Where will those regimes get their raw material for this artificial coherency? As Users go about their days and lives, dragging their phone-shaped homing beacons hither and yon, they may pass by millions of sensors, each peering out into the world like a tick waiting for mammal heat. Together they form a cloud of machine sensation, each listening or looking or feeling or smelling something about the world or about the Users in the world, or both at once. A sensor may even be a User if it also initiates columns up and down The Stack from its little perch. With this new infrastructure now active, the churn of social interactions that so interested Tarde is now not only made up of human-to-human communication; it is also a din of bodies, machines, and other chemistries signaling to itself about itself. Human Users are both the subject and object of this system, sometimes piloting it and sometimes piloted by it. We leave little traces of ourselves as we march through the sensor cloud, traces of our presence, our attention, our interests, the biological specificity of our person, and the risk and reward that we represent to the different Cloud polities here “ sensing like a state. ” <sup>70</sup> This stigmergy of data, like ants communicating by leaving tracks of pheromones, is another way that human interact with one another indirectly, anonymously, and perhaps unconsciously as the impact of one User’ s presence, her habits, is part of the information that another User may observe or be observed by when passing along the same route that is accumulating input and output. On the ground, this is where the interfacial regime of a particular Cloud Polis is formed and is how it guides and frames the worldview of the embedded User as a visual, graphical interface would.
We see then that Internet of Things operates at the Interface layer in relation with the specific patterns of Users’ physical movement, gathered up into secondary images, which then in turn contribute to how other physical interfaces will or will not interact with a given User and enforce the logics of a given regime. As the User establishes place through the interfacial lens of possible engagements with a site, the accumulation of these interfacial events upon events and connections upon connections generates another scale of interconnection through its own patterns, densities, rules, and durations. The stigmergic currents of clustered groups of people moving though the City form nodes by the cumulative overlapping and gathering of multiple itineraries around common interfaces. In order to form, a node requires a heterogeneous field of possible interfacial sequences, some of which will bind into a specific, meaningful pattern. Like possible moves on a game board, there must be capacity for a multitude of patterns to arise by the addition of new groups and new possible links. That there would be one pattern and not another is what makes the social reality of one network significant — its inclusiveness, exclusiveness, duration, centrality — especially to itself. It is here that all these crisscrosses take on that secondary order of abstraction as an emergent metaimage of all these situated interfacial events and their cybernetic back-and-forth. Ubiquitous computation may be for the most part a nonvisual interfacial array, but it is also capable of describing itself as an image, even as an image that can govern and design how that array is recomposed. By design, this image of the nonvisual network can also govern other interfaces up or down an order of scale such that their use would result in desired outcomes at the User layer. <sup>71</sup> This reflexive cycle of intentions, decisions, sensations, and filters governing the processes to which it refers (and to which it is itself referred) is another name for algorithmic governance. <sup>72</sup>
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