In expanding the space of potential addressability, the protocol interfaces between any two things that could be encapsulated into a provisional incorporation claim for them a position within a territorial apparatus. Even so there can ’ t be one single necessary relationship between a comprehensive computational addressing mechanism, such as the Address layer of The Stack, and the given distribution of things in the world. There is no one matrix of correspondence between a primary planetary plane and a second artificial machinic layer. Instead, between the two are qualified simulations and countersimulations that always flow both ways. Address is not simply a virtual layer constructed at scale so that it could overlay the first plane, like Borges ’ s one-to-one scale map, causing the original geography of positions to fade, crackle, and blow away. Rather, the interlacing territories blend and perforate, signifying within the other, feeding back and forth until each is interior to the other. Through addressability, the linking of matter and information otherwise disconnected is also a reinscribing of the boundaries of potential aggregations and a restructuring of their amalgamations and divisions through a recognition of their conditions and dependencies as a formal “ haecceity ” (after Charles Sanders Peirce). The correlation between an address and an addressee puts into question the stability of referent, which can be temporary, slow, or fast. As such, the proper unit for deep address wouldn ’ t be an Internet of Things, which suggests durable appliances beeping at each other, but an Internet of Haecceities, addressable specificities that might name particularities as they come and go, even before and after they exist for individual Users. <sup>39</sup>
For The Stack, the compositional logic of addressing is not contained only within the Address layer but links operations up and down from the local to global and back again. The Stack could be said to compose lines between addressees located elsewhere, as the Address layer provides identification and rendering as “ present ” whatever might be available for delineation or containment. Address is like a valve through which the nomos of the Cloud cleaves subdivisions smaller than the geographic, and where it draws landscape-scale calculable interiors. At the Earth and Cloud layers, platform service empires organize open and closed populations of addressable Users, sensors, data sets, and interaction platforms, among others, from which they absorb and recirculate patterns of value. The worlds that the Cloud layer provides is limited to what it can address and be addressed by. At the City layer, Address augments urban intensities of activity, attention, circulation, simultaneity, segmentation. That addition, where avenues, apertures, and avatars are gathered into tacit micro-stacks, doesn ’ t (necessarily) override local sites and their embedded rhythms, but it can compress and expand them by linking each interface with distant events. Above, at the Interface layer, interactive screens and programmable objects structure circuits of cause and effect undertaken through their summary diagrams, but can only present, frame, and instrumentalize what it is possible to address and summon. Only then are the gymnastic accumulation of traces that outline the User organized as a set of addressable positions, and only then can she affect and be affected by The Stack. Like pixels resolving into a portrait image with given distance, the pattern of instances that constitute the biography of the User for The Stack is a mosaic of addressable haecceities, and zoomed out further, the encapsulated User is also in turn another one of these resolved addressees.
Address Layer
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