Airport urbanism in general is characterized by this critical cohabitation of security and entertainment: securitized entertainment and entertaining securitization. In what Virilio calls a “ new topological order, ” control is both hard and soft. The machine guns are real and terrorists ’ obsession with these sites is real, and the unspoken threat of being grabbed offstage to be questioned behind closed doors by state agents able to eject the User back across the world is also real. <sup>14</sup> No less real are the digital departure and arrival screens, the hyper-legible black-on-yellow Helvetica signage, the precise strategic placement of the coffee carts exactly so many steps away from bathrooms, and again that omnipresent media and candy matrix. Human occupation of this space, a soft enveloping of delays and digestion in collaboration with the hard enveloping of security and filtering, is elevated now to a general principle of contemporary urbanism. For Virilio, this easygoing layering of exceptional, militarized space with the ambient landscape of airports ’ generic “ Singaporization ” of the global city, positioned at the critical interface connecting urban nodes within an expanded global sphere, is the model for the city as rendered as information hardware and software. That is, the airport discloses without fanfare that cities are airports. Airports are not simulations of cities; rather cities are simulations of airports. It is where police deep-scan your person while blending you a delicious smoothie of your choosing, and to do so without irony or contradiction of purpose and affect. But this is not (only) a surreal pun on despotism; as universal urbanism, the business model also has to include the reactive management of individual User actions provoked by this accidentally sadistic little drama.
The scattering distribution of interfaces and the intensification of potential agency reflected in the increased computational capacities of each does not dissipate the weight of platform authorities, but it does reformulate their permissions. Perhaps counterintuitively as interfaces become ubiquitous, interface decentralization becomes the engine of Cloud centralization, and as these interfaces become channels of increasing end User management, swarm intelligence, and spontaneous utility, Cloud centralization becomes as well the engine of interface decentralization. The logic of the City layer of The Stack power is thus both decentralized top-down and centralized bottom-up , as well as directed side-to-side interaction monetized as a raw social currency of cognition and circulation. Look over there by gate 12 at the search field on every screen, in every hand and on every lap, while the Users wait for their flights. See that what finally empowers the interface is less its function as some coercive frame for all signification and gesture than because it is so uniquely and relentlessly responsive to the nuances of every User ’ s own desires, interests, and intentions. It may do one because it can do the other.
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