{"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":223,"pdf_page":239,"physical_index":239,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b6bce0698e0cbce2c06bf6a6cc38c6e50162d944d7e3c5987643d2ac7907f18b"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"With Serres ’ s lesson in mind, I am looking at photos that I happened to take of the moment when my son Lucien, then two years old, became interested in a certain remote control that turned on and off an overhead light and a fan in our home office. That night he spent at least an hour clicking them both, light and dark, spinning and not spinning, in various combinations. He was lost in a fundamental discovery about his new world: that some things are not like other things and possess an inscrutable power to affect other things at a distance in predictable and repeatable patterns and according to some invisible force controlled by buttons. He had discovered a basic principle of modern interfaciality, and for him this was very big news. Like many other kids, he entered a phase of button-pushing mania, investigating which objects, surfaces, and icons possess this capacity, serving which effect, and which did not. He may also have deduced, in his own way, that this interfaciality is not reducible to the physical qualities of any object. A plastic button by itself, disconnected from any relay or absent that invisible force of effect, has no interfacial power. Isolated, it is all but useless, just a button. Only when it is embedded in some system of input and output, usually involving waves or wires, he soon learns, does the thing become interfacial. Then it takes on its capacities of sorting, transference, and vicarious causality. But of course, that particular discovery is limited to interfaces with local and observable cybernetic circuits. Remote interfaces, linking Users across time zones perhaps, are more difficult to keep straight. More broadly, any effective tool has some interfacial capacities in that it transforms, encodes, or transmits some worldly dynamic in a specific way. A rock is an interface if you use it in the right way. We could say, at the risk of teleology, that the mastery of a tool, already a kind of embodied internalization of its own effects, entails a specific intelligence regarding the mutual interfaciality of objects in the world. That is, any reflexive knowledge of effects and environments must also include an understanding of the intrinsic and extrinsic interfacialities of available objects. <sup>12</sup>\n\nBut what about GUIs and their links, both simulated and mechanical? For them Charles Sanders Peirce ’ s full range of “ signs ” (icon, index, symbol, diagram) is put to use in order to represent what interfaces do and the programs they present to us. Instead of manipulating objects as tools, we have learned to manipulate signs that have the same technical effects of tools. A general conversion is at work in this transference of interfacial knowledge from things to signs for things, from objects to icons.\n\nInterface Layer\n\n223","previous_page":222,"next_page":224}