Among the essential features of the emerging geopolitics of The Stack is how entire interfacial regimes cohere not just into functional reductions of complex chains of interaction, but also into total images of The Stack and of the world as whole, <sup>67</sup> and it is from that perception of a totality — an augmented cognition for a synthetic ontology — that any Cloud Polis draws its authority, and as those totalities multiply, so do their jurisdictions. A strong interfacial regime prefigures a platform architecture built of total interfacial images and does so through the repetition of use that coheres a durable polity in resemblance to the model. As suggested, the process is mutually constitutive; the representation gives rise to what it describes, on the one hand, and that polity articulating itself through interfacial systems eventually comes to resemble those structures of articulation, on the other. The regime ’ s interfacial images are the instruments through which their particular diagrammatic description of “ what exists ” on other layers of The Stack is directly enacted by its Users. In other words, those circuits of interfacial relay are never only cognitive models of action but establish real physical links between things and events, and in the cumulative agglomeration of those traces, they eventually cohere into a higher-order system and are realized as the physical transformation of the world itself. <sup>68</sup> Every totality, every little utopia, may arise from the correlation and coherence of one or more interfacial regimes evolving to express itself as an autonomous sovereign platform, as an informal imagined community or an actual nation-state. Each of these platform states may provide the experience of internal closure and “ autonomy ” even as they are structurally dependent on other platforms, including ones against which they may define themselves in opposition and by double-exposure. Not only is the instrumental coherence of The Stack coordinated by the interfacial regime, that regime becomes for its User the primary means by which the world itself is made to appear, and through which it is experienced in relation to that appearance. Whatever is assigned an Address by that regime appears may appear and whatever is not addressed simply does not exist as such. Each regime, and hence each mature Cloud Polis, state or nonstate, represents a different world of sites, things, events, processes, valuations, causes, and effects that is internally consistent for the User. But because it must reduce the world in order to provide that coherency, the regime ’ s mapping is always incomplete; some things are identified as addressable entities and located in an interactive narrative, and some are not, some are Addressed as figures and others as ground. No two regimes ’ reductions need be alike (or different) in how they specify a specific element, and nor does anyone need to acknowledge the existence of any others, though one could also demand some drama of allegiance or opposition to another regime as part of its worldview (e.g., the ancient DOS versus Mac schism). <sup>69</sup>
The Stack to Come
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