Notes On "State As Service"

The notion of ubiquitous, subscription-based technology has become a staple of postmodern life since the 2010s. Slowly but surely, the infrastructure of daily existence has migrated to the Cloud under the guise of convenience and speed. The initial techno-optimist altruism and hacker spirit of owning property, defined by the possession of powerful hardware and the means to own data independently has all but evaporated.

In its place, a plethora of never-ending "wrappers", "services" and "apps" often proprietary with the dreaded eternal monthly fee have colonized and taken a complete monopoly of cultural consumption. With the advent of generative AI, this monopoly has extended to the means of cultural production itself.

We have witnessed a quiet but total inversion of the property regime: the early anarcho-capitalist spirit of the cypherpunks has been displaced by a new form of Cloud Feudalism.

One can no longer function as a citizen of the algorithmic order without holding at least a few subscriptions. Naturally, to scale such provision of computational consumption, the homesteading spirit of self-hosting has given way to Megacorps. These entities are now the guardians of the digital commons, ensuring that all may partake in the information revolution, but only under Terms and Conditions attached to the fabled "Subscription." This reality is far removed from the lofty libertarian impulses of late-90s hacker culture. We have accepted that "everything is not computer", but rather "everything is subscription," and consumers now take this rentier dynamic for granted. We own nothing, accessing our digital lives as tenants on corporate servers.

However, as these corporations grow in size and stature, they cease to be mere service providers. They become centers of awesome computational power, rivaling nation-states in logistical capacity and surveillance reach. This shift signals a transition that was once the domain of speculative fiction. The dystopian landscape of Cyberpunk 2077, where megacorporations like Arasaka and Militech have eclipsed national governments, has noe escaped the realm of a cautionary cultural nareative; it is becoming a geotechnomic roadmap. In that fictional universe, the "corp" does not just lobby the state; it assumes the functions of the state, maintaining its own armies, intelligence agencies, and currency. We are drifting uncomfortably close to this reality, where the "Megacorp" is not a subject of the sovereign, but a peer.

Today, computation is not merely a utility; it is the primary domain of war. This raises the uncomfortable question of whether Sovereign States must give up Sovereignty irseld in order to compete. If the defining capital of the 21st century is compute and more specifically data and the hyperscale processing power required to train Large Language Models or run complex ballistic simulations, then globally speaking the State is already behind. Building sovereign infrastructure is slow, expensive, and bureaucratically paralyzed. Buying it "As A Service" is efficient, instant but potentially lethal to national independence. Megacorps particularly in GAE are not neutral arbiters and if coerced by Washington can easily lock you out of the subscription.

Thus our age is one where we witness the fracturing of the state into a client of its own creation, a dynamic visible in the "War as Service" model testing the boundaries of the post-WWII order. The conflict in Ukraine served as a grim proof-of-concept. When sovereign infrastructure was obliterated, the state’s digital survival relied on the good graces of private entities. The deployment of Starlink provided a lifeline, yet it introduced a non-state veto player into the theater of war.

Much like the fictional Militech or Arasaka dictating terms of engagement, a private board in Silicon Valley could effectively geofence a conflict zone or throttle communications, rendering a national military mute. A state that cannot route its own communications is no longer a sovereign military power; it is a subscriber to violence, subject to the Terms of Service. By this particular estimate there are perhaps only a handful of truly Sovereign powers left in the world - China, America and Russia? Maybe the French? (Yes surprising at first glance)

This logic of dependency has been formalized by the world's most powerful military. The US Department of Defense’s move toward the "Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability" (JWCC), a contract shared among tech giant is a tacit admission that the Pentagon cannot build its own cloud. The US military, once the progenitor of the internet, is now a tenant on commercial infrastructure.

Furthermore, the intelligence cycle itself is becoming indistinguishable from the private data brokerage economy. When "Surveillance Valley" corporations hold more granular data on a population than the census bureau or the secret service, the State is forced to purchase insights about its own citizens. This is the commodification of the Panopticon. The government does not own the eyes; it merely rents the feed. The risk is an epistemic crisis where the State sees the world only through the filtered, algorithmic lens provided by a vendor.

The pivot from "Software as a Service" to "State as a Service" is not merely an administrative change; it is a constitutional crisis disguised as procurement. If the State cannot own its means of computation, intelligence, and defense, it reverts to a feudal vassalage, paying tribute to the Megacorps that hold the keys to the algorithmic order.

And truly God knows best