The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 198 页

What has been called “ ubiquitous computing ” since the 1970s (and will soon simply be called “ computing ” ) refers to an evolutionary transition of computation from a generic type of equipment object ( “ this one thing is a computer but that one is not a computer ” ) toward a technical environment in which synthetic computation is, like electricity, a generic property of things in the world. We say that light bulbs, toasters, and remote controls are electric but not that they are electricity or “ electricity machines. ” Instead, for them, electrification is just another physical aspect alongside plastic compounds and steel wire. For better or worse, so too for computation: cars, doors, lights, window switches, and all forms of significant gateways and networked pebbles become computational media. On this general computation, Cory Doctorow observes that “ the world we live in today is made of computers. We don’t have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in; we don’t have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers; a 3D printer is not a device, it’s a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it’s a generalpurpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software. ” ⁶ Sensor nets and smart surfaces transform whole landscapes into intelligent territories (or remake their dumbness in new ways). As the ubiquity of computation extends to finer and finer granularity, smaller and smaller, it enlivens the things of the world (we hope) in perhaps startling and even animistic ways. The share of traffic dedicated to humanto-human communication (or even human-to-thing) is overwhelmed by tidal waves of object chatter coming online all around us. As it extends to envelop yet more vast gestures, the oscillating chatter of stuff that is now given voice only gets denser and more intricate. Perhaps instead of inaugurating some full-spectrum mastery, our own attempts to communicate with a ubiquitously computational world become but one vernacular voice among the object legions.

For such a computational landscape of things to communicate with itself, it must map and enumerate all the things that can send and receive information, and so provides each with an (at least temporarily) unique address, regardless of what that address might resolve. As said, that addressability does not replicate the proximity of those things in the real world (the way a sequential postal address does) but instead organizes them according to a universal indexical simulation that provides a bewilderingly high resolution of possible addresses and even produces new routing geographies and locations in its own image. In that it controls the very possibility of communication between things, the governance of the address becomes more than the management of an addressing schema; it becomes a governance of the addressee and of the addressable in general. ⁷ Besides the technological and epistemological complexity, it also suggests possible channels of direct economic relations between points within this vast address cloud, any single instance also a node of, for example, supply, demand, valuation, or debt. Consider the 2008 financial crisis. One effect of planetary computation on economic geography is the virtualization of sovereign currencies into n-dimensional abstractions and the consequent disturbance in the force of money to represent the exchange value of commodities, assets, work, and debt. What does money point to? The ultimate reference of a currency is always mythic ( “ Gold? Seriously? ” ), but when it is reduced to absolute pulses of light, the link between a currency, the value that it contains, and the thing or process that is exchanged for that currency becomes even more unwound. Among other things, the financial crisis is a crisis of addressability, a de-addressing of things, and one that continues consolidating a shift within global market economics (when not also collapsing them). We can only anticipate what forms of high weirdness will ensue, as the paired computerization of matter-into-monies (i.e., carbon credits trading, where the value of money is itself measured in carbon) and monies-into-virtuality (i.e., the light pulses of high-speed trading) continues to evolve and accelerate. ⁸ New addressing schemes to locate and coordinate instances of value are multiplying, both as generic currency (bitcoin blockchains) and as platforms for brokering things-with-value (various sharing economy schemes). At stake in all this is also the design of the economy of information itself, from the smallest-scale object or gesture to the largest topological frameworks, and interrelations across scales by drawing and managing an orthodox map in the form of an address table. ⁹ What gets to count and to whom, and who profits from merely counting? If one is unaddressed, then one cannot speak or be spoken to, and so in turn, resistance to official addressable geography and its enforcements characterizes so many histories of resistance to authorities wishing to consolidate their power by consolidating ability to nominate space. ¹⁰

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Address Layer