{"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":241,"pdf_page":257,"physical_index":257,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a3631ad7067c2e8912235cfb826e1e806cba176ecdab0ca14e44e0db7d2eb8a3"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"As operative for the Interface layer within The Stack, AR performs the imagistic and linguistic mediation between Users (one layer above) and the ubiquitous computational capacities of their habitats (one layer below). As a design space, it is a way to stage, animate, compose, and account for communication between Users and their worlds, and unlike traditional mechanical or screen-based user interfaces, it performs this as artificially embodied perception; it is a new genre of physical cinema in which spaces between fantasy and projection are collapsed. <sup>49</sup> In AR, just as for the interfacial image in general, its descriptions of space also become a medium for the recursive reinscription of a broader politico-geographic diagram back on the world through its direct instrumentalization as an interface. <sup>50</sup> Put another way, AR Apps, in all their baroque banality, augment the world more than they augment vision. As we define the interface as any point of contact that governs the conditions of exchange between two complex systems, then within AR, the GUI melts, so it seems, into reality itself, and is seen as another property of surfaces, things, and events. That melting becomes the scope of design, the registration of labor, the touchpoint of advertising, and even (perhaps especially) the domain of activist belief, sacred and secular. Slavoj Ž i ž ek ’ s definition of “ the Real ” as that which is negatively defined by fantasy is here given a literal, if dull, gloss. <sup>51</sup> If so motivated, we could then locate AR among modern media and their psychological or psychoanalytic effects and might say, in line with Friedrich Kittler ’ s association of film with the imaginary, the typewriter with the symbolism and the gramophone with the real, that in AR, the imaginary is so directly inscribed into the symbolic, as the content of the interface, that the real is also itself collapsed into the imaginary, making the reality of AR perhaps irredeemably occult. <sup>52</sup>\n\nOne supposes that the most pressing and initial nonaccident of AR is a deeply granular and pervasive advertising by which our embodied perceptions and gestures generate the monetizable surplus platform value of the network User profile, but it should not be confused with the technology ’ s ultimate social impact. <sup>53</sup> AR is where the microtargeting business models of cognitive capitalism melt into the choreography of the mobile User-subject. The effort that the User already makes to perfect targeting algorithms for search engines, in exchange for useful search results, can be scaled from finger points and clicks to the very musculature and dance of dwelling itself. However, a less secular danger is latent in AR in that its most killer application would prove to be not marketing but those fundamentalist religion and politics (as well as security Apps and their monetizations) by which the segmentation of the polis into friend and enemy becomes a direct literal annotation of the lifeworld (again, clean and unclean, ours and theirs, empire and rebel forces, kill it or eat it, and so on.) It is then with a lack of astonishment that we note that Google ’ s inaugural AR game is based on a science-fiction alien religious warfare story embedded into the lived urban fabric. Developed as part of its internal Niantic Labs, Ingress divides users into two opposing camps: Enlightened (green) and Resistance (blue). Players “ enclose regions of territory on the surface of the earth with virtual links between virtual portals, which are visible in the game software. The top-level goal of the game is for one ’ s faction to control large numbers of Mind Units, the estimated number of humans within the regions of territory controlled by the faction. ” <sup>54</sup> It should be a surprise only for those who have not realized that Star Wars is an al-Qaeda-esque parable (rural religious cult flies into the architectural core of the empire and blows it up) that the Manichean ludic demands of Ingress are to send people out into their cities training them to see, attack, and defend against the territorial incursions of enemies perceivable only through special software-enabled perspectives. <sup>55</sup>\n\nInterface Layer\n\n241","previous_page":240,"next_page":242}