The baseline design brief for the User layer of The Stack may go something like this: In the image of planetary-scale information infrastructure, comprising trillions of addressable haecceities, the resolved scale of the platform need not be for one User at a time, drifting into and out of narcissistic virtual reality, but for pluralities of partial users, quasi-users, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, intermingling in intersubjective alliances, sharing perceptions, memory, algorithms and techniques, visualization rhetorics situated among the semantic graphs of aggregate User experi ences predicated not just on autobiographical interoperability, but on direct physica and cognitive promiscuity. Imagine one sort of User logging the totality of her perceptions and interactions not as an atomic iota lost in her own manifestations (like Bell ’ s MyLifeBits QS persona) but as a population of 10 billion absolute Users, all generating content and all feeding off one another ’ s issuances. Plural systems provide plural images, which provide plural Users— two of us, ten of us, a hundred of us, an entire city of us — literally seeing through each other ’ s eyes, remembering through one another ’ s experiences, walking in one another ’ s shadows. Imagine Jakob von Uexk ü ll ’ s foray through the garden of Umwelten, where he encountered the interweaving but exclusive lifeworlds of plants, animals, flowers, and insects, but in our biosemiotic field, everything can now swap points of view. Tomorrow, may I have your yesterday? Unexpected alliances, continental organizations, linguistic traditions, and politico theological communions ensue, any one User moving into and out of several of them, just as they move into and out of him. The profile reflected back is not of a resolved individual but of empathetic assemblages across multiple spatial and rhythmic scales. Furthermore, as nonhuman users (sensors, animals, artificial intelligence, what-haveyou) are enrolled into these collaborative perceptual-interfacial affiliations and platforms, the contingent hierarchies between physical subjects and objects are put once again into play. So instead of the Shanghai Expo ’ s universal User scenario, where the cosmopolitan apparatus of The Stack would interpolate each human as an interoperable atomic profile, however comparable and equalized they might appear, can it instead come to provide and even demand far more alien subjectification en masse? These would perhaps be unaccountable, even invisible to, the dynamics of individu ation versus collectivization, physicalization versus virtualization, localization versus globalization — neither solution nor dissolution, only strange columns up and down The Stack, and from strange columns new geographies and geopolitics for a post-Anthropocenic User.
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User Layer