{"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":295,"pdf_page":309,"physical_index":309,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1dca76c8a00e79ab17b2a3f5c23134b7525454997e291a06070b8837d59ca641"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Moving our gaze just upward to the Cloud layer, we see vast logistics archipelagos and far-flung subterranean server farms, some outside normative jurisdictional control, and all superimposing irregular partial polities over locations and Users, interweaving themselves with state claims. Google Grossraum delaminates polity from territory and reglues it into various unblendable sublayers, weaving decentralized supercomputing through increasingly proprietary networks to hundreds of billions of device end points. Each of these is also a sensor and tracking node feeding information back into the proto-sovereign Cloud platform, which uses this to draw new maps of state space and also to absorb it into new formats ( Clouds becoming de facto states, states becoming Cloud platforms). This activates open-ended platform wars over identity, currency, logistics, devices, services, and infrastructure, with no player capable of fully remapping all links between the mobile citizen-user, data center location, and national laws. And so, we are left with specters of Cloud feudalism and cosmpolitanism, both at once.\n\nWe try to trace where this goes and from where it came. Archaic states drew their authority from the regular provision of food, and over the course of modernization, more was added to the intricate bargains of Leviathan: energy, infrastructure, legal identity and standing, objective and comprehensive maps, credible currencies, and flag-brand loyalties. Bit by bit, all of these and more are now provided by Cloud platforms, not necessarily as formal replacement for the state versions but, like Google ID, simply more useful and effective for daily life. For these, the terms of participation are not mandatory, and because of this, their social contracts are more extractive than constitutional. The Cloud Polis draws revenue from the cognitive capital of its Users, who trade attention and microeconomic compliance in exchange for global infrastructural services, and it in turn it provides each of them with an active, discrete online identity and the license to use that infrastructure. Before the full ambition of the state cybersecurity apparatuses were so evident, it was thought by many that the Cloud was a place where states had no ultimate competence or maybe even a role to play; they were seen as too slow, too dumb, too easily outwitted by using the right browser. <sup>7</sup> States would be cored out, component by component, until nothing was left but a well-armed health insurance scheme with its own World Cup team. In the long run, that may still perhaps be the outcome, with modern liberal states taking their place next to ceremonial monarchs, stripped of all but symbolic authority, not necessarily replaced but displaced and misplaced to one side. But now we hear the opposite, equally brittle conclusion that the Cloud is only the state, that it equals the state and that its totality (figural, potential) is intrinsically totalitarian. Despite all, I wouldn ’ t take that bet either.\n\nThe Stack to Come\n\n295","previous_page":294,"next_page":296}