Everyday examples suggest that this provides an inadequate explanation of the apparatus and platform sovereignties, and an empirically suspect description of how the contemporary career of the User-subject is formulated in apparatus economies. Clearly sometimes apparatuses (e.g., machines, systems, animals) are the User-subject of and for other machines, systems, and animals without the immediate human involvement and interference, though human-directed invention may set the stage for these interactions. Sometimes these Users are living, nonhuman beings with rather different desires regarding the recapture of some lost animality (in that they are already on the other side of the human-animal political divide, as articulated by Agamben in The Open). <sup>37</sup> Perhaps as living systems, their valence and variance is encapsulated by the consistent encounter with a particular apparatus, such as a rainforest whose “ inputs, states, and performance ” are sampled as a continuous calculus by ambient sensor arrays. Sometimes they are not living at all in any conventional sense. Machines possessing varying innate capacities or artificially imbued intelligences can work from the position of the User with Stack systems at every layer and are addressed by those layers in ways that are functionally agnostic as to whether such agents are motivated by human desires or not. It is still important to recognize that any one machine, just like any human, can be subjectivized by different external systems in different ways, and so can take on different effective profiles, just as a person does. The available range of User positions that a machine can inhabit is as diverse as the demands and interfaces that are made available to it. Its possible performances are also as diverse as those of any other User that derives its platform sovereignty by interacting with the surrounding apparatus and envelopes. We anticipated this decentering of human perspective in describing the potential plurality of deep address haecceities, invoking potential Users across an abyssal spectrum of scalar abstraction and physicalization. Of more immediate concern for the User layer of The Stack, however, is to understand the multidirectional and mutual capture of being (living or not), apparatus, and subjectivization. Giving them more depth, Agamben ’ s formulation echoes theories of machinic prostheticization, so important during the McLuhan era, whereby “ Man ” pilots various tools and technologies through which he extends himself and becomes reembodied by those media. <sup>38</sup> The high-tech Vitruvian Man, radiating waves of “ desire ” and “ needs ” out through the successive concentric relays of television, architecture, automobiles, and robotics, is like Earth within Ptolemaic astronomy, always sited at the center of his technical cosmos and believing his own perspective view rather too much. Economies of prostheticization are in fact important to understanding the posthuman User position, but their shape is not that of a one-way concentric radiation, from human into apparatus. It is, rather, a crisscrossing field in which humans themselves are just as likely to be the prostheses, and the apparatus is just as likely to be the User that prostheticizes the human, as the other way around.
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User Layer