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Paper short abstract

This paper theorises the Subscribed State, where governance shifts into proprietary cloud infrastructures owned by Amazon and Google. It shows how cloudification transforms democratic oversight, recasts bureaucrats as inefficiencies, and embeds state power within corporate algorithmic systems.

Paper long abstract

This paper theorises an infrastructural inversion of democratic governance, where the state is increasingly subsumed into the proprietary logic of cloud-based global digital platforms. We show how this represents a shift from territorial sovereignty to a "Subscribed State" model, where external corporate actors extend their influence over state decision-making. Under this paradigm, the core functions of the state are operationalised within black-boxed, privately owned infrastructures. The model prefigures a "more-than-now" future, where liberal democracy is challenged by the rise of an algorithmic state. By framing governance as a series of optimizations to be solved by AI, the project envisions a dehumanization of the public sector in favor of automated algorithmic systems. Consequently, the traditional "street-level bureaucrats" who mediate between the state and its citizens are increasingly framed as redundant "bureaucratic friction" or budgetary overhead.

We exemplify this transition through Project Nimbus, the wholesale "cloudification" of the Israeli state via Amazon (AWS) and Google (GCP). Through document analysis and interviews with actors within the state bureaucracy, we analyse how the cloudification of governance translates democratic deliberation into executable code. As state functions are outsourced to corporate cultures, the capacity for democratic oversight is eroded and replaced by a techno-solutionist approach that views AI as a more obedient and efficient alternative to a human, unionised workforce. This paper contends that the cloudification of the state redefines the relation between citizen and sovereign, questioning whether democratic agency can survive when the very substrate of governance is owned and governed by market-driven infrastructures.