In the construction of the User as an aggregate profile that both is and is not specific to any one entity, there is no identity to deduce other than the pattern of interaction between partial actors. We may find, perhaps ironically, that the User position of the Stack actually has far less in common with the neoliberal subject than some of today ’ s oppositionalist formats for political subjectivity that hope (rightly so in many cases) to challenge, reform, and resist the state Stack as it is currently configuring itself. However, something like a digital bill of rights for Users, despite its sweetness, becomes a much more complicated and limited solution when the discrete identification of a User is both so heterogeneous and so fluid. <sup>23</sup> Are all proxy composite users one User? Is anything with an IP address a User? If not, why not? If this throne is reserved for one species — humans — when is any one animal of that species being a User, and when is it not? Any time that it is generating information, is it a User? If so, that policy would in practice trespass some of our most basic concepts of the political, and for that reason alone may be a good place to start. In addition to the fortification of the User as a geopolitical subject, we also require, as I have laid out, a redefinition of the political subject in relation to the real operations of the User, one that is based not on homo economicus, parliamentary liberalism, poststructuralist linguistic reduction, or the will to secede into the moral safety of individual privacy and withdrawn from coercion. Instead, this definition should focus on composing and elevating sites of governance from the immediate, suturing interfacial material between subjects, in the stitches and the traces and the folds of interaction between bodies and things at a distance, congealing into different networks demanding very different kinds of platform sovereignty.
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The Black Stack