One of the most complex social effects of that generalized acceleration and centripetal consolidation is a sense of systemic incoherency for the end User and a corresponding need for interfaces to then renarrate whatever they connect. From the perspective of the User, as the intensification of computational power of each interfacial node and of the aggregate networks that link them gathers momentum along its accelerating axis and provides for more intense logistical linkages across even more nonlinear routes, then the temporal integrity and cognitive coherency of the worlds mediated by them are correspondingly dissolved in equal measure. Unlike a capitol building, corporate headquarters, or medieval prison where the corporeality of power was embedded into the site-specific dramatic choreography of architectural form and program, the architecture of The Stack delocalizes User experience of interactive cause-and-effect and its chains of interfacial transference. They may appear invisible, ungraspable, or insubstantial, despite (or because of) the friction and fragmentation that they carry up and down its layers. This well-known tendency of modernities to melt what is solid and disembed institutions is turned once more back on the forms that those earlier modernities had established. So, as a therapeutic response, Interfaces are asked to soothe the stress that they have caused by presenting their remedy images of orderly resolution as data visualizations, as GUI, as mind maps, as tools and trackers. Some of these are real medicine, some are placebo, some are dissimulation, but all are territorial claims on the geographies and geometries of The Stack by competitive interfacial regimes. Because the increase in computational intensity of each node in an opaque global network and of the network ’ s circulatory capacity as a whole helps to produce the radically diminished contiguity of the interfacial landscape, and less transparency of far-flung assemblage lines, a tremendous demand is then placed back on its own images, especially interfacial images, which can represent the totality of these nodes into coherent wholes. Instead of appeasing the desire for a “ binding collective representation, ” <sup>35</sup> nonlinear connections of the Interface layer seemingly intensify and radicalize it. The
Interface Layer
233