The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

1. See Benjamin H. Bratton, “ Interview by Metahaven, ” October 2011, http://www.bratton.info/ projects/texts/interview-by-metahaven/, and “ The Cloud, the State, and the Stack: Metahaven in Conversation with Benjamin Bratton, ” December 16, 2012, http://mthvn.tumblr.com/ post/38098461078/thecloudthestateandthestack.

1. See http://urbanizationproject.org/blog/charter-cities. Charter Cities represents a plan to introduce new legal frameworks for new or existing cities, turning them into a parallel to Special Economic Zones, here Special Political Zones. New York University economist Paul Romer is a leading advocate for the vision.

1. See this discussion of Gelernter ’ s influence on the conceptual development of the Cloud: David Gelernter, John Markoff, and Clay Shirky, “ Lord of the Cloud, ” Edge, April 29, 2009, http://edge.org/conversation/lord-of-the-cloud. For a sense of Gelernter ’ s political conservatism, see http://www.nationalreview.com/author/david-gelernter.

1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix\_time.

1. Sun Microsystems ’ old tagline, “ the network is the computer ” has been realized, especially if the definition of network is expanded to include both the physical computing network and the network of users providing content and feedback.

1. See Stu Woo, “ Welcome to Amazon Town, ” Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204058404577108821485438232.

1. I refer to Google ’ s mission statement: “ to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. ” See https://www.google.com/about/company.

1. China Mie ville, ́ The City and the City (New York: Del Rey Ballantine Books, 2009).

1. John Battelle calls this “ the government layer. ” He writes, “ We are increasingly going to the Web/Internet as the platform for our lives. There, our identity is not managed by the government. It ’ s managed — in the majority — by Facebook. When we buy things, our identity is managed by PayPal, Amazon, and Amex/Visa/Mastercard, not to mention a raft of pretenders to our identity throne, including Facebook, Google, and startups like Square. All of these are private corporations. None of them ask us for our government issued identity cards before allowing us to make a purchase. Some do ask for our SSN, of course. But online, the ‘ government layer ’ is melting into the background of our identity — rather like DOS melted into the background of Windows 3. I expect this to be the source of some serious conflict in the coming decade(s). ” See John Battelle, “ What Role Government? ” John Battelle ’ s Search Blog, November 4, 2011, http:// battellemedia.com/archives/2011/11/what-role-government.php.

1. See Jin Ge, “ The Father of China ’ s Great Firewall Re-defines Internet Sovereignty, ” http://www.88-bar.com/tag/sovereign-internet/. Thanks to Tricia Wang for alerting me to this quote.

1. See Xu Wu, Chinese Cyber Nationalism: Evolution, Characteristics, and Implications (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).

1. R. Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants (New York: St. Martin ’ s Press, 1983).

396

Notes

1. Katie Fehrenbacher, “ Google Floats Idea of Wave Powered Data Center, ” Gigaom, September 8, 2008, https://gigaom.com/2008/09/08/google-floats-idea-of-wave-powered-data-center/, and “ Google to Switch on Seawater-Cooled Data Center This Fall, ” Gigaom, May 24, 2011, https:// gigaom.com/2011/05/24/google-to-switch-on-worlds-first-seawater-cooled-data-center-this-fall/. On the speculative geography of oceanic architectures for Cloud systems, in this case HFT, see “ Islands at the Speed of Light, ” BLDGBLOG (blog), March 30, 2011, http://bldgblog.blogspot .com/2011/03/islands-at-speed-of-light.html. Pay particular attention to the notion of “ aircraft carriers as networked archipelagos. ”

1. See Larry Digran “ Google Wins Floating Data Center Patent, ” April 30, 2009, http://www. zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-wins-floating-data-center-patent/: “ It can be beneficial to distribute computing power closer to users. As such, data centers may be moved closer to users, with relevant content sent from a central facility out to regional data centers only once, and further transmissions occurring over shorter regional links. As a result, every request from a user need not result in a transmission cross-country and through the Internet backbone; network activity may be more evenly balanced and confined to local areas. ”

1. Cisco proudly estimated the number of “ things ” connected to the Internet of Things as 50 billion by 2020. See Dave Evans, “ The Internet of Things: How the Next Evolution of the Internet Is Changing Everything, ” April 2011, https://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/innov/ IoT\_IBSG\_0411FINAL.pdf. To say nothing of the more or less charted waters of the Dark Net, accessible only through tools like the Tor browser.

1. But as Jameson notes, it is the irregularity of opposing forces that breaks down the order of the nomos: “ With the religious wars, but perhaps also the English dominance of the sea — now leads to the Westphalian system of nation-states, in which, for the first time, the new nomos of state equality and friend-foe emerges. The friend-foe opposition is possible, indeed, only between equals: it includes Hegelian recognition, except that whereas Hegelian struggle aims to produce recognition, Schmitt ’ s version is enabled only after mutual recognition is secured. The individual analogy is with the duel. ” Fredric Jameson, “ Notes on the Nomos, ” South Atlantic Quarterly 104 (2005): 199 – 204, doi:10.1215/00382876-104-2-199.

1. See Cornelia Vismann and Markus Krajewski, “ Computer Juridisms, ” Grey Room, no. 29 (Fall

2007): 90 – 109, doi:10.1162/grey.2007.1.29.90.

1. Or perhaps less, given that Beijing has put rain under some measure of control, such as cloudbusting efforts just before the Beijing Olympics in 2008. More prosaic, Android is the most popular mobile operating system in China, but many versions in wide use are so forked that neither Google nor the Chinese central authorities can control or capitalize it directly. One solution proposed by the latter is COS (China Operating System) a linux based OS that could reduce reliance on “ American ” code. See http://www.china-cos.com/.

1. That back doors allowing for espionage are to be found in both United States and Chinese routers should surprise no one, least of all Cisco or Huawei. For this reason both countries have severely curtailed the importation and official purchase of one another ’ s equipment. See http:// www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/27/us-china-tech-exclusive-idUSKBN0LV08720150227.

Notes

397

1. Ryan Arsenault, “ Weird Data Center Locations, ” TechTarget, April 2010, http:// searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/Weird-Data-Center-Locations.

1. Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, “ How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers, ” December 2009, http://hmi.ucsd.edu/pdf/HMI\_2009\_ConsumerReport\_Dec9\_2009 .pdf.

1. This does not stop dedicated researchers from trying to develop maps of the Internet that are as comprehensive as possible. At the University of California, San Diego, the San Diego Supercomputer Center ’ s Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis has developed multiple ways to render Internet geographies and geometries. See “ Walrus-Gallery: Visualization and Navigation, ” Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis, http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/ walrus/gallery1/. The site submarinecablemap.com provides what it says it does. Recently a project called Internet Census 2012 by “ Carna Botnet ” used bots to scan IP version 4 space in a way that is more effective than legal. See Carna Botnet, Internet Census 2012, 2012, http:// internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html.

1. See the white paper studies by Cisco: “ The Zettabyte Era: Trends and Analysis, ” June 10, 2014, http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking -index-vni/VNI\_Hyperconnectivity\_WP.pdf, and “ Cisco Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2013 – 2018 ” http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/ global-cloud-index-gci/Cloud\_Index\_White\_Paper.pdf.

1. For a basic definition and explanation, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization -division\_multiplexing.

1. See Eric Price and David P. Woodruff, “ Applications of the Shannon-Hartley Theorem to Data Streams and Sparse Recovery, ” 2012, retrieved from IBM Watson researcher site May 8, 2015, http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-dpwoodru/pw12.pdf.

1. For the OptIPuter project, for example, each major component could be on a different continent, but they all work together as if it were a single self-contained machine. See http:// www.optiputer.net/.

1. See, for example, Steven Levy, “ Going with the Flow: Google’s Secret Switch to the Next Wave of Networking, ” Wired, April 17, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/04/going-with -the-flow-google/ and James C. Corbett, Jeffrey Dean, Michael Epstein, Andrew Fikes, Christopher Frost, JJ Furman, Sanjay Ghemawat, Andrey Gubarev, Christopher Heiser, Peter Hochschild, Wilson Hsieh, Sebastian Kanthak, Eugene Kogan, Hongyi Li, Alexander Lloyd, Sergey Melnik, David Mwaura, David Nagle, Sean Quinlan, Rajesh Rao, Lindsay Rolig, Yasushi Saito, Michal Szymaniak, Christopher Taylor, Ruth Wang, and Dale Woodford, “ Spanner: Google ’ s Globally-Distributed Database, ” technical paper, October 2012, http://static.googleusercontent.com/ media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf.

1. As a Cloud Polis model, Google Fiber would allow the platform to provide the line as well as the service, as well as software to optimize the line as the physical layer of that platform.

398

Notes

1. The Dutch East India Company ’ s licensed proto-sovereignty is perhaps the most obvious historical example.

1. See Tom McCarthy, “ Palestine Now Recognised by Greater Power Than US or Israel — Google, ” Guardian, May 3, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/03/google-palestine -palestinian-territories. See also Greg Kumparak, “ Google Palestine Hacked and Defaced through a Domain Registry Attack, ” TechCrunch, August 26, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/26 google-palestine-hacked-and-defaced-seemingly-through-a-domain-registry-attack/.

1. As claimed in cases such as the Megaupload raids whereby USA federal authorities claimed transoceanic jurisdiction and seized the propertly of CEO Kim Dotcom in his New Zealand residence and place of business. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure\_of\_Megaupload.

1. See James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), as well as Bruno Latour, “ How to Think like a State ” (lecture at the WRR Scientific Council for Government Policy, The Hague, November 22, 2007), http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-133-LA%20HAYE-QUEEN.pdf.

1. We see this transposition of the state into the Cloud quite literally in Estonia ’ s efforts to secure a full “ back-up ” of the country ’ s data, in case of (Russian) cyberattack. The plan calls for the distribution of “ data embassies ” in different parts of the world so that if the country ’ s systems were compromised or erased that could be restored from a comprehensive remote backup. See http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21645505-protect-itself-attack-estonia -finding-ways-back-up-its-data-how.

1. An awkward-at-best vision of this at the scale of an entire nation might look like UK Prime Minister David Cameron ’ s Big Society initiative, which sought to “ integrate the free market with a theory of social solidarity based on hierarchy and voluntarism, ” or in other words, offload state services onto local charities wrapped in words like “ social media ” and “ decentralization. ” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big\_Society.

1. Or even agents well beyond that government ’ s borders, as today much of the US federal government data entry is done in India.

1. See the US data.gov and the UK ’ s data.gov.uk (overseen by World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee) as very curtailed and limited examples of this federal information transparency.

1. This refers to Robert Nozick ’ s notorious economic libertarian manifesto, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974) , where he introduces the conceptual ideal of the minimal state. See also Methaven ’ s “ ultraminimal state ” and its Facestate project: Andrea Hyde, “ Metahaven ’ s Facestate, ” Walker Art Center, December 13, 2011, http://www.walkerart.org/ magazine/2011/metahavens-facestate.

1. The confusion this sows is readily apparent in both attempts to curtail Google under the rubric of a trust “ monopoly ” and in the awkward rationales for why Google is actually not a monopoly. See judicial “ originalist ” Robert Bork ’ s back-bending “ What Does the Chicago School Teach About Internet Search and the Antitrust Treatment of Google, ” Robert H. Bork and J. Gregory Sidak, Journal of Competition Law & Economics 8 (2012): 663 – 700.

Notes

399

1. In a way, geopolitical reality is only catching up with the anticipations of the science fiction that has already explored the proliferation and institutionalization of data havens and data infrastructures, “ community clouds, ” cloud-based microreligions and macrostates, and others. I believe that Bruce Sterling coined the term data haven in his 1989 novel, Islands in the Net, and Neal Stephenson developed the notion closer to the normalization of an emergent political geography in Snow Crash (1992), in which characters pop in and out of passport-granting microstates, not bound to specific lands but instead distributed on street corners like 7-11s (the protagonist frequents one of these known as Mr. Lee ’ s Hong Kong). Later in Stephenson ’ s sprawling Cryptonomicon, the transhistorical plot stretches from Alan Turing ’ s war years to the present day and locates a data haven in the fictional country of Kinatua, located between Borneo and the Philippines (domain .kk). In the real world, HavenCo operated from the self-declared sovereignty of the oil platforms of Sealand, while Freenet, a distributed encrypted network, tries to support a secured flow of information over public and private lines. While new micromodels of civil (or uncivil) society may well emerge from these miscellaneous jurisdictional folds and seams within the legal and extralegal geographical fabrics of globalization, they also couch and host the darkest repercussions of the tooth-and-claw libertarianism on which some are founded. For example, the US Federal Trade Commission recently shut down 3FN, a company based in Belize, which had run a lucrative business based largely the hosting and distribution of spam, malware, spyware, and, more disturbing, hundreds of gigabytes of images and videos of child sexual abuse. The street finds a way. However, unlike these interstitial pirate “ free-zones, ” the global platforms of Cloud Polis are not a confederation of alternative tactics. To the contrary, they are the normative architecture from which the exception bends.

1. The relevant passage reads, “ Management of Identification resources, 31B 3A.2 Member States shall have equal rights to manage the Internet, including in regard to the allotment, assignment and reclamation of Internet numbering, naming, addressing and identification resources and to support for the operation and development of basic Internet infrastructure. ” See McTim, “ It’s Not Paranoia If They Are Really After You! ” CircleID (blog), December 9, 2012, http:// www.circleid.com/posts/20121209\_it\_is\_not\_paranoia\_if\_they\_are\_really\_after\_you/.

1. We might take this in the sense of “ constituent ” and “ constitutive ” violence as described in Walter Benjamin, “ The Critique of Violence, ” in Reflections Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 277 – 300.

1. Consider how Iraqi insurgent groups managed to tap into coalition surveillance and communication satellites as well as aerial drone camera feeds using the Russian off-the-shelf software, SkyGrabber, which sells for \$26. See Charles Arthur, “ SkyGrabber: The \$26 Software Used by Insurgents to Hack into US Drones, ” Guardian, December 17, 2009, http://www.theguardian .com/technology/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-software-drones-hacked.

1. Umberto Eco, “ The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS, La bustina di Minerva, ” L ’ Espresso, September 30,
2. See also http://cliffarnold.com/macvdos.pdf.

1. There are certainly other Cloud platforms to consider as possible Cloud Polis models, and certainly not nearly all of them are US megaplatforms. A word on Twitter, which I view as too onedimensional to compare to the others ’ more grandiose geopolitical potentials: It may be better compared to a critical insect species in a larger ecology, moving memes from place to place, like bees pollinating flowers. It never builds more than simple clusters on its own, but without it, more complex architectures would decay. For some time, I ’ ve argued that Twitter mustn ’ t overlook the nonhuman user base and that its potential as a universal platform for the Internet of Things may prove an equally important function as human-human threads.

400

Notes

1. See, for example, Erving Goffman ’ s seminal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959).

1. See Doug Beaver, “ 10 Billion Photos, ” Facebook, October 14, 2008, https://www.facebook.

com/notes/facebook-engineering/10-billion-photos/30695603919.

1. Unsurprisingly then, Cloud network platforms have hired many of the best social network analysis away from academia. For example, during my time at Yahoo! I worked with small-worlds network pioneer Duncan Watts, formerly of Columbia ’ s Department of Sociology and now at Microsoft Research.

1. Company founder Mark Zuckerberg may have found a way around the problem of Facebook ’ s closure from the open Internet, and that is to implement a proprietary aerial Facebook-centric version for the developing world. See Quentin Hardy and Vindu Goel, “ Drones Beaming Web Access Art in the Stars for Facebook, ” New York Times, March 26, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1GpPOXh.

1. See http://chatroulette.com/ if you must.

1. I particularly like the premise considered in Charles Stross ’ s novel Rule 34 (New York: Ace Books, 2011), that “ the singularity ” is born from the accumulation of global e-mail spam becoming sentient.

1. See Cory Doctorow ’ s novelization of gold farmers ’ plight and struggle in For the Win (New York: Tor, 2010).

1. David Graeber ’ s Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville Publishing, 2011) revived popular interest in debt as primary in the social ontology of money. See also Marcel Mauss ’ s The Gift (originally published in 1925), which remains a reference for the anthropology of finance, Marcel Mauss and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 1967).

1. It ’ s perhaps easy to underestimate Apple ’ s scale and position. Apple generated \$43.7 billion in sales during the first three months of 2014. That ’ s more than Google, Amazon, and Facebook combined. Apple now has 800 million iTunes accounts. That ’ s 800 million credit cards on file, which is more than any other company in the world. As of this writing, Apple has \$150.6 billion in cash. It could buy Facebook at Facebook ’ s current valuation with its cash. Or it could go on a shopping spree and buy Netflix, Tesla, Twitter, Dropbox, Pandora, and Spotify. When it was done buying those companies, it would still have \$59 billion in cash to spend on anything else it wants. See http://www.businessinsider.com/mind-blowing-facts-about-apple -2014-4?op=1#ixzz30L3YYeDJ.

Notes

401

1. In this famous TV advertisement aired only once — during the 1984 Super Bowl — a young rebel representing Apple hurls “ a torch of freedom ” into the screens on which the face of “ IBM ” drones on. The promise is that with Apple ’ s new colorful day, 1984 (the year) will not be like 1984, the Orwellian dystopia. If the reader is unfamiliar with the advertisement, its Wikipedia page will explain its significance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984\_%28advertisement%29.

1. See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). For an example of Limbaugh ’ s Apple love see http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/search/?query=apple & go.x=-299 & go .y=-365 & go=go. For a unusual and interesting take on Jobs and Wozniak ’ s early relationship, see the Steve & Steve comic, http://www.steve-and-steve.com/.

1. “ What then is an object? In the literal sense it is: ‘ that which has been thrown or which one throws in front. ’ Are world-objects lying in front of us? The global dimension that characterizes them eliminates the distance between us and them which in the past defined objects. We now live in those world-objects as we live in the world. ” From Michael Serres, “ Revisiting the Natural Contract, ” trans. Anne-Marie Feenburg-Dibon, CTheory, May 11, 2006, http://www.ctheory.net/ articles.aspx?id=515.).

1. For more on the urbanism of these hubs in the City chapter, see John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

1. See Farhad Manjoo, “ I Want It Today: How Amazon ’ s Ambitious New Push for Same-Day Delivery Will Destroy Local Retail, ” Slate, http://www.slate.com/articles/business/small \_business/2012/07/amazon\_same\_day\_delivery\_how\_the\_e\_commerce\_giant\_will\_destroy\_local \_retail\_.html.

1. As this book was going to press, Google announced that it would create a parent company called Alphabet, with many experimental initiatives moving outside of Google proper. It is not known how the reorganization will impact or revitalize the company ’ s founding mission, but the reader should infer that “ Google ” refers here to all ventures included within the Alphabet enterprise.

1. A typically simplistic and misinformed example is Shoshanna Zuboff ’ s thought piece, “ Dark Google ” in Frankfurter Allgemeine, April 30, 2014, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ the-digital-debate/shoshanna-zuboff-dark-google-12916679.html. We are provided with several of the most shrill and counterproductive tropes of Google bashing: taking what Eric Schmidt says in op-eds at face value as representing Google’s strategy, or, worse, as representing Google ’ s geopolitical and geoeconomic significance, power, or danger; conflating user feedback and pushback regarding strange new forms of data transparency with some deliberate and explicitly criminal mischief on Google ’ s part, including misrepresentation of what practices were and are secret and which are merely unusual and controversial; insisting that confusion about the ambiguous social logics of secrecy and privacy in a network society is proof not merely of disenchantment but of innocence betrayed by bad actors; insisting that the inability to articulate a coherent political description of Cloud-based social systems is demonstrable proof, not just of a general confusion, but of Google ’ s willful violence; insisting that the only way to adjudicate these new Googly

402

Notes

Notes

403

1. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

City Layer

1. Jean-Luc Godard, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Paris: Anouchka Films/ Argos Films/ Les Films du Carrose/ Parc Film, 1967).

1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).

1. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers: 1972 – 1990 (Paris: Editions De Minuit, 1990).

1. The term “ junkspace ” refers to Rem Koolhaas ’ essay on the poverty of contemporary environments. See October 100 (Spring 2002): 175 – 190.

1. Sanford Kwinter, “ Digital Pleistocene ” (seminar syllabus, Mediascapes program, SCI-Arc, summer 2008). See https://mediascapes.wikispaces.com/DigitalPleistocene.

1. A positive spin on this dual attention is suggested by Elie During, “ Loose Coexistence: Techologies of Attention in the Age of the Post-Metropolis, ” in Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics: Architecture and Mind in the Age of Communication and Information, ed. Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich (Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 2010).

1. Andrea Branzi, No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati (Orle ans: HYX, 2006).́

1. Kazys Varnelis, “ Programming after Program: Archizoom ’ s No-Stop City, ” Praxis: Journal of Writing and Building, May 18, 2006, 82 – 91.

1. Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, eds., The Whole Earth California and the Disappearance of the Outside (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013).

1. The term right to the city comes from Henri Lefebvre, who developed an urban materialism quite different from the one described here, though not necessarily incompatible with it.

1. Steven Graham and Simon Marvin identified this tunnel effect in their Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001). Among these is the centralization of key bandwidth hubs, often, but not always, in tier 1 global cities linking their trading centers to one another and further accelerating forces consolidating capital into fewer megacenters where it can be efficiently leveraged. Whereas in the dotcom era, some pundits emphasized how information technologies would soon virtualize economic contact and usher in a new era of cybersuburbs (and to an extent it has, but not by hollowing out urban cores as some enthused it would). See William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), and Joel Kotkin, The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape (New York: Random House, 2000). It is now clear that while planetary-scale computation does virtualize some kinds of places, its real project, it turns out, is the terraforming of continental interfaces with ferocious effect. In this large-scale bandwidth, provision and access becomes a core spatial planning strategy, whether for small market cities like Kansas City, Missouri, the first test bed for Google ’ s 100 megabyte fiber network, or for large market actors like traders who relocate their offices farther down the island in Manhattan to get closer to the central switches on Wall Street and shave nanoseconds off high-speed trading cycles. Despite its global spread and horizontal ubiquity, for Stack urbanism, proximity to the center, as defined by supermassive concentrations of bit flows, is seen as essential.

404

Notes

1. See David Kusner, “ The Real Story of Stuxnet, ” IEEE Spectrum, February 23, 2013, http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-real-story-of-stuxnet.

1. As well as simulations of all of these, as evidenced by the imaginary ISIS attack on Louisiana as invented by Russian mischief makers. See Cory Doctorow, “ Imaginary ISIS Attack on Louisiana and the Twitterbots Who Loved It, ” http://boingboing.net/2015/03/08/imaginary-isis-attack -on-louis.html.

1. The shock and awe of military/entertainment programs is by no means exclusive to airports, but as an urban type, they are perhaps most decisively dependent on its effects. On the one hand, the airport is a liminal space of territorial and jurisdictional transition, and so available to exceptional policing actions. On the other, airport urbanism is the absolutely normal essence of what the City layer is and does, and because of this symbolic miniaturization of the world at large, it is so useful as a target for political violence (and so available to exceptional policing actions).

1. The Foucauldian disciplinary model describes a mode of spatial power predicated on the securing of subjects in place (securing a negative freedom of movement and a positive freedom from movement).

1. The problematics and potential of the urban operating system are well articulated by Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque in Urban Versioning System v.1.0, Situated Technologies Pamphlet series, 2008, http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/. The conflicts involved, however, are impossible to tally in real time. In their book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, and Andy Muller-Maguhn are alarmed that “ Siemens is marketing a platform for intelligence agencies that does actually produce automated actions. So when target A is within a certain number of meters of target B according to their mobile intercept records, and target A receives an email mentioning something — a keyword — then an action is triggered. ” For them the User-versus- Cloud arms race is tilted by the widespread use of cryptographic systems (including perhaps the Cryptophone, http://www.cryptophone.de/en/products/mobile/). One lesson from the Snowden affair was that the cryptographic and anonymizing tools (like Tor browser) may increase the likelihood that the User will be a tracked target of surveillance. See Dan Goodin, “ Use of Tor and E-mail Crypto Could Increase Chances that NSA Keeps Your Data, ” http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/use-of-tor-and-e-mail-crypto-could-increase -chances-that-nsa-keeps-your-data/. For one, much of the tracking involves the reconstruction of metadata about the network of Users communicating instead of the more laborious cracking of individual messages, and so encrypting only content provides no additional privacy. Second, the National Security Agency seems to have decided that Tor users, for whom an IP address cannot be confidently located within the United States, are presumed not to be US citizens, and so not covered by federal legal protection. The argument then is that only when everyone uses cryptographic and anonymizing tools their use no longer places a target on the back of those who do. See Assange, et al., Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (New York: OR Books, 2012).

Notes

405