Algorithmic Governance A reflexive cycle of intentions, sensation, filtering, and decision-making that can govern the social, economic and computational cycles to which it refers and is referred by. Reporting agents in such a system both send and receive information to a higherorder governing abstraction: a measured swarm in relation to how algorithmic governance feeds back to them, resensing their reactions, and so on. Users observe that cycle through Interfaces, which in turn govern User actions by delineating and filtering their options.
Ambient Interface The term has both descriptive and prescriptive connotations. It is the field of both the physical and virtual interfaces that surround a User at any given moment; or put differently, it is the user ’ s world defined as a field of interfaces (an interface being defined as any point of contact between two complex systems that governs the conditions of exchange between those systems). The prescriptive connotation refers to designing in accordance with haptic, gestural, or semiotic User interfaces that prioritize interaction between things existing at very different physical and qualitative scales at once, suggesting unusual chains of remote agency and causality.
App A small software application running on a given piece of hardware that provides a highly specific, temporary, and limited functional Interface, thereby converting the general tool into a particular machine. The App manages information in several possible ways. It may store gathered information, including sensors and direct User input, for immediate or later use; it may draw new information down from more powerful applications in the Cloud to the device interface; and it may coordinate local and Cloud-based information streams into a consolidated image. Importantly, an App platform allows for software-driven hardware modularity.
Assemblage Line The space of Logistics shifts from the spatially contiguous assembly line to the more discontiguous assemblage line linked internally through specific interfacial chains. This delinking makes the arrival of material goods (and the processes of the world of production, in general) more opaque. Interfaces draw these chains as coherent wholes, gathering multiple events and effects into a common visual frame. This conceptual gathering refers instead to how a massively discontiguous assemblage line, bound together by exceedingly complex interfacial relays linking continents, must be understood and represented as if it were a single pattern or machine. For The Stack, such apparently comprehensive interfacial images of assemblage lines, which themselves comprise interfacial relays, are, for the User, a necessary tool to manage otherwise illegibly complex chains of interaction. See also Interface Layer.
The Black Stack The generic term for The Stack-to-Come that we cannot observe, map, name, or recognize. It may describe The Stack that remains, thriving or dead, after Homo sapiens is no longer the dominant geological actor. It is a name for the “ not-blank slate ” of whatever composition The Stack will turn into. It is a composition that we know is coming, know that we will have a hand in fashioning, but don ’ t know how to recognize in advance (or cannot possibly recognize in advance because we cannot possibly ever witness it for whatever reason.) Some ante-verberations of “ this-totality-to-come ” are surely already here and now.
Camp/Enclave The camp and the bunker, detention and enclave, are inversions of the same architecture. One is an architecture of internalization and the other of externalization, but they share the same material profile. What may be an interiorizing partition ( “ enclave ” ) for one User at one moment may be an exteriorizing partition ( “ camp ” ) for another at another moment. Giorgio
368
Glossary