Self movement enrolls available digital tools into the willful fabrication of autonomic self-interpolation and may be where the current political logic of the User reaches a certain apotheosis. While the empirical tracking and analysis of one ’ s personal biological processes is surely diagnostically important in many ways, especially as such data are aggregated and pluralized beyond private individuals by the surfacing of ecological, economic, and microbial forces, but the currency of personal performance optimization leans toward something rather different. It elevates the principles of User-centered design into an existential mandate for biological disclosure and epistemological closure tuned to harmonize with the hyperindividuated self-regard native to the zones that link transhumanism and Atlas Shrugged. I will argue that its animating desire for selfmastery through the quantification of system interactions over the course of autobiographical time is premised on a fundamental misrecognition — one for which the visual coherency of the object tracked is taken as validation of the subjective coherency of the “ self ” that stares back at it. As before, mirror reflection makes a false guarantee of the self ’ s apparent outline.
For anything that is situated in the User layer of The Stack — he, she or it — the interplay between technical delineation and stable self-image is volatile. In that it is entwined with feedback loops up and down the layers, the position of User is obviously in some ways always “ cybernetic, ” but it does not bend toward any homeostasis or necessary resolution. It is a limited effector of processes bubbling up and down layer to layer. To and from its location, the User is both an initiator and an outcome of those vertical paths that in the introductory chapter I called columns. But because this is also where actual human beings are most unambiguously situated within The Stack, it is also where political constitutions, end-user agreements, linguistic and cognitive cultures, psychoanalytic conundrums, and so on, together structure how platforms (including states) see Users and how Users model their own interests and actions, as seen in Interfaces large and small. As a given column tracks up and down, there is no single necessary path from layer to layer that must finally resolve a User through Interfaces and Addresses, within a City and Cloud platform and all the way down to the Earth layer. There are only possible routes among possible routes, and the durable form of one layer might guarantee or prevent variation within another layer that coexists with it in the same context. For example, one Cloud platform in one City may provide very different sets of interfacial possibilities than it would in another City, and in this case, it is a layer located well below the User and Interface that frames and limits how social formations can and cannot cohere. What a state sees or what any other Cloud platform sees is what it can see and wants to see through its particular capacities of perception and institutional dispositions of looking as it strategizes its own reflection up the columns toward the User. Looking back down, it is the contact between the User and the Interface, the recursive image of The Stack ’ s procedural totality, that informs how a User’ s habits of thought and action, no matter how fantastic or delusional, become at least for a moment validated by the concreteness of global information infrastructure. Indeed, it should go without saying that precisely because the claims by and for Users can be so diverse, and so deeply bound to a dynamic heterogeneity of human cultures, the historical and political textures of the User layer are also the most anthropologically complex. That said, where do Users come from?
User Layer
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