Today, at the withering end of post-Fordism and tilting perhaps toward a material economy based on desktop fabrication and real-time customization, we observe logistics shifting from the spatially contiguous assembly line to the radically discontiguous assemblage line linked internally through a specific interfacial chain. <sup>30</sup> Contemporary logistics disembeds production of things from particular sites and scatters it according to the synchronization and global variance in labor price and resource access, and it is this delinking that makes the arrival to us of material goods (and the process of the world of production in general) more opaque, even occult. How things come to be is removed further from the daily experience of direct cause and effect. The cyclical routes of the artificial ecologies of logistics are often proprietary and subterranean, and it is the visual incomprehensibility of the origins and outcomes of the interfacial chains in which Users are embedded (you, me, it) that instigates a second-order interface design, namely, information visualization, or the diagrammatic summation and articulation of those interfacial chains so that their form might be grasped. As hinted, GUIs also perform a kind of information visualization on their own. Beyond simple instrumentation, in their rhetorical display of relay networks connected to any one surface, we find the GUI ’ s pedagogical narrativization of discontiguous processes redrawn as a single actionable diagram, perhaps its most essential social function. Global logistics ’ material economy of assemblage is mediated to human actors, along its many chains, through these reductive interfacial summary diagrams of planetary-scale computational networks. It has to be seen also as a kind of rhetorical and stylistic system suggesting, if not promising, closure. <sup>31</sup> As real logistical channels link the unlikely arcs of things from here to there and from there to here, they then also enroll the User not only into an aesthetic of logistics but also logistics itself as an aesthetic ideal. <sup>32</sup> However, in this drawing together of otherwise incomprehensible cause and effect, the tracing of idealized configurations of flow becomes self-validating, and when these interfacial network visualizations evolve from diagrams into active instruments of action to enforce those configurations, they take on a life of their own.
The orthodox post-Fordist plot for “ the network society ” recounts a storied evolution from fixed, contiguous institutional interfaces into decentralized serial nodes and couplings. Old centers give way to new networks. But logistical modernity is defined as much by the concentration around meganodes and global platforms and protocols as it is by decentralization and dispersion (e.g., Google, the shipping container, the TCP/ IP protocol, US dollars). For The Stack, the performance of governance both centralizes and decentralizes interfacial regimes, one informing the other, and in this, the spinal contours of a global social morphology unfold along with them, their topological convulsions inextricable from the computational infrastructures with which they evolve and through which they are expressed. For this, we observe that there is something like a Moore ’ s law of exponential computing speed not only for processors but also for the interfaces and the landscapes of gateways that they power; there is an arc of exponentially accelerating computational capacity for both individual interfaces and their composite networks. Instead of tracking the number of transistors on a given chip, this exponential arc of interfacial acceleration might measure the total aggregate switches within a landscape of interfaces through which relays snake from site to site, or perhaps the number of FLOPS (floating-point operations) that landscape as a whole is capable of providing per second or per day. <sup>33</sup> This would recognize the network effects of the intensification of edges as well as nodes. It might (with sufficient research) specify something like the maximal carrying capacity of the computational substrate of the global economy in any given moment: the total possible interfacial throughput of all interconnected nodes and points and a weighing of the relays with which they accelerate in logarithmic correspondence.
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