Wandering around the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 and into the Urbanian pavilion, I encountered this User, perhaps in its metaphysical essence (or so it seemed at the time). <sup>12</sup> The core pedagogy of the sensurround urban-scale propaganda for urban-scale systems instructed that global citizenship is based on the quantitative comparability of how much energy, water, land, and other resources a person uses and produces. For this material cosmopolitanism, humanity is held in a planetary commons, not merely because we share Earth ’ s territorial surface (as it was for Kant) but because each of us generates a resource footprint that can be known to us and made known to one another. Visitors learn that it is our quantitatively comparative shadows that make us all one. Across apparent differences in appearance, culture, and lifestyle, each User consumes energy and produces things that others consume in turn, and so Users consume not only carbon and energy but also one another within an infrastructural metabolism. The geopolity staged here in the Urbanian pavilion is a governing commonwealth of urbanized electrons, one demanding a material ethics of biographical measurement and comparison. On display, literally, are several sample Users: towering use case personas extruded in zoological exhibition as if by Charles Ray. We have big mannequins of the Reids from Phoenix and the Hagens from Ghana, for example, and through the pavilion ’ s displays, we examine cinematic and sculptural vignettes of their daily lives, learning about what each of them does in the morning, what they consume at night, whom they love, what they produce, how much of the urban platform of information, energy, and carbon they use. All the while these immersive qualitative accounts of their lives are overlaid with alphanumeric dashboards of total consumption and production data, per User family unit. Their distant lives and situations are brought together and made comparable, if not also interchangeable, by these standard metrics for evaluating their relative performance. Here the City (the world, really) is posited as a mesh of semantic chemistries subordinated to their logistical administration. This isomorphic standardization of human survival — biopolitics entwined as usual with the statistical imaginary — underwrites an autobiographical geopolitics of the User, opening its position up to whatever it might acquire or make use of it so long as platform interactions can be traced, weighed, and optimized in relation to a planetary resource totality.
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