From these, larval proto-citizenships are derived not just from formal borders and envelopes but also from the aggregate and crisscrossing steel-energy-information envelopes. As we all share some relationship to these composite envelopes, by using them and by being used by them, that commonality coheres and automates User positions in relation to one another. The road makes us all drivers, the fiber cable line makes us all callers, and the City layer makes us all inhabitants of a composite urban territory. It suggests that any one of us is (or could be, or should be) less a political subject of this one city— London, Mumbai, Shanghai — but of the City, of the globally uneven mesh of amalgamated infrastructures and delaminated jurisdictions. As for humans, our shared but unequal relationships to this aggregate metaurban layer of The Stack also means that political subjectivity is resolved variously for the “ User” of energy, information, or land. Different Users of the City layer are curtailed toward different outcomes, even if the calculative terms of resolution are common. An individual User ’ s value, profile, and footprint are sorted within this consolidated index, fixing the City layer ’ s control program, as much as terms of a common access and rights of inhabitation and mobility throughout the layer ’ s wider expanse. The program of capture within the envelopes of a given city is always as real as the prospects of flight, but neither is guaranteed. For both of these, residential jurisdiction of a single city may be only one moment within the arc of a larger itinerary. Any one of us might only be passing through for a short time (on tourist or worker visas) or credentialized as formal citizens or restrained from leaving (refugee camps, prison cities, factory towns) or employed to drift across urban infrastructural polis (legally or not). Each of us passes from one relative state of motility to another, day by day or lifetime by lifetime. We are situated in motion, both inside generic cities, modeled on airports, translating less and less between increasingly homogeneous places, and also in the heterodoxy of urbanity as globality for which interlocking networks of passage are leveraged to support mutually reinforcing rhythms of spatial consumption. Still the platform sovereignties that emerge in the technical relations of this composite urbanity are at best contradictory. As for any grid, the reversible interfacial surface of the urban fabric can produce a durable User subject because it also by definition is a potential technology of capture and control. Part of the design brief for The Stack is to disseminate a repertoire of accidents that might frustrate the more unwanted forms of centripetal incarceration. The ultimate challenge for this is to conjure alien genres of urbanization from the bounded universality of the generic User subject position: not an undead Kantian cosmopolitanism but a geopolitical hypermaterialism for which the “ right to the city, ” and therefore to The Stack, is an essential suffrage of all meaningful Users, human and otherwise. <sup>10</sup>
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City Layer