- Maximum User
World-making is always also world-erasing, especially at the User layer, and appearance and disappearance themselves show up and go away at strange times and in strange ways. The case study of another exemplary maximal User draws us back into the heart of the QS movement, and also brings us more through the solution and dissolution of the individual User than toward a more expansive and inclusive population of Users. That this maximal User has also been called “ the patient of the future ” underscores the strange biopolitics at stake. <sup>25</sup> I wonder, not without some perverse pleasure, what Virilio might make of my friend and colleague Larry Smarr ’ s nearly decade-long interest with the rational self-quantification and observation of data pertaining to the health of his biological person. Originally a mathematician and astrophysicist, Smarr is the founding director of Calit2, the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, the University of California system ’ s flagship IT research institute, in La Jolla. Smarr was also the founder of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which among other things brought forth Mosaic, the web browser that became Netscape. <sup>26</sup> He is among the key pioneers in cyberinfrastrucure, scientific visualization, and what he calls “ planet scale distributed computing. ” But as of late, the information platform that has captured his most intense interest is his own body. While QS has many ancestors, Smarr ’ s own quest brings to mind Buckminster Fuller ’ s notebooks, the “ Dymaxion File, ” in which he recorded his every activity. The personality type of those who see the design of planetary technologies as their vocation seems to suggest an interest in modeling everyday activities as if they were astrophysics. For others in the QS scene, their own comparatively subdued pursuit may instead have more to do an unhealthy internalization of Office Park evaluative criteria of systems performance and benchmarking. Smarr and I have discussed this at some length, and it ’ s clear to me that his interest is much deeper and less individualistic than the psychology I have ascribed the QS movement as a whole.
Smarr tracks his health at a finer grain level than most of us could manage, or even likely want to. It demands forms of data mining that he is uniquely prepared for (he diagnosed himself with adult-onset Crohn ’ s disease years before doctors confirmed this). He has not only monitored and quantified his food intake for years, but has his blood drawn and analyzed according to a dizzying array of tests every few weeks. He ’ s had his personal genome mapped at a resolution few others ever have, and perhaps more interesting, he has also done the same for his microbial gut biome, the ecology of microscopic life that inhabits us and helps keep each of us healthy. The genome of the microbial biome inside our guts has evolved over millions of years in correspondence with the host human species, sometimes beneficially and sometimes pathologically. Over the course of our individual lives, our bodies provide selection pressures on how our individual microbial biomes change and evolve inside us. What we eat, in particular, can fundamentally alter the alien ecology in our gut, for better or worse. A poor diet can force the evolution of the biome toward an unhealthy state in which it no longer supports our health and instead could contribute to significant malaise in the entire biological mechanism. Smarr ’ s personal medicine is somewhat unusual in that the focus is shifted from the self-regard of his own somatic body toward the curation and gardening of this internal microbial civilization.
User Layer
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