The overindividuation of User identity in accordance with modern conventions of political identity can produce both comedy and tragedy. During protests in Maidan Square in early 2014, the Ukrainian government of then-President Viktor Yanukovych sent a text message to the phones of many of those gathered that read, “ Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance. ” This fact should be obvious to anyone participating in the mass disturbance, but the implied threat that comes from the sudden revelation that the state knows who she is, or at least her phone number, is clear, if somewhat pathetic as well. An explicit drawing of sides does not benefit a weak regime, and the anointment of someone in the square as officially an enemy of the state would do little to shore up its flagging legitimacy. Furthermore, the awkward over-individuation of a mass protest that has power only because it is an emergent crowd, not a coincidental gathering of many Users at one time, must have provoked more chuckling than cowering. For the future of the User layer, the episode also dramatizes the mismatch between traditional political individuation versus real world User/ Interface/ City layer assemblages when one is clumsily overlaid on top of the other. Who knows how sophisticated the targeting was or ever would be in a future of cell proxies, IP spoofing, number forwarding, and urban software ( “ Dear sensor embedded in a bridge, you have been identified as a protester … ” ). The mismatch gets more convoluted when it has to account for the inadvertent interpolation of Users with citizen-like rights, on the one hand, and the unwanted segmentation and surveillance of individuated Users, on the other. It confuses one with the other because it sees them both only in relation to how they deviate from an obsolete figure of User as individual citizen.
A specific design problem for the Interface layer-to-come is this individuation of the interface itself. By hailing “ the ” User as a single agent with a single perspective, instead of an important but partial agency within many larger and small apparatuses at once, the placebo identity of a resolved Vitruvian User is not only accommodated; it is reproduced and fortified. What is the better “ sovereign unit ” of this assembly then? One wonders if the legal accounting of individuals is even a viable notion when systems and individuals become indistinguishable from one another. The Stack ’ s technologies of the self give enormous weight to formulas that seem to verify the existential discreteness of the individual, diagrammed by biographical quantification and attended to by single-serving pointing and clicking. This is so even as the technologies of the self we see at work in (or as, or through) The Stack do what seems to be the exact opposite of what I am suggesting, and instead give more and more weight to formulas of individuation that seem to verify the existential discreteness of the existential individual through the diagrammatic quantification of his biography. For the User-to-come, perhaps no door is built only for you, because your being, having, and knowing are never only yours alone? The door builds you as that which passes or does not, that which is absorbed by the profile or that which absorbs it. Real infrastructure involves many actors, some named and some unaccounted for by law or by software but nevertheless active. The interface constructs Users, but it is also constructed by Users, and so to remake the User-subject is to reform “ the door ” to better reflect all of what is actually present and active within any chain of exchange and to institutionalize these as interfaces into new normative systems. To innovate the agency of the User is then not just to innovate the rights of humans who are Users but also to innovate the agency of the machines with which the User is embroiled. A User may be anything that can initiate a column up and down The Stack, but because as any particular thing, human or nonhuman, may step in or out of that position many times over the course of the day we need to design modes of accountability all the way up and down the line. Only then can we reasonably expect to design a livable governance of automated decision on the inside and the outside, who and what goes where, and how to program algorithmic interfacial governance, all the while attentive to the exceptions that it decides and does not decide.
The Stack to Come
347