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Bratton","content":"they are also over the definition of ground in the first place and over specifying into what currencies it can be converted and circulated.\n\n72. Address Layer to Come: Platform-of-Platforms\n\nOur extended consideration of The Stack is hardly the first time the idea of a computational governance has been considered. From the early twentieth-century science fiction, to the midcentury rise of IBM and cybernetics, to late-century campaigns to see the “ law as code ” and “ government as a platform, ” it has been a recurring thematic ideal or nightmare, depending on perspective. <sup>48</sup> It is curious, then, how poorly academic political science and international relations have dealt with computation as an institutional and global force. It is acknowledged as a mechanism available to statecraft and a sector over which policy is to be developed, but it is not usually considered by these disciplines as a primary seat of authority in its own right. Conversely, computer science, at least its populist variants, has had little trouble convincing itself that the social and institutional mechanisms for governing complex software and hardware systems (e.g., open source collaboration, sovereign user and administration, clustered APIs) can directly displace older models of public governance without prohibitive difficulty. But the translation between politics and programming is not automatic or inevitable, and indeed their transgenic encounter is occurring in ways that are often unpremeditated and misunderstood (being therefore the topic of this book). We observed that new forms of governmentality arise through new capacities to tax flows (at ports, at gates, on property, on income, on attention, on clicks, on movement, on electrons, and on carbon, for example). It is not at all clear whether, in the long run, Cloud platforms will overwhelm state control on such flows, or whether states will continue to evolve into Cloud platforms absorbing the displaced functions back into themselves, or whether both will split or rotate diagonally to one another, or how deeply what we may now recognize as the surveillance state (United States, China, or others) will become a universal solvent of compulsory transparency or an opaque monolith of absolute paranoia, or all of the above, or none of the above.\n\nBetween the state, the market, and the platform, which is best designed to tax the interfaces of everyday life and draw sovereignty thereby? It is a false choice, to be sure, but one that raises the question of where to locate the proper site of governance as such. What would we mean by “ the public ” if not that which is constituted by such interfaces, and where else should “ governance ” — meant here as the necessary, deliberate, and enforceable composition of durable political subjects and their mediations — live if not there? Not in some obtuse chain of parliamentary representation, some delusional monadic individual unit, or some sad little community consensus powered by moral hectoring, but instead in the immanent, immediate, and exactly present interfaces that cleave and bind us. Where should sovereignty reside if not in what is in between us, and derived not from each of us individually but by what draws the world through us? For this, it ’ s critical to underscore that Cloud platforms (including sometimes state apparatuses) are exactly that: platforms. It is important as well to insist once more that platforms are not only a technical architecture, but also an institutional form. At once, they centralize (like states) scaffolding the terms of participation according to rigid but universal protocols, just as they decentralize (like markets) coordinating economies not through the superimposition of fixed plans but through interoperable and emergent interaction. Next to states and markets, platforms are a third form, coordinating through fixed protocols while scattering free-range Users watched over in loving if also disconcertingly omniscient grace. The platform as totality draws the interfaces of everyday life into one another, again, where the maximal state and the minimal state, “ Red Plenty ” and “ Google Gosplan, ” start to look weirdly similar. From this, our own subjective enrollment in them is less as citizens of polis or as homo economicus within a market, but positioned rather as Users of a platform. As I see it, the future work of geopolitical theory (and of design and geopolitics) includes the development of a proper history, typology, and program for such platforms. These would not be a shorthand for Cloud feudalism (or for the monotonic network politics of the “ multitude ” ) but models for the organization of durable alter-totalities that command the force of law, if not necessarily its forms and formality. Our understanding of the political and economic philosophy of platforms demands its own Hobbes, Marx, Hayek, and Keynes — but until then, only a few broad strokes or, a field of dots that may provoke other inspired line drawers to connect them in ingenious ways.\n\nThe Stack to Come\n\n327","previous_page":326,"next_page":328}