{"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":33,"pdf_page":51,"physical_index":51,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ec6b114b6c8b9e5d474548fa6b4895e96be2fb94cffc01d8facb513723d8e563"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"The Stack makes space by occupying it; it does so by surveying abstraction, absorbing it, and virtualizing it, which is how it is even possible to consider whether or not it expresses a nomos at all. If the space of planetary-scale computation is a new kind of “ free soil, ” then that “ soil ” is land, sea, and air all at once, equally tangible and ephemeral. It can be both inside the line of the Westphalian state and its internal legal optics but outside its borders and sovereignty; sometimes it is both outside its borders and internalized by legal and military sight. It digs deep into the ground, tunneling cables across cities and countryside; passes across the seafloor of oceans linking con tinents physically as well as virtually; and bounces down from swarms of overhead satellites and cell towers. Its infrastructural profile contains all of these qualities of the earth at once, each of them dependent on the others. It smooths space by striating it with heavy physical grids of cables and server farms, and striates space by smoothing it out with ubiquitous access, sensing, relay, and processing micropoints. For its chthonic Cloud, data centers are housed under mountains with reliable ice cores; suburban farmland between metropolitan trading centers is redug to lay private cable for algorithmic trading concerns near the old AT & T switches in New Jersey, realizing a new topographic expression of the transport layer of the TCP/IP stack; while the wireless frequency spectrum is subdivided, auctioned, allocated, and bundled into derivatives like any other prized commercial real estate. Whereas the Schmittian “ grounded ” way of thinking detests dedifferentiated space and the flattening superimposition of multiple maps, valorizing instead the perspectival spatial order of human establishment, the geographies of The Stack go a long way toward collapsing distinctions between the one and the other, as its interlacing of land, sea, and air through networks of recombinant flows realizes the simultaneous physicalization of the virtual and the virtualization of physical forces. Again, ground is abstracted as abstractions are grounded, but if the platform space in question cannot be collapsed into a single type of Earth (land, sea, air, or cyber), this doesn ’ t make it any less contested. Practical sovereignty over what its geography becomes is animated and augmented by a drive for a spectrumdominant position within an integrated totality of enumerable, governable zones, both high and low, visible and invisible. Building out the spaces of The Stack is precisely the accomplishment of Google, the NSA, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, Alibaba\n\nThe Nomos of the Cloud\n\n33","previous_page":32,"next_page":34}