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# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

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The prospect of polities delinking from states, and states from territories, and territories from the consumable image of governing platforms sets in motion other realignments and liquefactions. Unlike oceans, however, that liquidity does not cover location with an equal, smooth surface. Does universal mobility always also mean that economies mobilize against the consequences of their metatransactional externalities stored in camps, carbon sinks, landfills, and prisons? Some technolibertarian design fictions draw the conclusion that elective self-exclusion will better guarantee a community comprising only those of the preferred disposition. Freedom is taken to mean a challenge to the state ’ s monopoly on walls and borders, seen as offensive to the principles of personal liberty and mobility, in order that new private walls and borders

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can be developed without the restraints of collective regulation. The economist Robin Hansen wonders aloud about the impending likelihood of individual human trillionaires, people who have encircled so much monetary wealth that they each control more than the GDP of any but the top twenty or so nation-states (as of 2015). <sup>36</sup> For Hansen, this development might be welcome because it would allow for a scale of privately sovereign capital previously unknown to highly technological societies, which could be risked on behalf of globally beneficial megaprojects that would be otherwise impossible. Yes, perhaps. It may bring instead (or also) psychotic, incestuous autocracies, which generally have a poor track record. For some, the prospects of running the world through a “ Sky Club ” suite of sovereign private lounge services may feel like a tidy substitute for the messy state of things, but Users without the means to purchase their way in, or whose cognitive labor and attention is deemed not valuable enough to support adequate platform services, are left exposed to the wilderness beyond the bad walls. <sup>37</sup> Unless it is designed in another direction, this Cloud Polis model may tend to lead away from a heterogeneity of dynamic alternatives and toward a strongly differentiated hierarchy of lived experiences and isolated economies. That scenario casts a vast cognitive biomass, heaving and wheezing, clicking on things, with no privacy or support, curtailed into restricted channels of menial online work, training search and advertising algorithms with their frustrated queries, naming things, captcha-ing blurry images until mealtime. In other words, under the terms of this scenario, the differential capacity of mobility for some is proportional to the immobility of others. For some the right of “ exit ” is paired with a right (or ability) of “ entrance ” to the island platform of their choosing, whereas for others, “ exit ” is a dead option because they are denied “ entrance ” into the closed enclaves that they would choose if they were allowed. Without entrance, exit is not a right; it is a privilege (or product). When exit becomes a privilege, one defined by the suppression of entrance, it stops being a philosophical principle and starts being a weapon. <sup>38</sup>

What does design learn from this consideration of Cloud feudalism? <sup>39</sup> Or, what do we learn about design by examining the logistics of this numinous demolition derby? First, violence over the terms and conditions of political geography has moved to society ’ s interfaces (airports, stations, itinerant websites, terminals, shipping ports, disposable cell phones, buses, embassies, financial hubs, hotels, SIM cards, interactive maps). The mobilization of what Walter Benjamin called the “ constituent ” power of extralegal violence is normally thought to prefer targeting the centers of grounded contiguous institutions (capitols, towers, obelisks, sacred books, and personas), but instead, we see another strategic tendency to go after crossroads, points of convergence, dilation, expansion — interfaces — that are as often diffuse, civilian, urban, and algorithmic. Perhaps this is because the center is now diffused, or because in the interfacial image of totality, the center is already represented and available anywhere. The uncertainty of The Stack ’ s social repercussions are thereby on display. As we evaluate its potential for a future geopolitical rotation, we recognize that this is possible only because The Stack cannot guarantee in advance that its Cloud polities will not degrade into caricature dystopias (and no one can guarantee that they will). To repeat the point already made, modernity is an open platform for the design and development of antimodern briefs. Not only does modernity disembed and reembed traditional social forms, traditional and fundamentalist social forms also disembed and reembed modernity. It is the proximity and adjacency of premodernist fundamentalist projects with the burrowing ubiquity of hypermodernist platforms that is most telling. It is instructive of what we do not know: how to describe and theorize this atemporal jumble of projective geographies, and what happens to states and the guarantees of modern sovereignty when they must compete to defend so directly for their monopoly on legitimate citizenship? What we haven ’ t figured out, haven ’ t designed, are the appropriate ways for such an assemblage to compose itself. In the figure of the Cloud Polis we have, as it stands today, no idea what the terms and limits of a Cloud-based citizenship of the Google Grossraum will or would entail and curtail: Some amalgam of postsecular cosmopolitanism, agonistic radical democracy, and rational actor microeconomics, largely driven by intersecting petabyte at-hand data sets and mutant strains of Abrahamic monotheism? But specifically, what is governance (let alone government) within that amalgamation? <sup>40</sup> Working by subtraction, we can say that it may be neither the annulment of dissensus nor the wholesale transposition of political will into systems optimization, nor is it the synthesizing the political as a metaphysical operation undertaken perhaps with technology but never as technology. In the absence of well-drawn alternative futures, the proliferation of unredeemable programs means that the primary positions of utopian dissent end up being those of the secessionist, the fundamentalist, and the misanthrope. That is an unsustainable trinity.

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As the following section on the City layer-to-come will explore, we are not lacking utopian visions; we are instead drowning in their surplus. It is increasingly unlikely that for each and every state, each layer of The Stack would somehow resolve inside of each national boundary, which would then, as similar units, cooperate in a universal and global constitutional federal order. “ The right of the state ” to “ control the Internet inside its borders ” is very difficult to enforce when its borders are on the Internet and are themselves, in one of several ways, outside their own terrestrial geography. Today this option is nevertheless floated by regimes (some if not most authoritarian) hoping to fix themselves against the tides, withdrawing into national islands, while disallowing entrance and exit to their own Users and citizens (the state monopoly turns ugliest when its ability to cohere citizens is challenged and undermined). We assume that not only is there no conventionally cosmopolitan resolution forthcoming around the bend but perhaps that there cannot be, and should not be. Isn ’ t the “ state condition ” of software and sovereignty going forward one in which each of us is already claimed by multiple jurisdictions at the same time, and in which we already manage multiple formal claims on our social identities and economic agency? Geodesign must draw on that entanglement, not problematize it as a “ contradiction ” to be solved. The outgoing Secretary of State Clinton was right in this regard: the Cloud polities to come — State into Cloud platforms and platforms into states — do need new architectures. <sup>41</sup>

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We need to experiment with formalizing the partial “ citizenships ” already at work in our multiple User identities, including the rights of the “ refugees ” that all of us will be at one time or another, as both state-ful and state-less persons. <sup>42</sup> We can draw some provisional principles; we can choose whom we share our time with but not whom we share our world with, and so the voice-versus-exit dichotomy is dangerously incomplete as a basic algorithm for platform geopolitics. First, without the ability to materially design and redesign the systems that we have, “ voice ” is just requesting others to take action. “ If you can ’ t open it, you don ’ t own it, ” and while you can voice all you want, if you can ’ t redesign it, it ’ s already at least partially broken (as they say). User-redesignable systems are both more resilient and more accountable: no “ voice ” then without also “ design. ” Second, a right of “ exit ” without sym metrical rights of “ entrance ” is an empty promise. The emigrants that Srinivasan spoke about not only left their home countries, they also entered a new one. If they had not been able to freely move to, as well as freely move from, the lesson and the example fall apart. “ Exit for all, entrance for some ” is a bunker mentality, a sovereign filtering decision camouflaged as something else. It is not practical or scalable and is antithetical to the cold, hard optimism of my thesis. <sup>43</sup> As a platform politics, it also goes against the “ robustness principle ” that John Postel wrote into an early draft of a TCP/IP specifications document: “ Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept from others. ” <sup>44</sup> Lastly, the real futures of our Cloud polities will be determined by extreme accidents at least as much by the execution of plans, and the coexistence of opposites as much as by the curation of ideals, and so whereas we might normally contrast the envisioned “ clean future ” ( 2001: A Space Odyssey’ s airport lounges, or Gattaca’ s dress code) from the “ dirty future ” ( Blade Runner’ s streets of LA, or Mad Max’ s social contract of mayhem) as mutually exclusive, instead they actually depend on one other, each world drinking the wastewater of the other. It is utopia and dystopia, both at once. For every Cloud Polis, the reversibility of the utopian and the dystopian tracks with the reversibility of the enveloping line of interiority and exteriority. The normalized exception can protect or fight the asymmetries of exit and entrance whether the Interface’ s User intends it or not. As discussed below, this is true (truer in fact) when the lines and hinges of these reversible enclaves/camps overlap and coexist in volumetric space, in the same project, sharing the same envelope, in the same City layer. Accordingly, even identifying where exit and entrance take place is not always easy. 45

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71. City Layer to Come: Multiple Utopias and Rough Totality

In the modern tradition, the utopian is bound up with the future and the future with the utopian. <sup>46</sup> As intimated, however, it also spawns the fundamentalist utopian futurepast and the totalitarian future-present, as well as other impulses that sometimes work without messianism. It does, however, require a kind of imagination — what we might otherwise call “ fiction, ” an alternative that is not exactly true or false but is, like all other models, a simulation of logical intentions. Now today we seem to rely on more sordid measures and untoward means, apocrypha, apophenia, and the gruesome populism of conspiracy theory. Design is not immune to this, and the City layer of The Stack may succeed by doubling up again on the actual fictions. In Los Angeles, for example, the rhetoric of future utopia was part of the official foundational brand of the city, a city with so much future because it had so little history. Today the city has less an official utopia than an officially cracked utopia . To speak of the Angeleno condition, its precipice, in the dystopian vernacular is not a critical stance; it is the party line (or more precisely, the oscillation between the utopian and the dystopian, back again, over again, in and out, one through the other, both occupying the same place and plot). The Tyrell Corporation and Rand Corporation, Reyner Banham and Darby Crash, Squeaky Fromme and Ryan Seacrest. Joan Didion ’ s self-driving Google car and Gregory Ain ’ s gated community project in Calabasas. Philip K. Dick ’ s spec screenplay for the Farmville movie, and Rene Daalder and Rem Koolhaas ’ s 1974 screenplay about computergenerated actors and digital films taking over Hollywood. Diller, Scofidio & Renfro ’ s use of proprietary film script analysis and focus group testing algorithms ported into Grasshopper to simulate crowd flow at the Broad Museum, and blockchain – based digital object identifier infrastructure linking Disney ’ s DRM copy protection to Prism. Morphosis ’ s CalTrans building ’ s second career as the bad guy ’ s headquarters in every cop show ever made, perhaps soon dethroned by versions of Apple ’ s UFO megastructure headquarters up the coast in Cupertino. Among the many quotable dictums of British urbanist and science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard, one is “ sex times technology equals the future. ” We might modify it slightly, perhaps even without changing its essential meaning, to political theology times technology equals the utopian catastrophe. Put differently, even once more, the history of the city is, after Walter Benjamin, bound to the rhythms of theological and prophetic history, and in the guise of the city, that prophetic economy becomes both utopian and dystopian at once. For Benjamin, the persistence of theology is its own revelation, but for my thesis, it is more of a nuisance, but one with explanatory value nevertheless. The design of political systems in the here and now (which can extend in variously extreme durations) is, for better and for worse, often enacted through some politico-theological projection for which real cities and real societies exist, always in a fallen simulacrum of an eventual ideal. For example, after the beginning of the never-ending and never-not-ending War on Terror, the globalization of risk has brought with it an aspirational vision of security as a utopia of urban interfaces , an image of all urban interfaces in a single governable totality. The geodesign of the City layer must surpass or evade this program.

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Utopia not only depends on futurity; it produces futurity as a space to be described and filled with peace or war or both. Unlike cities in the real world, utopias are absolute singularities, from a Jerusalem that was the geographic center of the world, to the island jurisdiction of Thomas More, to Theodor Adorno ’ s insistence to Ernst Bloch that the utopian impulse is not that of positive reform, but of complete transformation of the totality of what is, up to and including the apparent reality of death. On that last bend sits Fredric Jameson ’ s quote, repeated often by even those it was meant to ridicule, that “ it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. ” But is that even still true? Was it less true at the end of 2008 than now, when, after the storm, we have blithely resumed business as usual and officially wasted a good crisis? Either way, we are most definitely not lacking in imagined ends — capitalist, critical, green, securitarian, sacred ends — and it is this surplus (of utopian ends of this or that) that presents a problem for the City layer. Whatever “ end of history ” began in 1989 and supposedly ended in 2001 (or later again in 2008) was in no way an eclipse of utopia, as some who believe themselves dispassionate pragmatists would have it. The flat earth of digital globalization was nothing if not intensely utopian in its self-image. Cities were adorned with a new brotherhood of obelisks marking this new “ postutopian ” order, predicated on the cargo cult economics of Bilbao effects and affects and punctuated by the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City by that utopian urbanist, Mohamed Atta. His master ’ s degree in urban planning described the segmentation of Aleppo, Syria, into Islamic and Western zones where immunity of the former could be protected from the dangers of the latter, as well as his mortification at the mistreatment of the twin towers of the Gates of Al-Nasr. His utopian security urbanism was to “ sacrifice one set of twin towers to save another. ” <sup>47</sup> This is the problem with a surplus of utopian ends.

What holds for our City layer ’ s urbanism proper? Real progress in design tends to occur in response to an emergency, often a war. Recently design has been asked to choose between two metaemergencies: ecological deterioration and securitization/the War on Terror. Lines are drawn. Use cases are modeled. Budgets are allocated. And now a third, the financial crisis, adds another metaemergency/productive constraint condition against which design can push. The three work in combination and in competition for prioritization, and through them, constraint is not only a set of conditions in which design must struggle; to constrain is itself the design strategy. Already these first two crises, among others, turn our attention to urban interfaces, physical and virtual both, as the critical design points. The realities of climatic, ecological, natural, and energy economies as enabling limits on urban systems stage every point within that system as a transference to be interrogated, subtracted, or optimized. For security, the permanent emergency of potential exceptional violence recasts every partition, aperture, orifice, choke point as a site of discipline for the generalized interior and the immunity of the aggregate urban body. The utopia of security might even be defined exactly as the aspirational notion that the polymorphous (and polyspatial and polytemporal) interfaces of the city can be known and governed in total and as a resolved totality through total images and image instruments. So again, for the normalized exception and the reversible interfacial envelope, it is not the utopian versus the realist but an effluent of multiple utopias, of open utopias and closed utopias, fully operational and co-occupying the same location, totalities on top of totalities. For the City layer, we see that this interlacing of utopias, one involving the other, even through the medium of a single architectural or urban form, as defining its lurches into the future.

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Examples are not difficult to collect. Lashkar-e-Taiba ’ s attacks on Mumbai are already one illustration of this. The utopian urbanism of this Pakistani state within a state may be based on an expansive geographical vision of Dar al-Islam, whereas the cosmopolitan logic of Google and Google Earth is a singular denuded space into which competing claims can be enveloped. The platform utopia of Google Earth ’ s cosmographic capacities are instrumentalized by fundamentalist politico-theological geographies, such that one space can interweave through the other in the same projection. And again, their interweaving and interdependency produce the space of their encounter (once more, the lesson is less that jihad can fit within Google Earth but than Google Earth fits within jihad). The space of this interlacing of utopias is made and thereby entered into, not entered into and so made, or again, after Adorno, “ but in that we travel there, the island of utopia rises out of the sea. ” But this doubling is also the work of emergent platforms, fundamentalist or futurist. In everyday urban design, we see forms based on both openness and closedness at once, often rendered into the official symbolism of the state. While the George W. Bush – era US embassy in Berlin by Moore Ruble Yudell (though it looks like Halliburton ’ s design) didn ’ t bother even to suggest civil space or civilian purpose, some others do. Consider Kieran and Timberlake ’ s winning design for the US embassy in London, one quickly derided for its schizophrenic posture to the world, both transparent glass and defensive bunker at once. It may be a confused compromise of contemporary clich é and contradictory programmatic requirements, or it may be a perfectly tuned ambivalent and affectless posture for what global architectural presence even means to the Obama era. Similarly, for Morphosis ’ s Los Angeles CalTrans building, dynamic expressionistic forms look like public sculpture but perform as martial security program: decorative camouflage precisely. It is ostensibly an open, green democratic building in which the virtue of architectural innovation and artistry is on display for public edification. The building ’ s footprint is defined in relation to post – Oklahoma City Bombing guidelines against vehicular proximity, a gigantic concrete skirt opening only along one corner, where pedestrians encounter outsized expressionistic metal fingers as they try to enter. Housing the higher administrative functions of

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California ’ s network of roads and freeways, it is not without reason that the CalTrans headquarters is a kind of fortress, but it does not really look like one exactly. It looks like irreverent sculpture, but it is in fact the whimsical artistic sculptural elements that also are the defensive techniques in play and at work. The building ’ s architect, Thom Mayne, and I once discussed this, and the irony is not lost on him that one key function of the expressionist gestures of the LA School is now to serve as security programming. This displacement is by no means limited to this kind of design. In this nervous selfcontradiction, the urban public body is redefined by its supposed relation to imminent violence by extrastate actors, but with design flair and ingenuity. It is another mode of the paranoid style in American spatial politics, one for which urbanism ’ s primary use cases are always, on the one hand, the tax-paying citizen who may actually also be suicide bomber and, on the other, the symbolism of a responsible and transparent institution held up and out of unauthorized reach. Attempts to reconcile the performative and symbolic demands of security and the open society within the same architectonic entity, whether a building or a park or a city, means interweaving openness and closedness into a complicated pattern of open and shut, bulletproof glass that makes building skin transparent, massive car bomb deterrents as public art in pedestrian plazas, evacuation corridors that link floors with sculptural public walkways that also sort and filter crowds into firewalled zones in case of emergency, and more. This combination of Enlightenment transparency of publics and gated bunker with weaponized interfaces is a special design solution that we could call a glass fort. The combination of apparent opposites into adjacent fabrics and into a single form is one version of what reversible political boundaries and interiors collapsing on themselves — the normalized exception of the reversible interface — look like as a design language. Its utopian enclave is less Elysium than executive lounge membership check-in protocol, and its dystopia is less the vast pens of Agamben ’ s canonical camp , and more the furtive moments of political exception, sandwiched between moments of generalized mobility, like the ten minutes spent in airport security lines.

While we can interpret the political complications that give rise to these forms, we are less certain of their ultimate effects, even as we get used to them. The securitarian utopia of total interfacial visualization works at the scale of the individual building or city because it also works at the scale of subdivided states and jurisdictions, especially when its ability to separate one from the other is mostly legal and symbolic. The border, like any other interface, activates as much energy and information as it cleaves and suppresses, and while there are persistent calls to finalize a West Bank – style total wedge between the United States and Mexico, from the Pacific to the Gulf, the utopian securitization that motivates this is not possible. The border economy is so deeply and thoroughly interdependent (money, goods, labor, people, data, water, food) that to tilt toward their final disentanglement by strong sorting is a fantasy. Instead the emergent flow of day-to-day networking continually overwhelms the zombie jurisdictions of this prophylactic geopolitics. On the other side of the world, Jerusalem itself is in many ways archetypical of this sort of designing against regional intracontamination. The physical city materializes the sacred maps of three major religions, one layered on top of another, one woven through another, history and prophetic future differentially activated for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. These exist also in the imaginary architectures of rebuilt temples, original foundations, polydimensional boundaries and land rights codes, and of course a real wedge introducing an artificial canal, torturing the limits of legitimate jurisdictionally past their breaking point. But the boundary of this theocratic enclave/camp economy is not only at the external membrane of official Israeli territory. Like the international borders held deep within landlocked airports nowhere near another country, the checkpoints that dot the political border, marking interior from exterior, are repeated again and again inside Jerusalem proper. These external-but-internal checkpoints multiply the border interface, absorbing it into the interfaces of everyday life and folding the civil war of Abrahamic monotheism into their programming. Finally, as their association is concretized in the governed interfaces of mutual immunization, it is also no clearer where the secular economy is predicated on theocratic military segmentation, and where theocratic military segmentation is built on the secular economy.

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“ Imagine no lines ” is the manifesto of security experts, as in no frontlines to definitely situate war and no clear interior demarcated by exterior membrane. This infinite smoothing is perhaps another name for what Schmitt called total war and Virilio called pure war. It is in effect the same thing as “ imagine nothing but lines ” where the infinity of smoothness proves on closer inspection to be infinite striation. The reversibility of the line and the no line is expressed in the reversibility of the open and the closed within the same architecture, the line that draws the enclave that flips into the line that draws the camp. Just as for the embassies, the paired demands of open and transparent urbanity and the megastructure-under-siege, democratic and martial, co-occupying the same structure and the same architecture, less juxtaposed than twisted one within the other, never dissolve into the same solution. So for The Stack, this leaves more questions. Does the surplus of utopias prevent political will from acting on a planetary level precisely because it sublimates so much energy into the realm of the imaginary, leaving us to conquer only fantastic worlds? Are these dreamworld fragments recuperable? If romanticism is foremost the will to lost unity, and utopia the will to potential totality, can there be an antiromantic utopianism? A catastrophe without melancholy? For the geodesign we most need, can there be a true plurality of utopias, not a totality of the multiple, but like real cities, a multiple of totalities?

It would seem that the positive answers to these questions point away from Security (with a capital S) as the sovereign utopian imaginary for which all governance becomes a subset of policing. It does not, however, bend away from governance per se (and from the design of governance). An urban interfacial regime constitutes and mediates power, and this is why it is worth designing at all. The unromantic and unmelancholic utopian impulse as a conceptual driver for urban futures (whatever direction that might lead) may or may not involve the politicization of this difference between securitization and the programmatic interests of another geodesign frame work. Just as civil technologies can and do have martial qualities and consequences regardless of whether militaries or paramilitaries ever touch them, so too can explicitly military technologies have civil purpose that goes beyond, or even altogether evades, their instrumentality for violence or how that violence would have designated the city. In fact, the city itself, the primordial bunker on the horizon or the boulevard turned into battleground, is perhaps the exemplary technology for the oscillation between military and civilian deployments. We already say all too readily that violent irruptions within the City represent failures in the governance of interfaces. Any architecture not only symbolizes power; it also mediates it directly, even consti tutes it. One core weakness of securitization as the design driver of urban interfacial systems is its consistent tendency to enact greater violence onto the city that it is ostensibly protecting than the dangers it defends against is ever likely to bring. As perhaps our single most important form of technology, the City suffers from a kind of autoimmune disorder by which we disfigure them in advance of potential future disfiguring; we attack them with defensive measures in the inverted image of a potential threat of future criminal or terrorist attack. This is designing for the emergency (as discussed in the Earth layer chapter, and not on behalf of the emergent) by preemptively repeating the possibility of the catastrophic violence before it actually occurs. That eventual violence may or may not come, and now it does not even need to come because its disfiguring plot has already been accomplished by security engineers. By way of precedent, consider that for the entirety of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union did not explode a single nuclear device on the enemy ’ s territory. Instead, in the guise of the test, the United States bombed the United States (over 1,000 bomb tests, over 300 of them atmospheric, in Nevada, Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, New Mexico, the Marshall Islands, and elsewhere, for a total of 174 megatons) and the Soviet Union bombed the Soviet Union (700 to 900 bombs, in Kazakhstan, Arctic archipelagos, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and other areas of Russia proper, including the Tsar Bomba in 1961 — 50 megatons all by itself, or ten times the total munitions of World War II, for a total of 285 megatons). By comparison, the bombs that were used in a war on an external enemy, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States, were 15 and 20 kilotons, respectively. To attack one ’ s own body, not just to demonstrate the capacity to attack, but to ward off the possibility of the attack from occurring in the future by performing the attack over and over again on oneself: this is pathological, is it not?

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Another geodesign problem for the City layer with which we are concerned, then, is not the protection of indeterminate space from this sort of excessive defense mechanism, but the extension and expansion of platforms of openness, not because it would be nice but because it is necessary to the ultimate goal of robust, designable governance of urban platforms. This requires a model of the User that is constitutionally diverse and well tuned to the computationally active urban interfaces in which it is situated. That model would be guaranteed more by the continuity of urban networks, blending into planetary boulevards, than by cartographically delineated parliaments. Its potential depends on the viable universality of whatever base-unit interfaces it can build on, and whatever intelligent agent, human or nonhuman, of that urban political geography would engage them. Buttons? Borders? Ballots? Buildings? Still just these interfaces? One of these becoming another? In the worldliness of migrant labor, migrant capital, migrant information, migrant cultures, migrant languages, migrant standards of legal rights and itinerant universalisms, the specific standards of (national) citizenship ( jus sanguinis, “ right of blood, ” and jus soil, “ right of soil ” ) cannot carry the same guarantee of determination as they may have under different regimes of relative motility operated by nations tied to land and states woven to nations. These citizen statuses may be a matter of life and death for some, but are they still inadequate foundations from which to scale the model geopolitics of the User going forward. Furthermore, any inadequacy is measured not only against hypermobility, but against positions of agency no longer exclusive to humans and the political traditions of humans, occupied by the overlaid populations of Users and Addresses for whom we now design. Such are the cities, and the City layer.

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