{"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":143,"pdf_page":159,"physical_index":159,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f068d519dc1eec22cbd0d733b1f75ec9195a212abcd1b11d04c896e88a48a502"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Today some states seek to reconcretize their authority over the otherwise untaxed flows of value through the Cloud and have turned to forums like the UN International Communications Union to redefine global governance of the Cloud accordingly. <sup>71</sup> Some simply want more global representation in standards and policy bodies dominated by the United States, other want to meter and tax Google for sending data over their lines, others to build tighter control systems into the apparatus making it easier for them to police troublemakers, and others even seek to shift the assignment of neutral infrastructural processes, such as the allocation of IP addresses, to individual nation-states for reasons that are unclear even to them. <sup>72</sup> Instead of resolving the contradictions posed by the sovereign Cloud platforms by putting everything back in the bottle of the state ’ s borders, some propositions would immediately exacerbate pockets of friction by fraying points of mutual incompatibility toward kaleidoscopic delirium and structural vacuum. A further decentralization of Internet governance is not a bad idea in itself, but basing governance instead on the privileges of local fiefdoms and seizures, and on making blunt old-school patriarchal authoritarianism more convenient, is in fact a very bad idea. The Stack suggests no teleology or necessary outcome, and the specter of Cloud feudalism becoming the normal twenty-first-century macroeconomics is a real possibility, but the state pushback against today ’ s version of planetary-scale computation should not be seen as extrinsic, or even contradictory, to the logics of Stack geopolitics. As already suggested, a political and cultural momentum toward generalized secession, not one-worldism, seems to drive what we might see as the nomos of the Cloud. As a response to the uncertainties of the Cloud, polities consolidate into enclaves, new and old. Some of these are based on gestures like a reinscription of original lines of ethnic division and self-location, and some are based on platform sovereignties provided or demanded by regular participation in and identification with particular Cloud services, and some are based on both at once. Libertarian dreams of atomic secession and Eurasianist dreams of atavistic empire are two sides of the same coin. <sup>73</sup> Just as fundamentalism is a persistent symptom of globalization, sometimes conservative localism is a symptom of planetary systemization; as such, it succeeds less as countermeasure against hegemony than as a culture laying siege to itself.\n\nAt some point, these conflicts may resolve into stable, if also contradictory, geopolitical architectures. Cloud Polis models may recognize some consensus(es) for the superimposition of one sovereignty on the other, sharing the same spot on alternative maps. Or perhaps, even if without mutual recognition, the “ Google ” and “ China ” models of Cloud Polis, for example, may still coexist in some as-yet-undetermined modus vivendi, the terms of which change as quickly as unintended effects of technical maneuvers ripple back and forth through their planes of jurisdiction. But even so, we expect that the map that is supposed to mark the sites of disputation between the two would itself be disputed. The two may weigh the scale of a demilitarized zone very differently, and the drawing of a real line on the ground may or may not be registered as formal demarcation regardless of how much it might actually structure actual flows. Any functional monopoly over the crucial symbolic lexicon of geography structures the kind of economics that can play out on it, and the Google Maps Nicaragua – Costa Rica conflict is telling, if only as a geopolitical allegory, of a novel shift between states and cloud platforms in establishing functional authority over that geographic symbolization. But China is no Costa Rica, and as India, Japan, and every other neighbor can attest, it is not shy about redrawing its own version of territorial reality according to an ambitious geographic self-image. Google ’ s ultimate geographic strategy is less obvious and strategically articulated; indeed, it neither needs to be nor should be. Instead of claiming and occupying an exclusive sovereign territory, Google absorbs existing spaces into its purview by capturing and consolidating images of all territory at various scales, from street to satellite and back, and rendering them into the platform ’ s comprehensive interface of rationalized space. Territory absorbed by Google is not one loop among others on a zero-sum horizontal plane, but a universal layer beneath the particular claims of any one entity in a thickened geographical stack. Google ’ s mapping ambition therefore is foundational and inclusive of territory-in-total, and thereby it may be seen as interfering with an absolute last instance of sovereign identification that states might otherwise enjoy. Its descriptive reason extends beyond land masses, even deep into the Amazon river basin to oceanic underwater canyons, and beyond the planet, including Mars and Earth ’ s moon, and offering them up through its own versions of the Blue Marble Earth, now interfacial regimes for the Google Earth publics. Does the Cloud Polis model suggested by Google ’ s geographic reach recast political territory in a recognizable way, and if so, where are its binding limits? Are they established by the interfaces between Google and the state, or do they extend “ beyond the line ” ? On the one hand, the superterranean spaces of the Cloud layer are a geometric mismatch with political geography as conventionally understood, but they are also coterminous with a return and ascendance of new city-state networks, and so with the fissiparous unbinding of one-world architectures comes a general resorting of mobile subjects into new infrastructural cosmopolities, enclaves, and exclaves, including ancient nationalisms and futuristic alliances. <sup>74</sup>\n\nCloud Layer\n\n143","previous_page":142,"next_page":144}