{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":220,"pdf_page":236,"physical_index":236,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"36983c09152cc66417d9ce8160fdff8830f45e484ba2e516c82410a88e7c81f0"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"51. What Interfaces Are\n\nThe Interface layer consists of any technical-informational machine, compressed into graphical or objective formats, that links or delinks Users and the Addressed entities up and down columns within the Stack. Its role is to telescope, compress, and expand layers of The Stack, routing User actions both up and down as they go. <sup>5</sup> We need to think of interfaces not only in terms of the GUI (as “ buttons with words on them ” ) but as a more generic structuring of links and boundaries within a given form or field. <sup>6</sup> An interface is any point of contact between two complex systems that governs the conditions of exchange between those systems. <sup>7</sup> Levers, steering wheels, doorways, mobile Apps, fences, office layout schemes, international borders, telecommunications infrastructure: these are all interfaces. The conditioning of exchange that any interface provides could be variously promiscuous or prophylactic, physical or virtual, accelerating or decelerating, signifying or asignifying, symmetrical or asymmetrical, territorializing or deterritorializing. <sup>8</sup> The interface could be a line that links two things together into one, or a line that cleaves them apart. Buttons and levers are interfaces to machines and to what machines do. Familiar architectural interfaces organize interior and exterior zones, and borders between countries are interfaces between sovereign polities. Once an image can be used to control what it represents, it too becomes technology: diagram plus computation equals interface. As a computationally intensive interface, the image is not only a picture of the network; it is also an instrument through which a user of this image-interface can effect change back on that network. Computation turns the image into a technology, just as it then turns technology more generally into fields of actionable images — in this case, maps that also reprogram territories. In other words, for the GUI specifically, interfaces are diagrams of possible actions, a menu of simulations that when activated (clicked, touched, pinched, waved at, chosen from a delimited array of options) executes some information loop resulting (it is assumed) in an outcome approximating what was on the menu. The veracity of that loop between interface and event depends on both a technical correspondence between one part of a machine and another (i.e., a button on a keyboard linked to a peripheral device across the room) as well as a semiotic correspondence between a visual simulation and a relevant outcome (i.e., between an icon on the screen that resembles X and the X-like event that it initiates in the world). We could have one loop working without the other, and often do in fact, but our expansive interfacial modernity depends on a universally usable and effectively compelling alignment between these two correspondences. For interfaces to be systematic, clicks must work and do what they promise.\n\n220\n\nInterface Layer","previous_page":null,"next_page":221}