The Circle: Geographies of Network vs. Geometries of Disjunction

“In a society of control,” Deleuze wrote, “the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas.”1 This statement describes the immaterial nature of the notion of corporation, somehow denying its architectural roots, by depicting it as an entity in perpetual “metastability.”2 But if a corporation is defined by its immaterial flows, it is also described by the territorial basis of its nodes, legible in the headquarters of the corporation itself. Today, more than in the past, the network of intense online connection seems to have its fortified zones: IT campuses, research laboratories, and headquarters of the Internet giants appear as physical nodes for producing digital technologies and fostering global connectivity, but they also materialize as new strongholds of control and power. A kind of militarization makes these centers inaccessible and fortified garrisons, which paradoxically produces a spatial model that separates instead of connecting. Among the multinational technology companies, Apple is the pivotal example of a corporation serving a global marketplace while challenging, in the form of its headquarters, notions of virtual and physical space, connection and separation, centralization and colonization.