A Tale of Two Cloud Polis: Neoliberalism, Postsocialism, and the Cultural Politics of Technology

Qiaoyu Cai
English
UC Santa Barbara

In contemporary geopolitics, there is a marked shift toward redefining the traditional political geography formalized at Westphalia. This is driven by the rapid development and complication of a computation-based planetary architecture—what Benjamin Bratton brilliantly modeled and elaborated as The Stack. This emerging geopolitical architecture signals the reorientated logic of sovereignty based on the amorphous, contingent, horizontally and vertically expansive Cloud geography. This shifted topology of political geography demands a novel political theory that directly addresses the nature of sovereign claims on the Cloud.

My project undertakes this challenge, aiming to theorize the sovereign condition of the Cloud geopolitics as a matter of cultural politics—the cultural-technics of sovereignty extended into the Cloud. This approach offers an understanding of the current U.S.-China Tech War beyond the conventional framework of national struggles for global dominance. Through emphasizing the social-historical and cultural-political underpinnings of sovereign entities in the era of planetary computation, my project seeks to explore the cultural-technical aspects of Cloud politics through the lenses of neoliberalism and postsocialism, highlighting the different paradigms as alternative modernity projects with distinct worldviews and historical contexts. To effectively manage the conflict, my project advocates for this cultural-political perspective as indispensable.