- An IPv6 address is not a random number but a hierarchical addressing structure, like a postal address. It is a categorization and mapping schema, in which some numbers are subsets of others, used for routing, and so on. Like any other widely adopted addressing platform, it is a kind of geographical and jurisdiction technology. For what that political technology is ultimately used for, if anything of significance, we do not know.
- Secure hashes may be another worthwhile model to pursue. Julian Assange outlines lays out a vision for this in his When WikiLeaks Met Google $( \mathrm { N . p . }$ : OR Books, 2014).
- Once again there is a correspondence between the universal addressability of discrete assemblages with mass and indiscrete assemblages without mass, things, or concepts, with the flat ontology of Latour ’ s “ irreductionism. ” One could borrow any Latour litany of possible objects and imagine them as addressed in relation to one another and supported by an artificial infrastructure for the exchange of physical information between each other. That said, it may be tempting to overinterpret apparent resemblances between the generic universalities of deep address with the various flat ontologies of object-oriented philosophy, and any direct conflation of the two would be a mistake. The Address layer is an artificial superimposition of a symbolic cartography onto the world according to a specific, contingent diagram, and like any other symbolic cartography, it is totally limited by the prejudicial finitude of its own structure. Its ontology is tactical, not metaphysical. That its structure, as a layer within The Stack, would come to materi ally affect whatever “ objects ” it may address demonstrates only the power of categorization to mobilize complex systems. The litany of things that may be identified by Address sets does not actually flatten the plateau any further than it already is, or support any additional withdrawal of objects from one another. To the contrary, it nominates each as an instance with a location to which and from which information could be communicated. It is only cartography and communication, not chemistry or ontology.
- I will quote a standard definition of the term. Haecceity (from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as “ thisness ” ) is a term from medieval philosophy coined by Duns Scotus. It denotes the discrete qualities, properties, or characteristics of a thing that make it a particular thing. Haecceity is a person or object ’ s “ thisness. ” Charles Sanders Peirce later used the term as a nondescriptive reference to an individual. See Martin A. Bertman, Classical American Pragmatism (New York: Humanities-Ebooks, 2010).
- Furthermore, the specter of deep address should not be seen as a necessary justification for a cosmically inflated ontological “ computationalism ” whereby the whole universe is understood at its essence as algorithmic unfolding, with deep address cast as infinite drawing by which such cosmic calculations can be mapped. Instead, deep address should be taken for what it is: an emergent global logic for the de-differentiation of things and events by their common entry into a common, artificial platform of identification and exchange. And for this already and without decoration, it already represents a sufficiently disruptive and provocative aspect of The Stack infrastructure and its relation to the omnivorousness of Anthropocene capitalism (as well as to the fragility of the totalities that its growth program composes for itself and which may prove its undoing). See Alexander R. Galloway, “ The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism, ” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2013): 347 – 366, doi:10.1086/668529, and Reza Negarastani, “ The Non-Trivial Goat and the Cliffs of the Universal ” (lecture at the Abrons Playhouse, New York, November 15, 2012), and my own “ Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics, ” 2013, http://www.e-flux.com/issues/46-june-2013/.
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