Four of the six layers are seen now at once, and above them we locate Interfaces, particularly graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that make legible the far-flung Earth, Cloud, City, and Address layers of this Stack for Users who cannot possibly map the cause-and-effect relations of their own actions without some instrumental narrative. As they multiply, Interfaces assemble into interfacial regimes that present and enforce synthetic diagrammatic total images of how the entire platform can work for a User who perceives that platform through the grammar of that same regime. In turn as the User’ s own actions are also sensed and read by the Interface; they are incorporated into its totality and into governing procedures for monetizing User activities according to that regime ’ s own aesthetics of logistics. Hand-based tools may have passed for a moment into iconic point-and-click modes of the interface, but they now return to embodied gesture and perception, including App subplatforms that introduce new interfacial capacities to generic hardware. In this naturalistic synthesis of cognition and interfaciality, the metaphorical space between icon and what it represents, or between the single interface and the platform it interfaces, begins to implode. Subsequently, some platform totalities are drawn into theological projections, for which the work of anamnesis is externalized into perceptual-instrumental events that pre-decide the significance of real world interface elements, as well as the terms of encounter the User should have with them. We fear a militarization of cognition itself, as avant-garde and atavistic fundamentalisms move into the direct augmentation of reality and new political theologies emerge alongside them. Again, totalities are layered on top of totalities, but here the elemental terms of their superimposition are a catechism of war.
Enrollment and motivation according to the interfacial closures of a political theological totality might work by ludic sequences for human Users or by competitive algorithmic ecologies for nonhuman Users. But for each the proto-sovereignty of the User is drawn from both the artificial individuation of each User as well as the dissolution of that individuation by the overwhelming accumulation of incorporating information flows, some parasitic and others infrastructural. First, the political economic position of User, born of Taylorist rationalization, becomes the site of a different universality for which the User-subject position is circumscribed in the measurement of its appetite for carbon, energy, water, and data: the footprint. But eventually the maximal user — the absolutely quantified and qualified self — is dissolved by the intersection of multiple indexes and traces; its singularity is drawn and quartered by the accumulation of its relations. Further, the interfacial apparatus that coheres the human User as an economic subject also addresses nonhuman agents (algorithmic, animal, and machine users) with the same ease, placing all Users on a common plane and shifting the design question for the platform from a design for Users to a design of Users.
The Stack to Come
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