The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

The scenario described in the chapters to follow, and appearing before us in the real world, can be summarized as one in which Users, ¹⁰ human or nonhuman, are cohered in relation to Interfaces, which provide synthetic total images of the Addressed landscapes and networks of the whole, from the physical and virtual envelopes of the City, to the geographic archipelagos of the Cloud and the autophagic consumption of Earth’ s minerals, electrons, and climates that power all of the above. The most complex paths through these layers may displace well-established forms of human – machine-infrastructure interaction, perhaps so well established that entire cities were designed to accommodate them. This may insert machine control at almost any point, amplifying or diverting human control over any machine in which the User happens to be installed, or even of the whole infrastructural landscape in which those machines swarm together. For example, the integrated design of driverless cars includes navigation interfaces, computationally intensive and environmentally aware rolling hardware, and street systems that can stage the network effects of hundreds of thousands speeding robots at once. The next stable form of the “ automobile ” (a description that will become perhaps more and more accurate) may be as a mobile Cloud platform inside of which Users navigate the City layer of a larger Stack according to augmented scenery Interfacial overlays and powered by grids of electrons as well as bits. Planetaryscale computation involves the whole Earth from which silica, steel, and all manner of conflict minerals are drawn. Computation is not virtual; it is deeply physical event, and The Stack has an enormous appetite for molecules of interest and distributing them into our pockets, our laps, and our landfills. The chemistries and the terawatts that will feed The Stack, and us through it, force us to reckon that the ponderous heaviness of Cloud computing will be a key driver of geopolitical frictions to come. We are taking a high-stakes risk with the development of smart grids and the energy appetites per terminus they will enable. Will the platform efficiencies of The Stack provide the lightness necessary for a new subtractive modernity, an engine of a sustainable counterindustrialization, or will its appetite finally suck everything into its collapsing cores of data centers buried under mountains: the last race, the climate itself the last enemy?

In the figure of The Stack, we see not one totality but the production of multiple and incongruous totalities, some of which are “ interfacial regimes, ” some are superimposed landscapes of Addresses, and others are interwoven Cloud and state geometries. These geometries both draw and draw on the vertical platform of The Stack, and in doing so may also displace existing geographies with several alternatives at once. Perhaps these culminate in the apotheosis of Anthropocenic industrialism and perhaps they provide larval scripts for a post-Anthropocenic alternative, or both, or perhaps something much less decisive and dramatic. Our sights are not trained on how The Stack might hasten the messianic arrival of some seamless full-spectrum computational end of history, but how its gnashing and grating juxtapositions generate peculiar new spaces, normal enclaves, and how those exceptions are instructive as ways of deliberately reorganizing the world. Put differently, treatments of each of these six layers work with a particular caveat, that is Paul Virilio ’ s axiom that the invention of any new kind of technology is also simultaneously the invention of a new kind of accident. ¹¹ This holds true for the emergence of planetary computation and its Stack, as much as it does for the forging of aluminum and airplane crashes, set theory and stock market crashes, and incandescent light bulbs and climate change. Each individual layer promises its own range of possible accidents as it abuts its neighbors, and in some way each of the six layers is presented as a technology for accidents . Each is described in terms of both how it resolves the emergent accidental megastructure of The Stack into one and how the essential accident of each layer, and of the combined whole, points toward very different kinds of geosocial relations and geopolitical systems, perhaps especially those determined not by today ’ s technology but by whatever technological regime will come after planetary-scale computation.

12

Introduction

1. Blur and Accident

We start with questions that are as slippery as what they interrogate. In an age of planetary-scale computation, what is “ sovereignty ” and what is the future political geography, especially as the former is separated from the latter? How would the answers influence how we draw and divide up who and what goes where, and what shape the maps are that could do this? When geography becomes geolocation, who or what truly occupies any given place? Its owner, its user, the platform that makes it useful to either? Again, how is one person governed when platforms of governance see her as a User at a particular layer of a whole more than as a formal citizen? What freedoms of movement and freedoms from movement can she claim? What constitutes a constitution when the terms of engagement with other publics, near and far, both human and nonhuman, are codified into visual interfaces— images that are also tools? How can these platforms be redesigned to organize alternative economics, geopolitics, ecologies, philosophies, and even models of historical time? As it is conditioned by globalization, localization, and intermediate zonal regionalisms, by spaces absorbed by networks and networks absorbed by citadels, will some other, unknown political geometry come to enact and enforce the necessary partitions and brackets (border, wall, law, identity) that could program the world according to its alternative plan and plan it according to its program? Who and what gets to be the citizen-subject- User-agent of that program? Finally, to Clinton ’ s half-formed question, what is the architecture of the emergent geopolitics of this software society? What alignments, components, foundations, and apertures?

Introduction

13

We need ways to account for the intersecting complexities of computational globalization, its thickened geographies, its mysterious weaving of geometries of governance and territory, seen on their own terms, not as transgressions of some other system. The emergence of computation as global infrastructure contributes to an ungluing and delamination of land, governance, and territory, one from another. ¹² Accordingly, sovereignty is now less guaranteed by the conceptual resolution of the flattened geopolitical plane as offered by the Westphalian nation-state system, but that does not mean that takes leave. As said, that particular compromise on the delimited monopoly over sovereign space is unbuttoned from its mooring, perhaps only to be refastened even tighter in another way. Indeed the appetite of the state is rejuvenated by the same processes of computation that delink modern sovereignty and geography and challenge that particular consensual framework. The state ’ s own future is to be decided through its own negotiation of encounters with the challenges posed by planetary-scale computation to its geographic and jurisdictional legacies. The state continues by extending up and down into the new scales offered by multiple interdependent layers of The Stack, which sometimes do not blend into one form, but rather produce unresolved compound images and unresolved compound worlds, jurisdictions, frontlines, and boundaries. The gaps opened up by this rotation, a simultaneous coming undone and refortification, is where the reprogrammability of things plays out. The touchpoints between these layers make substitute locations and addresses, variously new and primeval; they are translations, wet with life, descriptive and consistent with what can be repeated over and again as governance. Squinting hard to make out the contours as they slip and slide off the map, we realize that only a blur provides for an accurate picture of what is going on now and to come. For better or worse, blur is what they are and what they do. Our description of a system in advance of its appearance maps what we can see but cannot articulate, on the one hand, versus what we know to articulate but cannot yet see, on the other. This oscillation between the real-but-as-yet-unnamed and the imagined-but-as-yet-not-real — this blur between them — might sustain the necessary challenges to the imagination and even enforce what it conceives, a giving way to compound images and sectional perspectives: to stacks.

For this investigation, that compound image is articulated through the lens of computation operating at planetary scale (which it does very unevenly). But this is also exactly what makes the question of that future more difficult to ask with precision because it is also too easy to ask. ¹³ To say that the future of geopolitics is a function of the future of computation is to risk saying nothing at all or, worse, to repeat everything that shouldn ’ t have been said in the first place. Isn ’ t the conflation of globalization with “ digital, ” under a rubric that cajoles allegiance to a computational teleology, today ’ s quintessential nonthought, a mere sequencing of the most obvious into something that stands for history because it renders the mundane for us at a historical scale? Yes. Yet if looking from the future at the present instead of the present for the future, we were to consider that exact situation from the virtual perspective of a world already utterly realigned, we would see plainly that a fundamental and computationally determined realignment of our world is already well underway. Where it goes is anything but settled, and today ’ s official futurism may have little to contribute when all is said and done. We can, however, say a few things about where it goes with some confidence. This future-antecedent revision of political geography owes itself to a calibrated repetition, a desimulation, of the blur noted above in at least two ways. First, it is realized within a tangible geographic agency of material computation, a physical information geology, that is already at work, already spoken about ad nauseam and so therefore escapes adequate description; second, it is today latent in some possible articulation that could give it formal composability in advance. We can hope that even as the blur confounds, that we designate it further so that it can design us in the course of its own articulation. It may be that our predicament is that we cannot design the next political geography of planetary computation until it more fully designs us in its own image or, in other words, that the critical dependence of the future ’ s futurity is that we are not yet available for it! It is less that the contemporary hyperbole for computational globalization is a lie, that it doesn ’ t truthfully describe what it purports to map, but that what it maps doesn ’ t yet exist. The difficulty in formulating a sufficient geopolity is a function of both what we think we know it has done (but don ’ t actually know because it hasn ’ t done that yet) and of what it has done and will do (but which we don ’ t know and actually don ’ t know how to know). Unfortunately, for learning how to know it, direct amplification in the intensity and resolution of our answers to the inevitably wrong questions will not help us.

14

Introduction

Every thing is, it seems, a stakeholder and is at stake. The consequences hinge on what is the most difficult challenge to our uncertain competency to redesign our own geogovernance, that is, the fragility of our climatic and ecological commonwealth. The bedraggled UN Climate Change conferences underscore why intersovereign federations have a limited ability to enforce deep transformation through legal consensus. The ecological crisis will likely necessitate the formulation of new scales of bioregional jurisdiction (both smaller and larger than a state), new modes of calculating energy (quantifying, computing, distributing, visualizing a polity of electrons), and new forms of networked geopolitics (that can represent both urban megasettlements as well several hundred million migrants with equal representational facility). States and sovereignty as we know them may be ill-suited to these tasks, and so the option may prove to be, quite literally, adapt or die. And these are just the problems we know, the known-unknowns.

The project to be taken up sees politics as infrastructure, systems as law, totalities as site condition, supply chains as ecologies, and energy as money. Each of these, and each layer of The Stack drawn from them, is a unique but dependent logic of design and governance. Most of the unfamiliar questions arise from problems that cannot be answered in isolation and cannot be properly addressed by extrapolating and extruding familiar models from past modern eras or by presuming that the past is actually in the past (despite the earnest protestations of some who would say they can). ¹⁴ What maps, what media of exchange and equivalence, what agency of synthetic objects, which currencies for ecological economics, what ethical appetite of risk or promiscuity, what bargains with violence are necessary? These can ’ t only be decided by philosophical discourse or solved by engineering, nor can we engage the blur that makes them partially legible to us without also deploying both at once. Opportunistic variations of thinking and making must be enrolled, all at once and in dissonant combinations, braided one into another (just as their subject matter already is). We may not have to wait long to find out which way things will break. Geographies that were comfortable and doxic are now transient and alien, inhabited uncannily. But even as strange geographies corrugate, fracture, and smear worldly scale and tempo, the ground isn ’ t somehow evaporated into virtual information flux; to the contrary, we are brought to a certain end of nonplace. For this, a different kind of placefulness is reestablished, one that is not the organic inverse of artificial abstraction, but an experience of place as one resonant scale within a much larger telescoping between local and global consolidations. ¹⁵ That reestablishment is not a generalized secessionism or irredentism, a natural regrounding, or transcendent escape into technological raptures. It is designation, a composition, a design aesthetics, and a projective ethics of pan-infrastructure deployed for a geopolitical reality that cannot possibly untangle material from information, materialism from informationalism, earth from sky.

Introduction

15

Keeping the image of that reality in mind, all the while looking askance at the idiot predicaments of today, we can well wonder if our current faculties of analysis and making, our hideous languages, are capable of authoring any lasting alternatives. Perhaps ours is not a world of information but a wall of noise, a screeching m é lange of incompatible equations into which we have no real choice but to enter into directly: scrambled territories, institutions, constitutions, sovereignties, citizenships, hardwares, softwares, protocols, interfaces, databases, patterns, platforms, cities, muscles, skins, organs, failing presumptions, exotic refrains, domains, settlements, penultimate boundaries — or, better yet, directly into the forms-to-come, for which each of these legacies is just an ancestral ante-image. There is less forward and backward than entropy and negentropy, oblivion and not oblivion, imminent or deferred utopia. As such, any design authorship must understand that the dynamics at work now are — for better and worse — simultaneously and interchangeably both futuristic and archaic, at once both technocratic and theocratic. The Westphalian-Kantian diagram of the nation-state is attacked from both the front and the rear (another blurring). At the same time that we ponder oceanic financial archipelagos that would game the speed of light by locating offshore trading sites that optimize the movement of pulses between trading centers, and through which the incremental value of a commodity is determined literally by its location in the earth ’ s light cone, ¹⁶ we also watched, back in 2008, religious fundamentalist groups attacking Mumbai with Google Earth maps, satellite phones, stolen SIM cards. As some would launch the secular alter-cosmopolitanism-to-come, others lay the groundwork for a cloud-based neofeudalism: Visigoths with iPads, barbarian theological microstates with thriving biotech and nanotech industries (like California, perhaps). Supercomputing does not inoculate us from feudalism and from superstition, but it can perhaps provide for their opposite, that is, a futurity, and a futurism, without guarantees, only plasticity. ¹⁷ And so the accidents keep piling up. The jurisdictions are more interwoven. The geometry of political geography is only more complex, especially in that it seems to have no outside, no “ free space, ” to delimit itself against. Our accidental megastructure is more plural, more contradictory, more composite, and more polyscalar. But if so, then while Virilio ’ s axiom holds, and the invention of any new kind of technology is also necessarily and simultaneously the invention of a new kind of accident, it is true that the opposite holds as well: the accident also produces a new technology.

16

Introduction

Introduction

17

The Nomos of the Cloud

But historical forces wait for science, no more than Columbus waited for Copernicus. Each time, through the impulse of new historical forces, new lands and seas enter into the horizon of the collective consciousness, the spaces of historical existence are transformed. At that moment arise new measurements and dimensions of political-historical activity, new sciences, new orders, new life or reborn peoples. Seneca: the hot Indus and the cold Araxes converge, Persians drink from the Elbe and Rhine. Thetis will reveal new worlds. And Thule will no longer be the outer edge of the Earth.

— Carl Schmitt ¹

The space of the globe is a circle of circles. Time is imprisoned in the solar system where one may distinguish circles of circles by transfer, rotation, by helices and spirals.

— Michel Serres ²

We began with an architectural question and then worked toward a political theory. In this chapter, we begin with a political theory and work up toward a technological predicament. As argued, The Stack emerges not only as a global technical system but also as geopolitical geography. It is able to do so because it also emerges from modern political space and its capacities to site, subdivide, and occupy “ new worlds. ” First, we consider the geographic history of sovereignty through (and against) the notorious German legal theorist Carl Schmitt ’ s notion of nomos. For Schmitt, the physical incision of the line into the earth precedes the empty abstractions of mathematized grids and naval liquidity and is essential to any proper sovereign form. We will examine Schmitt ’ s binary opposition between the land and the sea, the physical and the virtual, with regard to The Stack, first to put it to use and ultimately to break it apart and likely leave it behind. In the chapter following, we define the institutional logics of platforms in general by considering their technical processes as political technologies. We then consider examples of how platforms (specifically stacks) have been employed to compose economies and societies in their own image. Finally we will examine the specific layers and logics of The Stack as developed in subsequent chapters.

1. Dividing Sovereignty

In starting with and from political theory in this first part, it is important to acknowledge in advance that “ sovereignty ” is positioned as a question, not as a given conclusion. The implication is not that software is new and sovereignty is timeless, thereby leading one to ask how sovereignty now works through software, but rather that both are now mutually contingent and that the work of software at a global scale itself produces unfamiliar sorts of sovereignties. Even so, the many connotations of sovereignty are highly contested in political philosophy, and this book is unlikely to temper this and may disappoint anyone looking for the definitive explication of the concept. Even so, we can say that in the most prosaic sense, state sovereignty is drawn out by rules of an international system that is itself guaranteed by the federation of states. According to this, a state would have a right to the legitimate exercise of control and governance within an exclusive geographic domain, usually of land, including certain monopolies over legitimate violence and the recognition of and by international law. This arrangement is predominant but incomplete. It is characterized, at the very least, by its own continuous breaching. In relation to this system are other several specific sovereignties in play: the legal sovereignty of states recognizing one another; an interdependence sovereignty of stable global flows of resources and capital ; domestic sovereignty , and the state ’ s authority over its own internal mechanisms and institutions; and Westphalian sovereignty , that states have the right to separately determine their own domestic structures of authority. The Westphalian mode is, as I ’ ve suggested, also predicated on a particular and arbitrary geographic design of political space defined primarily as zones of land, named by and as states. Sovereign decision has, of course, been a focus of renewed attention, from Jean Bodin ’ s definition of the sovereign as the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth through to the more Hobbesian definition of the sovereign as “ he who decides on the exception. ” ⁴ The exception is that which is on the face of it undecidable by the law, but which the sovereign assumes the right to adjudicate nevertheless. The sovereign is he who has the power to suspend the regularity of the law and issue enforcement into the indeterminate state of this “ emergency. ” Giorgio Agamben ’ s reading of Carl Schmitt moved this “ decisionism ” close to the primitive core of political authority (particularly after 9/11, when irregular jurisdictions and executive actions were announced regularly as the new normal). ⁵ His work also convened a lively discourse on sovereignty, including resistance to its forms, in relation to constituted and constitutive violence, drawing heavily on Walter Benjamin ’ s 1934 essay, “ A Critique of Violence, ” as well as Agamben ’ s own employment of Schmitt ’ s terminology to identify the camp (specifically the concentration camp) as “ the nomos of the Modern. ” ⁶ Sovereignty here is not limited to the work of states. In his later-career lectures on biopolitics at Coll è ge de France, Foucault outlined his idiosyncratic history of neoliberalism, which for Foucault was itself a unique subspecies of capitalism. He argued that one of the things that makes neoliberalism unique is that markets do not operate in conjunction with or in conflict with sovereign states, but rather that sovereignty is itself shifted from states into markets. For sovereign markets, rights of economic exchange supersede the governance of public order at the level of the individual and the collective. ⁷ Abstracted calculation supporting the strategic financialization of assets, both real and speculative, takes on new importance, and so at least in this regard, the historical emergence planetaryscale computation and neoliberalism are intertwined. However, as we examine in some detail with regard to platform sovereignty, that pairing is neither requisite nor inevitable.

20

The Nomos of the Cloud

For The Stack ’ s sovereign products, the decision over the exception remains crucial in several ways, including in relation to where and when the law is suspended on behalf of the drama of violence, but also where and when boundaries of Westphalian subdivisions have jurisdictional preeminence versus other spatial orders. Most importantly, it is the reversibility of the exception that makes it so fraught; it is at once outside the law yet determined by the authority of law itself and available for retroactive normalization at any time. For The Stack (and for other orders), this may work through reversibility of geographic lines of segmentation, gathering an interior at one moment and guarding against an exteriority in the next. Those segmentations may divide physical space or separate layers in a larger machine, and from this conjunction, we can trace an infrastructural sovereignty that is produced less by formal law than by the shared physical postures of political subjects in relation to common infrastructure. Within that broader framework, we can also identify platform sovereignty as a still immature combination of legally articulated political subjectivity (one sometimes determined by geographic position and sometimes not) and an infrastructural sovereignty produced in relation to the platform infrastructures of planetary-scale computation, regardless of whether these are privately or publicly owned. We ’ ll see that platform sovereignty operates within territories that are composed of intersecting lines, some physical and some virtual, and for this, deciding exceptions is no less critical. The exceptions to be decided, however, are over what geographies those lines describe and what conditions they inscribe. Is one side or the other the inside or outside? Is this a camp or enclave?

Modern state polities are defined as interior to their own circumscribing geographic partition, and their sovereignty is produced in the fragile image of that line ’ s stability, even as that line remains reversible (all extrastate actors rely on that inversion and its convolutions). In the end, this economy of reversible partitions supersedes the integrity of external and internal borders, such that any polity is always an incomplete complex of smaller subpolities, defined for itself according to its own private exceptions, both inward and outward-facing: capital cities, special economic zones, overseas territories, embassies, local ordinances, and so on. Even with these buffers, the stability of state polity is always in question, because to the extent that the state suppresses its original constituting violence (war, revolution, settler colonialism), all future agents of subsequent exceptional violence against that state become ghosts of those first rites of legal absolution and self-exception, their most exacting patriots in a way. But the political work of the geographic line and its violent reversal precedes and exceeds formal states into both their past and their future.

The Nomos of the Cloud

21