The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 227 页

We then extend the traced path for modern interfaculty from objects as primordial interfaces, shifting then to graphical signs as modern interfaces, and again back to objects, now imbued with the computational intelligence to interpret our gestures. In considering an emergent genre of object interfaciality, blending natural and artificial information into composite manipulative substances and habitats, one question to raise, after Serres ’ s parable, is, “ What happens to the hand and its universal flexibility to manipulate the world? ” ¹⁷ For the GUI, the hand is trained to sift through menus, windows, and sliders, playing a software application like a musical instrument, but in doing so, its immediate range of adaptive expression is focused on the pushing and pulling of signs and simulations. Those software routines initiated may be highly varied, but when computational objects and habitats respond to a wide range of gestures and manipulations, we can imagine that they may allow the hand a much wider range of expression, and in this, there are potentially novel coadaptations of the hand and the programmable object interface, of the grasp and the grasped. ¹⁸ At the same time, as the world meets it more than halfway, the uniqueness of the hand to exceed the accommodation of one niche is made that much less unique, as the niche is itself programmed to perform specific reactions to whatever the hand commands (or to resist that command and frustrate its intention). Heideggerians and Latourians spoke of the “ thing ” as a kind of gathering of the world into itself, but when the physical object is programmable in this way and responsive to gestures, or even able to make such gestures on its own affecting other objects in its orbit, then the interfacial thing seems to “ unfold ” its influences out into the world. This kind of “ thing, ” and perhaps any interface, is at least in this respect, is an inverse of a gathering; it aggressively unfurls its relations in a tangle of effect and relay. ¹⁹

How does that interfacial arc, from natural object to graphical sign to computational object, scale up for the collective interfacial matrices of the City layer, or the Cloud layer, and of millions of people and billions of things at once? The allegory of the city as a big computer is one that appears historically along with the computer itself, ²⁰ but it ’ s an altogether different design challenge to account for an urban-scale agglomeration of computational object-instruments, ranging in size from a few molecules, ²¹ to a few centimeters, up to the scales of furniture, a dump truck, and city block, all interacting among one another. Instead of (or in addition to) spatial projections through the graphical interface, this open condition for urban interfaciality is closer to an expanded landscape architecture composed by active arrangements of such objects. The design and governance challenge is then not to program this jungle platform in advance according to some set master plan, but to formulate parameters through which multiple subsystems can leverage one another. ²² The emergence of its eventual governance would be determined less by fixed formal interventions than by a procedural choreography and the accommodation of unpredictable collectives of these unfurling interfacial objects. The interlacing of computation and urbanism isn ’ t the direct superimposition of an artificial computational network on top of a given cement-and-steel scenario, but the activation or suppression of programs already present. For example, industrial technologies did not introduce electromagnetic fields in the urban landscape, but activated what was always there, and similarly, the design challenge of this urban-scale interfaciality is also to provide some regularizing geography to territorial energies already at work (as discussed in the linking of physical and virtual envelopes). That said, determining how sets of such computational hyperobjects might be embedded into the City layer remains a prerogative not just for interface design, even in this expanded sense, but can be initiated from any of the other layers of The Stack as well. ²³ We assume that any single object, perhaps as the subject of multiple Address schemas at once, will be interpolated not only by one master geography but many projects and projections at once. Critically, it is the incommensurability between these claims that is the real engine for Stack ’ s geopolitics of interfaciality, writ large and small.

Interface Layer

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