The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 343 页

HRI (human-robotics interaction) but is a separate issue from the actual autonomy or dependence of that device. Interfaces may sustain and nudge Users toward systemically optimal interactions, but for The Stack-to-come, the nudging must work both ways. ⁷⁶ No platform can only anticipate how Users will make use of it. The most basic principles of infrastuctural resilience dictate that the algorithmic correlation of new sensed information must be able to reprogram even the most fundamental assumptions of that interfacial regime ’ s model of governance and how it obligates decisions of inside from outside. If not, then that platform is a theocracy, and surely there are far too many theocratic platforms already plotting their ascendance. I hope, however, that those interfacial regimes will be dissipated by exit , as others are correspondingly swelled by entrance.

1. User Layer to Come: Inventing Users

The names don’t matter. The biomass does: so much of it, lost. So much new experience, so much fresh wisdom annihilated by this world of thinking tumors.

— Peter Watts ⁷⁷

For the most part, people would like to believe that the future of The Stack depends mostly on the geopolitics of the User and that the more human and humane the User layer becomes, the better resolved the rest of the accidental megastructure. Resolution at the User layer may prove decisive in some ways, but very different from how one might expect and perhaps from “ human ” in any normal sense. The world is still full of pre-Copernicans, across the political spectrum, and disturbances to human privilege will continue to invite violent pushback. The status of the User as a political and technological creature will stage much of this conflict to come, and it will draw both our deepest intelligence and stupidity to the surface.

An early work by Douglas Engelbart from 1960 is “ Special Considerations of the Individual as User, Generator, and Retriever of Information. ” Among the considerable effects for “ the individual ” of Engelbart ’ s later work, as one of the key designers of many of the interfacial systems we today take for granted (he was key contributor to the design of the mouse, pointer, and pull-down menu, among other techniques), has been the conflation of the use, generation, and retrieval of information under a single actor, the User. It is however also an identity that can easily also pluralize the singular agent into composite groups of users, generators, and retrievers, and it does so not only by what it allows people to do but by how it sees them as doers. For architectural space, the singular User is the generic identity of passengers, customers, drivers, shoppers, bench sitters, door-knob turners, the fenced in and the fenced out, and those cut-and-pasted inhabitants of rendered visualizations. ⁷⁸ For the Cloud, the User is also the subject created by available means of measurement and discrete identification, markup languages, online ID checks, avatars, and click paths, and for the law, the User may be whoever has a searchable cellular phone on his person, as his person, as part of his person, or simply in the proximity of his person. As discussed above, the conventional User-subject ’ s neutral utilitarianism relates him to homo economicus, but it is not identical to him; he is defined as much by how technologies delineate him for their purposes as he, she, or it uses technologies for perceived self-interest. The User is whatever The Stack senses at its top layer initiating columns up and down with means and ends in mind. This is where and how User subjectivity opens up beyond the borders of the human, and if all the sensors and bots are included, the clear majority of Users are already not human or even organic. This rerendering of the human in the image of the bot, as filtered through microeconomic compulsion, is as a task-solving sentient agent who will complete tasks for micropayments, just like other Cloud utility computing services that provide liquid markets of gigaflops. ⁷⁹ The cultural complexities to be negotiated (or to be simply made irrelevant) are uneven and irregular. It is interesting to note that the transposition of human labor into simple puzzle solving is taken by some as straightforward market efficiency and not as a transformation of humans into diminished automatons, whereas other Stack technologies that may ultimately allow for greater individual pleasure and safety are seen as affronts to the dignity of Creation.

The Stack to Come

343