"De facto, functional decision-making — you could call it sovereignty, although I don't think we even need this word — is built into technical systems in ways that are not available to legal manipulation… Traditional Schmittian concepts about 'the political' … no longer really explain much… Technology can even be defined as the automation of decision."Benjamin Bratton, interviewed in Palladium, 11 January 2021
Bratton isn't arguing that sovereignty should move. He's reporting that it already has — into the stack of software and infrastructure that actually decides who gets water pressure, credit, a visa, a search result, before any legislature is consulted. His displacement runs downward, into the machine. This site's bet runs the other way: outward, into the metabolic systems the machine depends on to keep running at all. Both readings agree on the diagnosis — the old seat is empty. They disagree hard about what's sitting in it now.