Computation, algorithms, big data, and other digital materialities have increasingly permeated different spaces and places, producing ‘deep’ and contested spaces of calculation and performance, no more so than in ‘deep’ algorithmic learning. The study of territory, sovereignty and state dynamics have gained significant attention as digital networks and materials have appeared to undermine state borders and control. However, this paper argues that a similar attention should be paid towards the concept of computational terrains, following emergent attention on terrains in Dialogues in Human Geography (Elden 2021; Squire 2021) and in relation to feminist thinking (Jackman et al. 2020). In this paper, I argue that simply understanding computation and its use through territorialisation misses important new spaces of political geography. I do so by embracing Amoore’s distinction between ‘Cloud I’ and ‘Cloud II’ in Cloud Ethics (2020) to offer how computation terrains can help us explore such new spaces and how they intersect in novel ways with state power. Such a study can deepen our understanding of how computation is not simply about networks, data, and routing – akin to early study of ‘cyber geography’ (Dodge, 2001) - but about calculation, cognition, and more-than-human politics that permit new readings on how cyber-attacks ‘work’, help to conceptualise more-than-human computational and algorithmic agencies, as well as concerns over disinformation. Through (auto)ethnographic fieldwork across scenes of cyber security, including malware and machine learning, I (re)situate the role of computation in everyday and global affairs.
Mots clés : cybersecurity|terrains|more-than-human|computation|agency
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