The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

1. It is clearly not the annulment of dissensus, because in the absence of real politicization of fundamental conflict and the proliferation of incompatible and often unredeemable cosmographies, the only positions of dissent end up being those of the irredentist, the humanist, and the fundamentalist. That is an unsustainable trinity.

1. Behold the Schengen Cloud, New Arizona, Transcalifornia, Hong Kong West, the Alibaba-Tesla Printing and Charging Station franchise network, NTT-DoKoMo Planet Tokyo retirement towers and robo-spa, Google Continent Cloud, Tata-IIT-Khan Academy primary schools, the Confederate States of Walmart, RadTransFem GMOrganic Foods and Soil Stewardship (based in Fresno), the Apple-Pixar-Genentech Alliance, and so on.

1. Consider once more Estonia ’ s program to extend “ e-citizenship ” to those who do not physically reside inside its land borders. See https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/about/.

1. The anarchist-artist dream of autonomous secession by sabotage, refusal, anonymity, and delinking is part of the problem. Localism (individual or communitarian) means inside these sturdy walls. A political philosophy inordinately nervous about the ambiguities of transaction externalities will have to build increasingly more elaborate justifications. The simplest is to simply wall off the external altogether so that it cannot intrude, interfere, or enforce a division of labor.

1. See the full RFC at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc761.

1. The reversibility of the line, between inside and outside, exit and entrance to or from what, tracks the reversibility of utopia and dystopia. The utopian perfect island may be projected into the present for the totalitarian, into the fundamentalist ’ s past, or into the modernist ’ s future. The dystopian is sometimes the aberration that merely smudges the utopian absolute, ruptured from the inside by the revenge-seeking tabula that was not so rasa after all. At other times, as in many Philip K. Dick fictions, the dystopian is more like the nightmare that turns out to be an dream of unforeseen redemption or unforeseeable enlightenment. As the utopias and their reversals (which may be dystopian, or perhaps not) begin to pile up and reflect onto the diagonal surfaces of one another, insides and outsides multiply, and the exit and entrance dynamics becomes less intelligible as the borderlines intersect in volumetric space. Those lines seem to reverberate and blur, doing double duty to hold something in and out, but as we will see, these may not be imprecise traces of something definite; rather they are also meticulous representations of something ambiguous.

Further, the reversibility of the line can help design or make its job impossible. Every new historical phase of information technology seemed to bring a promise of universalism, or of at least of an integration of global community and communication. At the same time, perhaps every “ imagined community ” congeals through its particular ways of reading and being read by media technologies unevenly arranged across the world. Any universality that does arrive may be that societies are subdivided from one another according to the same means, and so share this cycle of consolidation and forking, both real and imagined. Any line drawn with purpose pushes and pulls against this, knowingly or unknowingly, partitioning and framing its additions on an always rotating plane. Any project of metadesign is then faced with some crisis of confidence. As it becomes technically easier to draw a line, it is that much harder to know whether that line is linking or delinking, gathering something in or fencing something out. Because of this, not despite it, the right of design has to be equal to that of voice in the automanagement of those societies subdivided from one another as they share the common limitations of mutual intersection. It also means that the basic social problematics of cohabitation remain.

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As discussed in the City layer chapter, we lack an adequate legal and political understanding of the “ refugee ” as a generic position, as opposed to an exceptional situation. It is always not enough to say that we cannot solve a refugee problem by producing a new refugee problem because, for better or worse, the identity that anyone and everyone shares of the stateless person dislodged from her home is the identity that each of us navigates when the shadow of some other utopia or dystopia sweeps over us in which we have no role to play. That namelessness and uselessness can also be another name for statelessness. Given the contemporary mania for revanchism, based on claims of primordial occupation going back centuries or even millennia, it is worth asking once again if the values we place in the notion of home and homeland are more dangerous than whatever comfort of continuity they may promise. This would be a good starting point to designing cohabitation. It does not answer for us how to solve the puzzle of inclusion, always based on exclusion as a shared condition, or even if solving that is the point. It does point us away from conventional discussions of the legal unipolarity of a single regime of “ rights ” for citizens and noncitizens and toward another one about partial citizens, temporary citizens, dual-, triple-, and quad-citizenships, or away from this legal position altogether perhaps. It is complex enough to map stateless persons. It is perhaps more so to make room for personless states, or for corporations of multiple persons that are afforded religious and speech metarights above and beyond those of the humans that they aggregate. Swatting at flying robots all day and night can ’ t possibly keep the natural order in place.

On the contrary, the normalized exception, inverting interior and exterior also inverts the utopian and dystopian projects, even across the same interfacial hinge of the subdividing wall. The oscillation of the enclave and the camp may work variously as the cause or the effect of the proliferation of our overlapping surplus of utopias, absorbing design programs into its demands and spinning out the accidents of political subjectivity that characterize the City layer of The Stack. What is clear is that in this overlap, as each of us is, at every given moment, inside some Cloud polities that actively recognize us as Users or citizens, outside of others that may or may not, and inside others that do not recognize us, even as we move around geographies in what it may imagine to be their jurisdictions, that our continuous transactions with the physical and virtual envelopes of our habitats never resolve into any absolute political space that can make last-instance claims on whatever or whoever is passing through. No one addressing scheme can finally exclude others. Accordingly the plans and programs of the designers of that space, regardless of their own valorizations of an absolute architecture, have even less durable authority on those claims and those identities. The site is itself a microcosmic platform but only even in relation to others, at the same or different scale. As the borders cross you, you must be able to come as well as go. The interfaces that cohere the site as a surface of interest are only ever interfaces to or from another site, and if for no other reason than this, the platform geopolitics of the User must design entrance to be as dominant a function as exit.

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1. “ Marxists will likely find that life in our centrally-managed military compound is incompatible with their ideology. ” Eric Lach, “ ‘ Liberty-Driven ’ Fortress Community Being Planned in Idaho, ” TPM, January 14, 2013, http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/ liberty-driven-fortress-community-being-planned-in-idaho.

1. Roger O. Friedland, “ Money, Sex and God: The Erotic Logics of Religious Nationalism, ” Sociological Theory 20 (2002): 381 – 425.

1. Robert MacBride, The Automated State: Computer Systems as a New Force in Society (Philadelphia: Chilton Book, 1967); Stanislaw Lem, Summa Technologica (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013; originally published 1964); and Thomas Wells, “ The Robot Economy and the Crisis of Capitalism: Why We Need Universal Basic Income, ” ABC Religion and Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), July 17, 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/ articles/2014/07/17/4048180.htm.

1. Srnicek and Williams ’ book Inventing the Future would hold one end of this spectrum, whil Evgeny Morozov ’ s “ The Planning Machine ” would fix the other. See http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine.

1. McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015); Benedict Singleton, “ Maximum Jailbreak, ” e-flux, July 27, 2013, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ maximum-jailbreak/.

1. Friedrich A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 2:107 – 132.

1. “ If Wal-Mart instituted, say, a zero-tolerance policy against developing-world factories abusing their workforces, and simultaneously brought in a regime of unannounced factory inspections combined with anonymous, off-site interviews with workers, it would probably do more to change the working conditions in Third World sweatshops than any government on the planet. That, though, is the problem. Wal-Mart stretches far beyond the reach of any government. ” John Lanchester, “ The Price of Pickles, ” London Review of Books, June 22, 2006, 3 – 6, http://www.lrb .co.uk/v28/n12/john-lanchester/the-price-of-pickles.

1. Walmart ’ s customers, demographic analysis may suggest, do not have the same degree of access to e-commerce infrastructure, from home PCs to broadband service. Still, the current discrepancy of total revenue between Amazon (about \$50 billion a year) and Walmart (about \$450 billion) suggests any major shift is still to come.

1. That chagrin comes through in financial press articles such as these, http://www.fool.com/ investing/general/2015/02/04/amazon-just-admitted-that-its-losing-billions.aspx.

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1. Amazon is not a model of “ fully automated luxury communism ” but it is a model of something that may in turn be one of its ancestors.

1. As we will discuss in greater detail below, the geodesign potential of algorithmic governance, in the rawest sense, is hamstrung by the negative disposition that some hold regarding the politics of quantitative representation, statistics, and even mathematics itself. This is both a reaction to the considerable violence that calculative reason wrought during twentieth-century wars, as well as the result of a self-validating antimodernism that ensued and has become, in turn, the basis of a sometimes reactionary posture that in various mixtures and guises draws on noble and ignoble traditions. Moral vigilance against “ instrumental reason ” easily slides into anti-intellectualism. Some activists may bomb the Army Research Center for Mathematics and believe it to be a morally defensible part of an antiwar strategy, as they support and are supported by the conclusion that mathematics and war are inextricable ways of knowing. Others see our Anthropocenic precocity as the unprecedented metaexternality of modernity itself and conclude that only a dismantling, reversal, or downscaling of ambition and its equipment, especially computing machines, can limn the path away from apocalypse and toward their preferred salvation. These perspectives are not only assailable, they are variously inadequate, immature, and sociopathic. The importance of truly confronting the inarticulability of the Anthropocene, is unfortunately obscured not only by our own cowardice, but also by the enchanted nihilism of our worst angels. Back in the city, people may assault other people wearing Google Glass on behalf of evicted renters, imagining their acts as those of popular refusal and resistance to the tyranny of calculative vision. Others draw embarrassing dichotomies between “ poetry ” and “ finance ” as the key to unlocking a new society. However, others provide durable critiques of how the algorithmic geopolitics is currently configured, and how its dangerous naturalization by market fundamentalism is not only legible in certain philosophical trends but naturalized by them. Others have accomplished a powerful politics of open, reprogrammable computational infrastructures that has had a direct and positive on how global systems are developed, though not nearly enough, and battles won may be reversed. Still others have articulated, from the disciplinary margins, a visionary and proactive leftist futurism that makes a native comfort with techniques of comprehensive abstraction a central tenet of post-neoliberal economics. Lest the zealotry of negative retreat and resistance is to define the leftist geopolitics of planetary-scale computation, it is essential that the legacies of progressive futurism, democratic welfare and pleasure, and infrastructural transnationalism are able to resolve their crises of courage and self-legitimacy and to find themselves willing and able to design and enforce the platforms we all require.

1. I find the use of the term communism to describe these kinds of transformations in the marginal costs of commodity provisions needlessly old-fashioned. “ A new cybernetic communism, itself one of these options, would, we have seen, involve some of the following elements: use of the most advanced super-computing to algorithmically calculate labour time and resource requirements, at global, regional and local levels, of multiple possible paths of human development; selection from these paths by layered democratic discussion conducted across assemblies that include socialized digital networks and swarms of software agents; light-speed updating and constant revision of the selected plans by streams of big data from production and consumption sources; the passage of increasing numbers of goods and services into the realm of the free or of direct production as use values once automation, copy-left, peer-to-peer commons and other forms of micro-replication take hold; the informing of the entire process by parameters set from the simulations, sensors, and satellite systems measuring and monitoring the species metabolic interchange with the planetary environment. ” Nick Dyer-Witheford, “ Red Plenty Platforms, ” Culture Machines, July 28, 2013, http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/ 511/526.

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1. As well as a partial corrective, perhaps, to Adam Curtis ’ s tendentious narrative All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC Productions, 2011).

1. This is drawn on our white board as a syncretic thought experiment because of, not in spite of, the complexities and contradictions it makes visible. Among the two most salient are, first, that no actual platform ever functions in an ideal manner and so simply transposing state or corporate governance into platforms does not guarantee specific outcomes, and, second, that the data with which any platform might govern do not merely exist in the world to be gathered and then presented to political systems for their application; rather the identification, sensing, sorting, application, revelation, and instrumentalization of data is the political system in this context. Its distortions are not errors; they are, as for any other intelligence, a function of what any platform can and cannot see. The provisional typology of platforms listed in the first chapter should be applied as both generic description and functional ideal: the setting of stages, by rigorous morphological standardization, toward forms of entrenchment that are desirable, allowing for unexpected reprogrammability, according to intelligent formal models, adding genuine value for Users, from a position that is neither exactly central nor distributed, that modulates the generation of governable identities, according to denuded diagrams, in which all components can be replaced, governing instantaneously and cumulatively, with incentivized error correction, by organizing existing systems, that can withstand the vulnerabilities that come with ubiquity, that demonetize (or monetize absolutely, which may be the same thing), that inform Users of their architecture in ways that support narrative participation as much as infrastructural transparency, that coordinate with the parallel ubiquity of other total platforms, and which therefore spin out system-scale accidents that are net positive, and so on, and so on. These are not givens; they are guidelines, both descriptive and prescriptive. To this list I highlight the right of exit and entrance from platform totalities. It ’ s true that successful and sustainable platforms may not only be “ walled gardens, ” but will enforce that wall with serious punishment, but our geodesign program stipulates that orderly User promiscuity between platforms is how the totality of totalities would work best as an active search field for optimal Anthropocenic (or post-Anthropocenic) planetary urbanism.

1. Gabriel De Tarde and Theo Lorenc, Monadology and Sociology (Prahran, Victoria: Re.press,

2011), 167 – 168.

1. It would also expand the governability of the information into depths and domains previously impossible. The fully posthuman descendant of The Stack we have may compose communicative flows in ways that our unique perch, measured in meters and months, will have far less privilege of place. But just as indicated for any big data apparatus, any such governance of addresses, especially those in the near term, would not cohere around what they find out there but around what they are looking for. The Borges Chinese Encyclopedia problem does not disappear with supercomputing or $1 0 ^ { 2 3 }$ addresses; rather, it expands exponentially. Any two governing apparatuses are able to map the same planet and what happens on it according to the categorical logics of utterly different kinds of descriptive systems, both of which are equally valid from the rigorously agnostic view of the addresses themselves. For example, the ontologies of, say, midtwenty-first-century organic chemistry as informed by electron microscopes as well as certain medieval spoken dialects mixing Russian and Polish languages may both be able to decide that certain things are in fact “ things ” requiring a number or not, while others don ’ t register at all, physically or conceptually, and may do so according to their own limited scopes.

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1. See Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

1. The Security and Exchange Commission ’ s 2005 Regulation National Market System (Reg NMS), which required that traders execute trades at the “ best price for their clients, ” of which an unintended consequence was the rise of “ dark pools ” that incentivize large traders to build market simulations to make trades against. See http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405270 2304886904579475584095555384; Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (New York: Norton, 2014); and US Securities and Exchange Commission, Division of Market Regulation, Regulation National Market System (Washington, DC, 2005).

1. Paul Krugman, “ Bits and Barbarism, ” New York Times, December 22, 2013, http://www .nytimes.com/2013/12/23/opinion/krugman-bits-and-barbarism.html.

1. Once more, a different connotation for the word “ hyperobject” than Timothy Morton ’ s.

1. Niklas Luhmann, Dirk Baecker, and Peter Gilgen, Introduction to Systems Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).

1. It does so by representing the full scale of planetary systems and in doing so suggests some authority over them. As seen most explicitly in computational megaprojects such as Planetary Skin, the ascendance of data visualization as a governing visual rhetoric allows for, if not also demands, the pictorial coherence of worldly systems otherwise dedifferentiated. As GUI come to take on more of the look and utility of data visualization (the image-instrument diagram discussed in the Interface chapter), the same tilt toward not just comprehensive images but also total images and image-instruments. In other words, interfacial regimes make claims on the always reconfigurable geoscapes that frame the social, economic, or religious significance of any chain of interaction, and which by repetition comes to physically enforce that regime in the world. The symptomatic interest in reflecting a master diagram onto the world as if its mimetic regularity were interchangeable with the regulation of that world not only persists but is amplified by the affordances of planetary computation. The instrumentalized “ world picture ” functions not only as a projective image of a claim into the geoscape, as any utopian image does; it channels the utopian program of that projection not only into the abstract futurity of an image of a world in the future but also as a literal technology for the management of that future today. It renders its utopia less by the implied resolution of a meta-history than as meta-interfaciality.

1. This is perhaps a kind of reverse skeuomorphism. They automate consent, like automating a decision by building it into an interface.

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1. Planetary-scale computation is both the medium through which the possibility of comprehensive planetary visualization (however skewed) is possible and something to be represented within that geography and its motivated geoscapes. The Interface layer is where the performance of any exceptional reversal between inside and outside plays out, even if it is for the benefit of just one User ’ s line of sight. It is also, as discussed regarding the City layer, where any one interface, physical or virtual, may open or close urban habitats to some Users and foreclose them to others, automating the normalization of that inversion of exceptional internalization and externalization on the fly. Depending on the regime at work, the results for any given User may be very different, however resolved or however alien they appear to different Users all sorted by platform cognition into their microcultures. Things show up on your map that are not on mine, and vice versa, and that is precisely the point. While this may undermine the simple geometry of cosmopolitan consensus, it may also provide for less timid forms of universalism.

1. For modern panoptic systems, surveillant sensors are hidden or camouflaged from the view of the surveilled. The gaze is present but unseen. But the contemporary moment is characterized instead by the display of surveillance and the spectacle of transparency.

1. In practice the interrelationship between scales, both as real accumulations and as diagrammatic images of those accumulations, is a densely intermingled pattern of infra- and intrasignification. The interfacial image represents an interfacial assemblage, but it can also represent a network, a territory, or a geoscape. For example, a hand-held mapping application may construct a framed image of very local interfacial objects and surfaces or the larger-scale networks at work and the territories that structure them. The Citysense app, for example, as an interface to the urban field draws an image of particular networks among others as they congeal onto particular nodal interfaces within the city among others, but the image is of the coagulation more than of a given interface within it. It also locates that network onto the schematic territory of the city here rendered only as a field of channels for the potential formation of networks. In this, the interface not only accumulates into networks and networks into territories; here the interface directly diagrams the network in formation and the territory as its limit. We can expect any recursivity then to be between a decision to be subjectivity located within a field of urban interfaciality based on a sense of coordination with a network ( “ my people go there, so I should too ” ) and even the positive effects an action might have on the network accumulation itself and its socialized image ( “ if I go there, it will show up on the map of my network ” ).

1. See Tim O ’ Reilly, “ Open Data and Algorithmic Regulation, ” Beyond Transparency, http://beyondtransparency.org/chapters/part-5/open-data-and-algorithmic-regulation/, and Tim McCormick, “ A Brief Exchange with Tim O ’ Reilly about Algorithmic Regulation, ” February 15, 2014. http://tjm.org/2014/02/15/a-brief-exchange-with-tim-oreilly-about-algorithmic-regulation/. See as well this from O ’ Reilly: “ Consider, for a moment, regulation in a broader context. Your car ’ s electronics regulate the fuel-air mix in the engine to find an optimal balance of fuel efficiency and minimal emissions. An airplane ’ s autopilot regulates the countless factors required to keep that plane aloft and heading in the right direction. Credit card companies monitor and regulate charges to detect fraud and keep you under your credit limit. Doctors regulate the dosage of the medicine they give us, sometimes loosely, sometimes with exquisite care, as with the chemotherapy required to kill cancer cells while keeping normal cells alive, or with the anesthesia that keeps us unconscious during surgery while keeping vital processes going. ISPs and corporate mail systems regulate the mail that reaches us, filtering out spam and malware to the best of their ability. Search engines regulate the results and advertisements they serve up to us, doing their best to give us more of what we want to see. ” Tim O ’ Reilly, “ Open Data and Algorithmic Regulation, ” in Brett Goldstein and Lauren Dyson, eds., Beyond Transparency (San Francisco: Code for America Press, 2013), and http://beyondtransparency.org/chapters/part-5/open-data-and -algorithmic-regulation/.

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1. O ’ Reilly, “ Profile of Tim O’Reilly. ”

1. Evgeny Morozov, “ The Meme Hustler, ” Baffler 66 (2013), http://www.thebaffler.com/ articles/the-meme-hustler.

1. Among the core design problems for algorithmic governance is the modulation of that symmetry and asymmetry: between “ server side ” and “ client side, ” authority and autonomy, between upstream and downstream decisions, between Users informing algorithms and algorithms governing with the force of law, or perhaps just “ nudging ” Users toward ostensibly desirable outcomes. That is, where it may be news to conventional political science that planetary-scale computation is not only something to govern but where and how governance occurs, it may be equally surprising to others that software is not only how to govern but that it itself needs to be governed, and that the cultural conventions of early twenty-first century North American programming culture cannot be transposed onto all systems without difficult mutual translation and even violent (if necessary) counterdistortions. (As “ design outcomes ” algorithmic governance and governance of algorithms should be tightly paired.) Historical precedent strongly suggests that asymmetries of knowledge and power between governor or and governed (in either direction) may have disastrous consequences. Contemporary concerns over User privacy in relation to state surveillance and platform dataveillance have led to considerable outcry, some very legiti mate and some not. The contravention of surveillance (looking “ down ” onto the governed) with sousveillance (looking “ up ” at the governor) has become the conventional point of distinction for modulating transparency versus opacity, and, by extension, designing the geopolitics of the User. The problem in practice (as well as in theory) is that this distinction relies on notions of who or what is “ up ” and “ down ” in relation to whom and to what that are at best highly debatable. This is so even among the privacy advocacy communities who have come to agree on “ outcomes ” even if the reasons for these are incompatible. For some, large central governing systems must always by definition operate in complete transparency lest they become totalitarian and end Users must always by definition retain rights to complete opacity for the same reason. For others, a phobia regarding public scrutiny is hardly the point, and there is strong motivation to shine the bright light on some “ Users” such as wealthy tax evaders for the benefit of large public governance. Others advocate for maximum societal transparency as a self-correcting good, such as David Brin, while others advocate for maximum opacity and privacy for parallel or opposite goals, such as some cyptoanarchists. One pernicious result is that everyone believes himself to be working from a position of disadvantage and self-defense, and so assumes for himself a limitless license for social violence.

This up-versus-down heuristic will prove to be a far limited model for scaling the complex geopolitical design questions at hand now and in the future. It is born of a presumption that governance is synonymous with states that contain human being citizens, that governments are centralized and distant, but “ re-present ” the will of those citizens, that any space not occupied by government sovereignty is instead the domain of “ the market, ” which has diametrically opposed priorities for the essential (and inaccurate) vision of center versus periphery that underlies parlia mentarian and bureaucratic conceptions of how and where political authority operates, and so which can only vaguely discern how platforms may constitute a very different kind of political geography. As discussed in the City layer chapter, Cloud platforms push what used to be command-and-control infrastructural capabilities to the edges of the network, imbuing humble objects and interfaces with supercomputing capacity, with the Cloud interface device called the “ mobile phone ” being the plainest example, and in doing so, the Cloud absorbs and centralizes other platform regulation duties. In doing so, the object of governance is not just humans but things as well, including and especially the interfaces between humans and things. Who or what is or is not transparent in the first place is not the same for people and objects, and yet both can be Users of one another. As we will see, the geopolitics of the Cloud and composition of the User as a political subject may bring a kind of trauma, as the emergence of an algorithmic governance that is not primarily a governance of humans but also of ecologies, inanimate objects, data sets, other algorithms, of sensing and sensation. This is complicated by the fact that we are not designing one algorithmic-interfacial regime but multiple simultaneous and interweaving totalities. “ Desired outcomes ” may overlap but vary widely. What is legal and consistent for one may be technically or morally impossible for another. That heterogeneity may be another bulwark against totalitarianism, and it may also be a path toward another as yet undefined universal materialism, one that is no more or less totalitarian than the laws of mathematics.

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1. Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen, Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

1. Peter Watts, Beyond the Rift (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2013), 9.

1. James Bridle, “ Do You Know This Person? ” Render Search, http://render-search.com/.

1. Sarah Jaffe, “ Silicon Valley ’ s Gig Economy Is Not the Future of Work — It ’ s Driving Down Wages, ” Guardian, July 23, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/23/ gig-economy-silicon-valley-taskrabbit-workers.

1. When I was a youngster, my dislike for the Canadian rock band Rush was confirmed by the song “ Red Barchetta, ” about a guy who drives around in his muscle car in defiance of climate and pollution laws. Today, Johnny Dronehunter protects normatively masculine white guys from the emasculating influence of “ drones ” (and “ technology ” in general we assume) by zooming around inside his big metal box and shooting at things in the sky. Behold: “ Johnny Dronehunter: Defender of Privacy — Official Trailer Feat, ” Salvo 12 Shotgun Silencer, SilencerCo, 2014. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIXwQVFt8Ho.

1. The same Johnny Dronehunter: the bitter cyborg in a big heavy car, sitting down with his knees touching, his little eyes shielded, not only by a massive windshield, but also reflective lenses strapped to the front of this skull and covering his orbital sockets.

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1. Drew Harwell, “ ‘Human Props Stay in Luxury Homes But Live like Ghosts, ” Tampa Bay Times, July 6, 2014, http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/realestate/human-props-stay-in-luxury -homes-but-live-like-ghosts/2187417.

1. Cory Doctorow, “ The Coming Civil War over General-Purpose Computing ” (lecture at Talks at Google, Google, Mountain View, CA, August 22, 2012), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI.

1. Ryan Calo ’ s work is instructive on these and related issues. See his “ Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw, ” California Law Review 103 (2015) , University of Washington School of Law Research Paper No. 2014-08 , February 28, 2014.

The Black Stack

1. By contrast see Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

1. Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). Liis K ä ngsepp, “ Estonia to Offer ‘ E-Residency ’ to Foreigners, ” Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/estonia-to-offer-e-residency-to-foreigners-1413897698. Sleep Dealer, directed by Alex Rivera (Vaya Entertainment, 2008). L. Jordan, Dress to Kill (Vision Video, 1980).

1. “ Cunning use of flags ” is a line by comedian Eddie Izzard, describing British colonial strategy.

1. For example, Gaza and the West Bank are to live in different time zones. Maan News Agency, August 28, 2011, http://www.maannews.net/eng/viewdetails.aspx?id=416597.

1. O. Wainwright, “ The World ’ s First Indoor City: A Greatest Hits Mashup of London and New York, ” The Guardian, July 9, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture -design-blog/2014/jul/09/worlds-first-indoor-city-dubai-mall-of-the-world.

1. “ Biosphere 2 was a giant sealed world. Eight humans were locked in with a mass of flora and other fauna, and a balanced ecosystem was supposed to naturally emerge. But from the start it was completely unbalanced. The CO2 levels started soaring, so the experimenters desperately planted more green plants, but the CO2 continued to rise, then dissolved in the ‘ ocean ’ and ate their precious coral reef. Millions of tiny mites attacked the vegetables and there was less and less food to eat. The men lost 18% of their body weight. Then millions of cockroaches took over. The moment the lights were turned out in the kitchen, hordes of roaches covered every surface. And it got worse — the oxygen in the world started to disappear and no one knew where it was going. The ‘ bionauts ’ began to suffocate. And they began to hate one another — furious rows erupted that often ended with them spitting in one another ’ s faces. A psychiatrist was brought in to see if they had gone insane, but concluded simply that it was a struggle for power. Then millions of ants appeared from nowhere and waged war on the cockroaches. In 1993 the experiment collapsed in chaos and hatred. ” A. Curtis, “ How the ‘ Ecosystem ’ Myth Has Been Used for Sinister Means, ” The Guardian, May 28, 2011. See http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/ may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts.

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