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# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty
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For The Stack, we recognize how our contemporary territorial and epidermal lines are multiplied, dashed, and cross-hatched as they overlap jurisdictions, and in relation to them there is no cardinal outside or outdoors per se. Their framings seem at once cacophonous and practical to the management of everyday life. To Schmitt, the “ free soil ” of an undernamed and undermeasured land is not the same as the sterility of abstracted global space for which he claimed to feel such horror vacui. It is not something that hollows out the discipline of sovereign decision, but rather something that demands it to act. So where Schmitt ’ s original notion of sovereign exception spoke to the suspension of an internal law and its spatial imprints, it now moves to the adjudication of external geography, of the free soil of planetary-scale computation that for all its mathematics is not sterile, and of the lines that mark its starting points. In this, the sovereign decision shifts focus from the judgment of the enemy toward the design of active walls and partitions, and as it does, the figure – ground relationship between the law and the line, each framing the other, starts to wobble and oscillate. The design of what executes the interiorization or the exteriorization of any boundary, exemplified by the reversibility of the fence that defines the exceptional space of the camp/bunker, is not only controversial but essential. In an even partially multipolar world, the effects of these accumulating reversals are that much more complex, but not without their own governable rhythms. The ground begins to fall out from beneath Schmitt ’ s bottom-line prioritization of geographic lines of durable jurisdictional settlement over promiscuous geometric grids and our ability to tell which is which. When the sovereign was revealed by and through his decision over the state of emergency, its identity was fixed into relief by this action, but now we are without clarity as to where sovereign arises from which decision. Is it from the decision over interiority/exteriority, or is it their irresolvable reversibility, or is it the line itself deciding the polis rather than other way around, or is it the programming of the line to flip-flop the open and closed according to some generative script? If we also sense that mechanisms of exception are becoming somehow increasingly normalized (and even infrastructural) by their further modernization, then it is because they are now embedded in the actual lines, envelopes, and interfaces that mediate the reversibility of the camp/enclave machine itself. Platform sovereignty may not only accommodate but require this embedding of decision-making interfaces. As technologies more than discourses, theirs is a captured decision over a now less ambiguous interior and exterior limitation of where the outside starts and on which side of the line it sits, drawing us in or drawing us out (but even once decided, by automation or not, the active abstraction of physical geography takes over as lines reverse polarity all over again). It is here, in the automation of the exception, that infrastructural and platform sovereignties begin. As the provisional decision over the exception is designed into the technology of the line, the automated envelope and the Interface influences not only how the platform will address its Users, but also how Users will program the platform, and so another foundation of the Stack ’ s political geography is established: the machine.
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The Nomos of the Cloud
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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
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Group, and many other global cloud platforms, less by some Lockean right of ownership underwritten by cultivation than by the strategic articulation of the contours of a plastic territory. Its spaces are bent, inflated, and folded, and mapped accordingly. Inherited political orders are both circumvented and reinforced as the worlds they once described are disenchanted. That is, whereas states may be agents doing the taking and formulating of worlds, they cannot do so without transforming the anatomy of their own sovereignty at the same moment. The Stack space is not an already given vessel into which states intervene or markets mediate or political theologies invest with myths; rather it is generated in the confluence of platform logics that will recalculate the fate of all of these. On their own, the flexible terms of occupation might warrant Schmitt ’ s warning against the permission that technical universality gives to total war (or what Virilio later called “ pure war ” ). Unrestricted by the brakes of proper nomos, the absolute motivation for capture extends up and down from molecular to atmospheric scales. But for The Stack, these terms are not operating on their own untethered; they are instead as bound by their planetary situation as any other form of occupation. Even in the absence of a proper nomos, they congeal layer by layer into a metastructural order of a different governing order: a machine that is a state held together by deciding the spaces of technical exceptions as much as legal ones.
8. A Google Grossraum?
The machine that is a state is not engineered without conflict and controversy. Today the specter of Google Grossraum hangs over (and under and in between) The Stack. Google ’ s armatures, its internal and external interfaces, operate all up and down the spectra opened up by universalist computational geographies. Especially since Google is, to date, so deeply associated with the US and its interests, to what extent has the global space of planetary computation been occupied by its particular ambitions and strategies, and already established a certain claim on an embryonic political geography? Does “ Google ” (literally the cloud platform and the geography defined by it) represent something like a Monroe Doctrine of the Cloud, filling out and supervising a domain extended well beyond the North American continental shelf, across a more comprehensive composite spectrum? For Schmitt, the first Monroe Doctrine represented a break with an older order, and perhaps the new one (if it so exists) does too, but just as the first lost its validity for him by its transformation from an upright territorial claim into deterritorializing universalization, then at least, to this extent, it is possible to consider a it new doctrine because the first was itself already also so nebular? 34 The UScentricity of planetary computational space is even built into the infrastructure ’ s own autocartography. Not only was ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the Internet addressing authority, established in California and its relationship with the US federal authorities long controversial, but today the United States is still (and may remain) the unnamed, unmarked center of addressable Internet space (US websites are usually “ .com ” not “ .co.us ” as they would be without this infrastructural exceptionalism). It is in this context that the National Security Agency ’ s (NSA) comprehensive data capture, surveillance, storage, and metadata analysis programs as disclosed by Edward Snowden and colleagues are understood to represent a strong American state maneuver of sovereign control over (or, at the very least, of policing of) the spectral spaces of planetary-scale computation. The willing and unwilling complicity of major commercial Cloud platforms in this endeavor associates them directly with the reach of that claim, and so the Monroe Doctrine of the Cloud and the Google Grossraum are seen by some to conceal only one another. This conflation may simplify things for those who prefer easy plots, but it actually does not explain the situation very well. This decisive appropriation of “ free soil ” by US security services was met, of course, with outrage, including calls for alternative non-US Internets that could circumvent this capture (and in some cases also to ensure local and often authoritarian control by political, economic, and religious authorities). 35 We also know that the NSA ’ s acquisitive line-drawing is not unique and that Russian and Chinese agencies are at least as acquisitive, if not much more, and it is also unlikely that European agencies do not manage similar if less hegemonic operations as well. Still, the unipolarity of this still unmarked universality already overflows the normal legal geography, and its militarized brokerage does more than just draw a new territory. It also occupies it. Provisional omniscience comes from making policing the primary technique of spatial approximation, such that the geographic delineations are the result of the search for criminality and transgression, and so the friend-enemy distinction between mutually suspicious states is augmented by a User-hacker distinction between the rights and abuses of platform sovereignty.
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As is to be expected, global opinion dramatizes this in contradictory ways. With significant exceptions, the web has largely been developed through technologies and protocols of British, European, and American origin, with many of the most powerful governmental and economic players still located there (though it is certain that Chinese and Indian counterparts are at least as important in engineering The Stack that most people will ultimately inhabit). Its global growth could be read then as the creeping spread of cyber-empire and part of a larger superpower monocultural campaign, starting in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, and spreading to world capitals like an invasive machinic species. Some European activists, on both the left and the right, describe it this way. Alternatively, the contested terrain in question, both above and below ground and across the plateaus of scale, could be seen as one that was always there but only recently activated and given shape by available technology, like the electromagnetic spectrum was before industrialization. Or instead, as seen through the slits of a Guy Fawkes mask, it should be defined as a global commons, a messy and truant public sphere for the common intellect, private speech, and social expression that retains, and continuously regenerates, its own sovereign autonomies, and over which no security apparatus should ever claim to guarantee final jurisdiction. Or rather, for the view from Beijing (and from some of Washington, DC), sovereignty remains by right of modern national borders to retain (somehow) full control of the data that sit inside their Westphalian loop by engineering increasingly deep packet filtering at key transnational chokepoints. 36 Propositions for alternative Internets that would secede from the totality in order to retain relative political, cultural, or economic autonomy could be based on a more autonomous physical layer, regional encryption systems, or even unique addressing protocols. All of these are theoretically possible, and for some military and financial sectors, they already exist and thrive. But other proposals come from Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Schengen Area, and others that would require new platforms to process local data only on servers that physically reside inside the territorial borders of each state. Their data would be therefore (it is thought) subject to provincial policing and supposedly unavailable to other state actors (the NSA or Google, perhaps). In some cases, this may be technically possible in limited ways, but as a general politico-geographic principle on which to scale the nomos of the Cloud, it is a reactionary counter-policing that is of dubious value in the long run. Data do not really have a national career unless they are forced to produce one. Yes, information is just as bound to local and specific contexts as it is to global ones, but the idea that its transactional flows could be filtered into national flavors and pinned down in accordance with the coherent order of a fixed imagined community and its ethnic, legal, or linguistic forms invites the sort of nationalism that always ends in tears. That so many feel the design choice is between this secret police, that secret police, and cryptoanarchism shows just how dangerously immature our geopolitical theory of planetary-scale computation is at this point.
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So where should the decision over the exceptionality, or lack thereof, of the spaces of planetary computation reside? For now, we observe the metalegal acquisition and cultivation of Cloud territory by state and nonstate platforms but understand that the depth of that territory guarantees its ongoing malleability and resistance to full capture. It ’ s true that while the contours of such spaces are composed precisely by their occupation (entered into and so made), the armature of planetary-scale computation has a determining logic that is self-reinforcing if not self-fulfilling, and which through the automation of its own infrastructural operations, exceeds any national designs even if it is also used on their behalf. The programming of inversions between its interior and exteriors is generic to the program of the structure itself. Decision is based less on an economy of scarce sovereignty than on replicable algorithms built into the partitions of vertical and horizontal landscapes. Sovereignty is not just made about infrastructural lines; it is made by infrastructural lines. This principle of platform sovereignty is where the costume changes of User into citizen and citizen into User are worked out. In that those lines are already globally crisscrossing grids, layered one on top of the other, the portrait of unipolar universality versus multipolar heterogeneity is far messier without any zero-sum tally to represent it. The Stack is not the grid but an accumulation of grids, some communicable to one another and others not, some affording one type of provisional sovereignty and others another type, some incarcerating Users and others offering lines of flight, and many of them reversible. The tangles thicken.
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Perhaps the regional amorphousness of a “ Monroe Doctrine of the Cloud ” is both the wrong nomic precedent to claim and the wrong profile of empire to be resisted. The Stack appears to be American, and as of now, it both is and is not (it is also mostly Chinese), but in the long term, this identity may actually prove far less significant than it might seem today. The Stack will also change what “ American ” means in the first place, as the identity of a geopolitical actor and as a governmental service platform, and in doing so, The Stack as a whole may resemble that new national definition les and less. If the idea of one universal grid is a ruse in the service of a particular type of unipolar economy, then exponential overlaying of incommensurate grids brings different kinds of reversals and accidents. As computational edges and nodes claim some autonomy by their programmed automation, they also possess more authority as decision-making shifts from the designer to the designed. The platform sovereign ties that emerge in turn generate their own unplanned productive accidents, layer by layer and in combination, and with them come other universal positions into which Users might dip in and out. These are not exactly cosmopolitan for reasons discussed below, but they are nevertheless not unipolar and are quite capable of bending state claims against their will. As discussed in more detail in the next chapter, another core paradox of platform sovereignty (besides its geographic illegibility and axial revers ibility) is between architectures of standardization that bring together heterogeneous projects and decentralizing effects, on the one hand, and transitory dynamic interfaces, which in the accumulation of trillions of interactions enforce the authority of that standardization, on the other. With the break from one nomos toward something else, also nomic or not, comes a change in the topology of governance, from loops on a plane to something else. Platform sovereignty is derived from the Interfacial line, surface and partition, and how its designation influences how it will Address its Users and how they Address the platform and one another through it. In this regard, the amalgamation and reorganization of interactions into verticalized planes and towers is not only an event in the world but a process of making the world. Its geography is not only the allocation of lines; but is a squaring of the line into frames and a multiplication of frames and cells into grids. As grids become volumetric, the potential interiorizing reversals of their component lines multiply exponentially, and the squaring of lines over and again leads to more grids. Grids are reversible by design and the “ sovereignty ” of their reversibility is neither extrinsic nor exceptional; it is generic to their operation. It ’ s what grids do automatically. Or to paraphrase Gordon Matta-Clark, a volumetric grid describes all the possible layers without implying any priority or preferences. This is infuriating to the Schmittian requirement for grounded, human-scale order of clear-cut antagonistic oppositions arranged in adjacent set-pieces, but oh well. Grids are bent and piled up on top of each other; multilayered images of their compound margins further convolute the situation as individual grids that were designed for one specific effect are braided into a composite infrastructure with emergent plans all their own. Some of these are expressed by standardized protocols and application interfaces, interoperable standards, and service wrappers. 37 With the standardization of these, the rigidity of the grid and its isolating cells lays down the generic system that gives an addressable location to every site of interest held within its honeycomb chambers. However, its geometric lines, up and down and over and across, are also avenues of regular escape and open possibilities of relation between those addressees. This is its bargain: no more innocent outside, now only a theoretically recombinant inside.
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Mobility along the grid is also the writing of another line, and as these accumulate, they wear grooves into the landscape forming new channels. This is not best described however, as lighting a path of autopoietic “ freedom, ” if only because the lines of the grid and lines of mobilization through the grid are always reversible. Movement away is another mode of capture. Mobility is only one part of an economy of motility, from capture to camouflage, that holds no happy absolutes; as forms, these grids are the diagram of forces frozen, just as its forces are the form of the diagram made. 38 Immobilization is not what counteracts the drawing of the line of acceleration; it is what demonstrates its reversibility as a matter of normal course. For this, the decision over the regularity and regulation of slowing down or speeding up, over passage from or into the cells of the grids, can be programmed into the actual partitions of the world, and in the end it is their programmability, not their ideal geometry or geography, that affords platform sovereignty to their User. The geometries at work don ’ t simply reflect governance; they perform it: from line into frame into topos into something else situated where we might once have put nomos. Whether deliberately or accidentally designed, a geopolitical architecture is cast. Information is transformed into shape, drawing an arc of algorithmic governance along braided topoi built of asymmetrical superimpositions; less modus vivendi than the mutual invisibility of overlapping sovereignties. All of that.
Even as the sovereignty of designation over the “ exceptions ” of interiority and motility are unevenly embedded into the programs (e.g., architectural programs, algorithmic programs, software programs, political programs, economic programs) of the partition, the design of its automation remains part of the ongoing assignment for the design of The Stack as a whole. Topology is still the design problem, and as ever, the drawing of the line is both inscriptive and descriptive, both immanent and projective, both a writing of an immediate site and a determination of whatever might be there instead. The drawing can mark a surface, frame a site or event, or prototype how lines, frames, and grids should be engaged in the future or elsewhere. This is how worlds remake themselves even as they intersect and unravel. As contemporary philosophy bemoans the preeminence of “ digital ” technologies and how they ensure an erasure of worlds and a profanation of solidarity, some posit world-making (mondialization) as the antithesis of globalization with its “ atonal ” quantification and banalization of affective experience. 39 For some writers (as for Schmitt), the loss of a special coherence of articulation is also loss of all inceptive self-renewal. 40 For them, computation has smothered the possibility of radical breaks with the present condition, leaving us all to wander about in a virtual haze, having confused the entropy of ubiquity with the space of creation. However, I am not convinced that the end is upon us or that perplexed melancholy is wisdom. 41 I remain deeply curious as to how sensible oceans of planetary computation will evolve, making available a colossus deluge of connections within and across people, things, and traces, not necessarily according to the doctrines of the Google Gro ß raum, but in the collateral accidents of wonderfully inhuman machines (including us) running about, in and out. I suppose that for both of these positions, universal computation does destroy the “ world, ” and while for the former this is a dishonorable apocalypse, for the latter, it is a good starting point. But stepping back from this too-stark opposition, we do continue to understand framing (by lines, by grids) as the presentation of some part of the world to itself (or to another part of another world). That frame is a device for saying something new or to say something about what is and is not new. The design of that frame itself and its capacity to enforce its own presentation is how the sense of a full world is approximated.
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Clearly any discussion of the suspension or superseding of political norms that have grown up around the horizontal subdivisions of space, from national laws to human rights to currencies, will raise more questions that it can answer. We don ’ t know as much about what kinds of geopolitical effects vertical lines bring. We don ’ t know how to conceive of force and justice through them, and we barely know how to image the Earth through them. How is verticality similar and different in practice than horizontal? Does it mean first and foremost just so many horizontal lines overlapping and thickening such that they now have height, or are they a qualitatively different order? Regarding The Stack, I argue that they do represent a different order, but that this order is not given in advance. We need to design what that order is and will be. We start from what we know about what layering does to horizontal lines and what layers of vertical lines and sheets of horizontal lines pierced by slopes of diagonal and oblique lines do to political geography. Drawing from the sections already presented, we can make a summary. First, they perforate horizontal lines, making their ability to contain and conceal, as camp or bunker, more uncertain. As we ’ ve seen of late, this provokes states to mercilessly refortify their topographic contours. They normalize the exception of reversibility, making the movement between inside and outside into a programmed function of infrastructural surfaces and interfaces. They multiply the quantity of lines, making dense and unresolved grids. Some grids are filled with uniform and monochromatic cells and others with hierarchical patterns, but all afford some kind of social posture and position. Their proliferation doesn ’ t only close off space into smaller units; it also produces new territories that are equally physical and abstract, heavy and virtual. In turn, this space is motivating a new land grab among state and nonstate actors alike; it is also forcing transformations in how geography is held, conceptualized, modeled, and defended. The order of those transformations occupies a similar location in our architectures of sovereignty as nomos, but because it involves grids of land, air, and sea all at once, dedifferentiating their relative weight and liquidities, the logics of this new arrangement are also perhaps very different. 42 Because these transformations are both driven by planetary-scale computation and mediated through it, any strong distinctions between a political geography supported by technical systems and technological systems spread through agonistic geographic space are undermined.
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The state takes on the armature of a machine, because the machine, The Stack, has already taken on the roles and register of the state. While the proliferation of lines has normalized a certain kind of reversibility, the early geopolitics of The Stack also sees the fortification of intentional camps and bunkers, with some populations excluded from movement and transaction and others stationed in networks of enclaves absorbing capital by centripetal force. To design up and away from this outcome does not mean a reestablishment of ground for an upright primate perspective of natural place or prematurely freezing in place The Stack ’ s most preliminary new geographies as the only options. An emergent alternative to archaic and recidivist geopolitics must be based on something more scalable than settler colonialism, legacy genomes, and Bronze Age myths and the maps of nations that have resulted from these. 43 The discussion of the layers of The Stack, and the productive accidents of each, is an outline platform sovereignty, a term that will appear explicitly in some parts of the following chapters but lurks underneath almost every paragraph in some way. But first, what exactly is a platform, and how do the layers of The Stack constitute one?
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Platform and Stack, Model and Machine
The goal of future wars is already established: control over the network and the flows of information running through its architecture. It seems to me that the quest for global totalitarian power is not behind us but is a true promise of the future. If the network architecture culminates in one global building then there must be one power that controls it. The central political question of our time is the nature of this future power.
— Boris Groys 1
The essence of datagram is connectionless. That means you have no relationship established between sender and receiver. Things just go separately, one by one, like photons.
— Louis Pouzin 2
9. Platforms
Platforms are what platforms do. They pull things together into temporary higherorder aggregations and, in principle, add value both to what is brought into the platform and to the platform itself. They can be a physical technical apparatus or an alphanumeric system; they can be software or hardware, or various combinations. As of now, there are some organizational and technical theories of platforms available, but considering the ubiquity of platforms and their power in our lives, they are not nearly robust enough. Perhaps one reason for the lack of sufficient theories about them is that platforms are simultaneously organizational forms that are highly technical, and technical forms that provide extraordinary organizational complexity to emerge, and so as hybrids they are not well suited to conventional research programs. As organizations, they can also take on a powerful institutional role, solidifying economies and cultures in their image over time. For The Stack, this is their most important characteristic but perhaps also the hardest to fully appreciate. Platforms possess an institutional logic that is not reducible to those of states or markets or machines, as we normally think of them. They are a different but possibly equally powerful and important form. Many different kinds of systems can be understood as platforms, from urban street grids to Google, and so to consider their common operations, some abstraction is necessary. Part of their alterity to normal public and private operations is the apparently paradoxical way that they standardize and consolidate the terms of transaction through decentralized and undetermined interactions. Platforms can be based on the global distribution of Interfaces and Users, and in this, platforms resemble markets. At the same time, their programmed coordination of that distribution reinforces their governance of the interactions that are exchanged and capitalized through them, and for this, platforms resemble states. Platforms are often based on a physical standardization of functional components that allows for more diverse and unpredictable combinations within a given domain. On the macro scale, the intermixing of public-facing infrastructural investment and oversight tied up with the privatization of existing public services makes the political identity of platforms that much more ambiguous. 3 So long as those exchanges are regularized by passage through the platform ’ s established forms, they enforce the optimization of interactions by binding open exchanges between self-directed Users at the edges of its network. When those forms are computational (as for Google), that passage is the capitalized translation of interactions into data and data into interactions, and the movement of these into and out of central locations (such as strongly defended data centers). As we will see, the genealogy of platforms is diverse and seemingly contradictory. Roman urban planners, the encyclopedia of John Wilkins, Charles Babbage, the Commissioners ’ Grid Plan of 1811, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Lady Ada Byron, Vint Cerf, and others, all contribute to the parentage of platforms, and it is their eccentricity and exteriority from normal state and market institutional models, combining elements of these as well as of machine engineering, that has made them so successful in redrawing the effective terms of global systems.
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