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Bratton","content":"38. In the mature version of this particular Cloud feudalism scenario (again, it is one among many such scenarios, not a prediction), the walls of some gardens are hard and thick and resemble those of factories or zoos, while others are informal, invisible, or covered in pixels. The routinization of everyday life for the vast plurality of people reduces User-citizens to mere personnel in wider interplatform conflicts and dramas. The social and economic relationships between enclave/camps in a geography of Cloud polities operating at such radically different levels of power is likely to function like similar arrangements have in the past, through the extraction of arbitrary rent and the coordination of coercive exposure and autonomous servitude.\n\nOn the geopolitical stage, a not dissimilar mix of the new and the old, of consolidation and division, is played out. On the secular side, it is characterized by an apparently paradoxical dynamic between the entropic global integration of mobile people, goods, data, currencies, viruses, and genomes, versus pronounced state securitization, as well as nativist or irredentist claims against the effects, both real and imagined, of that mobility. The tension between geographic integration and disintegration emerges from an interdependent spatial-cultural economy in which the conditions of movement and the risks of interpenetration are mediated by the subdividing envelopes of interfacial provincialism and urban regionalism. Contemporary geopolitics depends on this tension just as much as the attacks on it from both the future front and archaic rear exploit it by elevating it to messianic first principle. Globalization results less on the disappearance of borders than in their perforated multiplication and superimposition, and in the proliferation of enclaves and exclaves bending around each other ’ s only-partial interior space. In this, the conditions of exclusive or partial membership of any Cloud Polis is determined not only by its technological services on offer but also by the more complex sociocultural, even theological, demands of those multiple interiors. That any User may occupy several, even at once, complicates how they are and are not mobilized by any one of these. This patchwork may generate new geopolitical belief systems, or make use of older ones, or combine them. Imagined communities might precede their migration to the Cloud (by several centuries in the case of religious or ethnic nationalisms) where they can reanimate and rearticulate older cosmologies and geographies. The appearance of new variations might be a novel function of the Cloud’ s most recent social moral communities to which they are native (such as Anonymous).\n\nIn practice, as for any transnational cultural sphere, the imagined communities that fill out any Cloud Polis with social content will draw on both an existing archive of cultural identities and tensions as well as employ novel logics of the Cloud to innovate on their conceptual alliances and practices of inclusion and exclusion. As we ’ ve explored, the fragility of such translations between the message and the medium includes ambiguities as to what is and is not a state or “ market ” endeavor in the first place, sacred or profane, inside and outside, here and there. At present, with that fragility at hand and those ambiguities in our hearts and mind, perhaps among the most urgent next steps for geodesign is to draw preemptive scenarios of their implications and work backward from them.\n\n39. There is unlikely potential in other examples at a different scale as well. We have the curious cases of religious movements becoming parastates, such as the Vatican, or ISIS, or Hezbollah, the transnational Shi ’ a party, and military and social service apparatus based in Lebanon. Suspending from our minds only for a moment the ideological content of this entity, what in reality is the sovereign status of this organizational form? It is a state within a state, albeit one largely financed by another state, that has not seceded from its host nation but controls large swaths with lastinstance sovereignty. On purely formal terms, how would organizational apparatuses such as these compare to corporations that have, at least in the United States, been granted the constitutional protections of private religious belief? (Here market fundamentalism collaborates directly in desecularization.) We can easily imagine scenarios in which theologically programmatic Cloud platforms might compose their City, Address, Interface, and User layers as something that resembles Hezbollah at least as much as a mid-twentieth-century corporation.\n\nNotes\n\n445","previous_page":444,"next_page":446}