Building a better armature for the User-subject position may not seem like the most pressing design problem, but in many ways, that is exactly what it is. An (only somewhat) unlikely consensus has formed around the structural importance of robotics and automation and their impact on the macroeconomics of labor and markets. Bets are placed from both the right and the left that a “ zero-marginal cost society ” or “ fully automated luxury communism ” is built into the future of software-driven globalization. A party line that crosses parties emerges in different versions, blending nanotechnology, industrial robotics, additive manufacturing (3D printing), Internet of Things, digital replication, biotechnology, and open networks to draw a scenario in which many physical commodities are rationalized into downloadable streams, and much of the heavy lifting (and flying) will be done by intelligent quasi- or fully autonomous machines. We shall have to wait and see, but algorithms and algorithmically intelligent hardware are already active Users in our world, and we need to give them their due. For better or worse, we and they occupy converging niches in a new equilibrium and its many punctuations. It is with vestigial stupidity that we police the human/animal divide in the way that we do, and it is equally misguided to insist that computing machines are “ just tools ” and not also co- Users along with us. The implications are both ethical and economic, and the geopolitics of the User must reflect not only how we want states and platforms to treat human Users, but how we would situate these ideals within interfacial regimes that are more effectively inclusive and more accurately representative (never fully — always by reduction) of who and what is interfacing with whom and what, regardless of species or kingdom.
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The Stack to Come