The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

It is because there is no one governance format for climates and electrons that the space for design is open at all. A communitarian integration of local techniques of measurement and mitigation into a more immediate tapestry may be an attractive vision for some, but a singing chorus to the invisible hand of flat networks is not a scalable posture of resistance to the status quo; to the contrary, programmatic localism and the democracy of means is a play for weakness. Without strong force-of-law mechanisms (and machines) in place, it is doubtful that design can possibly intervene at the superhuman scale of an planetary ecology, which, however, then leads us back to the contradictions of full-spectrum geography (but necessarily a compulsion to omniscience) with all its attendant problems, gaps, and failures intact. Moving away from an untrue position doesn ’ t make the new position truer. By way of comparison, merely inviting everything into a “ parliament ” (of all things) is to ask them to mimic and recite an old-fashioned, even reactionary, kind of political speech, but do strong computational alternatives seem any less arbitrary? ⁷¹ Is some currency backed by tons of carbon or gigaflops instead of US dollars (or gold or cryptocurrencies) a greater or lesser danger than the failures it would hope to ameliorate? Moreover, where is the limit to the conceptual violence of turning nature itself into a kind of permanent emergency, climate change into its final exception, and global warming into the masterwork of this ambient terrorist? Involving the planet as a ubiquitous enemy to be managed cannot end well for humans. What price is this to pay, even for a better currency? Does emergence necessarily shift from an open set available to unexpected incursions, recalling Deleuze ’ s meditation on the sands of California, to a closed loop, a synthetic landscape regulated as an objective resource? Yes and no. A synthetic landscape can also provide for new apertures in and out, especially the kinds unavailable while sitting on a beach. Within the Earth simulation machine demanded by planetary energy governance, the scalar relations between the local and global flipflop in ways that may multiply, absorb, and flatten alternative economies of energy exchange between big and little actors, and the most difficult step for geo-political design is to learn how to game the difference. In other words, the real design issues for the Earth layer are not defined by how well we can calculate risk and stage-manage disaster, but rather how well we engineer the path for one world to strategically fall apart into another. 72

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1. Designing the Earth Layer

By way of summary, we note that energy ecologies can confound state geographies because they work both below and above the scale of states ’ formal capacities to sense and observe which, in principle, extend only up to the limit of horizontal looping borders. Ecological emergencies suggest new geopolitical design based on data and energy jurisdictions, ones that can augment the nation-state, if not also demote it or defer it. In doing so, they substitute a politics of anthropic subjects for one of carbon flows, energy flows, and their effects, and in this regard, politics is partially refocused from the qualification of elections to the quantification of electrons. But this shift cannot by itself design for less violence, as any sovereign force, including The Stack, requires a continuing supply of disruption to renew its assignment to enforce force as such. As in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the failure of a state to maintain even basic infrastructural protection can ultimately serve to renew its charter to expand and regularize protection against an external enemy, now cast as a hostile climate provoked into unpredictable patterns and requiring a new bulwark of collective mitigation and enforcement. These are less geodesign programs of curation and creation than of a militarization of chemistry, a different and unwinnable type of warfare. ⁷³ It frames the unspoken-for public face of a quantified landscape not as our open perch within a particular astronomic neighborhood, but as a frontier of dangerous and vengeful toilets dotting plots of Earth as yet unmapped until brought inside as mere agriculture.

Instead of fighting a ubiquitous ecological enemy with higher-resolution countermeasures, a key aspect of the design program is to invent better economic technologies for valuing and evaluating what is inside and outside as such. Our ecological emergency is an exceptional state of things largely built out of unaccounted-for transactional externalities, neither legal nor illegal per se, but that nevertheless cannot be expunged from the physical world that a sovereign state tries to see, name, and count. In relation to Foucault ’ s identification of a sovereignty of markets, that sovereignty is partially held in the right to identify whether an externality is in fact external, and so whether the exception needs to be accounted for. ⁷⁴ Determining what is and is not accounted for — addressed as being inside or outside the economy — is also a determination of what that sovereignty is accountable to. Today this works by the normal sorting of what is and is not an externality, not only to a given transaction but also to the core reason of an economic model that might be validated or invalidated thereby. For those models and for what they do and do not claim in total, the right to deny identification is as essential as the right to assign it. For an emergent governance of ecologies, that includes a right of denial regarding the existence and extent of climate change itself, and in gradient degrees, this death wish spans all vestigial Anthropocenic political theologies. It claims an equivalent right to adjudicate ecological emergency not by omniscience but by a kind of blindness, and in this case, that blindness is a form of unreason willing to see only what it has already seen, but not what actually appears to it now. It is a sovereign decision drawn from inverse hallucinations: not seeing what is actually right there in front of you. It arranges for both an absolutized surveillance, as well as the right not to see what appears in the lens, and so in this regard, “ seeing like a state ” or “ seeing like a market ” also means protecting blind spots as needed.

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By contrast, computational megaprojects such as Planetary Skin do have an important part to play in building and thinking alternatives for the Earth layer of The Stack, and we shouldn ’ t dismiss their potential based on the na ï vet é of their initial goals and marketing. As a rule of thumb, I recommend more megastructures, not fewer, and yet Planetary Skin cannot really “ manage what it measures ” because ultimately it cannot measure what it thinks it can measure. Instead the Earth layer should be designed by thinking at the spatial and temporal scales of the ecological emergency itself, which means to build with the self-amplifying irruptions, not by policing them. Is the reliance on the identification of ecological noise — a standing enemy of excess and waste to be disciplined and normalized — also to foreclose possibilities and to guarantee that Anthropocenic global society, as it exists now, can only be the antecedent enemy of another Stack-to-come? If we fashion the Earth layer of The Stack in these terms, we have set ourselves up as the enemy of the enemy of the enemy of the friend we hope to conjure up. The math is against us.

Finally, as for the scale and program of the lines and frames we inscribe and the worlds we present by them, I would rather that design draw too big than draw too small. As we know, Anthropocenic energy platforms largely rely on sucking fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them in the sky, but planetary-scale computation cannot really grow if it powered by the oozy corpses of Mesozoic vegetation. Can we power the planet other than by eating the planet, or at least find a better way to do so? Splitting atoms (or, better, merging them) still holds some promise, as does the direct capture and storage of the energy shining down every day from our sun. While all of Earth ’ s civilizations are by definition solar powered, if sometimes indirectly (consider the ancient photosynthesis that made possible what goes into your gas tank), the amount of solar energy we use is nowhere near the total amount theoretically available to us. Thinking big, we recall that in his 1960 paper, “ Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation, ” Freeman Dyson surmised that a sufficiently advanced civilization would come to require not just more energy from its sun, but eventually all the energy from its sun. ⁷⁵ He supposed that one way to do this would be to build a sphere around the sun that would capture its energy (minus a bit of infrared radiation) and use it to support engineering projects elsewhere. The sphere could be a solid ball or a latticework of satellite collectors arranged in longitudinal or latitudinal rings, or perhaps arranged in triangular networks like a geodesic dome. As noted above, currently the global economy uses about 15 terawatts of energy, but consider what it could do if it had several orders of magnitude more than that (Earth now gets about

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175 petawatts of radiant energy from the sun, and we are about 150 million kilometers away). Science-fiction authors, Charles Stross in particular, have updated the Dyson sphere conjecture to include macrocomputational geoengineering. ⁷⁶ Beyond collecting energy to run machines somewhere else, the solar megastructure would also be a vast star-sized computer, known as a Matrioshka brain, that is able to support unimaginably complex and powerful synthetic calculation and intelligence. ⁷⁷ Perhaps some variation on this sort of megastructure will be, as Stross has suggested, composed not around a star but around a planet, such as Earth, where it will use the raw material of the stellar body itself as a computational substrate, and perhaps (like Galactus) also eventually consuming that planet by its operations. It is of course impossible to know what lifeforms will survive the Anthropocene, let alone if they will want to engineer carnivorous Turing machines at this scale, but such conjectures help coax a necessary shift in our thinking about the ground and figure of natural and synthetic computational landscapes. At stake for The Stack is not only a design and engineering program but a political-philosophical maneuver as well; though as should be clear, these are all but impossible to untangle from one another. As such it may be that the purpose of the Stack megastructure is less to archive and rationalize our bizarre digital cultures than to deliver the platform logics that will allow geodesign and geoengineering their full due as modes of governance. For this, the Earth layer is not only The Stack ’ s schematic foundation; it is also the driving force and form of its logic: the world remaking itself in waves, bit by bit, pebble by pebble.

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There is no doubt that we are currently witnessing a decisive turning point in history, comparable to the one that took place at the end of the Middle Ages. The beginning of the modern age is characterized by the unstoppable process of the progressive elimination of “ feudal ” political formations dividing the national units to the benefit of kingdoms, which is to say of nation-States. At present, it is these nation-States which, irresistibly, are gradually giving way to political formations which transgress national borders and which could be designated with the term “ Empires. ” Nation-States, still powerful in the nineteenth century, are ceasing to be political realities, States in the strong sense of the term, just as the medieval baronies, cities, and archdioceses ceased to be States. The modern State, the current political reality, requires a larger foundation than that represented by Nations in the strict sense. To be politically viable, the modern State must rest on a “ vast ‘ imperial ’ union of affiliated Nations. ” The modern State is only truly a State if it is an Empire.

— Alexandre Koj è ve, ” Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy ” (1945) ¹

No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation.

— Thomas Jefferson to James Madison Paris, September 6, 1789 ²

Heavy medium, light signal ; light medium, heavy signal.

— Unknown

Aristophanes ’ play The Clouds is a parody of intellectual presumption and its gift economies based on debt virtualizing all meaning into nothing but tactical rhetoric. ³ Does the same go for our Cloud Polis? As it draws its own lines, walls, and envelopes, their multiplication puts into play eccentric geopolitical designs including the delamination of normative Westphalian state sovereignty from its referent territory and the introduction of another territory on top or below. At the same time that Cloud platforms also take on traditional governing assignments such as public cartography, legal identity, currency, protocol allegiance, even patriotism, states themselves also evolve toward becoming Cloud-based entities. ⁴ In combining these, a Cloud Polis is built of thickened plural geographies and noncontiguous jurisdictions; it mixes some aspects of US superjurisdiction over the Cloud (and over state-space) with others that resemble the charter cities carving new partially privatized polities from the whole cloth of desovereigned lands. ⁵ These platforms extract revenue from the cognitive capital of their User-citizens, who trade attention in exchange for global infrastructural services that provide each of them a fixed and formal online identity and a license to use its services. Perhaps these early accomplishments of planetary-scale computation to redraw political territory in its own image point toward a more universal transformation of the organization of sovereign space and its organizing technologies. The Cloud layer is low in The Stack, above the chthonic forces of the Earth layer, from which it sucks the energy and minerals that course through its expansive megastructural body. It is also below the City layer into which it installs data centers and distribution nodes and for which it performs incredible feats of instantaneous calculation. While the term cloud computing may be traced back to the writings in the 1980s on “ life streams ” by Unabomber victim and Glenn Beck courtier David Gelernter, ⁶ the idea of computing as an on-tap utility served from central processing plants is as old as computer science itself. It builds on distributed server and terminal architectures, extending shared computing resources across a networked organization, and just as the regulation of industrial modernity was given tempo by the longitudinal standardization of railroad and telegraph timetables, the beginning of the Cloud could just as well be dated to the inauguration of the UNIX epoch (January 1, 1970) and the starting point of UNIX Time used to synchronize computers across a network (and which today helps synchronize, for example, Linux, C, Java, and Javascript).

Cloud Layer

But the footprint of the Cloud is measured at the scale of continents, not enterprises. Some see it as an uneven computational troposphere, others as a prototype universal Turing machine, arranged not with tape but with uneven networks of fiber optics, data centers, nested databases, terminals, and browsers. ⁸ The Cloud layer is also a geopolitical machine, erasing some geographies and producing others, forming and destabilizing territories in competitive measure. It is at this level of The Stack that the modern coherence of the state, which would produce one sort of public, and the operations of platforms, which would produce another, can come into conflict, overlapping and interlacing one another without universal jurisdiction or resolution, but it is also where they can reinforce each other with more pervasive forms of ambient governance. The geopolitics of the Cloud is everywhere and wants everything: the platform wars between Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, anonymized servers routing the angry tweets from street battles, Anonymous going up against Mexican drug cartels, WikiLeaks crowd-sourcing counterespionage, Tor users building on top of Amazon Web Services services, carriers licensing content, content providers licensing bandwidth, proprietary fiber networks connected trading centers, and on, and on. It might seem at first blush that these events, each perhaps pushing legal boundaries in its own way, should be understood as disruptive contaminations of a standing political order — acts of resistance to the system, even. Yet in their own consistency, this stockpile of exceptions is probably better interpreted as part of the constitution of another emergent order (a nomos of the Cloud even?). It is an order derived from the structural and technical protocols that locate different Users among different operations and condition the actions they take from there. As a governing nexus of The Stack, this order identifies, produces, and polices the information that can move up and down, layer to layer, fixing internal and external borders and designating passages to and from. In doing so, it generates more lines and borders, not fewer, and so its apparent universality is actually densely divided against itself.

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1. Platform Geography

In mountainous regions, trees above the cloud line are sometimes invisible from the vantage point of cities in the valley below. Sometimes it looks as if the gray sky has decapitated the peaks. But for the Cloud layer, what is invisible is less what is above than what is below the point where the computation touches the ground. Unseen but not placeless, the trans-urbanism of the Cloud layer is defined not just by the distribution of terrestrial borders, but also by the terraforming recentralization of nodes — urban, financial, logistical, political — in the service and purpose of its networks (e.g., former Siberian missile command bunkers are turned into icy data centers, and entire skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles are turned into massive, stacked switching hubs for every major telco by CoreSite/Carlyle Group). Above ground, the Cloud makes its own kind of temporary logistics plantations at exurban perimeters or near, or indeed inside, regional airports. The warehouse and supply chain centers that turn commands in databases into the traffic of real goods constitute a shadow network of itinerant packages and only slightly less itinerant laborers. Amazon and Walmart ’ s fulfillment centers in places like Hebron, Kentucky, Goodyear, Arizona, and Fernley, Nevada, are staffed by a multitiered outsourced and re-outsourced population of sorters, packers, and movers. During Christmas, when demand for short-term labor is acute, Amazon will make use of “ workampers, ” often senior citizens moving in large recreational vehicles from one fulfillment center to another, coming and going from Amazon towns as demand dictates. Guest workers of the algorithms: Grandpa, the Wandering Morlock of The Cloud. ⁹ Here we glimpse the prototype of a future Cloud feudalism.

A constitutional geography is at work. As the nomos of the Cloud rotates from a twodimensional map to a vertical, sectional stack, its topography is shaped by the multiplication and superimposition of layers of sovereign claims over the same site, person, and event. The microenclaves that it spawns are a pixelated patchwork of discontiguous partial interiors and enclaves. Their double exposures are the exceptions that constitute a new rule. Strategic networks of data centers, fiber-optics cables, energy pipelines, freeways, warehouses, and shipping ports magnetize other geographies around themselves, generating legal exceptions, economies of monetized cognition, and platform wars for expanding populations of Users, both human and nonhuman. So through the Cloud layer, it is less that The Stack emerges in the service of or in opposition to world governance than that it dissolves computational governance into the very fabric of things — platform immanence — and perhaps the productive accident of the Cloud layer is exactly this rotation and interweaving of regular and irregular sovereign geographies into still largely unmapped configurations. ¹⁰ Its everyday lived geopolitics is like that of Bes źel and Ul Qoma in China Mi é ville ’ s novel The City and the City, twin cities only partially visible to one another even as they occupy the same location, each dependent on enforcing a willed ignorance of the other ’ s presence, constantly policing one another ’ s breaching. ¹¹

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The Google-China conflict is exemplary of this interweaving. It can be interpreted reasonably as geopolitical conflict between empires, both leveraging their different state-corporate-military-information network systems to claim the free soil of planetary computational territory. It is more fundamental than that between two megastate actors; it was and is a conflict not only over the right to control search engine results, but indeed over the predominance of two different modes of sovereignty. The conflict pits a state that would dominate and determine the network sovereignty of information and energy flows versus a platform that would, by assembling users into another real network and imagined community, exceed, in deed if not letter, the last-instance sovereignty of the state and determine an alternate polity in its own image. ¹² The alternative that the platform poses is perhaps both too big for the state to control (the platform connects people and things and banks of data across planets) and too small to control ( Users ultimately could access the constitutive data packets of the latter regardless of any Great Maginot Firewall). The Stack itself coheres from conflicts such as these not by masterplan but by the accumulation of tactical solutions into a massively distributed inscription, one not circumscribed by a single stretch of land but spread across multiple layers in vast sectional landscapes. To understand how to design and engineer that inscription differently, we first consider in more detail how its conflicts are articulated.

1. The First Sino-Google War of 2009

The First Sino-Google War of 2009 may well be the opening crack in a very different kind of war over who or what governs global society, one less between two superpowers than between two logics of territorial control. One of these sees the Internet as an extension of the body of the state, or at least beneath the state in the priorities of sovereignty, and another sees the Internet as a living, quasi-autonomous, if privately controlled and capitalized, transterritorial civil society that produces, defends, and demands rights on its on and which can even assume traditional functions of the state for itself. For this, Google is a nonstate actor operating with the force of a state, but unlike modern states, it is not defined by a single specific territorial contiguity. While Google is as reliant on real physical infrastructure — its empire of data centers are by no means virtual — its terrestrial footprint is more dispersed and distributed than partitioned and circumscribed. On the superimposition of the two interlocking spaces, consider the breach theory of Fang Binxing from the China Academy of Engineering and one of the main designers of the infamous great firewall. In November 2011, he warned a conference that the Chinese Internet does not have the capability to disable a global Internet service whenever it wants to. He used the example of Google and said it was a pity that although Google had retreated from China, its service was still accessible in China: “ It ’ s like the relationship between riverbed and water. Water has no nationality, but riverbeds are sovereign territories, we cannot allow polluted water from other nation-states to enter our country. ” ¹³ This is an amazingly succinct rehearsal of the older European nomos’ s juridical separation of land and sea, fixed and liquid, made into parable. ¹⁴ While Fang likely was not familiar with Buckminster Fuller ’ s admonition that “ the fearful sovereign nation politicos will find that trying to arrest networking is like trying to arrest the waves of the ocean, ” Fuller, it is more certain, was never given the assignment, as Fang was, of building a glass dome for a billion Internet users. ¹⁵

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Shifting the figure of water from a metaphor to geography, consider that for Schmitt ’ s history of the nomos (that is, Carl Schmitt, not Eric Schmidt), the territorial domain of nations was always defended by the naval capacity over the omnidirectional glacis of the ocean in light of Google ’ s filed patent on water-based data centers. ¹⁶ This floating cyberinfrastructure would, in principle, greatly reduce the energy and cooling costs of hosting and serving the peta- and exabytes of data that will constitute an eventual planetary cloud computing platform. It may also neatly symbolize a productive crisis of territorial jurisdiction, one that alters how truly pervasive computation may demand, or activate, new forms of agonistic or cosmopolitan political habitats. ¹⁷ As discussed in the Earth layer chapter, data centers, as the hard technical core of the Internet, demand massive provisions of energy, mostly to keep processors cool; with only about half of the world ’ s 7 billion or so people using the web in any given month, the anticipated growth curve is steep. Where will the energy come from? How can Google possibly feed the energy appetite of the data centers that would provide ambient supercomputing to the next 3.5 billion human users and the next 5 billion to 500 billion object users of the Internet of things? ¹⁸ Oceanic data centers theoretically would help solve this by using both tidal and wind energy to power the stations, as well as the abundant supply of water to assist in the cooling process, but in doing so, the literal offshoring of such critical infrastructure also raises issues about the jurisdiction and legal control of data and the governance of the emergent Cloud Polis. What if a data object is originated in Beijing by a Japanese citizen, uploaded to a server off the shores of Vladivostok in international waters, and then used by a kid at an Internet caf é in Las Vegas to commit a crime in Brazil? Does one country ’ s data privacy and prosecution laws have clear means to control this? But of course such what-ifs are already everyday problems. The oceanic datacenter symbolizes the infrastructural offshoring that is one productive accident of the Cloud layer: the delamination of the layers of territory, economy, and sovereignty, one from the other, potentially perforating the domain of the state with the economies of nonstate infrastructure beamed in from the middle of the open ocean. This may conjure images of other ad hoc circumventions of national geography, such as pirate radio, offshore banking, and unrecognized microstates. But unlike these, the Cloud layer is not a peculiar outlier from an otherwise stable system of territorial sovereignty; rather, it is the technical basis of an emergent global system, an exception that takes on the force and diction of a geopolitical norm. The Cloud layer hosts more than a few streams of pirate data; it can carry entire cultures, economies, societies, and religions. And so it is not simply where an alternative geopolitics will take place; rather, in taking and making territory, it is also how it will take place. The Cloud layer is characterized less by a shift toward a new equilibrium of formal state powers now working at the scale of planetary computation than by the incongruities between modes of governable territorialization. For this, and unlike the Westphalian consensus, it is the absence of mutual recognition between types of actors (a state and a platform, in this case) that keeps something approximating a true nomos of the Cloud unresolved and perhaps irresolvable. ¹⁹

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