack in a very different kind of war over who or what governs global society, one less between two superpowers than between two logics of territorial control. One of these sees the Internet as an extension of the body of the state, or at least beneath the state in the priorities of sovereignty, and another sees the Internet as a living, quasi-autonomous, if privately controlled and capitalized, transterritorial civil society that produces, defends, and demands rights on its on and which can even assume traditional functions of the state for itself. 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. While Google is as reliant on real physical infrastructure — its empire of data centers are by no means virtual — its terrestrial footprint is more dispersed and distributed than partitioned and circumscribed. On the superimposition of the two interlocking spaces, consider the breach theory of Fang Binxing from the China Academy of Engineering and one of the main designers of the infamous great firewall. In November 2011, he warned a conference that the Chinese Internet does not have the capability to disable a global Internet service whenever it wants to. He used the example of Google and said it was a pity that although Google had retreated from China, its service was still accessible in China: “ It ’ s like the relationship between riverbed and water. Water has no nationality, but riverbeds are sovereign territories, we cannot allow polluted water from other nation-states to enter our country. ” <sup>13</sup> This is an amazingly succinct rehearsal of the older European nomos’ s juridical separation of land and sea, fixed and liquid, made into parable. <sup>14</sup> While Fang likely was not familiar with Buckminster Fuller ’ s admonition that “ the fearful sovereign nation politicos will find that trying to arrest networking is like trying to arrest the waves of the ocean, ” Fuller, it is more certain, was never given the assignment, as Fang was, of building a glass dome for a billion Internet users. <sup>15</sup>\n\n112\n\nCloud Layer","previous_page":111,"next_page":113}