{"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":23,"pdf_page":41,"physical_index":41,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"81f78c319468ec7dbaac94ca1ac3b62656f6085e83763ed625801128a1e0d240"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"5. Over (and under) the Line\n\nGlobalization both destabilizes and enforces borders, tethering retronationalisms and technological integration into the same contradictory dramas, populated by state and nonstate actors, czarists and androids, switching sides without moving an inch. Consider this odd and perhaps quintessential episode. During the Yugoslavian civil war of the 1990s, a squad of Serbian paramilitaries had captured a large group of Bosnian Muslims and held them in open-air prison camps. Now-famous photographs and film footage of these detainees, standing behind barbed wire looking out at the camera, horrified the world and mobilized opinion against the Serbian nationalist campaign and perhaps in favor of military intervention as well. The image of concentration camps, now again in Europe, crossed some red line and triggered demand for action. The Serbs claimed, however, that the global interpretation of the footage was all wrong — backward in fact. <sup>8</sup> According to them it was the photographer who was “ inside ” the camp, looking “ out ” at the curious Bosnians who had gathered around the perimeter fence to look in on him. This claim (albeit decided to be false in British court) demonstrates how easily such lines can invert themselves when an inversion suits the strategic perspective at hand. The line may be drawn on the ground as clear as clear can be, but the quality of the space that it draws — what is inside and what is outside, and who or what governs either side — is always in question (especially for those who die on one side of the wire). As the utopia/dystopia of the Berlin Wall (known as the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall in East Germany) also made clear, the camp and the bunker, detention and the enclave, are inversions of the same architectural form. One is an architecture of internalization and the other of externalization, but they share the same material profile. While one works to contain the danger within its walls, the other draws the same physical partition to keep the world at bay and expelled outside its safety membrane. Any exceptionality of the camp is actually exceptional not only because it is authorized by a sovereign decision that is both inside and outside the law, but also by a preceding decision to differentiate that enclosure from its own double, the bunker. Each is built into the other and their shared reversible design; the outside-in camp is not the only figure of this nomos of the modern as the inside-out bunker is an equally essential posture taken in relation to the same line. We will consider how the flip-flop of one into the other can be normalized and even automated by platforms and how the “ exception ” of linear reversibility itself becomes unexceptional. <sup>9</sup>\n\nFirst, we need to recognize how different kinds of lines, segmenting and generating different geometries, accumulate to realize different kinds of geopolitical effects. Schmitt has more than a little to say about this. Drawing the world is a work in progress. In Ptolemaic cosmology, the Earth was kept under a crystalline bubble, dividing two worlds, ours on the inside of this glass vitrine and one on the outside, the heavens looking in at us. From the fifteenth and sixteenth century claims on the New World, to longitudinal zones derived from Greenwich mean time, to the subdivision of broadcast spectrum, modern geopolitics is always based on a particular and arbitrary compositional alignment of territorial and governmental layers into a particular architecture: no topography without topology. Lines that are linked, folded, and looped become a frame, keeping things in or out, but like all other frames, they also present a certain section of the world and put it on display. The modern nation-state is itself also function of a cartographic projection that conceives the Earth as a horizontal plane filled with various allotments of land in which individual sovereign domains are circumscribed by jagged lines. Some are drawn as irregular hexagons (like France), some are regularized rectangles (like Colorado), some are discontiguous clusters of spiky circles (like Hawaii), but all these shapes are derived from the basic topology of loops. Also there is no geography without first topology, and so as we ’ ll see, also no nomos without topos: no stable geopolitical order without an underlying architecture of spatial subdivision. This loop topology is normative but not mandatory. As we know, other subdivisions of the Earth are not only possible; their lines already proliferate. While some lines and frames are more physically tangible than others, for the political geography of The Stack, it is the physicality of abstraction that is at the center of things. As a kind of master architecture (in the making), The Stack model is also perhaps also a contemporary version of what Schmitt called the nomos, and perhaps it is what retires the Schmittian nomos altogether . This slippery concept refers to the historically evolving structure of the world order (more specifically for him, an Earth-order) and the corresponding partitioning of political space according to which sovereign entities are constituted. Is there a nomos of the Cloud? We may conclude that The Stack is the nomos of our moment, or a better grasp on the architecture of The Stack may establish that there is no real nomos after all.\n\nThe Nomos of the Cloud\n\n23","previous_page":22,"next_page":24}