The Interface layer describes the projective, perceptual cinematic, semiotic layer on a given instrumental landscape, including the frames, subtitles, navigable maps, pixelated hallucinations, and augmented realities through which local signification and significance are programmed. Interfaces provide imagistic and linguistic mediation between Users and the Addressable computational capacities of their habitats, priming the pump for possible communication. The chapter outlines a typological history of interfaces, from the mechanical, to the semiolinguistic, to the haptic and gestural. As an interface, any surface or gateway oscillates between open and closed in a given context, and because of this, it is where the reversibility of the interior/exterior decision by platforms is most clearly observed. As an interactive diagram, GUIs present a visually coherent image of otherwise discontiguous and opaque logistical flows, but when aligned with new interface technologies, such as augmented reality that superimposes interfacial elements directly into the perceptual field, they can collapse a metaphorical space between object and interpretation. This literal projection of the ideas and ideologies of an imagined community onto perceived objects and events can engender undesirable cognitive fundamentalisms.
At the top of The Stack is the most culturally complex layer, the User. This chapter describes how The Stack sees the humans and nonhumans that initiate columns up and down its layers, from Interface to Earth and back again, As a contemporary image of self, the User is asked to speak through utilitarian scripts, and yet its subjectivity is also opened up to unexpected kinds of universality. Human and nonhuman Users are positioned by The Stack (perhaps rudely) as comparable and even interchangeable through a wide-ranging and omnivorous quantification of their behaviors and effects. The preponderance of data generated by Users and the traces of their worldly transactions initially overtrace the outline of a given User (e.g., the hyperindividualism of the quantified self movement), but as new data streams overlap over it and through it, the coherent position of the User dissolves through its overdetermination by external relations and networks. The User’ s enumeration is first a grotesquely individuated selfimage, a profile, but as the same process is oversubscribed by data that trace all the things that affect the User, now included in the profile, the persona that first promises coherency and closure brings an explosion and liquefaction of self.
The concluding chapter draws out from these discussions some of the most tangled and complex implications of The Stack as geopolitical design challenges to be achieved or resisted. Among these is the proliferation of enclaves as a political and architectural expression of network geographies. As each layer is considered in relation to its accidents, The Stack itself is the composite accident that may define the course of geopolitics to come. As a global platform, its demand for universality and totality should be read in both utopian and dystopian registers equally. The Stack may represent an epochal enclosure of the planet under an absolutist regime of algorithmic capital, or the fragility of its totality may force new breaks as its infrastructural universality spawns new, even emancipatory programs of disenchantment, discovery, and design. The design brief begins on the cliff ’ s edge of the Anthropocene, and tilts toward an acceleration into risk and reward; it presumes that the megainfrastructures of “ actually existing ” algorithmic capitalism are not, as of now, able to break clear of their own failures and realize a break for and toward the latent potential of a postscarcity geoeconomics. That acceleration is not therefore an acceleration of The Stack or away from its risks, but toward a particular termination and succession, and toward the articulation and realization of a more genuinely luxurious social geology. We are resigned that the emergence of that planetary condition, wherever and whenever, will likely not include or require human geopolitics as we currently understand it. As such, we commit to the ongoing design of the accidental megastructure knowing full well that its ultimate purpose may be to disappear before it fully arrives.
Platform and Stack, Model and Machine
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