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The Stack: Chap5 © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or me- chanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) with- out permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in ITC Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Cover design by Metahaven. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-262-02957-5 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cloud Layer There is no doubt that we are currently witnessing a decisive turning point in history, comparable to the one that took place at the end of the Middle Ages. The beginning of the modern age is characterized by the unstoppable process of the progressive elimination of “ feudal ” political for- mations dividing the national units to the benefit of kingdoms, which is to say of nation-States. At present, it is these nation-States which, irresistibly, are gradually giving way to political forma- tions which transgress national borders and which could be designated with the term “ Empires. ” Nation-States, still powerful in the nineteenth century, are ceasing to be political realities, States in the strong sense of the term, just as the medieval baronies, cities, and archdioceses ceased to be States. The modern State, the current political reality, requires a larger foundation than that rep- resented by Nations in the strict sense. To be politically viable, the modern State must rest on a “ vast ‘ imperial ’ union of affiliated Nations. ” The modern State is only truly a State if it is an Empire. — Alexandre Koj è ve, ” Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy ” (1945) 1 No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. — Thomas Jefferson to James Madison Paris, September 6, 1789 2 Heavy medium, light signal ; light medium, heavy signal. — Unknown Aristophanes ’ play The Clouds is a parody of intellectual presumption and its gift econ- omies based on debt virtualizing all meaning into nothing but tactical rhetoric. 3 Does the same go for our Cloud Polis ? As it draws its own lines, walls, and envelopes, their multiplication puts into play eccentric geopolitical designs including the delamination of normative Westphalian state sovereignty from its referent territory and the introduc- tion of another territory on top or below. At the same time that Cloud platforms also take on traditional governing assignments such as public cartography, legal identity, currency, protocol allegiance, even patriotism, states themselves also evolve toward becoming Cloud -based entities. 4 In combining these, a Cloud Polis is built of thickened 110 Cloud Layer plural geographies and noncontiguous jurisdictions; it mixes some aspects of US super- jurisdiction over the Cloud (and over state-space) with others that resemble the charter cities carving new partially privatized polities from the whole cloth of desovereigned lands. 5 These platforms extract revenue from the cognitive capital of their User -citizens, who trade attention in exchange for global infrastructural services that provide each of them a fixed and formal online identity and a license to use its services. Perhaps these early accomplishments of planetary-scale computation to redraw political terri- tory in its own image point toward a more universal transformation of the organiza- tion of sovereign space and its organizing technologies. The Cloud layer is low in The Stack, above the chthonic forces of the Earth layer, from which it sucks the energy and minerals that course through its expansive megastructural body. It is also below the City layer into which it installs data centers and distribution nodes and for which it performs incredible feats of instantaneous calculation. While the term cloud computing may be traced back to the writings in the 1980s on “ life streams ” by Unabomber victim and Glenn Beck courtier David Gelernter, 6 the idea of computing as an on-tap utility served from central processing plants is as old as computer science itself. It builds on distributed server and terminal architectures, extending shared computing resources across a networked organization, and just as the regulation of industrial modernity was given tempo by the longitudinal standardization of railroad and telegraph timetables, the beginning of the Cloud could just as well be dated to the inauguration of the UNIX epoch (January 1, 1970) and the starting point of UNIX Time used to synchronize com- puters across a network (and which today helps synchronize, for example, Linux, C, Java, and Javascript). 7 But the footprint of the Cloud is measured at the scale of continents, not enter- prises. Some see it as an uneven computational troposphere, others as a prototype universal Turing machine, arranged not with tape but with uneven networks of fiber optics, data centers, nested databases, terminals, and browsers. 8 The Cloud layer is also a geopolitical machine, erasing some geographies and producing others, forming and destabilizing territories in competitive measure. It is at this level of The Stack that the modern coherence of the state, which would produce one sort of public, and the operations of platforms, which would produce another, can come into conflict, over- lapping and interlacing one another without universal jurisdiction or resolution, but it is also where they can reinforce each other with more pervasive forms of ambient gov- ernance. The geopolitics of the Cloud is everywhere and wants everything: the platform wars between Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, anonymized servers routing the angry tweets from street battles, Anonymous going up against Mexican drug cartels, WikiLeaks crowd-sourcing counterespionage, Tor users building on top of Amazon Web Services services, carriers licensing content, content providers licensing bandwidth, proprietary fiber networks connected trading centers, and on, and on. It might seem at first blush that these events, each perhaps pushing legal boundaries in its own way, Cloud Layer 111 should be understood as disruptive contaminations of a standing political order — acts of resistance to the system, even. Yet in their own consistency, this stockpile of excep- tions is probably better interpreted as part of the constitution of another emergent order (a nomos of the Cloud even?). It is an order derived from the structural and techni- cal protocols that locate different Users among different operations and condition the actions they take from there. As a governing nexus of The Stack, this order identifies, produces, and polices the information that can move up and down, layer to layer, fix- ing internal and external borders and designating passages to and from. In doing so, it generates more lines and borders, not fewer, and so its apparent universality is actually densely divided against itself. 24. Platform Geography In mountainous regions, trees above the cloud line are sometimes invisible from the vantage point of cities in the valley below. Sometimes it looks as if the gray sky has decapitated the peaks. But for the Cloud layer, what is invisible is less what is above than what is below the point where the computation touches the ground. Unseen but not placeless, the trans-urbanism of the Cloud layer is defined not just by the distri- bution of terrestrial borders, but also by the terraforming recentralization of nodes — urban, financial, logistical, political — in the service and purpose of its networks (e.g., former Siberian missile command bunkers are turned into icy data centers, and entire skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles are turned into massive, stacked switching hubs for every major telco by CoreSite/Carlyle Group). Above ground, the Cloud makes its own kind of temporary logistics plantations at exurban perimeters or near, or indeed inside, regional airports. The warehouse and supply chain centers that turn commands in databases into the traffic of real goods constitute a shadow network of itinerant packages and only slightly less itinerant laborers. Amazon and Walmart ’ s fulfillment centers in places like Hebron, Kentucky, Goodyear, Arizona, and Fernley, Nevada, are staffed by a multitiered outsourced and re-outsourced population of sorters, packers, and movers. During Christmas, when demand for short-term labor is acute, Amazon will make use of “ workampers, ” often senior citizens moving in large recreational vehi- cles from one fulfillment center to another, coming and going from Amazon towns as demand dictates. Guest workers of the algorithms: Grandpa, the Wandering Morlock of The Cloud. 9 Here we glimpse the prototype of a future Cloud feudalism. A constitutional geography is at work. As the nomos of the Cloud rotates from a two- dimensional map to a vertical, sectional stack, its topography is shaped by the multi- plication and superimposition of layers of sovereign claims over the same site, person, and event. The microenclaves that it spawns are a pixelated patchwork of discontiguous partial interiors and enclaves. Their double exposures are the exceptions that constitute a new rule. Strategic networks of data centers, fiber-optics cables, energy pipelines, 112 Cloud Layer freeways, warehouses, and shipping ports magnetize other geographies around them- selves, generating legal exceptions, economies of monetized cognition, and platform wars for expanding populations of Users , both human and nonhuman. So through
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