The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 201 页

Other programs focus on the design of the spatial, temporal, and semantic relations between physical and data objects. Bruce Sterling ’ s influential Shaping Things introduced the term SPIME to designate the hybrid profile of an object, as accumulated all the way from its virtual design, to sourcing, to assembly, through its use and consumption, and its ultimate disassembly back into entropic matter. He situates this at the end of a schematic history of artificial objects, from artisanal craft to post-Fordism, and suggests that the SPIME is the modality of objects defined by the conjunction of computer-aided design, pervasive big data, computational logistics, global sourcing, and waste materials management. It is less the object as melted into the computational solvent, but one that talks to the platform through the long arc of its conception and assemblage, oscillating between virtual and tangible states and shedding metadata all along the way. This “ thing ” is ultimately indistinguishable from (if not reducible to) the traces that it produces about itself and its various relations with the world that brought it into being. ¹⁶ The SPIME is then a kind of meta-diagram that precedes the object ’ s manufacture, couches its real physical life in the world, and outlasts its recycling; it is the “ thing ” defined as an artificial temporal instance of digitalphysical relations from beginning to end. The politics of the SPIME motivates interest in making global supply chains deeply transparent, and in principle more accountable and sustainable. The hope is that if any interested User can “ read ” the complete biography of a thing, measure all of the conditions of its appearance, use, and disappearance now captured as extensible metadata, then the politics of its chemical and mineral origins (as discussed in Earth chapter) or factory labor conditions, or nutritional authenticity, or post-use death cycle might become more legible currencies of everyday material culture. From other highly controlled perspectives, such transparencies are common in global supply chains but are guarded proprietary sources of competitive information, not public platforms (see the discussion in the Cloud chapter on Amazon and Walmart). But as object fashioning also moves from far-flung extraction-design-factory-distribution chains to scenarios associated with networked 3D printing, then the public constitution of the thing as a traceable data shell is perhaps both more apparent and more salient for end Users. Every time that the schematic instructions of physical object are downloaded and rendered into atoms, that transformation and the relevant information about who, what, where, when, how, and why that took place might be added to the cumulative “ objectivity ” of an object that is itself already a networked entity. Given the disruptive potential of a tectonic shift toward the economies of additive manufacturing, including the decentralization of the “ industrial Internet, ” the related control and governance issues are uncertain. They might range from the dangerously annoying (such as digital-rights management schemes for tangible objects crippled by remote rentier platforms attempting to collect royalties and fees on forks, lamps, and chairs) ¹⁷ to the annoyingly dangerous (the widespread distribution of tools of mayhem, and new forms of virus spread through distributed object networks, either a real biological virus ¹⁸ or physical malware or combinations thereof ¹⁹).

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