For our geodesign initiative, the important pressure point is that the sovereign operations of any one layer in The Stack are not necessarily reducible to or even interoperable with the others, and so redesigning (reprogramming, relegislating, rearticulating) the sovereign techniques of those layers can directly affect the others and shift the relative leverage between them. There is nothing inevitable about any one angle, and the recombinant logics of Stack platforms allow in principle for the future replacement and displacement of the machinery of one layer. Further, as the activation of a column occurs down and up all layers of The Stack from wherever a User may be physically located, the reformation of the sovereign qualities of any one layer may reverberate up to Users across the world from and to one another, but because they are located differently, the ultimate effects of that reverberation will not be uniform. As both activate that reprogrammed layer, one User may be opting out while another may be opting in, even as their gestures appear identical. What is up for one may be down for the other; what is exit for one may be entrance for another. As a User initiates multiple columns over time, even simultaneously, she may be inside the sovereign terms of one version of one layer (say, a Cloud platform or the apparent geolocation of her IP address) while simultaneously inside those same layers as the User of another column in another stack. That is, the political interpolation of the User never finally resolves into the biography of one single person in the same way that the identity of the citizen did and does. The management of multiple User identities and political positions is less a psychological disorder than the politics of everyday life. The design of the terms and norms of that irresolvable multiplicity is inseparable from the design of the sovereign characteristics of the Stack layers that mediate it, and in this way the simplistic state-versus-market metaphysics of mainstream Silicon Valley technolibertarianism rather undersells the disruptive potential of its own product.
314
The Stack to Come