{"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":140,"pdf_page":156,"physical_index":156,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"56bb3c02b3d3f4d45fb755f8cd2e16cd7f7fc507723d2ce72c239a9207de1a25"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Perhaps the most fundamental of these, however, will prove to be energy and the Cloud layer ’ s governance of the Earth layer of The Stack. To return to the earlier figure of a remote sea-based data center, we can say that is not likely that Google ’ s research exploration of this solution is meant as an experiment with the liquid boundaries of Cloud jurisdiction. The company is not, I assume, looking at this particular project as a way to directly challenge state jurisdiction altogether. In fact, Google ’ s fortune is probably more suited not to secession from state platform space, but to strategic interweaving with states (plural) and to an incremental assumption of traditional functions of the state, as they themselves pivot to the Cloud. However, taken as a design fiction (albeit one under Google ’ s patent protection), the oceanic data center cannot but inspire ideas about new geographies. As indicated, Google ’ s direct interest in such a system is driven by the pursuit of energy efficiencies and how to scale a planetary Cloud without a minimum of carbon- and dollar-intensive electrons. Google already has a subsidiary, Google Energy, that allows it to directly buy and sell federally regulated wholesale electricity, allowing the company to purchase directly from independent producers bypassing local utilities, and then selling excess energy back to the grid. <sup>69</sup> It is not difficult to imagine how a User-facing alternate version of Google Energy could become both major smart grid concern and provider of Google-branded or Googleproduced energy, municipal and personal metering services, grid platform software, or a business-to-business and business-to-customer customer/ User relationship management systems. In principle, that combined energy-data platform could make (some) international carbon mitigation agreements more enforceable precisely because states would not have to agree among each other as to how to monitor and measure the flows. Could Google (and corollaries in other parts of the world) just do this on its own and report it? Would state security hacking of energy-data routers and sensors only extend the old realpolitik into the realm of networked electrons? Still, as discussed in the Earth chapter, the membrane between an energy grid that powers the Cloud and the Cloud as a grid that mediates both bits and electrons at once is potentially porous at some key points. Google ’ s energy ventures may suggest a model for the Cloud Polis for which the provision of both of these at once is a compound service and system. <sup>70</sup> The interface of two existing systems, an information network and an energy network, may combine to produce a third thing: an energy Cloud drawn by a mixture of urban and regional infrastructures, networked production and storage centers, and on-demand utility nodes. Just as the production and management of infrastructure cohered publics for industrial states, the same may be true for the organization of new publics in their image of the platforms that come to manage them. If so, Google might depoliticize energy in some ways and radically politicize it in others. Recall that the political guarantee of a secure energy source (food) was and is a building block of archaic political loyalty, and is continued by states that did and do provide electricity as a public utility. Regardless of any benefits, the rendering of human-usable electrons according to the logics of platform surplus value is also certain to be attached to at least a few calamities. Nevertheless, as the geopolitics of climate change – related energy production and consumption effects looms larger, the questions of energy provision, dissemination, transparency, monitoring, alliance, and allegiance will (as discussed in the Earth chapter) drive realignments of jurisdictional loyalties around common predicaments, whether we prefer them to do so or not. Going forward, there is no Earth layer without the Cloud layer, and vice versa. Because energy is so essential and its calculative rationalization so attractive, it may drive the determining variables — its planetary limits, its antagonistic territories, its reserve currencies, and its included and excluded populations of Users — not just for Google ’ s model of the Cloud Polis, but for the political geographic alignments of the entire Stack.\n\n140\n\nCloud Layer","previous_page":139,"next_page":141}