If, as this book argues, technologies can be defined by the quality of accidents that they produce, at least as much as, if not more so than, by the uses for which they were intended, then for The Stack, we can include the universal — once again human and nonhuman, living and nonliving — User-subject among these. Foregrounding the fact that this subject need not be human in order for it to constitute a relationship with other agents and apparatus suggests some conclusions and projects for the User layer. The first might suggest that the User is an obnoxious subject, derived from the simpleminded and self-affirming utilitarianism of consumer cybernetics and defended mostly to make humans easier to locate and monetize as end points in systemic relays. In this light, putting nonhumans into that User position should be seen as a temporary station at best, but perhaps a means to invent different kinds of agencies, not just mimicking this degraded human. We must save the nonhumans from being merely humans, so that they could show us a different way for us to be both human and not. Another project might steal from the surfacing of posthuman actors through the medium of the universal User, that these simple utilitarianisms cannot hold and that the psychological-utilitarian User is thereby recast in a far less reductive and less familiar light. In its place we imagine a re-wilded landscape of inhumanist intentions, mapped by multipolar points of control, composing a more polysynchronic and less chauvinistic system of systems. It is probably prudent to acknowledge the first conclusion and design on behalf of that second project. In doing so, we should pay special attention to the risks incurred by legacy User positions, including the tendency to individuate the subjective outcomes of interactions with The Stack ’ s apparatuses and envelopes. With these caveats at hand, we examine the work of nonhuman User in three exemplary guises: animal User, artificial intelligence (AI) User, and machine User.
User Layer
273