Who or what could organize universal addressing platforms and distribute their rights and regulations, especially now? Anthropocenic economic axioms lean everything toward an imperative of connection, to link one market with another, one location with another, one gesture with another, and to capture all things under the rubric of universal exchange where they might communicate without interference, friction, noise, distance, or delay. Its capture and transmission of energy (e.g., physical, geographic, cognitive, chemical) is also, if not essentially, a relay and mediation of these forms as information (their storage, calculation, transmission). From the perspective of deep address, these economies are but one local site of a more comprehensive congregation of reactions. <sup>42</sup> The ultimate interest of this prehensile vortex is a white hot absolute communication, as means and end in itself. We have no idea how to govern in this context and will likely fall back on the structural compulsion to transparency and an enforced necessity of appearance, everything summoned past the threshold of the pornographic. For The Stack, appearance may already be “ compulsory, ” as nothing is couched within its architecture without prior nomination of its presence and identity (and its deformation and alterity). This mandate is similar to the function of money as the mediator of universal equivalence between things and actions, which guarantees their appearance one to the other according to that reductive exchangeability. We might then anticipate a full financialization of addressability whereby hoarding and speculating on the capacity to address things and events is itself a commodity with global value. However, while the Address layer contributes to The Stack ’ s totality through this compulsory cartography in which anything unaddressed cannot have formal presence and everything past, present, and future must be addressed, it is not necessary that they are representable through a single master perspective. That is, while the universal appetite of deep address appears as a totally synchronic space, an atonal closed field (an atemporal zero-sum geography, the ultimate walled garden), and so invites reflexive reactions of resistance, strategic opacity, and lines of flight, the totality is far more fragile and unpredictable than we might wish or fear. 4
We can then summarize two basic conditions that we will want to bounce off one another until they crack. The first is algorithmic logic in the service of a ferocious autophagic efficiency that characterizes the myopia of the post-Fordist aesthetics of logistics. The second is that the individuation and virtualization of particulate substance into a self-transparent computational material through standardized indexes of nested relations would become a prerequisite for the unrestrained financialization of matter, living and nonliving. But not only is the totality of The Stack itself deeply unstable, it ’ s not clear that its abyssal scope of addressability and its platform for the proliferation of near-infinite signifiers within a mutable finite space are actually correspondent with the current version of Anthropocenic capitalism. Concurrent to its immediate programs, deep address also distributes a mesh over existing supply chains that has the potential to destabilize their closed hub-and-spoke topologies. The valorization of the node within a decentralized network provides to it a certain degree of autonomy to form new edges on its own without the permissive provision from a central authority, market, or provider. The apparently irreducible plane of the addressable landscape begins to percolate with odd links and “ conversations ” between unpredictable pairings of sender and receiver. Organic conspiracies blossom in our midst, and these accidents are part of the unpredictability of platforms. Deep address demands appearance, but appearance to what? Toward what forum is it a forensic medium? How many utterly incongruent territories can evolve through this platform, one layered on top of the other, speaking completely different languages, deaf to one another ’ s claims on anything? There is no reason that the same object might not have a million different addresses for a million different schemes, most of which might not even be aware of the existence of the other and need never be. In this, the radical transparency of utter appearance becomes but one worldly immediacy, within the space of a particular addressing territory that may be illiterate of others and invisible to them. While any haecceity is obligated to appear to its own semantic references and in this is given both subjectivity and subjugation, it is also free to enter into relations with others that enroll it in exotic extrinsic economies. This potential blessing of drift toward alien incommunication is along with the very abyssality of deep address itself, a most productive accident of the Address layer, and one we would do well to explore.
Address Layer
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