The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 242 页

Will mature AR initiate a wave of bizarre new sects, scams, and activist versions of fundamentalist monotheisms and ideologies for which the metaphorical nuance of holy books is collapsed by the direct imprint of virtual words onto real things? ⁵⁶ There are some indications that this is so. We can see the use of Google Earth, Google Maps, stolen SIM cards, and other advanced off-the-shelf spatial command and communication technologies by, for example, Lashkar-e-Taiba during their attack on Mumbai in 2008, as a prototype of the weaponized AR that concerns us. ⁵⁷ The dozen attackers used these tools to see and navigate the city, identifying targets and keeping a closed communication loop intact (to what extent any given technology was employed, we can only speculate based on press and court accounts). One assumes that their movements were planned beforehand to advance through the overhead and tilted satellite images of the city ’ s buildings, streets, alleys, and squares. As much as classified reconnaissance, simulation, and situational-awareness tools are war technologies for states, declassified tools can be for nonstate actors; and the trail of representation and counterrepresentation of contested space through these specific tools and specific events is knotted. For example, in Mumbai, Google Earth was a mechanism of the attack itself, but news agencies also mapped the attacks in near real time using Google Earth as part of their own coverage. In this awkward recursion, satellite views of the City layer serve as medium of violence by those who would enact it, witness it, report it, or defend against it, as Google Earth ’ s cosmograms are deployed by politico-theological geographies that may appear at first to be outside its intended program. ⁵⁸ Here a proto-AR is not only the territorial index through which such projections play themselves out; it is, as much as the City that it maps, the very means to project their activist and in this case irredentist imagination.

This episode is a more violent and extreme variation of a Christianist AR overlay of the Grand Canyon in Arizona that explains how the canyon proves creationism and disproves evolution for those willing to peer through the looking glass and see what it sees. ⁵⁹ An App simply called The Bible is already installed on over 100 million devices and helps its Users navigate their days according to a personalized devotional itinerary, positioning them into the rhythms of religio as they move about, and translating various homilies into a closely curated experience of the everyday. ⁶⁰ We anticipate that Apps like these may innovate a close integration with the geolocative tracking to enforce by surveillance a particular pathway though City space, knowing and logging whether Users went to good places or bad places and inferring behavior accordingly, perhaps suggesting the confession of sins as appropriate. The automation of repentance can now be based on real evidence of wrongdoing instead of the unreliable guilty conscience of individual worshippers. Perhaps the tallying of sins was the first big data play (numinous omniscience as panopticon archive), but now it can be done with greater worldly precision as repentance is now supported by information visualization. In time geotheological innovation may give us new commandments and invented prohibitions based on the ability to trace movements through the City layer. Today there are many widely used Apps that provide some moral frame, for example, Qibla direction indicated from any spot on Earth, and others that allow users to scan bar codes to determine if food is kosher or halal, or vegan, free-range, or GMO free, or if your new colleague is a “ suppressive person, ” or even perhaps if he is a Cylon (or if you happen to be a Cylon, if someone shares your particular form of monotheism), and they all may seem benign and obvious. Most are. But once again, one truly hopes that the poetry and metaphor of the monotheistic cognitive cultures that they reference can withstand the unambiguous literalism that AR might afford them and the violence that absolute explication demands of adherents. Interfacial regimes such as these are more than visual technologies; they are indeed cosmograms (Umberto Eco ’ s 1984 essay arguing that Mac is Catholic and DOS is Protestant isn ’ t obsolete; it ’ s prophetic). ⁶¹ As the spawn of logistical aesthetics, these regimes are not only a programmatic diagram of how a particular machine network works but, in aggregate, of how the world works and what its proper configuration is or should be, and what is to be done about it, right here and now, by you. It is this capacity to project an alternative global space, in some cases a vision of purified utopia, through an interfacial system of symbols that are also active tools, that allows AR and similar interfaces to function as theological media. Utopian political theology becomes projective interfacial geography, and vice versa in some cases. This is borne out by observing that any closed self-referential platform is also a belief circle. Other much stranger platforms to come will certainly coalesce as belief circles as well, and together they will help design, map by map, the spaces over which the geopolitics of The Stack is claimed and contested.

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