{"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":234,"pdf_page":250,"physical_index":250,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b0d1fd8141dfcc6f582fb52e2f22ad8ae6cf369fb6cb855aeda8777c952cfe68"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"User demands visual resolution with descriptions, diagnoses, and coherent projections of how important interfaces are dispersed and their impact on our lives. This is the essential comfort of information visualization, especially dashboards, because instead of being elusive and rare, data arrive in bewildering excess. This complicates its assignment to clarify things for us, as any query of the world results in so much raw information coming back to the User in response that another question must be asked of the first answer in the form of a reductive visualization, and inside the bounding frame of that diagram, pattern recognition begins to take over for interpretation.\n\nThis drawing of coherent wholes gathers multiple events and effects into a conceptual whole as if they were a single thing, and in the interfacial landscape, they in fact are one and many at the same time (just as an automobile comprises hundreds of smaller machines, not to mention legal, political, and cultural attributes and determinants, but these are understood in the singular, a car, and the plural at the same time). This kind of putting together is different from an assemblage, which would refer the real physical intermingling of material into a new composite. This conceptual gathering refers instead to how a massively discontiguous assemblage line, bound together by exceedingly complex interfacial relays linking continents, must be understood and represented as if it were a single pattern or machine. <sup>36</sup> For The Stack, such apparently comprehensive interfacial images of assemblage lines that themselves comprise interfacial relays, are, for the User, a necessary tool to manage otherwise illegibly complex chains of interaction. It draws the discontiguous assemblage line into that resolved diagram, but to do so, it must, like all diagrams, necessarily reduce and conceal the complexity of the processes it represents (and as indicated above, that reduction is also necessary to its ability to function as a broadly useful social tool). Further, as interfaces are reductive in how they compress information — in their foregrounding of certain things and not others — they are also inevitably “ ideological. ” <sup>37</sup> Their reduction toward resolution is doctrinal. Ultimately the provision of an affectively compelling and instrumentally effective image of a composite interface chain becomes a strategic expertise, as information designers carve out a niche to provide convincing images of organization, tempo, and narrative. <sup>38</sup> For Users, they compose cognitive maps of multiple layers of exchange drawn at once, gathered into provisional total images (for which pattern recognition and intentional, motivated interpretation can start to merge.) <sup>39</sup> Moreover, such image interfaces are not only maps of flows as they exist according to whatever logic of reduction they invoke; they are also tools that reproject and extend their conceptual gathering of relations back out onto the world. Once more, unlike static diagrams, such interfaces can directly affect what they represent; as the chain of signification runs both from the event up through a chain of representation to the image represents it, it also runs back down to the event, and so the User-manipulated image of the thing becomes the medium through which the thing can also be manipulated. In this recursion, the semiotic and instrumental loop is closed, and so these images of assemblage that are also machines to make those assemblages are a third-order interface design. Within the broader history of images, these diagrammatic tools are innovative in that they not only provide a convincing and concise minimal diagram of far-flung processes; they actually do what they represent (see the above reference to “ weaponized skeuomorphism ” ). Conversely within the history of interfaces, which would include fences, levers, latches, knobs, switches, handles, buttons, and plugs, these interfaces rely on visual representations of the effects on the menu.\n\n234\n\nInterface Layer","previous_page":233,"next_page":235}