Common addressing tables are a means to enable forms of universal communication with sometimes very different ends, and so more than one specter of ubiquitous computation haunts the landscapes of our material imagination. The design problematics of planetary-scale computation push up against the expansion of infrastructure at urban and transcontinental scales but also draw on the dilution of small-scale objects into something like a universal solvent of synthetic computation. By comparison, we are no longer so impressed by the prospect of “ smart objects, ” interactive habitats, and reflexive architectures. Now projects seek “ networked matter, ” the hybridizing of digital bits and pieces of the physical world, both above and below anthropometric scale, into an ambient field of systematic intercommunication and assembly. Joining the battalions of RFID-enabled objects would be smart dust, robotic insects, transistors inside of living cells, and programmable clay filled with zillions of nanometric machines that can take on any animated form. Research programs such as Hewlett-Packard ’ s Central Nervous System of the Earth (CeNSE), work toward the trillion-sensor world in which bridges, trains, warehouses, earthquake faults, trees, flowers and animals, and even internal organs are filled with tiny sensors, each transmitting data directly to one another or to the Cloud. <sup>4</sup> The promise (or threat) of designing with a computation that is so deeply laced into the structures and behaviors of matter is an ambition for addressing platforms of comprehensive transparency and the remote interaction with the world at a chemical and atomic scale. The motes falling in space that fascinated Lucretius would be addressable data points and their transit fields a programmable clinamen. Why stop at a trillion? The “ googol sensor world ” or “ Avogadro ’ s number address world ” might allow Users to search the whereabouts and state conditions of any “ thing ” that one could imagine as a discrete addressable event. This open assignment is the basis of many different possible designs. One path suggests a full-spectrum surveillance society, in which no biochemical misdeed goes unsearchable and unnoticed, but another suggests an almost inconceivable reopening of the possible qualities, grammars, temporalities, and polities of material communication and design. For one, the world closes down on itself, reduced like an algebraic equation to baseline symmetries, but for the other, it opens up as never before. The design brief of the Address layer of The Stack contains the seeds of both outcomes.
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Address Layer