The space in which the discursive formation of the subject meets the technical constitution of the User enjoys a much larger horizon than the one defined by these kinds of projects for hyperattenuated digital individuation. Consider, for example, proxy users. uProxy is a project supported by Google Ideas, a browser modification that lets users easily pair up across distances to allow someone in one location (trapped in the Bad Internets) to send information unencumbered through the virtual position of another User in another location (enjoying the Good Internets). <sup>22</sup> Recalling the proxy servers set up during Arab Spring, one can see how Google Ideas (Jared Cohen ’ s group) might take special interest in baking this into Chrome. For Sino-Google geopolitics, the platform could theoretically be available at a billion-user scale to those who live in China, even if Google is not technically “ in China, ” because those Users, acting through and as foreign proxies, are themselves, as far as the Internet geography is concerned, both in and not in China. Developers of uProxy believe that it would take two simultaneous and synchronized man-in-the-middle attacks to hack the link, and at population scale, that should prove difficult even for the best state actors, for now. (More disconcerting perhaps is that such a framework could just as easily be used to withdraw data from a paired site — a paired “ user ” — that for good reasons should be left alone.) Any plural User subject that is conjoined by a proxy link or other means could be composed of different types of addressable subjects: two humans in different countries, or a human and a sensor, a sensor and a bot, a human and a robot and a sensor, a whatever and a whatever. In principle, any one of these subcomponents not only could be part of multiple conjoined positions, but might not know or need to always know which meta- User it contributes to, any more than the microbial biome in your gut needs to know your name. Spoofing with honeypot identities, between humans and nonhumans, is measured against the scope and scale of deep address. The abyssal quantity and range of “ things ” that could, in principle, participate in these vast pluralities includes real and fictional addressable persons, objects, locations, even addressable massless relations between things, any of which could be a sub- User in our Internet of haecceities.
So while The Stack and The Stack-to-come stage The Death of User in one sense — the eclipse of a certain resolute individuated utilitarian humanism — they do so because they also bring in the multiplication and proliferation of other kinds of nonhuman Users (including sensors, financial algorithms, and various robots from nanometric to landscape scale), any combination of which one might enter into a relationship as part of a composite User. This is where the recent shift by major Cloud platforms into robotics may prove especially vital, because — like Darwin ’ s tortoises finding their way to different Galapagos islands — the Cambrian explosion in robotics sees speciation occur in the wild, not just in the lab, and with “ us ” on “ their ” inside, not on the outside. As robotics and cloud hardware of all scales blend into a common category of machine, it will be unclear for everyday human-robotic interaction whether one is encountering a fully autonomous, partially autonomous, or completely human-piloted synthetic intelligence. Everyday interactions replay the Turing test over and over. Is there a person behind this machine, and if so how much? In time, the answer will matter less, and the postulation of human (or even carbon-based life) as the threshold measure of intelligence and as the qualifying gauge of a political ethics may seem like tasteless vestigial racism, replaced by less anthropocentric frames of reference. The position of the User then maps only very incompletely onto any one individual body. From the perspective of the platform, what looks like one is really many, and what looks like many may only be one. Elaborate schizophrenias already take hold in our early negotiation of these composite User positions. The individual subject position makes absurd demands on people as Users, as quantified selves, as SysAdmins of their own psyche, and from this, paranoia and narcissism are two symptoms of the same disposition, two functions of the same mask. For one, the mask works to pluralize identity according to the subjective demands of the User position as composite alloy; for another, it defends against those same demands on behalf of the illusory integrity of a self-identity fracturing around its existential core. Ask yourself: Is that User anonymous because he is dissolved into a vital machinic plurality, or because public identification threatens individual self-mastery, sense of autonomy, social unaccountability? The former and the latter are two very different politics but use the same masks and the same software suite. Given the schizophrenic economy of the User, first overindividuated and then multiplied and dedifferentiated, this really isn ’ t an unexpected or neurotic reaction at all. It is, however, fragile and inadequate.
The Black Stack
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