{"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":261,"pdf_page":277,"physical_index":277,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a262989531d1d61b9641ad8f0315e79cc7daf9d042d53aa3cada0a6d0ec4467a"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Like the axe, the User is situated by the myriad relations that produce our worlds and the things that we do in them. There is a “ there ” there, but it is plural and in motion. In our profiles, our names, ideas, organs, identities, rights, licenses, tools, itineraries, and genomes can each be peeled off, however provisionally and artificially, from those that also belong to other Users and so can be made to cohere into the composite image of one self. But not only do these always move in and out of that frame, moment by moment, each is constantly attaching itself to other profiles and to another positions. Sometimes one of these can even take on the position of User all by itself, leaving all the others elsewhere. As discussed for Griffith ’ s movement between the scales of individual and collective Users, the part is determined by the whole, which achieves its identity through the coherence of its parts (even when the whole is one User and the parts his partial component characteristics). But inside the economy of the User position, profile components cohere into the temporary resolution, but they do so without belonging exclusively to it. <sup>17</sup> They travel into external places and positions, leaving behind the afterimage of the resolved User into which so many people invest their own identities.\n\nAs suggested, this slippage is exemplified by the Quantified Self movement, an extremely Californian subculture that seeks “ self knowledge through numbers. ” It champions the use of data capture technologies to track an individual User’ s “ inputs ” (i.e., food and air), “ states ” (mood, energy level), and “ performance ” (mental and physical metrics). This administrative auto-objectification turns the gaze of user-centered design research inward on itself, inflating it toward existential closure. This “ care of the self ” is a fabricated hypertrophic self-interpolation, a hyperindividuated diagnostics perfectly suited to cube farms. For the User, the reflection provides recognition and misrecognition, not so unlike Jacques Lacan ’ s mirror stage parable, whereby the visual coherency of the body reflected back is believed to confirm the psychological coherency of the self who stares at it. <sup>18</sup> Before the primal encounter with a mirror, the temporality of inner experience was confused, unable to differentiate the mental imagery of direct experience from memory, from a desired wish; present, past, and future are all a jumble. On seeing the coherent image reflected back, seeing outlines following movements following outlines, the grounding of a coherent sense of self as a self-directed subject, and as an object in the world among others, was not only possible but imperative. The visualization comes with a false guarantee but provides for more interesting detours by those inevitable failures.\n\nConsider, by way of example, a project that Gordon Bell developed at Microsoft in the late 1990s, MyLifeBits, which considered the User and his individuated biography as the locus of a kind of computational infinity. The experiment draws on a simple and ambitious question: What if everything you ever saw, heard, and felt, every object you ever touched, every location you ever shadowed — every externally trackable experience — could be recorded at some incredible lossless resolution and fidelity, fed into practically infinite storage, and available to recall and replay at any time?\n\nUser Layer\n\n261","previous_page":260,"next_page":262}