Geoscapes Maps on top of maps create the map of maps. Geoscapes are defined as a territory of territories, each competing over the right to describe the reality of location, distance, borders, and juxtaposition of the whole of territory itself. It composes and is composed of multiple contradictory mapping gestures and held in overlapping and finally incommensurate arrangements. Geoscapes are held in agonistic tension by overlapping descriptions of territories as they exist, as well as idealized territories, futuristic or atavistic, as they should be. In such utopias, idealizations continue to operate through geographic imagery, just as geographic imagery — in its fidelity, affect, comprehensiveness — continues to imply an idealized (and sometimes utopian) image of the world as it is. The ultimate quality of geoscapes is made only by the accumulation of territories that fill it by their drawings; it has no shape or presence other than by this accumulation.
Google Gosplan/ Grossraum Refers in general to the convergence of planned and market economies into computational platforms that share ideal and practical characteristics, and specifically to the genealogy of Google as inclusive of socialist and communist state attempts to use computing systems, primitive by today ’ s standards, to model and coordinate their economies, sometimes with success and sometimes with disastrous effect. The term also implies that the future evolu tion of Cloud platforms that absorb traditional functions of states (such as Google, to a degree) may realize forms of effective economic governance that are recognizable as both minimal state and maximal state at once. It strongly suggests that there is no intrinsic relationship between infrastructural scale computation and neoliberal economies as they are conventionally understood. Many socialist computing platforms were criticized as suffering insufficient information to regulate price properly, but platforms like Google may suggest that information scarcity may no longer be as strong a limitation, and in principle it implies that such platforms could also calculate the true costs of transaction externalities.
Interface Layer The fifth layer from bottom of The Stack, just below the User layer. Interfaces are the membrane through which The Stack addresses and is addressed by Users. Interfaces, as compressed into graphical or objective forms, link (or delink) Users and the Addressed entities up and down columns. The speed by which the embedded interface circulates information and physical goods contributes to the real and perceived discontiguity of chains of production and distribution of material culture for the User. The dominant contemporary genre of Interface, the graphical user interface, is an interactive visual diagram that presents a visually coherent image of otherwise discontiguous and opaque processes and flows. Some emerging technologies, such as augmented reality, superimpose interfacial elements directly into the User ’ s perceptual field, with the capability of articulating the significance of people, places, and things according to the program of different imagined communities. This collapse of the metaphorical space between perceived object and its interpretation, especially when paired with messianic political theologies, can engender forms of cognitive fundamentalism.
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Glossary