{"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":255,"pdf_page":271,"physical_index":271,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"98a5ee3fdd5927ef88b11cbeaaa88327b743df488abf9b49f0429f5221bfa546"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Today persona design and use case modeling is widely taught as a basic design research methodology, and as a result, for better or worse, a plurality of our material artifacts were conceived to suit the nuanced interests of completely fictional people following fictional scenarios. We, the actual consumers, are the shadows of the personified simulations of ourselves. Now real-time Cloud-based User-response-driven systems (such as Google AdWords and geolocative advertising schemes) work to close the gaps between upstream observation of Users and the microcustomization of services that are provided to them. Instead of abstracting a few typical personas out of the patterns seen through cumbersome, representative studies (we hope), and then designing offerings to suit those abstractions, the cycle between analysis and provision is more instantaneous. Whereas the standardization of large-scale industrial production demanded standardized Users, this is not as true for Stack economies. Instead of one User served by her supposed resemblance to one of a handful of personas derived from n population of all Users, Cloud platforms with access to each User’ s specific profile (previous search history, purchases, geographic location, circle of friends) can hypersegment services and content. The ratio between number of Users and possible personas is then trending toward a 1:1 ratio; your profile is your persona, and in principle, every data User gets his or her own version of any offering. To be sure, this doesn ’ t conclude but rather intensifies the interfacial apparatus processes of artificial subjectivization.\n\n“ User ” is a normative figure of subjective agency for The Stack, not just a dummy sovereign held in an empty (if also supervisory) position at the head of a table with words put in its mouth. It also brings with it residual and sometimes discredited concepts of human agency and cognitive transparency. While the differential design of one apparatus versus another must modulate how each does or does not construct User-subjects, any entity positioned as a User, however briefly or permanently, brings with it a contextual history that is not reducible to software instructions and can twist the terms of subject delineation for its own purposes. An apparatus ’ s ways of subject making set terms of disposition and articulation, but it does not magically flatten the history of the world into its single interface (even as much as it might want to do exactly that). It also cannot hold onto all Users for the same duration, and so we must be equally attentive to the dissolution of subjects, in and out of User positions, as we are to their formulation. As described in the City chapter, apparatuses and envelopes situate the indissolubility of technical and subjective systems, drawing them together and unwinding them in equal measure. This dynamic of making and unmaking Usersubjects is neither exhausted by discursive shifts and play, as assiduously mapped by poststructuralism, nor excluded from them, and often it innovates on them directly. The open entanglements of multiple apparatuses express different postures and positions, some of which can innovate cultural norms and invent new Users on the scene. More often, however, at the global scale of The Stack, the User position is reserved for a reductive regularization into customized utilitarianism, and when that is mobilized for planetary-scale interfacial regimes, then its identification with the local reflections of computational mirrors can make it alien even to its own experiences. It can do this in at least two ways: by the “ informatization ” of self-identity as a project of individual care and management and in the revelation of the robust subjectivity of other nonhuman but computationally complex Users. As we ’ ll see, both of these work to first overdefine and overdetermine their subject (sometimes by bizarre constraints) and then work to dissolve its individual boundaries through a radicalization of that same overarticulation. For the User, from solution comes dissolution. Across the two, the geopolitics of The Stack in no way requires the alleviation of these unsettled identifications, externalizations, and counteridentifications. On the contrary, I would argue that anthropocenic humanism is not a natural reality into which we must awake from the slumber of machinic alienation; rather it is itself a symptomatic structure powered by — among other things — a gnostic mistrust of matter, narcissistic self-dramatization, and indefensibly pre-Copernican programs for design. By loosening the grip, alternatives can be modeled, midwifed, cultivated, cared for, radicalized, soothed, executed, extrapolated, rendered, exported, and accelerated.\n\nUser Layer\n\n255","previous_page":254,"next_page":256}