Considered in relation to Exit, these questions might be clarified by juxtaposing them with a remark by Gayatri Spivak, from her lecture on “ planetarity, ” to the effect that “ the most pernicious presupposition today is that globalization has happily happened in every aspect of our lives. Globalization can never happen to the sensory equipment of the experiencing being except insofar as it always was implicit in its vanishing outlines [my emphasis]. ” <sup>30</sup> I am perhaps more at ease with this perniciousness than she, but I take this this to mean that globalization (only one weak guise of planetarity) does in fact happen to the sensory equipment of the experiencing being exactly by making the outlines of that being appear and disappear, including to itself, according to regular rhythmic terms. Odysseys of self-quantification (such as Smarr ’ s) might confirm that disappearance must be preceded by an appearance of the cybernetic User-subject and of a world made through his embodied biology and disembodied profile. The cultural resonance of big data and their participation in the formation of the User position within The Stack is defined by this oscillation between appearance and disappearance realized in finely grained logistical techniques now reassigned to make heretofore unseen autobiographical patterns visible and actionable as interfacial compositions. That position, filled with subjects and other effectors, is strongly optimized as a visual object of knowledge, and so situated Users are invited to see themselves within the stabilizing outlines of the exabyte ego. In this regard, Spivak may have it wrong. Globalization, as she defines it in the planetary career of electronic capital as ubiquitous grid, is very much experienced at the level of sensory equipment precisely because it, at least initially, makes appearance possible and validates subjects produced accordingly. This validation is not just perceived; it is experienced (and for some, it is experienced as synthetic User experience). But the inclusion of information from extrinsic (if also corporeally internal) sources into an economy of identity has the opposite effect, and it is exactly the vanishing of outlines that Spivak suggests is basically impossible. To the extent that the composition of the User as a biopolitical subject also includes vectors of data — genomic, microbial, microeconomic, metaecological — into the living diagram of interpolation, then the site of the subject is experienced as fully infused and overcome with extrinsic flows such that the coherence, stability, and confidence previously invested in the visual fade away. The visual outline of the User perforates and liquefies because the biological apparatus itself comes to observe its own becoming from the temporal perspectives of the inhuman forces congealing to give it form. Looking inward from the outside, the somatic homo economicus, especially the one reflected in the mirror of big data, burns brightest in the sharp relief of its own extinguishment. <sup>31</sup> As ever, economic imperatives fabricate subjects, even universalizing them as transhistorical actors, only to melt them down as the raw material of another project — in this case, one that is not limited by the self-regard of a single species.
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User Layer