The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 228 页

1. The Interface as Layer

Interfaces are thresholds. They connect and disconnect in equal measure, structuring flows by combining and segmenting it, enabling it or frustrating ${ \mathrm { i t } } , ^ { 2 4 }$ bridging unlike forms over vast distances and subdividing that which would otherwise congeal on its own. ²⁵ Any given interface may have one effect at one site, just as it has the opposite effect at another. Its performance — who, what, and how it interfaces — may vary widely depending on circumstances. At a global level of billions of interfaces working at once, The Stack might deterritorialize (and apparently decentralize) modern institutional inputs and outputs at the same time that it installs another even more regularized network on the same landscape (effectively recentralizing it in its own image at the Cloud layer). But while this superimposition of generic thresholds works to homogenize the wider apparatus, it can also flatten hierarchies of access to that infrastructure, as we ’ ve seen. It bears reinforcing at this point that this is an elemental principle of The Stack as an organizing matrix, and to a degree of platforms in general; through rigid regularization, dynamic self-directed flow can achieve scale, and as it does, those flows congeal and centralize into global subplatforms (as we see among the key set of players at the Cloud layer discussed above). The dynamic is not unique to computational platforms. It is as apparent in the urban systems that order physical flows according to fixed geometries that host dynamic autonomous circulation, which in time produce new superscalar nodes often centralized around key threshold points. When grid topologies circumscribe sites as individual cells within their larger matrix, they also allow each to generate its heterogeneous program, separate from its horizontal neighbors and internally differentiated within its own vertical strata, as far up into the air as needed. (The form that is horizontally differentiated as a discrete cell within an urban grid and vertically differentiated by multiple stacked programs is called a skyscraper.) ²⁶ Especially but not exclusively for GUIs, Stack interfacial systems are also grids and sometimes work in a similar way as urban grids. The lines they draw, both linking and segmenting, crisscross one another in regular patterns and circumscribe individual cells within their own particular telescopic logics of the global and the local. As multiple interfaces congeal or are deployed as strategically particular interfacial regimes, they push toward naming everything that is visible to its scope (as discussed in the Address layer chapter). In that this drawing is also a kind of machine, the GUI synthesizes cognition (and aspiration, affect, drama) into its syntax; it grids both the image machine itself and the space in which the image machine can act. Interfaces can give local shape to The Stack ’ s aspiration to nomos, prototyping political geography as a technology of artificial distributed cognition, and through this, it constructs and configures the diagram of possible action that Users can make on The Stack and that The Stack can make on Users. An interfacial regime draws together flows and connections that may be geographically dispersed, massively discontiguous, and yet intimately connected by a particular causal interfacial chain, and then presents these to the User as a single image in its own particular way, different than other such regimes. The interface takes what is linked by distributed computational systems but impossible to directly perceive because it is happening across the planet at once, and in turn gives it a portrait. In this regard, interfacial regimes are also totality machines, both describing linkages and making projective claims over them. But as said unlike other geographic projections, the interface is not only a visual representation of an aspirational totality; it is an image of a totality that when acted upon actually effects it. By using these kinds of image-mapinstruments, the User herself collaborates in the real remaking of the world according to that interfacial regime ’ s particular geographic vision and representations. The power (and danger) of the Interface layer is this remaking of the world through instrumentalized images of totality; it is what gives any interfacial regime even a politico-theological coherency and appeal. ²⁷

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Interface Layer