- Finding the Universal User
User is a position not only through which we see The Stack, but also through which The Stack sees us, and so the platform sovereignties that it is most disposed to support are those that align with how the other layers organize their own intersecting interfacial regimes. The Earth layer spins out polities of the electron and emergency, the Cloud layer enrolls proto-citizens in global platform totalities, the City chapter maps out spaces of filtering control and accidental alegal access, the Address layer discloses a landscape in reserve filled with things and events available for interaction, and the Interface layer diagrams reductive images of all of these processes, served up as total or tactical instrumental regimes. All these are put in motion for Users, as Users are put in motion for them. This singular-generic User pinpoints where proto-cosmopolitanisms overlap and contradict the acquisitive platforms of cognitive capitalism and its blurry alternatives. The more salient design problem seems less to design for Users, as if they were stable forms to be known and served, than to design and redesign the User itself in the image of whatever program might enroll it. <sup>11</sup> For this, any User is always a step behind itself as it moves along its path of potential use cases, realizing some and not others. When one virtual possible path collapses into a real interaction with a real interfacial regime, it alters the profile and the persona, which in turn transforms the interactions to come. The evasive distance between the predicted path and the one taken directs the portraiture of future Users, one by one or in populations, as the repetition of irregular interactions is normalized into new models from which Stack geopolitics coheres second by second and measurement by measurement.
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User Layer