{"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":288,"pdf_page":304,"physical_index":304,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"20d0a362e7b0a108eda2a4d7e55755346a40d3f9f271dfdcf96078265bb6811b"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Put differently, at the same time that the User encrypts its membranes against violations from the outside, the system itself always inoculates itself against bad actor Users. Corporate IT departments are funded precisely to ensure this biopolitical security, but the platform commons demands guarantees of resilience and coherence against both vectors of risk. A different model User is required, but how? Benedict Singleton has developed a design theory based on metis and cunning, for which design is the instigation of traps. <sup>74</sup> All species are at work to design their interactions with the world so as to trap what they need, and for humans the institutionalization of these traps is where design and governmentality intersect. This is not just an immoral tendency for natural and sexual selection; it is how intelligence leverages ecological interdependencies so as to modulate them by strategies and tactics. <sup>75</sup> Like Grosz ’ s framing of the Earth presents design as a primordial geography, a design ontology of traps foregrounds instead a violent symbiosis as the frame ’ s actual strategy revealed. Different things require different traps, and each becomes ensnared in the trap of the other, around and around, a trap within a trip within a trap stabilized over time: flowers and bees, orchids and wasps, bees and wasps, Venus fly-trap and fly, fly and dirt, dirt and flower, photograph and memory. Ensnared one within the other, the “ user ” of each design encapsulates another while being itself encapsulated, infecting and infected at once, integrities crumbling. <sup>76</sup> This is part of the architecture of biology, this is a model for communities of Users one inside the other. Far weirder than Larry Smarr ’ s gut microbes, nested parasitic biostrata are in some cases embedded five levels deep inside the other (fifth-order hyperparasitism): animal inside animal inside animal inside animal inside animal, user inside user inside user. <sup>77</sup> This symbiotic recursion could be called a microplatform, but it ’ s more than that; it is not just the negotiation among actors within the User position; it is a durable interpenetration of actors, mutually embedded one within the other. This is the primal scene that should have been on display at the Shanghai Expo as the root pedagogy of the universal User, not the mannequin zoology of the Reids and the Hagens. This dissolution of the private human User comes not through the white noise of absolute quantification or mathematically guaranteed withdrawal from appearance, but through the plodding evolution toward alternative phenotypes in relation to manic apparatuses, both internal and external. The dispersant is not thanatos, a slouching toward deliquesce, but an activist attentiveness to the more open geographies available to our composite inhuman alternatives. So, again, forget human-centered design; we need to design for what comes next, what comes outside, what has already arrived, for the synthetic User-subjects for which another geopolitics is derived. These come from the division, segmentation, and multiplication of partial and compound Users into diagonal organs, both bigger and smaller than any one body or person. In this, the geopolitical design problem is drawn as a planetary resorting and redistribution of envelopes, interfaces and membranes, hard and soft, enabling forms of political sovereignty and geography that will enforce a more adventurous futurity, along a path of anguished falling toward our own special void. That, as well, is the design brief.\n\n288\n\nUser Layer","previous_page":287,"next_page":289}