In our era of swift technological upheaval, it is no longer enough for society to be governed solely by the vestiges of nation-state power. Digital networks are transgressing borders, data is materializing as a new currency, and human identity is unfurling in spaces that owe no allegiance to any single geographic place. As the world folds itself into software, we sense the gravitational pull of planetary-scale computation, a global infrastructure that connects billions of people while reshaping the very notion of sovereignty.
Yet this vision of total connectivity faces a crucial question: How can such structures reflect the depth of human culture, freedom, and spiritual heritage, rather than reduce us all to interchangeable users on a massive digital grid?
Enter three distinct but harmonious perspectives: Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, Benjamin Bratton’s planetary megastructure known as The Stack, and Carl Schmitt’s political theology of sovereignty. In their intersection, a new model of governance begins to emerge—one where technology is culturally situated, democracy is reimagined through transparent computation, and individuals are empowered to craft their own digital and physical destinies.
At the heart of this reimagined order stands Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics. Far from reducing technology to a universal standard of efficiency, cosmotechnics insists that each culture shapes its machines in accordance with its spiritual, social, and mythological heritage. Hui asks us to see technology not as an apparatus separate from life’s meaning, but as one thread in a larger cosmic tapestry—a tapestry woven from rituals, ethics, artistic traditions, and the intangible aura that gives a community its unique identity.
This approach dismantles the myopic assumption that all societies will inevitably converge on the same technical path. Instead, it privileges pluralism: whether we speak of bioenergy solutions in a region that honors the land as sacred, or intangible software architectures that encode historical practices in their data flows, the emphasis is on conscious design. Cosmotechnics endows technology with a measure of enchantment, conceiving it as the craft of bringing culture’s deepest stories into the realm of code.
The Stack
If cosmotechnics roots technology in cultural and spiritual soil, then Benjamin Bratton’s concept of The Stack elevates us to the planetary scale. Bratton describes a layered system comprising Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User—each layer governed by its own forms of power and control. Geopolitics, in this view, no longer resides in tidy lines on a world map. Instead, sovereignty flows through data centers, algorithms, and the intangible domain of protocol.
Bratton’s architecture reveals the extent to which our world has become computational in nature. Everything from the smartphone in a rural village to the high-frequency trading servers of global finance belongs to a single, planetary-scale matrix. Governance, once the domain of the nation-state, now plays out across these layered scales: from local municipal sensor networks in so-called “smart cities” to the ephemeral addresses we use to navigate online realms.
Yet The Stack does not merely rearrange conventional boundaries—it catalyzes entirely new forms of sovereignty. The borders of the digital realm are fluid and flickering, shaped by economic incentives, code protocols, and the power to define who gets to participate. Where once a government had to patrol physical frontiers, now it must regulate intangible flows of data, moral codes encoded in AI training sets, and the economic logic of decentralized networks.
Beneath these glimmering new structures sits a fundamental political reality: the power to decide on exceptions. Carl Schmitt, the provocative political theorist, contends that sovereignty resides with those who can define the “friend/enemy” distinction and determine when normal rules no longer apply. Though Schmitt’s ideas were forged in an era of totalitarian states, they resonate today in the micro-political terrain of algorithms, platform governance, and global network administration.
In digitally mediated societies, Schmitt’s “decision on the exception” can manifest in the moment an algorithm bans a user, or a cloud service decides which data is permissible. It emerges when a decentralized community revokes membership from malicious actors, or when platform moderators choose to throttle disinformation. Though the language of “friend versus enemy” may sound archaic, contemporary governance increasingly rests on decisions about who is allowed to speak or trade, and who is cast out. The Stack, from this vantage, becomes a massive apparatus for continuous boundary-setting, one that works alongside or within national governments’ efforts—and sometimes undermines them altogether.
Is it possible to embed these cosmotechnical principles—rooted in local culture, metaphysics, and spiritual belief—into a unified global stack? The quick answer is yes, but only if we resist the urge to flatten out cultural differences in the name of efficiency.
Consider the “Earth” layer of Bratton’s model, where data centers physically reside on land. In many places, land is tied to creation stories, ancestral ties, and sacred rites. Designing data centers that respect local cosmologies means exploring energy sources like geothermal power (which fosters ecological equilibrium) and even incorporating cultural rituals into data-management practices. At the “Cloud” layer, this attitude might translate into systems of privacy that do not treat data merely as an exploitable resource, but as something carrying the imprint of a community’s lifeworld. From the vantage of cosmotechnics, protecting data becomes akin to protecting cultural heritage.
Further up the chain, The Stack’s City layer could become a realm of local governance where overlapping jurisdictions coexist. The friction between different cultural frameworks, once seen as an obstacle, might be reconfigured into a productive tension that nurtures creative approaches to urban policy. Interfaces, from smartphone screens to immersive virtual reality, in turn become opportunities for artistic expression rather than purely commercial design. By letting communities actively shape how interfaces look and behave, technology ceases to be alienating—and instead starts to resonate with local aesthetics and symbolic forms.
New Expressions of Sovereignty
This evolving tapestry of local and planetary infrastructures demands a new vocabulary of sovereignty. The old territorial model is insufficient in a world where the power to define the rules of speech (or commerce, or identity) lies in the domain of servers, encryption protocols, and AI moderation algorithms. Sovereignty now concerns the stewardship of personal data, the right to define cultural values in software, and the authority to decide how technology interfaces with spiritual life.
These shifts also open novel possibilities for individual agency. Self-sovereign identity (SSI) protocols, built on decentralized technologies such as blockchain, allow individuals to maintain control over their digital footprints. They decide how and where personal information is shared, forging a protective barrier against predatory data extraction. By applying Schmitt’s logic of the exception, we might see communities banding together to assert new kinds of boundaries around data use, cultural expression, and algorithmic oversight.
Yet true self-sovereignty is more than the right to say “no.” At its finest, it is the opportunity to shape one’s life in accordance with one’s values. Participatory systems, open-source AI models, and community-led data projects can reorient technology from a controlling mechanism into a vehicle for moral and cultural development. The sovereignty dynamic is thus neither purely top-down (governments decreeing rules) nor purely bottom-up (individuals controlling their data) but emerges from the interplay of multiple actors and layers.
Toward a Cosmotechnical Economy
Amid these transformations, economic growth likewise requires reexamination. By looking at human action and production through the lens of cosmotechnics, we move beyond the usual metrics that focus narrowly on GDP, productivity, and consumption. While these remain important, there is also “cultural capital” to account for: the intangible but potent energy that comes from cultural, artistic, and spiritual flourishing.
If individuals control their data, they can sell or share it on terms they choose, potentially redirecting monetary flows that used to accrue to mega-platforms. In this sense, data becomes not just an asset for corporations but a commons for collective creativity and economic empowerment. Community-owned platforms, or “platform cooperatives,” could provide alternative economic models in which the people generating data also share in the profits. These participatory frameworks allow for a broader interpretation of wealth—one that includes both communal well-being and cultural resilience.
Agent-Based Models (ABMs) and other sophisticated econometric tools can help us simulate these new digital ecosystems. Instead of focusing only on competitive equilibria and profit-maximizing actors, these models might track how individuals interact with governance protocols that honor local traditions, how they flourish when data sovereignty is baked into the design, and how emergent behaviors generate new forms of cultural capital.
Challenges to Overcome
Of course, weaving cosmotechnics into a planetary infrastructure is no easy task. Powerful commercial forces are heavily invested in a one-size-fits-all technology model, and the drive toward standardization and monopoly can bulldoze local nuance. Governments clinging to twentieth-century definitions of territory and security may also find themselves ill-equipped to regulate this new array of borderless platforms.
Still, there are encouraging steps: edge computing centers that operate under local ethical charters, self-sovereign identity projects that yield new frameworks for data ownership, or regionally minded AI training sets curated by local communities rather than corporate behemoths. These experiments, no matter how modest, exemplify the vast potential for synergy between ancient cosmologies and cutting-edge computation.
At stake in this grand vision is nothing less than a re-enchantment of the technological sphere—reconnecting science and engineering with the cultural imaginations that make human life so richly varied. In this sense, the push for cosmotechnics, planetary-scale computation, and a new articulation of sovereignty is an attempt to transcend the stale binaries that pit tradition against progress, or personal freedom against collective needs.
What if the future of innovation could be both universal and deeply local, highly efficient yet imbued with cultural significance? What if data could be owned and shared in ways that honor ancestral ties, aesthetic sensibilities, or ethical codes, rather than being relentlessly extracted for corporate profits? If these questions feel radical, that is because they unravel the assumption that modern technology must be globally uniform and purely instrumental.
Ultimately, integrating cosmotechnics into The Stack frames technology not as a “how,” but a “why.” It reminds us that no matter how advanced our planetary-scale computation becomes, it remains beholden to human stories and moral visions. Yes, we will have protocols that coordinate across continents in milliseconds, but these protocols can carry cultural meaning within their code. Yes, governments and corporations will jostle for power, but they may find that real authority resides in the consent of communities that have decided—by their own standards—what kind of digital world they wish to inhabit.
In that sense, the promise of embedding cosmotechnics in planetary-scale systems might lie in a more democratic, more humane, and ultimately more sacred iteration of our technological future. We stand on the cusp of a moment where freedom and growth do not require flattening difference but can instead arise from nurturing the manifold forms of cultural expression that have guided humanity through millennia. If successful, this approach could reweave the cosmic tapestry of technology and spirit—resurrecting enchantment in a world all too often governed by profit and code.
In this vision, codes and servers, rituals and myths, markets and communities converge to forge a governance model that honors both planetary interconnection and local autonomy. The stakes have never been higher, for it is in these new heights of possibility—where sovereignty is configured anew—that the future of human dignity, cultural richness, and spiritual resonance is being written, line by line, in the language of computation.
References
- Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press.
- Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Urbanomic.
- Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. University of Chicago Press.
- Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. University of Minnesota Press.
