For this reason, the ideological reductiveness of the interfacial image is more than a conceptual problem; it is also how systems enforce themselves, one against another. An image of totality, which when acted on configures cause and effect in the literal terms of its own totalization, makes its reductive map incrementally truer each time it is used. The User clicks X, and X happens, and so the world has more X for this and more images representing X-making interfacial tools, and so on. This recursion, both mechanical and semantic, is how the Interface layer telescopes between the local and global, enrolling its own resources and the User’ s simultaneously to put both in order according to the logic of that interfacial regime ’ s particular vocabulary of reduction. The ongoing competition between multiple platforms, both state and nonstate, to define the nomos of The Stack includes a kaleidoscopic collection of interfacial regimes, each projecting its own specific grids, one on top of the other, superimposing their differing self-referential claims on the nomination and arrangement of various territories. Critically, because their comprehensive images are not merely descriptive of what they diagram but are driven by a motivated narrativization of The Stack as a totality for Users to make and remake it over and over, they are ripe for investment by utopian imaginaries. <sup>40</sup> Interfaces are composed images of an encapsulated totality in the here and now, but they can also function as projective total images of a world clarified — cleansed — according to its idealized master diagram. Whole interfacial regimes can then function not unlike cosmograms, offering prototypical geographies for worlds to come. The political volatility of a future interfacial regime is not only in the drawing of an imaginary resolution directly overlapped onto the real and available landscape, but also its technical ability to affect those realities by User action. When counterprograms for the whole world are drawn from acutely selfserving platform strategies or from delusional political and theological doctrines, then whole User populations can lose the interpretive distance between a merely tactical reductive description of the world on the one hand, and its ecstatic idealization or exploitative distortion on the other (more on this phenomenon below). In that such futural projective images of utopian totalities are, like all such graphical interfacial tools, not only simulations but also fantastic instruments aimed directly toward The Stack ’ s mega structure, this is perhaps, for better or worse, the most essential productive accident of the Interface layer.
Interface Layer
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