Put into sharper relief by the Mumbai attacks is the volatile economy of contemporary warfare: contested urbanity, exceptional violence, civil architecture, geographic projection, networked software, motivated interfacial maps, all rolled into one. For this, Lashkar-e-Taiba is, among other things, also a sort of politico-theological urban design practice. It is one that follows maps and plans, that creates them, challenges received maps that draws them and makes them real, and is clearly willing to die over them. Obviously the tactical use of Google Earth in providing situational awareness during the attack was a practical choice, and in no way do I suggest that it is their literal intention to remap the caliphate directly onto Google Earth, making the software some new sort of illuminated Word. I am also not blaming Google. Instead, I observe that the ultimate asymmetry between these two spatial logics, jihad and Google, is less absolute than we might presume, and in their unlikely compatibility and alignment, something critical about how geoscapes operate above and beneath the state is discovered. Because they must be reductive in order to even work as interfacial regimes, even those secular interactive cartographies are not a truly universal plane into which all competing political ontologies can be embedded and arranged; rather, the polyphonous perversion of their translatability, even and especially into anticosmopolitan fundamentalisms, is the means by which the geopolitics is given form.
These slippages depend on the immediacy of the interfacial image, as both a technique for spatial inscription and a screen on which a geographic imagination is projected. The Interface layer is simultaneously a site for the direct aggregation of flows, a technique for the representation of those assemblages, and a vocabulary of contentious alternatives. It is the social need for total images of dispersed assemblages and invisible interfacial chains that makes an economy of purified imagined geographies possible. The Interface layer becomes a medium not only for the transmission of utopian images but for the composition of utopian spaces. Whereas the nomos of The Stack refers to an ordinate, enumerated spatial logic, geoscape names the agonistic territorial images of the world, any of which may be a direct expression of the architectures of The Stack, or which may be driven by another doctrine or megastructure. When the terms of geoscapes are contested through the instrumental images of an interfacial regime, the geographic framings of the Earth can congeal into total and cosmographic diagrams. As active instruments, those projective and idealized inscriptions are more than maps; they are also the means to realize their particular compositional arguments about how the world should be idealized; the interface becomes the very tool to bring about the conceptual arrangement that it would want to represent. At the same time, images of interfaces come to connote futuristic speculative design. From summer movie science fiction to corporate vision of future marketing videos, advanced GUIs have become part of the global visual culture, signifying expressivity, contemporaneity, security, omniscience, secrecy, and, most of all, a future world in which frustrated desire and agency are resolved by graceful and powerful technical apparitions-to-come. <sup>71</sup> For these, the drawing medium of the interfacial regime takes leave of any immediate machinic pur pose and serves instead a dreamworld canvas on which utopian social relations are evoked. In this utopian cinematic subgenre, if possible geographies are prototyped for later instantiation as geoscapes demanding enforcement, they are first drawn into fantastic infrastructures, transhumanist overcoming, transcendental experiences of speed and immersion, and calming day-in-the-life use for personal control, ease, clarification, groundedness, and affluence. In these clairvoyant fictions, we see how techniques of the Interface layer, especially GUI, are mobilized toward the management of platforms that may almost exist, but are at least partially illegible or unresolved and so demand our active participation, even vigilance. They are the visual languages available with which to explore, express, and communicate unrealized desires and ambitions for realities only imagined and wished for, which find shape as design fictions and so have permission to absorb utopian and dystopian energies at that level. The real complexity of discontiguous assemblage lines and interfacial chains requires that fictional resolution of the interfacial diagram in order for Users to comprehend and participate within them, and the utopian projection of fictional alternatives to these uncertain social and technical conditions onto surfaces of real technologies of interfaces is how they articulate those wishes. The agonistic politics of geoscapes and their claims on the territories of The Stack oscillate back and forth between both of these projects. The inspired utopian interfacial landscape-to-come (from Thomas More ’ s diagrams of the island Utopia to Tony Stark ’ s schematics for an omnipotent heads-up display) is also a geoscape-tocome specified by the images that would reflect and represent it. <sup>72</sup> They conceive possible technology and possible social connections, possible powers and abilities, possible sovereignties and polities, and possible social realities to be drawn.
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Interface Layer