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# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty
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Consider that with the first agriculture also came more permanent settlement patterns, more formal authority structures, as well as the compelling fortification of place, cordoning it off through symbolic boundaries and by real walls and bunkers. The zone of habitation more forcefully encircles itself, now less a territory on an open plain (or plane) than one gathered into a proto-urban interior. With agricultural settlement as the driver, it is food — those parts of the world that we ourselves interiorize through ingestion and digestion — that guarantees this biopolitical economy of space. The digestion cycle envelops inhabitants into themselves; over time, a city consumes its inhabitants as the inhabitants consume the city (and in this way at least, all settlements are cannibalistic). The boundary lines that define the inside of that neolithic biopolitical economy are inscribed walls that outline and absorb what is wanted into its own corpus, filtering out what is not. As these partitions are membranes between the inside and the outside of a real social body, they are also skins, and it is in relation to the sensibility, intelligence, and vulnerability of skins and surfaces that these systems govern movements between enclosure and mobilization. In time, urban economies of eating and not eating, and including and excluding, will multiply and diversify such skins, deploying some as abstracted infrastructures and others as exposed flesh to be disciplined, sacrificed, capitalized, augmented, consumed over again. But for all that, it is still undecidable in advance what will finally constitute the interior or the exterior of any linear boundary, and so a specific sovereignty of that decision must necessarily be invoked, implicitly or explicitly, and even programmed and automated. Lines (and surfaces) provide tension by setting opposition between the negative spaces to each side (and inside and out), but they cannot ever fully control how either side is charged in relation to the other at any given moment: which one is dominant and which is subordinate, which is gathered in and which is excluded. This holds equally true for Stack partitions, both spatial and technical, such as City grids locking off bound cells from the linear flow, or Interface surfaces drawing together Users and systems, negotiating on the fly who and what is driving any interaction. While this primordial dynamic remains essential for the apparently irregular geographies of The Stack, we will see that platform sovereignty also relies on genuinely novel developments emerging through the reversibility of “ lines ” that are equally geographic and technological, folding the world in and out and up and down its layers, over and over again.
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5. Over (and under) the Line
Globalization both destabilizes and enforces borders, tethering retronationalisms and technological integration into the same contradictory dramas, populated by state and nonstate actors, czarists and androids, switching sides without moving an inch. Consider this odd and perhaps quintessential episode. During the Yugoslavian civil war of the 1990s, a squad of Serbian paramilitaries had captured a large group of Bosnian Muslims and held them in open-air prison camps. Now-famous photographs and film footage of these detainees, standing behind barbed wire looking out at the camera, horrified the world and mobilized opinion against the Serbian nationalist campaign and perhaps in favor of military intervention as well. The image of concentration camps, now again in Europe, crossed some red line and triggered demand for action. The Serbs claimed, however, that the global interpretation of the footage was all wrong — backward in fact. 8 According to them it was the photographer who was “ inside ” the camp, looking “ out ” at the curious Bosnians who had gathered around the perimeter fence to look in on him. This claim (albeit decided to be false in British court) demonstrates how easily such lines can invert themselves when an inversion suits the strategic perspective at hand. The line may be drawn on the ground as clear as clear can be, but the quality of the space that it draws — what is inside and what is outside, and who or what governs either side — is always in question (especially for those who die on one side of the wire). As the utopia/dystopia of the Berlin Wall (known as the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall in East Germany) also made clear, the camp and the bunker, detention and the enclave, are inversions of the same architectural form. One is an architecture of internalization and the other of externalization, but they share the same material profile. While one works to contain the danger within its walls, the other draws the same physical partition to keep the world at bay and expelled outside its safety membrane. Any exceptionality of the camp is actually exceptional not only because it is authorized by a sovereign decision that is both inside and outside the law, but also by a preceding decision to differentiate that enclosure from its own double, the bunker. Each is built into the other and their shared reversible design; the outside-in camp is not the only figure of this nomos of the modern as the inside-out bunker is an equally essential posture taken in relation to the same line. We will consider how the flip-flop of one into the other can be normalized and even automated by platforms and how the “ exception ” of linear reversibility itself becomes unexceptional. 9
First, we need to recognize how different kinds of lines, segmenting and generating different geometries, accumulate to realize different kinds of geopolitical effects. Schmitt has more than a little to say about this. Drawing the world is a work in progress. In Ptolemaic cosmology, the Earth was kept under a crystalline bubble, dividing two worlds, ours on the inside of this glass vitrine and one on the outside, the heavens looking in at us. From the fifteenth and sixteenth century claims on the New World, to longitudinal zones derived from Greenwich mean time, to the subdivision of broadcast spectrum, modern geopolitics is always based on a particular and arbitrary compositional alignment of territorial and governmental layers into a particular architecture: no topography without topology. Lines that are linked, folded, and looped become a frame, keeping things in or out, but like all other frames, they also present a certain section of the world and put it on display. The modern nation-state is itself also function of a cartographic projection that conceives the Earth as a horizontal plane filled with various allotments of land in which individual sovereign domains are circumscribed by jagged lines. Some are drawn as irregular hexagons (like France), some are regularized rectangles (like Colorado), some are discontiguous clusters of spiky circles (like Hawaii), but all these shapes are derived from the basic topology of loops. Also there is no geography without first topology, and so as we ’ ll see, also no nomos without topos: no stable geopolitical order without an underlying architecture of spatial subdivision. This loop topology is normative but not mandatory. As we know, other subdivisions of the Earth are not only possible; their lines already proliferate. While some lines and frames are more physically tangible than others, for the political geography of The Stack, it is the physicality of abstraction that is at the center of things. As a kind of master architecture (in the making), The Stack model is also perhaps also a contemporary version of what Schmitt called the nomos, and perhaps it is what retires the Schmittian nomos altogether . This slippery concept refers to the historically evolving structure of the world order (more specifically for him, an Earth-order) and the corresponding partitioning of political space according to which sovereign entities are constituted. Is there a nomos of the Cloud? We may conclude that The Stack is the nomos of our moment, or a better grasp on the architecture of The Stack may establish that there is no real nomos after all.
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My extended discussion of Schmitt and this term, nomos, needs some explanation. My interest is not to make a new contribution to the already well-trod domain of Schmitt studies or to suggest that we cannot develop a practical theory of sovereignty and political geography without first steering clear passage through his thought and legacy. Instead, some of Schmitt ’ s problematic concepts are used for both the particular things that they may illuminate and also for what is to be learned by what they obscure, and how and why they do both of these. In this sense, his concepts stand in for other related perspectives that deserve criticism, specifically those that begin from and end with a basic distinction between the physical and virtual when trying to make sense of computation and space, let alone geography. Implicit or explicit, this lazy association of analog systems, with physics and nature, and digital systems, with artifice and artificiality, dulls and confuses our debates about technology in ways we cannot afford. A corollary to this is a discourse on “ the political ” that fetishizes oppositional antagonisms, and another that can comprehend technology only as an instrument or topic of governance, and not as its actual form. 10 The nomos, however, is one of his concepts ( “ exception ” is another) that might be twisted and reused in such a way as to force it toward very different conclusions that he intended. But what is nomos exactly?
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In his 1950 work, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, the legal theorist offered a sweeping history of Western geopolitical architectures. The work focuses on how Roman, British, and Germanic legal empires drew the geometry of territory — specifically European territory — into a stable of political geographic orders from which spatial sovereignty over land, sea, and air was derived. 11 Schmitt defined nomos as “ the Greek word for the first measure of all subsequent measures, for the first land appropriation understood as the first partite and classification of space, for the primeval division and distribution, is nomos. ” 12 It is a both a structural logic in accordance with the primal first act of territorial inscription that gives rise to its subsequent formalization; it is a making of a territorial order through the execution of a territorial claim and physical occupation that precedes it. It also refers to a set of “ principles governing human conduct ” regarding war, space, and governance, but Schmitt makes use of nomos to suggest something both more concrete and transcendental than the abstractions of law. Nomos is described as prior to every legal, economic, and social order; 13 it is constituted by appropriation, distribution, and production, and only through this can it move from the particular to the universal: from arbitrary territorial capture, to representations of spatial delineation and to a geopolitical order. It is at once a physical oppositional arrangement, a discursive order, and an organic naturalization of this. Fredric Jameson offers another interpretation on Schmitt when he writes,
The concept of the nomos is a periodizing and structural category (whose family likenesses, besides one to the Marxian “ mode of production, ” might also include one to Foucault ’ s historical é pistemes) then inevitably brings with it the problem of the break, not particularly solved by the notion of a “ transition. ” In Schmitt, however, the fact of the break is an energizing one: first, because it suggests that each break, the historical disintegration of a given nomos, will call for a historically original production of a new legal superstructure or Novum. This call then lays in place the notion of an active moment of constitutive power … 14
Schmitt wrote The Nomos of the Earth following World War II, during which he served in Nazi Germany, and the “ break ” that concerned him was the end of a European order and the rise of an American era that he views with deep suspicion. He was pessimistic that the US was capable of such responsibility — and even if it was, that its reign would be desirable given “ the nature ” of “ North Atlanticist ” conceptions of space. As the US and the other Americas became a more central geopolitical actor, both the global omniscience of British-Greenwich naval ubiquity and the Roman-Germanic legal order of grounded jurisdiction were displaced by other forms of transactional sovereignty. In Schmitt ’ s history, this shift also validated transnational claims of sovereignty over entire continental zones, such as the Monroe Doctrine, which Schmitt greatly admired as a model of how a multipolar nomos should work. The catastrophes of World War I and II led to the establishment of a binary architecture held in place by the extranational domains of the US and Soviet blocs, their hierarchies of client states, their proxy battles over postcolonial nations, their transformation of Berlin into an enclave inside an enclave, and so forth. Today another multipolarity between China, the other BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies, the North American Free Trade Agreement, ASEAN, the European Union, and the Eurasian Economic Union, among others, plays out both in and over types of space that are equally geographic and technological.
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Schmitt ’ s history of the origins of that European nomos is staged through the continental encounter with the supposedly unpartitioned New World, and the “ free soil ” it presented to the European jurisdictional imagination. (We know full well that the very idea of an “ empty American continent ” is itself an invitation to genocide. For our purposes, we rehearse Schmitt ’ s theoretical argument but not the validity of its worldview.) Schmitt claims that recognition of an “ unwritten ” territorial outside confronting a European interior motivated competing common laws and juridical traditions to respond by formalizing political geography. The pressing challenge of giving order to the “ free soil ” made the current heterodox and ambiguous state of jurisdictional affairs in Europe somehow intolerable by comparison. That solution ratified the subdivision of loops of land, but not sea (and largely ignoring air and the z-axis altogether), in favor of a master Archimedean point from which this political cartography would be consolidated and naturalized, as symbolized by the Westphalian compromise half a century after Columbus ’ s first expedition. Today the continuing (if still incipient) emergence of planetary-scale computation may represent a similar break and a similar challenge to the political geographic order. It does so not only because the Cloud is a new continent to be colonized, but because, as a kind of space, it trespasses the Schmittian metaphysical distinction between solid ground and liquid sea as the essential poles of geopolitical space and theory.
This puts us today neither at the end of the liberal world-state nor as subjects of a consolidated and self-transparent empire, but, rather inside something much harder to map because it is not entirely certain which space is which, what referent is physical and what distinction is abstract, the fiber-optic line or the pulse of light? This is not only a crisis of legitimacy; it is also a crisis of addressability , and one that initiates a break between one order and another, nomic or not. Our own encounter with a new world of unaddressed space generates a productive confusion over what type of Earth is to be claimed: land, sea, air, and now information; each of these seems to always be allocated, addressed, owned, and unowned differently. But this also is where we begin to depart from Schmitt ’ s framework altogether. He historicized the fate of Westphalia and the European nomos through his two metaphysical modes of geospatial governance: the opposition of an authentic grounded order and organic habitation versus an inauthentic maritime and aerial lawlessness extending over the line. The latter ’ s promiscuous forms are governed not by immediate occupation over time but by abstractions, located by flags, mathematical geologistics, and a vectorial relation to starry neighbors. 15 The industrial militarization of aerial space with World War I destabilized this essential opposition, and with it, according to Schmitt, the basic foundation for not only European geopolitical architecture and threatened the possibility of a renewed nomic order to come. From the sky, a pilot ’ s survey and visual capture of land smoothed the ground over and made it perceptually flat, oceanic, optical, geometric, quantitative. The drifting swirl of aerial warfare overcomes the distinction between grounded habitation and liquid movement through abstract space. Later, Virilio would echo (in terms not so unlike Schmitt ’ s) the significance of this shift and extend the analysis to include the arrival of information spaces that govern and are governed through an even more radical visual abstraction of planetary space and time, and the even more unnatural mathematization of territory manipulated from afar. 16 Jameson again: “ Yet the prophecy of an air-power return to total war, with the friend-foe pairing replaced by self and other, human and subhuman, is only partially correct, for it is no longer a question of air as an element, but one of cyberspace. Information is the new element that re-problematizes the spatial. ” 17
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The Stack also contributes to a geopolitical order and is a manifest representation of that order, but what sort? The Stack does not neatly fit into Schmitt ’ s historical model or vice versa. Its appropriations of irregular territories and complications of geographical distinctions suggest more than modern political geometry outfitted with fast processors. Planetary-scale computation may need to be understood as a successor to these other modes of geographic governance — land, sea, air — each with its own logics of partition. But unlike the US Department of Defense, which also recognizes “ cyber ” as the fourth spatial domain of war but describes it as necessarily subordinate to existing forms of state jurisdiction, I suggest that other shifts are at work, perhaps even a break, that will prove more difficult to accommodate and contain. It is neither that the spaces of The Stack are enrolled into established systems or simply stamped with a new governing system of addresses all at once; rather, an accumulation of interactions between layers in an emergent structure is producing the scale, dimension, and contours of this supercomputational geography in the first place. 18 First and foremost, The Stack is occupying itself. Schmitt ’ s opposition of the “ land versus liquid ” logics of sovereignty ( “ Eternal Rome ” versus “ Eternal Carthage ” ) does not hold, any more than the distinction between the physical and the virtual. 19 For planetary-scale computation, the practical issues of addressing the world cross-divides of solid and fluid, the material and the informational, between sand and bits, between things and actions, between objects and enunciations, archived pasts and simulated futures and the structures that would govern all those exchanges as they bloom into new forms. If addressability is also some form of accountability, all this congeals toward what kind of geopolitical space?
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6. Land/Sea/Air/Cloud
To approximate an answer, it will first be necessary to show how this collapse of the Schmittian distinction between land and sea (and all that it implies for the ultimate career of states as they move into the Cloud and The Stack) is accomplished not only by a radicalization of the “ aerial ” into even more vaporous “ information space, ” but equally as much through a radicalization of the physical line carving into territory and guaranteeing its own enforcement. As The Stack emerges as both the machine and the geography, the territory and the map at once, yet more smoke escapes from the ears of Schmitt ’ s direct and indirect heirs. Schmitt ’ s spatial thought is aligned with the German philosophy of his historical moment. He writes approvingly of Heidegger ’ s dictum, “ Die Welt ist nicht im Raum, sondem der Raum ist in der Welt” (The world is not in space; rather, space is in the world) as a path out of the “ nihilism of empty space. ” 20 Jameson conveys that “ the origins of ( nomos of the Earth ’ s) ‘ spatial thought ’ ... [follows] Husserl, whose critique of modern abstraction ... locates the fall in the separation, the occultation and/or repression, of geometry from the existential praxis of land surveying in ancient Egypt. Schmitt diagnoses a similar degradation in the dissociation of the juridical tradition from the brute geographical fact of Landnahme, that is to say, the seizure and occupation of land as such. ” The geographies of land, from sea, from air, are arranged by Schmitt not just as different projects and techniques, but as a tragic dilution of a prelapsarian origination of ground toward increasingly legalistic, geometric, and virtual abstractions. In considering a nomos of the Cloud by counting the transoceanic fiber-optics also digging through the countryside, data centers buried deep in mountains near dams, the exotic minerals pulled from African rivers to make cell phones, alongside the engineered hallucinations of augmented reality, an inability to stay true to the dirt-venerating provincialism of Schmittian nomic priorities is seriously challenged. No workable distinction between ground and water, between Cloud infrastructure and Cloud interactivity as mapped across some spectrum from tangible to virtual, can survive much poking and prodding. Even so, there are nomic claims on the undetermined territory of the Cloud, as recent revelations regarding state surveillance programs and state versus state cyberwarfare make plain, for example. Even so, the residual confusion of jurisdictional divisions of land, sea, air, and cyber is itself worth mapping forensically. From its buzz and howl, perhaps alternative governmentalities for the decades that lie beyond might cohere.
The Schmittian primal scenes are the plowing of a field, taken and defended, and the state ’ s duty to build good walls around it. These sovereignties over place are materially substantiated by a defended occupation of place that is supposed to outlast the prosthetic logistical visions of Roman surveyors who have come and gone. Two lines: the ox draws its line into the absolute place of this soil, whereas the itinerant emissary of empire superimposes his invisible geometry — one a true fact and the other a temporary mathematical conjecture. For Schmitt (and for Heidegger and any number of subsequent political programs, both left and right, irredentist and esoteric), “ the very possibility of legal relations is dependent upon an original act of collective appropriation of land which establishes the material matrix — literally the ground — of those legal relations. ” 21 Even forgetting that this is the same ox plow that Jacques Derrida used, once upon a time, to prosecute for writing against ontologies of presence, it should be obvious that “ facts on the ground ” absolutely do not defend sites against revision and innovation. 22 It should be said that for Schmitt, if not for Heidegger, it is the physical taking and defense of land that matters most, not the transgenerational claims of autochthonous bloodlines that may have lost out against new forces. These political conundrums are still on our plates, and the ecological absolutes staring back at us are based not in the simple honor of defending homelands, but in the physicalization of abstraction and the abstraction of physicalization. The Cloud is not virtual; it is physical even if it is not always “ on the ground, ” even when it is deep underground. There is nothing immaterial about massless information that demands such energy from the Earth.
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Networks make space and take space, and like any other architecture, by their inscriptions into a given location, they exclude other possibilities from being there. Networks dwell differently than buildings do, however, and they exceed what a bipedal hominid would recognize as a single location, but they are nevertheless placeful. Network edges and lines produce interiors and exteriors, and so networks are not just superimposed on a given territory, they also produce a real territory by striating it. Consider the Montana East Line Telephone Association of the 1920s. 23 Before the federal universalization of telephone line service across the vast rural areas of the United States, farm collectives made use of a network of land demarcation and domain interiorization already in place: the miles of barbed wire that segmented the prairie. Using barbed wire fences, they fashioned crude but effective telephony using the steel lines as a signal relay channel. This network did what networks always do. The same network that links and integrates locations, house to house, in a disembodied conversation, is the same network that demarcates the distance and separation of each area by bordering them into a series of continuous positions. The same network of wire that virtualizes the presence of voice also establishes the territorial coherency of homesteads, each job easily folding into and on the other without fuss (farms, you see, are not allergic to disembodied inscriptions of informational geography). One line links across inhuman distance, and one line separates place into space, but no real line ever does one without the other and each allows the other to work. But any line cannot by itself constitute its own political efficacy and make its own decision about what is inside and what is outside. Schmitt is not wrong when he argues that “ the political works not by founding or composing, but by settling and dividing. ” 24 But when the ground itself is indeterminate, when the air and the Cloud are both so heavy with mass, then the composition of settlement and the division of founding crossover into one another, and so the sovereign decision over that inversion is always in play.
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For Schmitt these kinds of piracies and perversities are always threatening to undermine the regulatory work of authentically grounded power as they reverberate in the void of our geopolitics. Onshore or off, the phrase “ beyond the line ” includes an exceptional or unregularized geography carried by maritime movements as well. Schmitt argued that “ when the great pioneering powers of Europe struck out towards the world oceans, this immeasurable broadening of the known world resulted in a qualitatively new conception of physical space. The opening of the world oceans created the cultural context in which the universe could be conceived of as an infinite, empty space. ” 25 The internalization of this empty depth was seen in new modes of political thought, painterly perspective, literature, and philosophy. “ Released from the limits and inhibitions of traditional spatial intuition, the ruling classes of Europe were mentally equipped to become the masters of the world. ” The emptying out of intuitive anthropometric space was the starting point for the arrival of a universal spatial order based on mathematical formalization and geographic interchangeability. Decade after decade, this groundless materialism was radicalized over again by mechanical production, industrial flight, modern chemistry, and, eventually, we now understand, digital computing. As said, from the sky looking down, the sea and the land are both flat planes full of points located in a universally matching coordinate system, virtualizing the immediate perception of geography in motion. “ Air space, ” writes Cornelia Vissman, “ seems to engender constructed images of space rather than space-experience. ” 26 This protocinematic flattening of natural dimensions, where the Earth itself is seen merely as a “ thicker version of the sky, ” disheartened Schmitt, who saw it as a catastrophic ephemeralization of the embodied occupation of the Earth that should underwrite durable human geopolitics. Instead, that architecture would now be built on the unreliable footing of overwhelming synthetic speed and the screen of false equivalences. 27 This is because “ movement makes space, rather than happens in, space ” 28 and because this abstract global sphere is not properly occupied, it offers space that is merely measured. For Schmitt, it is less physically defended than divided up like an algebraic equation, 29 and it is the spacelessness of the twentieth century that the contemporary geopolitics provides, with none of the rooted limits of solid fortresses and true walls and no true distinction between friend and enemy. Without these, Schmitt warned of an era inaugurated not only by global war but of total war of all against all. 30
According to this line of thought, the deconcretizing of space instates a geopolitical simulacrum spinning in an endlessly self-available matrix. It can never finally govern because it can never find a solid ground on which to erect institutions capable of durable distinction between inside and out, us and them. At the same time, however, this universalism, “ homogeneous … and morally and legally malleable, ” also has for Schmitt a certain ethnic and economic odor. It is highly functional for certain forms of capture and exploitation, namely English and American forms, which would not defeat their military enemies but instead “ disqualify ” them by policing moral and technical incapabilities with “ universal ” architectures that are in fact extensions of their own specific interests. This counterhegemonic move undergirds how some on the contemporary left, have made use of Schmittian concepts, against what they take to be a US-centric neo-Wilsonian empire building, and instead in the service of a multipolar geopolitical architecture that is heterogeneous and programmatically antiuniversalist. 31 For Schmitt, but not for most of these leftist deployments, that multipolarity is also couched in transnational Gro ß raum (for ASCII , Grossraum), or “ great spaces ” or spheres of influences and domains of dominion over which dominant political cultures reserve systemic sovereignty, such as the US Monroe Doctrine claims over North and South American continental space. However, to establish what the nomos of the Cloud may or may not be, it is necessary to counter the misrecognition of the extraordinary spacefulness of global information networks, tracking their ongoing occupation, settlement, and doctrinal composition. We will observe the technically necessary and politically limited universality through which platforms can cohere polities, and toward that, we will look more closely at the grossraum, the type of claims it makes and could make (and how hard it is to decide its inside from its outside).
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7. The Nomos of the Cloud?
For Schmitt, the Monroe Doctrine symbolized an end of older Jus Publicum European system of international relations and operated in a parallel domain to that arrangement of Westphalian modules, one for which multiple political geographic ordering principles abut and overlap. In that, the League of Nations was explicitly “ excluded from asserting jurisdictional claims in the American Grossraum, i.e. the Western Hemisphere. ... The Western Hemisphere was excluded from the purview of the League, ” and so represented not only another pole of power competing with Europe but another political geographic mechanism altogether. At first the model it represented appealed strongly to Schmitt, and his “ advocation of a Gro ß raum world-view ... grew out of his admiration for the origins of the Monroe Doctrine, when it was a territorially delimited, hemispherical order. From economic origins, it had found continental coherence, but had then been distorted into a liberal, universal, spaceless policy of non-intervention. ” 32 The model it suggested of a hemispheric multipolar arrangement of geographically natural transnational domains gave way, however, to what was for him most dubious thing about twentieth-century globalization. In Schmitt ’ s positive vision for it, through the Monroe Doctrine, the United States is the sole sovereign in the Western Hemisphere and its will is fiat. The doctrine reintroduced transnational territorial lines of demarcation into the body of modern international law, infusing it not just according to population and land, or space and politics, but by “ land, people and idea, ” in opposition to liberal internationalism and “ Anglo-Saxon pseudo-universalism. ” 33 For the older Schmitt, both Wilsonian/United Nations globalism as well as Nazi Germany ’ s Lebensraum diluted a really “ genuine ” Grossraum solution, partially because both rejected true multipolarity and the coexistence of Grossr ä ume (plural) in a stable order.
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