Instead, we also need to consider a politics from the perspective of the addressed looking out at the world. Because each object is understood not only as a discrete entity but as a durable intersection of multiple ancestor and descendant objects, events, and processes, all of which are inscribed and archived in some sort of available “ cloud ” of traces, a mature Address layer infrastructure would also generate second- and thirdorder layers of metadata about metadata produced by the logistical intersections of new and old objects, coming and going. Like a text, any object can contain a multitude of contingent layers of logistical trace, including its location in open or proprietary supply chain models, as one instance in a network of metadata, traces, and relations with its own semantic meanings held in relation and association with others. “ It ” is contained inevitably within multiple sets of structured data at once, each set perhaps overlapping, perhaps aware of the work of jurisdictional categorization done by other sets and perhaps not. Any parameter of the object is articulated by an addressing of it as a nameable entity, as a site of interconnected relations, or as a producer of metadata about itself and those relations, but its appearance as a “ virtually discrete ” thing, a fleeting event, or a cipher for networked commodity flows is fixed at a specific location within a global addressable space so that “ it ” can say things to other things and other things can say things to it. Once more, for any trace to be visible, it must be enumerated and enunciated, and as these inscriptions for the virtual object are instances within a universal space of trace enumeration, they are addresses. This addressability of the object (or sub-object, or relation of assemblage, or SPIME, or event of association, or trace, or commodity life cycle phase) zooms between spatial and temporal scales, gaining complexity exponentially as data and metadata for second- and third-order relations accumulate. This ecology of proliferating data points generated by and about the flows of material cultures seems to aspire toward a beyond human-scale universal architecture for addressing the qualities of relations between all parameters. Seen through deep address, the ultimate politics of the Internet of Things hinges on the dynamic between the open universality of such a platform architecture and its global closure as a total geography. The abyssal scope of this architecture, its exponential layers of relations upon relations , and its essential position within The Stack, may be the most important intersection between the SPIME motif and deep address, and may be the most integral accident of the Address layer.
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Address Layer