Cockroaches, Siri, and driverless cars, taken together, make a strange confederation, but from the perspective of The Stack, no stranger than the Reids, the Hagans, Larry Smarr, or you or me. At the same time, this agnostic flatness of the User subject does little by itself to adjudicate what the “ best ” “ sovereign ” position for any of these Users might be. While we are optimistic that posthuman Users contribute in some way toward a post-Anthropocenic geopolitics, that does not mean necessarily that visualizing Siri ’ s carbon footprint or mapping the microbial biome in the cockroaches that pilot Google cars is the shining path. To date, much of the discussion about the political “ rights ” of the User have conflated the “ property rights ” (and privacy rights) of a computer ’ s owner with the interests of a User who may or may not own his or her apparatuses. The scope of rights that the individual owner to protect his machine and information from surveillance, malware, DRM, and spyware, for example, has animated discourses around data freedom, cyberlaw, and the electronic frontier for decades now, and as the NSA revelations show the disturbing depths of how far these policies (if that is even always the right word) have skewed. For as much as is at stake in these controversies, the focus on individual privacy and autonomy from systems does not help frame how Users that do not own the computational systems with which they interface (which is to say almost the entirety of The Stack itself) can assert their interests. Cory Doctorow ’ s “ The Coming Civil War over General-Purpose Computing, ” draws several dark scenarios for what happens to human Users who may be renting (financing) biomedical robotic components (e.g., artificial eyes or legs, cochlear implants) and for whatever reason are not able keep up with the financial terms of this particular “ use/not own ” service economy. It cannot be acceptable for a biomedical Cloud service provider to suspend service on the smart medical components that the provider owns, leaving the User blind or immobile or deaf. Surely the User that merely uses and not owns should be able to assert individual interests against the harm brought by property rights to determine what an apparatus may or may not do.
For The Stack, this issue is crucial. As discussed in the Address chapter, as computation becomes a general property of all apparatuses, from the implantable to the infrastructural, then over the course of the day, a human actor may be the User of thousands and thousands of different “ computers ” at various scales and in various collaborative combinations with other actors, human and otherwise. A program by which that User position is always subservient to the sovereignty of property claims made by the owner of the apparatus itself, whether on behalf of state publics, corporate Cloud platforms, or distant individuals cannot possibly scale. While there may be versions of The Stack megastructure that could withstand and even enforce that kind of totalitarian monologic, to do so would likely go against the catalytic platform logic for which end Users in the network regularize autonomy so as to introduce information, modify it, and reprogram the whole according to local and instantaneous needs. Clearly the better design strategy is instead to imbue the User who is not the property owner (and who may never own property such as a robot or an animal or a rainforest) with some real control over his or her relations to The Stack, as broad or as delimited as any one of those addressable relations might be. Even if the User position is occupied by software, such as Siri, this model is in some ways the opposite of the Taylorist archetype of the User as automaton. In practice, this means not just that the specific entity that may enter the User position requires some form of sovereign identification, but also that the columns that this User makes up and down The Stack, linking intention through interface, to addressable haecceity in the City, to energy-intensive Cloud provision and back up the column to another User, do as well. An alternative is to address every single User-Stack relation and every column initiated as a discrete haecceity and as the instantaneous mutual property of all the actors contributing to its realization. <sup>63</sup> However, this leaves the simplistic notion of sovereignty derived from property unimproved, and as a design solution, it merely translates the opposed interests of some owner- Users and some tenant- Users into the legacy vocabularies of a property conflict and all the structural inadequacies that entails. It does nothing to adjudicate their claims, or enforce the mutual interests of good actors, or protect them from the cost of bad actors, and more.
User Layer
285