Skolkova, Foxconn, Peter Thiel ’ s tutelage under Rene Girard, and the dissertation that Alex Karp, founder of Palantir, did with J ü rgen Habermas before inventing big data search tools that would provide a far more rigorous communicative rationality than his advisor could ever grasp. <sup>20</sup> Or perhaps not. Perhaps the most relevant totalities multiplied one on top of another into hyperbolic geometries are those that seem too dumb to matter. Perhaps the real candidate is not the smart city but Home Depot, and the logistical space of the recombinant object coursing through supply chain heaven. Ponder these warehouse arcades filled with incomplete things with incomplete utility that must be assembled later into metathings in order to be consumed and in order to realize their mission, a factory for 10 <sup>9</sup> <sup>(people)</sup> multipled by 10 <sup>28</sup> <sup>(addresses)</sup> as potential experimental architectures. Invention depends, doesn ’ t it, on recalculations of substance, but when or where? The deep time of comparative planetology brings with it local implementation in and as computational geopolitics. Instead of driving a new condition to emerge at some postponed launch event (next fiscal quarter, after the rebuilding of the temple, the coming of the multitude ’ s sovereignty, or whatever), this recalculation would perhaps do so here and now in this space through the resorted synchronic field of the longest possible present moment.
The geopolitics of the User we have now is, however, inadequate for that task, including its oppositional modes, but perhaps the spells of geopolitical apophenia can be broken. The Oedipal discourse of privacy and transparency in relation to the evil eye of the uninvited stepfather is a necessary process toward an alter-globalism, but it has real limits. <sup>21</sup> A geopolitics of computation predicated at its core on the biopolitics of privacy, of self-immunization from any compulsory appearance in front of publics, of platforms, of states, of others, can sometimes also serve a psychological internalization of a now ascendant general economy of succession, castration anxiety — more besides — resulting in the preparanoia of withdrawal into an atomic and anomic dream of self-mastery that elsewhere one might call “ neoliberal subject. ” Like Theseus ’ s paradox, where after every component of a thing has been replaced nothing original remains but a metaphysical husk, the User is confronted with the existential lesson that at any point, he is only the intersection of many streams (at first, the subject position of the User overproduces individual identity, but in the continuance of the same mechanisms, it then succeeds in exploding it). That immunization is matched and inverted by a demand for an equally absolute transparency of authority. Power apparently can tell no jokes of its own, supposedly is never ironic, and any shadows that it harbors are already sinister, never demonstrating nuance. The autonomic narcissism means that the world endangers you; the empire cares about you, who are such an important threat to the order of things that your anonymity and boundaries must be enforced as a first principle for the design of the User-layer as a whole. This glass house of immurement calls for absolute transparency when looking up and absolute opacity when looking down, but it is never so clear where we are, even if we are within an architecture with clear directions of stratification in the first place. Without a clear map of up and down in a social structure, these absolutes are inevitably contaminated and spastically invert on each other, and so the stakes are raised (axiom: no one is more likely to commit atrocities than someone who believes himself to be acting in self-defense).
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The Black Stack