The more valuable point he makes (almost offhandedly) is one that does not require the geographic region of Silicon Valley to redraw lines on the map as such. “ That ’ s the thing about exit is: you can take as much or as little of it as you want. You don ’ t have to actually go and get your own island; you can do the equivalent of dual-booting or telecommuting. You can opt out, exit at whatever level [emphasis mine] you prefer. ” Especially if we take “ level ” to correspond strongly or weakly with the layers of The Stack, he is correct but perhaps not entirely aware of the cascading implications of this observation. As I discussed at length above, different Users may initiate columns up and down The Stack from many different positions and will be interpolated by the geoscopic interests of different Interfaces, will make use of what those interests are able to Address, will be situated within the interfacial envelopes of a given City, variously interiorizing and exteriorizing his location, will be enrolled by one or many competing Cloud platforms and supporting energy systems of varying interoperability. Different Users will have different columns available and unavailable to them, by definition, according to the determinant strength of one of more governing layers activated. The City layers of Pyongyang and Palo Alto will curtail or enable such very different possibilities for the other layers in The Stack that the City layer may have final leverage over the others. Or, in a perfectly walled garden, the platform coherence of the Cloud layer may be so closed and perfected that the Interface, Address, and User layers, are decided within a very small margin of variance. That is, for any real column up and down The Stack, there is a range between the strong incorporation of the sovereign operations of all layers together into complete vertical systems and the strong modularity of the layers into separate and counterprogrammable components. That range is not equally distributed to all Users everywhere, and the most important variations may be possible for some Users but not for others, and so exit is never available equally to and from all platform Users.
The Stack to Come
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