Technical Milieu of Governance

The Hemispherical Stacks claim that "the political" and "governance" are different things which always exist inside some technical milieu that causes and limits them. The political is the agonistic contest over symbols of power; governance, in the cybernetic sense, is how any complex system (a society included) senses, models, and recursively acts back on itself. From this Bratton rejects the "closely held axiom" that planetary computation is something to be governed from an external, supervisory position: it is governance in its most direct sense, and is currently reforming geopolitical regimes in its image. The move makes "planetary computation is governance" nearly analytic and exiles contestation to "the political" — the weak point to press.