{"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":28,"pdf_page":46,"physical_index":46,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5a58ab8d6e61260d33bc1bdb3c592e4c2735027f910a59b3a22a68f2082f3285"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"6. Land/Sea/Air/Cloud\n\nTo approximate an answer, it will first be necessary to show how this collapse of the Schmittian distinction between land and sea (and all that it implies for the ultimate career of states as they move into the Cloud and The Stack) is accomplished not only by a radicalization of the “ aerial ” into even more vaporous “ information space, ” but equally as much through a radicalization of the physical line carving into territory and guaranteeing its own enforcement. As The Stack emerges as both the machine and the geography, the territory and the map at once, yet more smoke escapes from the ears of Schmitt ’ s direct and indirect heirs. Schmitt ’ s spatial thought is aligned with the German philosophy of his historical moment. He writes approvingly of Heidegger ’ s dictum, “ Die Welt ist nicht im Raum, sondem der Raum ist in der Welt” (The world is not in space; rather, space is in the world) as a path out of the “ nihilism of empty space. ” <sup>20</sup> Jameson conveys that “ the origins of ( nomos of the Earth ’ s) ‘ spatial thought ’ ... [follows] Husserl, whose critique of modern abstraction ... locates the fall in the separation, the occultation and/or repression, of geometry from the existential praxis of land surveying in ancient Egypt. Schmitt diagnoses a similar degradation in the dissociation of the juridical tradition from the brute geographical fact of Landnahme, that is to say, the seizure and occupation of land as such. ” The geographies of land, from sea, from air, are arranged by Schmitt not just as different projects and techniques, but as a tragic dilution of a prelapsarian origination of ground toward increasingly legalistic, geometric, and virtual abstractions. In considering a nomos of the Cloud by counting the transoceanic fiber-optics also digging through the countryside, data centers buried deep in mountains near dams, the exotic minerals pulled from African rivers to make cell phones, alongside the engineered hallucinations of augmented reality, an inability to stay true to the dirt-venerating provincialism of Schmittian nomic priorities is seriously challenged. No workable distinction between ground and water, between Cloud infrastructure and Cloud interactivity as mapped across some spectrum from tangible to virtual, can survive much poking and prodding. Even so, there are nomic claims on the undetermined territory of the Cloud, as recent revelations regarding state surveillance programs and state versus state cyberwarfare make plain, for example. Even so, the residual confusion of jurisdictional divisions of land, sea, air, and cyber is itself worth mapping forensically. From its buzz and howl, perhaps alternative governmentalities for the decades that lie beyond might cohere.\n\nThe Schmittian primal scenes are the plowing of a field, taken and defended, and the state ’ s duty to build good walls around it. These sovereignties over place are materially substantiated by a defended occupation of place that is supposed to outlast the prosthetic logistical visions of Roman surveyors who have come and gone. Two lines: the ox draws its line into the absolute place of this soil, whereas the itinerant emissary of empire superimposes his invisible geometry — one a true fact and the other a temporary mathematical conjecture. For Schmitt (and for Heidegger and any number of subsequent political programs, both left and right, irredentist and esoteric), “ the very possibility of legal relations is dependent upon an original act of collective appropriation of land which establishes the material matrix — literally the ground — of those legal relations. ” <sup>21</sup> Even forgetting that this is the same ox plow that Jacques Derrida used, once upon a time, to prosecute for writing against ontologies of presence, it should be obvious that “ facts on the ground ” absolutely do not defend sites against revision and innovation. <sup>22</sup> It should be said that for Schmitt, if not for Heidegger, it is the physical taking and defense of land that matters most, not the transgenerational claims of autochthonous bloodlines that may have lost out against new forces. These political conundrums are still on our plates, and the ecological absolutes staring back at us are based not in the simple honor of defending homelands, but in the physicalization of abstraction and the abstraction of physicalization. The Cloud is not virtual; it is physical even if it is not always “ on the ground, ” even when it is deep underground. There is nothing immaterial about massless information that demands such energy from the Earth.\n\n28\n\nThe Nomos of the Cloud","previous_page":27,"next_page":29}