For the Address layer of The Stack, however, our interest is focused less on “ the Internet ” as it exists than on the expanded fields of addressability per se to coordinate communication between things, whether through a single universal geography or multiple competing systems. We ’ re interested not just in how the essential procedures of addressing do more than tally up the digital world as we see it, but also in how they can allow us (force us) to engage with scales and qualities of communication otherwise inconceivable. We can understand addressing as a formal system, regardless of what it is organizing. Addressing depends on the identification of a singularity (the thing, site, event, however heavy or ephemeral, that is enumerated as a discrete entity), on a system of bifurcators (the names, hierarchies, and sets that include the singularity as a member, such as a street name, a postal prefix, or an IP address quadrant), and on a resolver (a universal or idiosyncratic table that can route messages by matching any enumerated address string to the proper entity in the world). As we ’ ll see, this combination can produce several productive accidents for the Address layer of The Stack. These include the enforcement of social hierarchies based on the capitalization of private addresses by some actors and an exploitable exposure of addresses for others. In this, address spoofing and the misidentification and misrecognition of addressable entities as something other than what they really are can have strategic consequences. The most interesting accident, however, may be a cracking open of the scope of what ultimately can be (and cannot be) specified as an addressable singularity in the first place. This will frame the greatest challenges not only to technological infrastructure but to our conventional understandings of what is and is not available for communication, human and nonhuman, physical and immaterial. It is there that the material ambition of The Stack may be most clearly demonstrated.
- Deep Address
As said, any “ thing ” that is incorporated into The Stack must be known by it. To be known, it must be locatable as a discrete entity among all others. To the extent that The Stack, as megastructure, provides a global and universal architecture for planetary computation, the space of potential location in which any thing may be situated is equally global and universal. That universality is necessary because the addressed “ things ” may be of very different kinds and qualities (an entry in a particular spreadsheet, a light bulb in a remote street lamp, a single gateway on a single transistor, a component on an orbiting satellite, or a unique chemical process in a Petri dish). The Address layer of The Stack organizes this telescoping from a global grid of locations to the specific local instance of the addressed and back again. This is the ultimate horizon of a truly ubiquitous computing that exceeds the experiential limits of anthropometric and anthropocentric design by enrolling entities into a scope of addressability across and between natural scales, from the infinitesimal to the astronomic, and across natural tempo, from instantaneous to geologic duration. This is deep address; it is where the scope of addressability expands to the point of breaking common sense of what is and is not a sender, a receiver, and message as the theoretical landscape of information promiscuity explodes.
Address Layer
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