- Planetary-scale computation is both the medium through which the possibility of comprehensive planetary visualization (however skewed) is possible and something to be represented within that geography and its motivated geoscapes. The Interface layer is where the performance of any exceptional reversal between inside and outside plays out, even if it is for the benefit of just one User ’ s line of sight. It is also, as discussed regarding the City layer, where any one interface, physical or virtual, may open or close urban habitats to some Users and foreclose them to others, automating the normalization of that inversion of exceptional internalization and externalization on the fly. Depending on the regime at work, the results for any given User may be very different, however resolved or however alien they appear to different Users all sorted by platform cognition into their microcultures. Things show up on your map that are not on mine, and vice versa, and that is precisely the point. While this may undermine the simple geometry of cosmopolitan consensus, it may also provide for less timid forms of universalism.
- For modern panoptic systems, surveillant sensors are hidden or camouflaged from the view of the surveilled. The gaze is present but unseen. But the contemporary moment is characterized instead by the display of surveillance and the spectacle of transparency.
- In practice the interrelationship between scales, both as real accumulations and as diagrammatic images of those accumulations, is a densely intermingled pattern of infra- and intrasignification. The interfacial image represents an interfacial assemblage, but it can also represent a network, a territory, or a geoscape. For example, a hand-held mapping application may construct a framed image of very local interfacial objects and surfaces or the larger-scale networks at work and the territories that structure them. The Citysense app, for example, as an interface to the urban field draws an image of particular networks among others as they congeal onto particular nodal interfaces within the city among others, but the image is of the coagulation more than of a given interface within it. It also locates that network onto the schematic territory of the city here rendered only as a field of channels for the potential formation of networks. In this, the interface not only accumulates into networks and networks into territories; here the interface directly diagrams the network in formation and the territory as its limit. We can expect any recursivity then to be between a decision to be subjectivity located within a field of urban interfaciality based on a sense of coordination with a network ( “ my people go there, so I should too ” ) and even the positive effects an action might have on the network accumulation itself and its socialized image ( “ if I go there, it will show up on the map of my network ” ).
- See Tim O ’ Reilly, “ Open Data and Algorithmic Regulation, ” Beyond Transparency, http://beyondtransparency.org/chapters/part-5/open-data-and-algorithmic-regulation/, and Tim McCormick, “ A Brief Exchange with Tim O ’ Reilly about Algorithmic Regulation, ” February 15, 2014. http://tjm.org/2014/02/15/a-brief-exchange-with-tim-oreilly-about-algorithmic-regulation/. See as well this from O ’ Reilly: “ Consider, for a moment, regulation in a broader context. Your car ’ s electronics regulate the fuel-air mix in the engine to find an optimal balance of fuel efficiency and minimal emissions. An airplane ’ s autopilot regulates the countless factors required to keep that plane aloft and heading in the right direction. Credit card companies monitor and regulate charges to detect fraud and keep you under your credit limit. Doctors regulate the dosage of the medicine they give us, sometimes loosely, sometimes with exquisite care, as with the chemotherapy required to kill cancer cells while keeping normal cells alive, or with the anesthesia that keeps us unconscious during surgery while keeping vital processes going. ISPs and corporate mail systems regulate the mail that reaches us, filtering out spam and malware to the best of their ability. Search engines regulate the results and advertisements they serve up to us, doing their best to give us more of what we want to see. ” Tim O ’ Reilly, “ Open Data and Algorithmic Regulation, ” in Brett Goldstein and Lauren Dyson, eds., Beyond Transparency (San Francisco: Code for America Press, 2013), and http://beyondtransparency.org/chapters/part-5/open-data-and -algorithmic-regulation/.
452
Notes