The ultimate granularity of that reference, how it might address and identify value or debt by trace-routing production and consumption, both physical and conceptual, is but one fenestration through which deep address enters into the design of Stack money. In addition to some massive sensing, sorting supercomputational platform needed to track and pay all this — some terrestrial amalgamation of Planetary Skin, Google Gosplan, and whatever else — mechanisms are needed to identify every single instance of economizable matter, action, event, and procedure that can be accounted for in the first place. The deep and wide adoption of some massively universal, spatially and temporally expansive addressing schema is required to individuate, nominate, and enumerate something like Avogadro ’ s number of instances per person, such that this absolute accounting of everything might have a map of its own charge. If so, then solving the capitalist pricing problem becomes practical. While the exaflops might in theory be available for such a mechanism in the future, its energy costs may be insurmountable, save for quantum computing or some such deliverance — especially if those costs are themselves priced in reserve currency of network addressable carbon.
- Interface Layer to Come: Ambient Interface
The voyage stacks space upon space, concrete space upon the space of knowledge, the space of practical communication upon the former two. It therefore stacks map upon map, world-map upon world-map, the uniform space of plains and seas, the space of techniques, the space of knowledges. When the first cycle is exhausted, a second cycle is constituted from it; when the second is finished, a third, and so forth.
— Michel Serres, “ Jules Verne ’ s Strange Journeys ”
The Interface layer may come to situate a new architecture of algorithmic governance that draws and enforces the conflicts in layers above and below. It may come to absorb an automated sovereignty over decisions of inside and outside and deploy it through the surfaces of everyday computational habitats. How so? It links the User to the other layers by radically reducing the possible network relations between these sprawling infrastructures and the individuated agents who may initiate columns up and down, back and forth. As discussed in the Interface chapter, an interface may take any form that supports that work of reduction and translation, and today that is it is often the GUI, through which the User observes and controls things, events, or data. However, the Interface layer at work for the deep address platforms described may be almost any object or surface with which a User could conceivably interact and which could then affect, in principle, any other such object or surface, nearby or far away: instead of a hyperlink, a true hyperobject. <sup>65</sup> These are all ways that something we are comfortable doing might be automated by ubiquitous computation, but the deeper design program is to allow for other kinds of Users to do other kinds of things that may seem uncomfortable or even illogical to us today. The pairing of a deep address with ambient interfaces — the field of interfaces both physical and virtual that surround a User at any given moment — allows us to imagine a computational solvent imbued into any bit of matter, providing it with additional intelligence and a universal and/or highly curated network addressability. As discussed, this would allow “ things ” that exist at very dif ferent physical scales to exchange information and form unusual confederations, with or without human involvement. It would also imply that either of these could be an interface allowing a User to point to, control, or play with the other. If a plastic stick in my hand can be used to control a video game character whose actions are calculated on a server inside a mountain drawing power from a nearby dam, then many even more bizarre chains of remote agency and distributed responsibility are possible. This pile of smart sand could be a haptic interface that precisely guides a robotic surgical tool inside another person ’ s body across the ocean as he lies prone, enveloped in the loving embrace of several twenty-four-axis machine hands and their cushiony little arms. That cuttlefish changes color in relation to the presence of prey, which causes its linked avatar, several meters tall, to do the same, which causes the birds to flee just as a human player of a popular augmented reality (AR) game walks by, ruining his chances of capturing their fountain for his aligned forces. The factorial combinations of the chains of interfaciality that are possible go well beyond automating smart home use cases.
The Stack to Come
337