{"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":113,"pdf_page":129,"physical_index":129,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"9f4eafd6311e9551b49f5f43ad55fab7733b86a7d88f0284ef3d598f9ee2f8ad"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Shifting the figure of water from a metaphor to geography, consider that for Schmitt ’ s history of the nomos (that is, Carl Schmitt, not Eric Schmidt), the territorial domain of nations was always defended by the naval capacity over the omnidirectional glacis of the ocean in light of Google ’ s filed patent on water-based data centers. <sup>16</sup> This floating cyberinfrastructure would, in principle, greatly reduce the energy and cooling costs of hosting and serving the peta- and exabytes of data that will constitute an eventual planetary cloud computing platform. It may also neatly symbolize a productive crisis of territorial jurisdiction, one that alters how truly pervasive computation may demand, or activate, new forms of agonistic or cosmopolitan political habitats. <sup>17</sup> As discussed in the Earth layer chapter, data centers, as the hard technical core of the Internet, demand massive provisions of energy, mostly to keep processors cool; with only about half of the world ’ s 7 billion or so people using the web in any given month, the anticipated growth curve is steep. Where will the energy come from? How can Google possibly feed the energy appetite of the data centers that would provide ambient supercomputing to the next 3.5 billion human users and the next 5 billion to 500 billion object users of the Internet of things? <sup>18</sup> Oceanic data centers theoretically would help solve this by using both tidal and wind energy to power the stations, as well as the abundant supply of water to assist in the cooling process, but in doing so, the literal offshoring of such critical infrastructure also raises issues about the jurisdiction and legal control of data and the governance of the emergent Cloud Polis. What if a data object is originated in Beijing by a Japanese citizen, uploaded to a server off the shores of Vladivostok in international waters, and then used by a kid at an Internet caf é in Las Vegas to commit a crime in Brazil? Does one country ’ s data privacy and prosecution laws have clear means to control this? But of course such what-ifs are already everyday problems. The oceanic datacenter symbolizes the infrastructural offshoring that is one productive accident of the Cloud layer: the delamination of the layers of territory, economy, and sovereignty, one from the other, potentially perforating the domain of the state with the economies of nonstate infrastructure beamed in from the middle of the open ocean. This may conjure images of other ad hoc circumventions of national geography, such as pirate radio, offshore banking, and unrecognized microstates. But unlike these, the Cloud layer is not a peculiar outlier from an otherwise stable system of territorial sovereignty; rather, it is the technical basis of an emergent global system, an exception that takes on the force and diction of a geopolitical norm. The Cloud layer hosts more than a few streams of pirate data; it can carry entire cultures, economies, societies, and religions. And so it is not simply where an alternative geopolitics will take place; rather, in taking and making territory, it is also how it will take place. The Cloud layer is characterized less by a shift toward a new equilibrium of formal state powers now working at the scale of planetary computation than by the incongruities between modes of governable territorialization. For this, and unlike the Westphalian consensus, it is the absence of mutual recognition between types of actors (a state and a platform, in this case) that keeps something approximating a true nomos of the Cloud unresolved and perhaps irresolvable. <sup>19</sup>\n\nCloud Layer\n\n113","previous_page":112,"next_page":114}