The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 215 页

So if deep address evolves in such directions, its geopolitical effect may be driven more by these accidents, doublings, and reversals than by immaculate chambers of unventilated order. Should the day come when we are flying over cities spaying aerosolized smart motes with effectors, then not only will “ Street View ” come to mean a trillion possible perspectives at once, but also that the fertile soup germinating in every sidewalk crack will overflow the business models of today ’ s enterprises, to say the least. ⁴⁶ When our lives are linked by the deeply addressable traces, shed like dead skin cells, then the biographical and cognitive contiguity of the individual User will rupture into a thick cloud of shadows (more on this in the User chapter). Moreover, given that today at least 75 percent of all e-mail sent is spam, and that if you were to add together spambots, search engine spiders, scrappers, and so forth, well over half all Internet traffic is initiated by nonhumans, then for the deep address, how difficult a problem will object-to-object spam be? If the current net is any indicator, even the everyday Internet of Things may involve equipment, furniture, driverless cars, and sensor arrays ruthlessly direct-response marketing to one another. ⁴⁷ But perhaps it is not spam, and the presentation and exchange of alluring information is exactly what happens already in the coordination of sympathetic and symbiotic relationships in nature, say, between a bee and a bright flower or a peacock displaying for a peahen. One would have to stretch the metaphor well beyond snapping point to suggest that a field in spring bloom is “ spamming ” insects to come and fly their pollination routes, but to observe a slice of any complex ecology, at any scale, is to see that things are already communicating with one another, and with incredible intensity and intricacy. Some deep address scenarios would augment these lines of communication with formal addresses, sensors, and effectors, a prospect that leads in directions that are disruptive, destructive, creative, and outlandish. Would the interweaving of the existing matrices of communication between things with the secondary blanket of addresses introduce, in the intermingling of their tempos, their resiliencies and fragilities, their defenses, immunities, and fitness selection dynamics, some sort of second-order synthetic evolution at least in some local sites? Distortions emerge that are unknowable in advance, and with them the universality of the Address layer makes it always suspect to idiosyncratic purposes and outcomes. If its network topology is apparently flat and affected by endothermic perturbations from any point, then it is not just a map; it is a medium, an ecology even, and it can and will evolve. Gray goo scenarios of out-ofcontrol molecular manufacturing and discharging entropic sludge in its wake are now best understood less as a real existential risk than as a parable for mindless industrial rapaciousness. Similarly, perhaps federations of the Addressed, across scales, become catalysts of a countercomposition of the world, generating unthinkable new ground and air, and so instead of an Anthropocenic future in which fewer and fewer conglomerates own, license, or otherwise capitalize more and more things, perhaps the evolu tion of the infrastructure results in an inversion of the ratio, whereby something on the order of 340 undecillian haecceities (in IPv6 address space) come to recompose and govern a vastly smaller number of assemblages. But there is a countervailing scenario (perhaps equally parabolical) in which the unfathomable legion of haecceities lurches not toward entropy but toward a new and more heterogeneous and complex jungle, one that is perhaps mostly unrecognizable and incommunicable for us. ⁴⁸

Address Layer

215