Any increase in the computational capacity of any given interface, as both conduit and producer of information, allows that interface to concentrate and give structure to greater quantities and more complex qualities of informational-logistical flow. In turn, as computational power and networked software become faster and cheaper, each node is newly empowered as a medium of governance over what those flows represent, and so the intensification of capacity also shines political attention onto them. This “ law ” of interfacial acceleration makes any given node able to handle increasingly complex programs, which, in accumulation at the level of a whole interfacial regime, also amplifies the complexity of articulation through which that governance can act. This makes any question as to how to design an interfacial regime that much more fraught and important, and especially so when its nodes are programmed and articulated through the Cloud layer (such as Android and iOS nodes in motion, sucking up information as they are dragged around the world by Users) as this can also induce overflow of the jurisdictional bounds of any single designer ’ s own control or her client ’ s. Put more succinctly, the acceleration of a network of interfacial nodes, both screen based and physically embedded, gives that network greater capacity, and for this, social systems place greater demands on it, capitalizing further acceleration, and shifting interest and attention onto them as they displace other infrastructures for which they may have played only a supporting role in the recent past. A tendency toward generalized mobility of goods, people, and information, as described throughout recent decades of social theory, should be seen as both a driver and effect of this technical acceleration in the computational power and communicative flexibility of the interface regimes that contest with one another to congeal the social domains of Users. <sup>34</sup> It is an autocatalytic process. The greater the mobility is within the network, the greater the need for more sophistication in its interfaces, and the greater the availability of cheap, powerful, intelligent computation, the greater the enabling of flexible mobilization. Phenomenon feeds on epiphenomenon feeds on emergent capacity, and back again. For The Stack, this makes the production and figuration of these interfaces a critical site of empowered authority and its social imaginary. As discussed regarding the City layer, forms of power that were once inscribed by the fixed and partitioned citadel are shifted to ambient gateways for bodies in motion, now gathered into open corrals with invisible fences. This distribution provides the raw material and competitive channels for new forms of concentration and capture, not in citadels but platforms.
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Interface Layer