Technological Territories

Essay for Noon magazine's inaugural issue Spring/Summer 2014. The article expands on themes around Designed Conflict Territories and technology as a territorial basis for a commons.

Technology can be a territory. If we take territory to be an abstract political projection of boundaries and laws over a hardened and implacable geography then, in a sense, anything could be a territory. But if we take geography, not as continents and landmasses but as the network - the jealously embedded system of cabling and legal frameworks often carelessly brushed off as ‘The Internet’ or more recently ‘the cloud’ - then we arrive at a point where the territories constructed on the network possess a cruel politics that is crushing the imaginable alternatives the technology promised.

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