- As well as a partial corrective, perhaps, to Adam Curtis ’ s tendentious narrative All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC Productions, 2011).
- This is drawn on our white board as a syncretic thought experiment because of, not in spite of, the complexities and contradictions it makes visible. Among the two most salient are, first, that no actual platform ever functions in an ideal manner and so simply transposing state or corporate governance into platforms does not guarantee specific outcomes, and, second, that the data with which any platform might govern do not merely exist in the world to be gathered and then presented to political systems for their application; rather the identification, sensing, sorting, application, revelation, and instrumentalization of data is the political system in this context. Its distortions are not errors; they are, as for any other intelligence, a function of what any platform can and cannot see. The provisional typology of platforms listed in the first chapter should be applied as both generic description and functional ideal: the setting of stages, by rigorous morphological standardization, toward forms of entrenchment that are desirable, allowing for unexpected reprogrammability, according to intelligent formal models, adding genuine value for Users, from a position that is neither exactly central nor distributed, that modulates the generation of governable identities, according to denuded diagrams, in which all components can be replaced, governing instantaneously and cumulatively, with incentivized error correction, by organizing existing systems, that can withstand the vulnerabilities that come with ubiquity, that demonetize (or monetize absolutely, which may be the same thing), that inform Users of their architecture in ways that support narrative participation as much as infrastructural transparency, that coordinate with the parallel ubiquity of other total platforms, and which therefore spin out system-scale accidents that are net positive, and so on, and so on. These are not givens; they are guidelines, both descriptive and prescriptive. To this list I highlight the right of exit and entrance from platform totalities. It ’ s true that successful and sustainable platforms may not only be “ walled gardens, ” but will enforce that wall with serious punishment, but our geodesign program stipulates that orderly User promiscuity between platforms is how the totality of totalities would work best as an active search field for optimal Anthropocenic (or post-Anthropocenic) planetary urbanism.
- Gabriel De Tarde and Theo Lorenc, Monadology and Sociology (Prahran, Victoria: Re.press,
2011), 167 – 168.
- It would also expand the governability of the information into depths and domains previously impossible. The fully posthuman descendant of The Stack we have may compose communicative flows in ways that our unique perch, measured in meters and months, will have far less privilege of place. But just as indicated for any big data apparatus, any such governance of addresses, especially those in the near term, would not cohere around what they find out there but around what they are looking for. The Borges Chinese Encyclopedia problem does not disappear with supercomputing or $1 0 ^ { 2 3 }$ addresses; rather, it expands exponentially. Any two governing apparatuses are able to map the same planet and what happens on it according to the categorical logics of utterly different kinds of descriptive systems, both of which are equally valid from the rigorously agnostic view of the addresses themselves. For example, the ontologies of, say, midtwenty-first-century organic chemistry as informed by electron microscopes as well as certain medieval spoken dialects mixing Russian and Polish languages may both be able to decide that certain things are in fact “ things ” requiring a number or not, while others don ’ t register at all, physically or conceptually, and may do so according to their own limited scopes.
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Notes