The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 286 页

The User cosmopolitanism on offer at the Shanghai Expo to the Reids and to all the rest of us is based on the constitutional precondition that total statistical transparency of the User as the composite weight of his interactions is the price to pay for political voice, exit, or entrance. For some, that social nudity may be nonnegotiable, whereas for others, privacy and opacity are just like other premium services and allow them some measure of protection. ⁶⁴ Framing the User as a free agent whose person, privacy, and actions are his property to be leased and fortified according to market demand, and couching User sovereignty in privacy markets, is but one suspicious point of agreement between Assange and neo-Austrian libertarians. ⁶⁵ “ Privacy, ” of course, is a deeply paradoxical ethos that does very different things under different circumstances. ⁶⁶ The axiomatization of individual privacy as a first-order principle of political systems is also a salve for those made insecure by an insulted sense of self-command, and it ’ s a very limited program for the geodesign of the User layer of The Stack. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the design decision should not be to locate sovereignty in the encapsulated person who steps into the User position but instead into the position itself. ⁶⁷ Particular agents may step into or out of composite User assemblages (as tangible as a Google Car or as intangible as a trace over time), and their interests do not remain stable as they do so. From The Stack ’ s perspective, the User is both the edge-state on the other side of the Interface and the agent initiating columns back down into its layers; it is defined by what it connects to, not by who or what it “ is. ” In a way, the NSA revelations demonstrate this. The target of message interception in many cases was the metadata attached to any communication of interest. “ It ’ s only ‘ metadata, ’ ” some scoffed. “ What ’ s the big deal? ” ⁶⁸ Of initial interest is how a particular thread within the larger landscape is located in time and geography, what systems and networks it passed through, and, most important, the corresponding metadata for the receivers of the thread. From these, we believe that analysts can reconstruct specific networks of Users, monitoring their rhythms and intensities. ⁶⁹ While the semantic content of what a message says is obviously of some interest to the analyst, in order to knit the haystack in which needles hide, he collages metadata to reconstruct its patterns. In the terms of The Stack, this is more directly a policing of columns than it is of individual persons who are Users. The regular channels of association across layers and scales become the target of opportunity. Palantir ’ s analysts, for example, use the company ’ s software to provide structure to unstructured government data, and so their work provides for us at least a reasonable model for the sort of activities that Snowden ’ s leaks shed light on. But instead of watching from some sterilized perch, even the User of the Palantir software is participating in the tracing of the column. “ Palantir ’ s central privacy and security protection would be ... ‘ the immutable log. ’ Everything a user does in Palantir creates a trail that can be audited. No Russian spy, jealous husband or Edward Snowden can use the tool ’ s abilities without leaving an indelible record of his or her actions. ” ⁷⁰ This meta-metadata recursivity is a key aspect for how such systems function. The fact that analyst B has already established links between persons X and Y becomes the trail that analyst C explores. The query becomes the quarry. Meta-meta-metadata of any event in the world becomes in a sense the event itself, and just like you or me, the event itself, the column, also secretes more information that it contains within it. The policing of columns, their metadata, all the way down into the abyss strongly suggests that tolerance for vertigo is an important attribute for designers of Stack governance.

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User Layer