For this, an interface necessarily limits the full range of possible interactions in a specific and arbitrary way. Any interface, because it is a specific summary, must eliminate or make invisible a whole range of other equally valid possible interactions. This is not in itself a negative aspect of interfaciality. Only because they reduce and simplify complex systems can they make it possible for people to use those systems at a systematic scale and realize platform value from them. Without coercing us, the interface cannot properly interface anything to us. This essential persuasive and rhetorical work of interfaces can obviously have ambiguous and negative consequences (one augmented reality interface for a video game might “ suggest ” to the User which unworthy strangers in a crowd to kill, another might give deliberately misleading nutritional information about food, and another uses everyday keystrokes to execute remote, unadjudicated violence). But the subtraction of possible interactions to a manageable set leaves behind clearer channels of systemic legibility. With the Interface, the User sees what she can do with The Stack. At the same time, the range of possible interfacial circuits into The Stack may not be identical for every User even for the same machine, and so for the Interface layer, the governance is also the modulation and enforcement of the differential possibilities available through a specific interface and for a specific User. Interfaces slice, cleave, and individuate. Each is open for some and closed to others.
For software polities derived from intermodal networks, the provision of contact itself is condensed into these buttons and icons, menus and dashboards, familiar pathways and arresting surfaces. These are nodes along lines of urban flow: terminals, spectacles, ports, and stations. Interfaces link and partition society itself, as belief systems, ballots, and borders. Such points of contact, everywhere and nowhere at once, are not just our interfaces to the world, but also the world ’ s channels to us. What is open for me may be closed to you, and so our vectors are made divergent. As we ourselves are hurtled through logistical space, the world discloses itself to us as interfaces: activated and unactivated interfaces, fast and slow interfaces, synchronous and asynchronous interfaces, graphical and tangible interfaces. As discussed regarding the City layer, what Deleuze called “ control ” is based on the computational intensity of interfaces and governs through its differentiation of the capacities of Users to do and make things in accordance with whatever interfaces they can access (and that can act on their behalf). Some Users are sent drifting through the City, bouncing across zoning boundaries, given provisional subjectivity by interfaces that allow for their mutual communication, governed less by what captures them in place than by what programs their aimlessness and what alegally inserts them into demand chains without names. Others are sent very intentionally into the urban storm, bound by formal zones with explicit legal projects. Both assemble tactical habitats and tradable assets, and are in turn absorbed by them in accordance with how their individuated profiles as Interface Users can be monetized by sacred and secular Cloud capitalizations.
Interface Layer
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