This is unavoidable, and so let ’ s not avoid it. Any sovereign claim over a space is first a claim to define that space as such, and that ontological gesture is as necessary for satellite photography and Internet addressing protocols as it is for monotheistic political theology, even as their claims may be heterodox and irresolvable and in fact because they are. In the balance between an infrastructure over which territorial claims are made and an infrastructure through which those claims are drawn, the ultimate geopolitical design of The Stack can ’ t possibly be decided in advance. Too many inversions are part of the process, and yet it is clear that our existing geopolitical machines desperately require intervention at scale. And so the interfacial regimes that give narrative form to The Stack are image-instruments of governance both here and now and yet to come, and for this, perhaps their momentum is too fast and their topography too dispersed for states to capture on their own, and too bound up with slow-to-change human anthropology for algorithmic Cloud platforms to merely abscond with them. At the same time, these instabilities are also what give stability to the whole. As The Stack has elevated interfacial diagrams to the status of planetary infrastructure, linking event to image with the ambient interfaces and habitats of the City layer, it coheres Users around generic experiences of social confusion that may still germinate new forms of political universality. This productive dissensus will remain open as long as the political architectures of The Stack can situate multiple jurisdictional claims and generate new jurisdictional strata where none existed, such that no single combination can finally resolve into a consensus sovereignty of last instance (or last resort). This defense against totalitarianism comes not from any axiomatic reverence for nonhierarchical horizontality but from the multiplication of verticalized totalities one on another. In that each of us, as a User, is also a living site over which that dissensus competes — not only over the right of legitimate violence, but also of the right of legitimate citizenship and political agency — then our own immediate experience of our interfacial regimes demands from us the management of several often incompatible personal identities, perched within these double-exposed platform totalities. It is the condition of any site, including any single User, to be enrolled into more than one regime at once and to suffer or enjoy a surplus of utopian total images, dual and treble citizenships, and fractured and noisy names and aliases. As discussed in the following chapter, on the last and top layer of The Stack this confusion first compels an overidentification with the reflective contours of User subjectivity, which is then followed by a more productive dissolution of the User-subject back into the indifferent churn of worldly interfaciality.
Interface Layer
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