Extrastatecraft

1. Infrastructure as a Global Operating System

Far from hidden, infrastructure is now the overt point of contact and access between us all—the rules governing the space of everyday life.

Infrastructure is ubiquitous. Beyond traditional physical networks like roads and pipes, infrastructure today includes invisible systems like microwaves, electronic devices, and shared standards for everything from credit cards to management styles. These elements are not just hidden substrates but the visible, everyday rules shaping our world.

Repeatable formulas dominate. Much of the built environment consists of reproducible products and arrangements engineered for logistics and profit, forming what can be called "infrastructure space." Examples include:

• Big box stores and strip malls
• Tract housing and suburbs
• Free zones and industrial parks
• Container ports and business parks
  These are not unique designs but repeatable phenomena, constituting an infrastructural technology.

Global urbanism is formulaic. Entire cities are now constructed based on formulas, replicating models like Shenzhen or Dubai with generic skyscrapers. Infrastructure is no longer just the substructure but the very parameters of global urbanism, driven by logistics and the bottom line.

2. Extrastatecraft: Power Beyond the State

Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but in these spatial, infrastructural technologies—often because market promotions or prevailing political ideologies lubricate their movement through the world.

Power operates outside statecraft. Extrastatecraft describes influential activities that occur outside of, in addition to, and sometimes in partnership with state governments. These dynamic systems of space, information, and power generate de facto forms of polity faster than official governance can legislate.

Infrastructure creates new authorities. Large infrastructure projects have historically created a need for administrative authority comparable to the state. Today, they require direction from new constellations of international, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental players, operating in spaces of multiple, overlapping jurisdictions.

Market forces drive change. Extrastatecraft leverages market promotions and prevailing political ideologies to move spatial and infrastructural technologies globally. This allows consequential changes to bypass traditional legislative processes, often remaining undisclosed while profoundly impacting the world.

3. Infrastructure Space as Spatial Software

Infrastructure space, with the power and currency of software, is an operating system for shaping the city.

Space is an information medium. Even without digital enhancements, infrastructure space behaves like spatial software. It's not just static objects but an active medium that organizes and circulates objects and content, dictating the rules of the urban game.

The action is the form. Borrowing from McLuhan, the "message" (declared content like a unique building) can distract from what the "medium" (infrastructural matrix) is doing. Information resides in the invisible, powerful activities – the protocols, routines, schedules – that infrastructure space manifests.

An updating platform. Unlike a static building, infrastructure space is an updating platform unfolding over time. It encodes relationships between buildings and dictates logistics, acting as a content manager for the urban milieu.

4. Disposition: The Hidden Agency of Space

Disposition is the character or propensity of an organization that results from all its activity.

Beyond declared intent. Disposition is the inherent agency or capacity of an organization, often undeclared in its dominant stories or rhetoric. It's like Twain reading the river's surface for subtle signs of underlying turbulence, rather than just seeing the pretty landscape.

Potential in relationships. Disposition is immanent not just in moving parts but in the relationships between components of a spatial organization. A ball on an incline has disposition even before it rolls; its potential is present in its position and geometry.

Revealed over time. Assessing disposition requires observing how an organization deals with variables over time. It's a changing set of actions, a latent potential or tendency present even without a specific event, describing what the organization is doing.

5. Active Forms: Hacking the System's Code

Different from the object forms of masterpiece buildings or master plans, these active forms operate in another gear or register, to act like bits of code in the system.

Tools for shaping disposition. Active forms are like software bits that influence the disposition of infrastructure space. They are not static objects but dynamic elements that establish potentials and relationships.

Key types of active forms:

• Multiplier: A repeatable component that propagates effects (e.g., suburban house, elevator, cell phone).
• Switch/Remote: Points of access or control that modulate flows (e.g., highway interchange, cable landing, ISP).
• Wiring/Topology: The arrangement of connections in a network (e.g., linear, radial, mesh).
• Interplay/Governor: A set of instructions linking interdependent variables to regulate a system over time (e.g., Savannah's growth protocol).

Designing action, not just objects. Engaging with infrastructure space requires designing these active forms and their interplay. This gives design the power and currency of software, crafting relationships and sequences rather than just singular shapes.

6. Misleading Stories Mask True Dispositions

However immaterial, these ideological stories have the power to buckle concrete and bend steel, and they can often be difficult to escape.

Stories as active forms. Cultural stories and ideologies attached to infrastructure space are powerful active forms. They can script the use of space and influence its disposition, often diverging from the organization's actual activity.

Dominant, often paradoxical, narratives:

• Military: Infrastructure as a primary military asset, blurring civil and military boundaries.
• Liberal: Infrastructure as a standard-bearer of free markets and economic freedom, often masking manipulation and inequality.
• Universal: Infrastructure as a platform for rationalizing global exchange and fostering a global society, sometimes leading to irrationality and bureaucracy.

Creating ideological collisions. These stories, often rooted in Enlightenment or modernist tautologies, can become ossified ideologies. They create confusion and conflict, but also provide ready audiences and can assemble powerful political narratives, even when decoupled from reality.

7. The Zone: Extrastatecraft's Spatial Formula

Having swallowed the city whole, the zone is now the germ of a city-building epidemic that reproduces glittering mimics of Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

A ubiquitous spatial technology. The free zone (Export Processing Zone, Special Economic Zone) is a dominant formula for making urban space globally. It has evolved from fenced enclaves to entire cities or city-states.

Operating outside domestic law. Zones typically operate under independent authorities, offering incentives like tax exemptions, deregulation, and cheap labor to attract business. This creates a de facto form of polity beyond state jurisdiction.

Paradoxical and mutable. Promoted as free and efficient, zones often become sites of labor/environmental abuse and complex extrastate governance. Despite being deemed suboptimal economically, their popularity makes them powerful multipliers, ripe for manipulation or carrying alternative urbanities.

8. Broadband: A Technoscape of Extrastatecraft

Just as mobile telephony is an information network, infrastructure space itself is a carrier of information, and it reciprocally shapes the resilience and robustness of all the broadband networks.

A field of rapid change. Broadband infrastructure (fiber-optic cable, mobile telephony) is a pervasive and consequential field of infrastructure space, especially in developing countries like Kenya. Its growth is driven by global telecoms and international organizations.

Complex spatial organization. Broadband involves multiple topologies:

• Linear terrestrial cable (territorializing like roads)
• Atomized airborne mobile networks (microwave towers, handsets)
• Clustered switches (points of access, service providers)
  Bottlenecks and monopolies can develop at these switches.

New business models and governance. The large populations of mobile users in developing countries are sponsoring new "trickle-up" business models (e.g., M-PESA). Extrastate players (telecoms, IGOs, consultancies) are deeply involved, influencing development and urban space, sometimes promoting outdated spatial formulas like zones.

9. Quality Standards: The Power of Meaninglessness

Over a million organizations in 170 countries have been ISO 9000 certified, and yet no one can say what ISO 9000 actually is.

Global meta-organization. ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is a private NGO and a parliament of extrastatecraft, setting technical and management standards globally. It convenes nations and private entities, often headquartered in Geneva.

The mystery of "quality". ISO's most popular standard, ISO 9000, is a management standard for "quality." It doesn't specify product performance but outlines processes for achieving internal goals. Its broad appeal stems partly from this lack of specific content, allowing it to apply universally.

Habit and bureaucracy. Quality management has become a global custom, a service industry with its own jargon and rituals (PDCA, etc.). While it promotes habits of information gathering and process, it often avoids setting binding standards on critical issues like labor or environment, potentially inoculating organizations against meaningful regulation.

10. Traditional Activism vs. Extrastatecraft

Attempting to cure its failures with “purification,” the left consolidates, and expels those who seem to compromise its values.

Declaration vs. undeclared power. Traditional activism often relies on declaration, opposition, and taking a stand against a named opponent. This requires courage and adherence to principles, often assuming a binary stance (David vs. Goliath).

Easily tricked and exhausted. However, powerful players in extrastatecraft operate with fluid, undeclared intentions, using proxies and disguises. They can easily mislead or neutralize activism that expects direct confrontation or relies solely on forthrightness.

Constraints of the repertoire. Focusing only on "politics proper" or righteous opposition can limit activism's effectiveness. Seeking purification or defining a single enemy can lead to internal divisions and exhaust energies, ironically acting as camouflage for the real, subtle forms of power.

11. An Alternative Activist Repertoire

Supplementing these forms of dissent are activist stances that are both harder to target and less interested in being right.

Beyond opposition. An alternative "extrastatecraft" for activism uses techniques that are less heroic, less confrontational, and more subtle. It doesn't aim to destroy the system but to recondition its disposition.

Unorthodox auxiliaries. This repertoire employs techniques often overlooked in traditional politics:

• Gossip, rumor, hoax
• Gift-giving (pandas)
• Exaggerated compliance
• Doubling (proxies, imposters)
• Comedy
• Remote control
• Meaninglessness, distraction, irrationality
• Hacking, entrepreneurialism

Altering the chemistry. These techniques are politically inflected active forms. They work by altering the underlying disposition of infrastructure space, often without direct confrontation, making them harder to target and less likely to escalate tensions.

12. The Art of Altering Disposition

Releasing the tense grip of binary resistance, the auxiliary activist never turns around for the duel but continues pacing away into a new
[ERROR: Incomplete response]

Last updated: June 11, 2025