- Machine User
The machine User comes in many different guises and in a variety that is difficult to summarize and characterize. It can refer to almost any kind of automation or machinic process, if drawn broadly enough, or to very specific instances in which an apparatus is designed to operate in exact relation to other apparatuses, as if it were something like Agamben ’ s “ living being, ” which becomes a User subject through this delicate interpolation. For the latter, robotics will play an increasingly important role, and not just as a subgenre of biomimicry. Their expanded field would be populated by subjects and objects, of varying degrees of anthropomorphism, that animate the User layer of The Stack by internalizing flows from the other layers and sending them back down in columns of intentional action. These include machine Users, individuated as discrete addressable entities within interfacial regimes and more diffuse aggregate Users interwoven into background infrastructure, and various combinations of both. Some may be tightly bound to remote human control, such as the da Vinci robotic surgery system, and others may be programmed to operate and locomote with relative autonomy, such as sensor arrays or mobile surveillance robots. <sup>48</sup> The most complex of these blend in such a way so as to displace what has been a well-established form of humanmachine-infrastructure interaction, one so well established that cities are designed to accommodate it. That blend inserts networked machinic control at different points, including computational augmentation of human agency over the system, or over the machine in which the User is installed, and of the infrastructural landscape in which those machines swarm together. Among these scenarios, the integrated design of driverless car navigation interfaces, computationally intensive and environmentally aware groups of cars and street systems that can stage the network effects of hundreds of thousands such speeding robots at once, would have a dramatic impact on everyday urbanism. The “ automobile ” is a mobile Cloud apparatus inside of which Users navigate the City layer according to augmented scenery, interfacial overlays mapping addressable haecceities of interest, and suckling chemical energies from, one hopes, a sustainable and equitable grid. Inside the fast box, the world doesn ’ t only pass by as interstitial nonplaces between departure and investigation; the kinesthetic momentum of a world passing becomes homelike, the default state against which stationary location is measured. The human User-passenger, drifting through an architecture of displacement and suspended proprioception, is symbiotically reliant on the apparatus, itself a machinic User of the wider infrastructural systems around them to provide not just transportation but an artificial somatosensorium.
User Layer
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