--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "The Stack On Software and Sovereignty" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9780262029575" library_document_id: "24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341" source_sha256: "9ce65d410e7e1630d3751064df8dca7be548b331423b3bb82e47c29fb5ab6d96" pdf_physical_page_count: 517 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 240 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341?start=240&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341.md?start=240&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341.md?start=230&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341.md?start=250&limit=10" --- # The Stack On Software and Sovereignty > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=240 | PRINTED_PAGE=224 A fantastic transubstantiation takes place for which visual signs and images no longer simply represent other things in the world, but become themselves tactile technologies that, when activated, cause a real event to occur correspondent with the semantic content of that sign/image. A picture of a bomb is merely a representation, whereas a button with a picture of a bomb on it that causes remote explosions is weaponized skeuomorphism. Put in more technical terms, the GUI is a visualization of a machinic network and of the outcomes that it claims to mediate; the formation of its interfaciality is an arc of translation from a set of possibilities into a visual instrument. Between the machine and what it can do and the representations of that potential are translations, and however arbitrary or integral each may be, they are necessary for our comprehension of any network we might encounter. This is particularly true for computational machines, which can, according to software instructions, perform any calculable task we might assign to them. In the past, any one of those functions may have been performed by a single-purpose analog machine that perhaps communicated its unique functions directly by its form. Wrenches look like wrenching. Computational machines may rely on the rhetorics of the interface to do the same, or as a design strategy, the posture of the computational object and its function can evolve semiautonomously. Through that expression of function by GUI layers, the machine network can appear to be and do almost anything, and because of this (not in spite of it), the interface is essential to the machine itself. In the play of a function communicating itself, honestly or by dissimulation, the real and relative transparency or opacity of an interface ’ s distant effects are themselves disclosed, hidden, or masked. As the interface conceals and narrates, its concealments and narrations are themselves concealed and narrated. At one extreme, placebo interfaces let Users point and click all they want and yet have no real effect on any outcome other than apophenic satisfaction. Some Users manage persuasive interfaces, which deliberately train the self in response to positive and negative feedback stimulus, promising more control over life by reassigning that control to automated metrics. These micro-rhetorics of the interface are core to their social effects. Some call this “ making computers invisible, ” others call it “ interaction dissolving into behavior, ” and still others “ society without organs. ” Not so unlike my son, we are all probing our interfacial condition, trying to figure out the ultimate technical, ethical, political, and aesthetic possibilities of a world full of images of things that do (or do not do) the things they visual signify. In the awkward, incomplete (and incompletable) semiotics of interface representability, where cause and effect is reduced to a bounded set of idiomatic and idiotic pictograms, culture becomes interfacial and vice versa. Even a maturing metaphysics of data visualization serving the ubiquity of time-based diagrams of events and patterns (and prototyping perhaps what future GUI will look like) does not provide a short-cut out of ambiguity, but it does raise the stakes. 13 In that they previsualize their effects in advance for us, these sorts of interface machines must be located within a historical shift in technologies of the image itself. 14 Taking the long view, we see that humans ’ externalized expression of visual ideas dates at least to the primordial architectures of the cave wall, and then much later, it passed through a relatively short painting-photographic-cinematic phase (lasting a few centuries, give or take) for which individual images and image sequences were produced, distributed, and appreciated as rare artifactual events. Now and for the foreseeable future, images are a specific genre of machines. How so? Like the images on paper money that appear as they do in order to support the performance of specific counterfeit-prevention technologies designed into the patterns, some images have a discrete technical capacity that is inextricable from their physical form. Consider how everyday data visualization turns the diagrammatic image into a scientific, managerial, and military instrument, or how GUIs turn icons into active, goal-directed tools mediating between human folk psychology of action and algorithms linked to screens in the User ’ s environment. Additionally GUIs don ’ t only mirror preexisting User intentions; as whole interfacial regimes (such as Windows or iOS or Bloomberg Terminal, etc.), they also train thought toward certain ways of interpreting that environment through the repetition of represented interactions. As those representations become more closely glued to the direct perception of environments (as for augmented reality, for example), their capacity to engender committed interpretations for Users will prove irresistible to various fundamentalisms (see below). The machinic image is qualified by many little sinkholes between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, and at a global scale of billions of Users, the interfacial image is also partially a function of sheer machinic quantity. With the comparatively instantaneous adoption of mobile devices (a Turing complete processor + camera + homing tether + telephonic voice relay), we have seen an explosion in the absolute volume of mechanical images of and in the world, dwarfing the total sum produced before the mobile phone appeared in our hands. Unlike images of the painting-photographic-cinematic era, these images do not pass into an archive only after their practical life is passed; rather, through various Apps, images are produced through the medium of the archival database itself, socialized through the archive, and assigned searchable metadata through the archive. As a consequence, the general image apparatus is slowly accumulating a comprehensive simulation of visual experience that will be of enormous value to future artificial intelligences interested in simulating its Anthropocenic origins. This may even be its most durable purpose and its true responsibility. Even today, it ’ s not difficult to see the whole Android user population (for example) as comprising individual nodes in a vast, massively distributed supercomputing sensing, seeing, tracking, and sorting platform. At the same time, visual trends like the New Aesthetic suggest the potential of an art (if that is still the right word) that is made not only by artificial vision machines generating their own autonomous aesthetic, but in time an art for such intelligences that can appreciate them uniquely and perhaps develop their own taste genres of M2M (machine-to-machine) connoisseurship. 15 It is also worth noting that many current applications of the machinic image (e.g., on currency, or to X-ray great works of art to verify their originality, or facial recognition to verify the identity of User) are used to authenticate the originality of either the image itself or what it represents. With Walter Benjamin in mind, we see that the image in the age of mechanical reproduction is being pushed toward the assignment of verifying the original and its aura as well. 224 Interface Layer ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=241 | PRINTED_PAGE=225 Interface Layer 225 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=242 | PRINTED_PAGE=226 However, even as GUIs become more normative and essential to the instrumentalization of global culture, we also see at the same time that physical objects are increasingly imbued with the interfacial intelligences of computational media (storage, calculation, and transmission). This suggests a reversal of the earlier shift from natural interfacial objects to virtual interfacial signs, and now back again to computationally intensive interfacial objects. The MIT Media Lab Tangible Media Group, led by Hiroshi Ishii, works on tangible user interfaces (TUI) and a future of radical atoms based on microscopic computing machines dissolved into physical matter, while the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms led by Neil Gershenfeld develops self-assembling microrobotics and a program of “ conformal computing ” in which artificial and natural information layers might interoperate directly. Computation is cast again as a generic solvent within and between everyday things. In living rooms, Microsoft ’ s Kinect gestural-based gaming interface dispenses with touch altogether and relies instead on Users ’ natural maneuvers and proprioceptive skills to manipulate both physical things and their digi tal shadows (a general-purpose theremin). 16 These expansions of interfaciality through objects return it from the semiotic to the corporeal, and in doing so draw potentially even wider worlds into their computational domains than GUI can. The GUI largely reduced the hand to a fingertip, one that points and selects among a bounded set of options, and so simulated tactile craft as a sequence of discrete menu items, each executing chosen software subroutines in programmed sequences. But with gesturaltangible-haptic interfaces, we can imagine the possibility of a fully mature interface regime that dispenses almost entirely with both the alphanumeric machine of the keyboard and the semiotic machine of clickable icon. In contrast, some things might be so thoroughly imbued by that computational solvent that they will contain their own direct interfaciality with the world, not as objective metaphors but as real objects. To interact with an everyday object may involve haunted causality at a distance. To provide interfacial mediation between the mobile primates — that ’ s us — and the environmentally embedded digital information in which we are situated, such a regime would rely instead on the wisdom of spatial-object navigation accumulated over millennia: waving, poking, dancing, stacking, peeling, squishing, sorting, throwing. Any of these interactions with computational matter could link Users down the layers of The Stack and back up again. 226 Interface Layer ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=243 | PRINTED_PAGE=227 We then extend the traced path for modern interfaculty from objects as primordial interfaces, shifting then to graphical signs as modern interfaces, and again back to objects, now imbued with the computational intelligence to interpret our gestures. In considering an emergent genre of object interfaciality, blending natural and artificial information into composite manipulative substances and habitats, one question to raise, after Serres ’ s parable, is, “ What happens to the hand and its universal flexibility to manipulate the world? ” 17 For the GUI, the hand is trained to sift through menus, windows, and sliders, playing a software application like a musical instrument, but in doing so, its immediate range of adaptive expression is focused on the pushing and pulling of signs and simulations. Those software routines initiated may be highly varied, but when computational objects and habitats respond to a wide range of gestures and manipulations, we can imagine that they may allow the hand a much wider range of expression, and in this, there are potentially novel coadaptations of the hand and the programmable object interface, of the grasp and the grasped. 18 At the same time, as the world meets it more than halfway, the uniqueness of the hand to exceed the accommodation of one niche is made that much less unique, as the niche is itself programmed to perform specific reactions to whatever the hand commands (or to resist that command and frustrate its intention). Heideggerians and Latourians spoke of the “ thing ” as a kind of gathering of the world into itself, but when the physical object is programmable in this way and responsive to gestures, or even able to make such gestures on its own affecting other objects in its orbit, then the interfacial thing seems to “ unfold ” its influences out into the world. This kind of “ thing, ” and perhaps any interface, is at least in this respect, is an inverse of a gathering; it aggressively unfurls its relations in a tangle of effect and relay. 19 How does that interfacial arc, from natural object to graphical sign to computational object, scale up for the collective interfacial matrices of the City layer, or the Cloud layer, and of millions of people and billions of things at once? The allegory of the city as a big computer is one that appears historically along with the computer itself, 20 but it ’ s an altogether different design challenge to account for an urban-scale agglomeration of computational object-instruments, ranging in size from a few molecules, 21 to a few centimeters, up to the scales of furniture, a dump truck, and city block, all interacting among one another. Instead of (or in addition to) spatial projections through the graphical interface, this open condition for urban interfaciality is closer to an expanded landscape architecture composed by active arrangements of such objects. The design and governance challenge is then not to program this jungle platform in advance according to some set master plan, but to formulate parameters through which multiple subsystems can leverage one another. 22 The emergence of its eventual governance would be determined less by fixed formal interventions than by a procedural choreography and the accommodation of unpredictable collectives of these unfurling interfacial objects. The interlacing of computation and urbanism isn ’ t the direct superimposition of an artificial computational network on top of a given cement-and-steel scenario, but the activation or suppression of programs already present. For example, industrial technologies did not introduce electromagnetic fields in the urban landscape, but activated what was always there, and similarly, the design challenge of this urban-scale interfaciality is also to provide some regularizing geography to territorial energies already at work (as discussed in the linking of physical and virtual envelopes). That said, determining how sets of such computational hyperobjects might be embedded into the City layer remains a prerogative not just for interface design, even in this expanded sense, but can be initiated from any of the other layers of The Stack as well. 23 We assume that any single object, perhaps as the subject of multiple Address schemas at once, will be interpolated not only by one master geography but many projects and projections at once. Critically, it is the incommensurability between these claims that is the real engine for Stack ’ s geopolitics of interfaciality, writ large and small. Interface Layer 227 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=244 | PRINTED_PAGE=228 53. The Interface as Layer Interfaces are thresholds. They connect and disconnect in equal measure, structuring flows by combining and segmenting it, enabling it or frustrating ${ \mathrm { i t } } , ^ { 2 4 }$ bridging unlike forms over vast distances and subdividing that which would otherwise congeal on its own. 25 Any given interface may have one effect at one site, just as it has the opposite effect at another. Its performance — who, what, and how it interfaces — may vary widely depending on circumstances. At a global level of billions of interfaces working at once, The Stack might deterritorialize (and apparently decentralize) modern institutional inputs and outputs at the same time that it installs another even more regularized network on the same landscape (effectively recentralizing it in its own image at the Cloud layer). But while this superimposition of generic thresholds works to homogenize the wider apparatus, it can also flatten hierarchies of access to that infrastructure, as we ’ ve seen. It bears reinforcing at this point that this is an elemental principle of The Stack as an organizing matrix, and to a degree of platforms in general; through rigid regularization, dynamic self-directed flow can achieve scale, and as it does, those flows congeal and centralize into global subplatforms (as we see among the key set of players at the Cloud layer discussed above). The dynamic is not unique to computational platforms. It is as apparent in the urban systems that order physical flows according to fixed geometries that host dynamic autonomous circulation, which in time produce new superscalar nodes often centralized around key threshold points. When grid topologies circumscribe sites as individual cells within their larger matrix, they also allow each to generate its heterogeneous program, separate from its horizontal neighbors and internally differentiated within its own vertical strata, as far up into the air as needed. (The form that is horizontally differentiated as a discrete cell within an urban grid and vertically differentiated by multiple stacked programs is called a skyscraper.) 26 Especially but not exclusively for GUIs, Stack interfacial systems are also grids and sometimes work in a similar way as urban grids. The lines they draw, both linking and segmenting, crisscross one another in regular patterns and circumscribe individual cells within their own particular telescopic logics of the global and the local. As multiple interfaces congeal or are deployed as strategically particular interfacial regimes, they push toward naming everything that is visible to its scope (as discussed in the Address layer chapter). In that this drawing is also a kind of machine, the GUI synthesizes cognition (and aspiration, affect, drama) into its syntax; it grids both the image machine itself and the space in which the image machine can act. Interfaces can give local shape to The Stack ’ s aspiration to nomos, prototyping political geography as a technology of artificial distributed cognition, and through this, it constructs and configures the diagram of possible action that Users can make on The Stack and that The Stack can make on Users. An interfacial regime draws together flows and connections that may be geographically dispersed, massively discontiguous, and yet intimately connected by a particular causal interfacial chain, and then presents these to the User as a single image in its own particular way, different than other such regimes. The interface takes what is linked by distributed computational systems but impossible to directly perceive because it is happening across the planet at once, and in turn gives it a portrait. In this regard, interfacial regimes are also totality machines, both describing linkages and making projective claims over them. But as said unlike other geographic projections, the interface is not only a visual representation of an aspirational totality; it is an image of a totality that when acted upon actually effects it. By using these kinds of image-mapinstruments, the User herself collaborates in the real remaking of the world according to that interfacial regime ’ s particular geographic vision and representations. The power (and danger) of the Interface layer is this remaking of the world through instrumentalized images of totality; it is what gives any interfacial regime even a politico-theological coherency and appeal. 27 228 Interface Layer ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=245 | PRINTED_PAGE=229 In the following sections, I examine the dynamics of the Interface layer of The Stack by looking at three ways that interfacial regimes organize the actions of Users in their own image. First, the visual organization of an aesthetics of logistics 28 and global assemblage line draw total images of commodity production across vast distances. As nodes within global interface networks, these images are themselves subject to exponential arcs, such as Moore ’ s law, and when accelerated, they in turn accelerate the flows of all those things that they interface. Second is the role of Apps to counterprogram immediate User habitats and recast them as localized forms of Cloud hardware. This also has the effect of simultaneously augmenting and dissipating the technical specificity of the hand as the privileged interface between body and environment. Third is how the direct blending of a graphical interfacial overlay on a User’ s direct perception poses unique complications for design and interface geopolitics. We will look at the specific case of augmented reality interfaces and consider their ripeness for the revival and innovation of fundamentalist and militarized forms of political theology. Interface Layer 229 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=246 | PRINTED_PAGE=230 54. Interfaces in The Stack 1: The Aesthetics of Logistics Because interfacial grids within The Stack compose lines that both subdivide and gather, even at the same time, and because these framings localize interactions within a global platform, they can control the distribution of bits, objects, and affects according to those curves. Within this context, the effectiveness of the GUI is not limited to simple relays but also depends on other physical interfaces in the landscape. A contemporary interfacial regime includes all manner of gates and switches, both large and small, adding up to a vast distribution of circuits: anatomical sensations, screen-based icons, chips and sensors, software protocols, buildings and roads, airport terminals, warehouses and continental shipping ports, transoceanic supply chains, open and closed production cycles, forensic analytics, geographically particular store shelves, individuated instances of consumption, and so on. Any particular interfacial regime is itself one among the many that compete to design The Stack, and while each provides a particular (perhaps totalizing) logistical imaginary for the Interface layer, it in no way exhausts its design horizon. Interfacial regimes focus all mediation onto and into key switch points, but like any other media, they are not only conduits of information; they also produce information by translating and relaying it from there to here. Interfaces work as machines, and machines work as interfaces, and so in the wider interfacial landscape, many specific technologies are not isolated mechanisms put to work for isolated goals; they are also technologies for the production of other technologies. A car is produced by assembly line robots, which are produced by other machines, which are produced by other machines, all operating in relations of mutual production (it is technology turtles all the way down). In this contemporary logistics, the procedural chains of productive and consumptive succession pass from one machine to another and one interface point to another. The interfaciality of each level is of course designed toward particular ends, even if the entire chain is not really knowable or viewable as one big whole from any one point. For The Stack, increasingly intense computational intelligence is designed into specific nodes in this chain, and sometimes without knowledge or control of other interfaces that may directly or indirectly link to it. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, we should then define interface design not only as the specification of one given node (such as the GUI for an App) but also as the design of the succession of relays through an intended pathway of connections. It is a programming of multiple interfaces in spatial and temporal sequence, potentially spanning ideation and production to distribution to consumption to recycling and recapture. With this expanded brief, interface design (combining tool, icon, space, service, interaction, organization, and so on) encompasses the design of objects and surfaces and the systems that enable other Users to put their own programs in motion, as well as the programming of the processes whereby all these things may assemble or disassemble according to plan. By this perspective, the potential interfaciality of any single node (virtual or physical) could be thought of as equal to the cumulative interfaciality of all the processes that it can put in motion toward some resulting assemblage, however permanent or temporary. This is first-order interface design: the design of chains of interfacial effect by means of physical and virtual relay networks (and it clearly has much in common with platform design but focuses on designing the exact mediations as its essential problematic). 29 230 Interface Layer ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=247 | PRINTED_PAGE=231 Today, at the withering end of post-Fordism and tilting perhaps toward a material economy based on desktop fabrication and real-time customization, we observe logistics shifting from the spatially contiguous assembly line to the radically discontiguous assemblage line linked internally through a specific interfacial chain. 30 Contemporary logistics disembeds production of things from particular sites and scatters it according to the synchronization and global variance in labor price and resource access, and it is this delinking that makes the arrival to us of material goods (and the process of the world of production in general) more opaque, even occult. How things come to be is removed further from the daily experience of direct cause and effect. The cyclical routes of the artificial ecologies of logistics are often proprietary and subterranean, and it is the visual incomprehensibility of the origins and outcomes of the interfacial chains in which Users are embedded (you, me, it) that instigates a second-order interface design, namely, information visualization, or the diagrammatic summation and articulation of those interfacial chains so that their form might be grasped. As hinted, GUIs also perform a kind of information visualization on their own. Beyond simple instrumentation, in their rhetorical display of relay networks connected to any one surface, we find the GUI ’ s pedagogical narrativization of discontiguous processes redrawn as a single actionable diagram, perhaps its most essential social function. Global logistics ’ material economy of assemblage is mediated to human actors, along its many chains, through these reductive interfacial summary diagrams of planetary-scale computational networks. It has to be seen also as a kind of rhetorical and stylistic system suggesting, if not promising, closure. 31 As real logistical channels link the unlikely arcs of things from here to there and from there to here, they then also enroll the User not only into an aesthetic of logistics but also logistics itself as an aesthetic ideal. 32 However, in this drawing together of otherwise incomprehensible cause and effect, the tracing of idealized configurations of flow becomes self-validating, and when these interfacial network visualizations evolve from diagrams into active instruments of action to enforce those configurations, they take on a life of their own. The orthodox post-Fordist plot for “ the network society ” recounts a storied evolution from fixed, contiguous institutional interfaces into decentralized serial nodes and couplings. Old centers give way to new networks. But logistical modernity is defined as much by the concentration around meganodes and global platforms and protocols as it is by decentralization and dispersion (e.g., Google, the shipping container, the TCP/ IP protocol, US dollars). For The Stack, the performance of governance both centralizes and decentralizes interfacial regimes, one informing the other, and in this, the spinal contours of a global social morphology unfold along with them, their topological convulsions inextricable from the computational infrastructures with which they evolve and through which they are expressed. For this, we observe that there is something like a Moore ’ s law of exponential computing speed not only for processors but also for the interfaces and the landscapes of gateways that they power; there is an arc of exponentially accelerating computational capacity for both individual interfaces and their composite networks. Instead of tracking the number of transistors on a given chip, this exponential arc of interfacial acceleration might measure the total aggregate switches within a landscape of interfaces through which relays snake from site to site, or perhaps the number of FLOPS (floating-point operations) that landscape as a whole is capable of providing per second or per day. 33 This would recognize the network effects of the intensification of edges as well as nodes. It might (with sufficient research) specify something like the maximal carrying capacity of the computational substrate of the global economy in any given moment: the total possible interfacial throughput of all interconnected nodes and points and a weighing of the relays with which they accelerate in logarithmic correspondence. Interface Layer 231 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=248 | PRINTED_PAGE=232 Any increase in the computational capacity of any given interface, as both conduit and producer of information, allows that interface to concentrate and give structure to greater quantities and more complex qualities of informational-logistical flow. In turn, as computational power and networked software become faster and cheaper, each node is newly empowered as a medium of governance over what those flows represent, and so the intensification of capacity also shines political attention onto them. This “ law ” of interfacial acceleration makes any given node able to handle increasingly complex programs, which, in accumulation at the level of a whole interfacial regime, also amplifies the complexity of articulation through which that governance can act. This makes any question as to how to design an interfacial regime that much more fraught and important, and especially so when its nodes are programmed and articulated through the Cloud layer (such as Android and iOS nodes in motion, sucking up information as they are dragged around the world by Users) as this can also induce overflow of the jurisdictional bounds of any single designer ’ s own control or her client ’ s. Put more succinctly, the acceleration of a network of interfacial nodes, both screen based and physically embedded, gives that network greater capacity, and for this, social systems place greater demands on it, capitalizing further acceleration, and shifting interest and attention onto them as they displace other infrastructures for which they may have played only a supporting role in the recent past. A tendency toward generalized mobility of goods, people, and information, as described throughout recent decades of social theory, should be seen as both a driver and effect of this technical acceleration in the computational power and communicative flexibility of the interface regimes that contest with one another to congeal the social domains of Users. 34 It is an autocatalytic process. The greater the mobility is within the network, the greater the need for more sophistication in its interfaces, and the greater the availability of cheap, powerful, intelligent computation, the greater the enabling of flexible mobilization. Phenomenon feeds on epiphenomenon feeds on emergent capacity, and back again. For The Stack, this makes the production and figuration of these interfaces a critical site of empowered authority and its social imaginary. As discussed regarding the City layer, forms of power that were once inscribed by the fixed and partitioned citadel are shifted to ambient gateways for bodies in motion, now gathered into open corrals with invisible fences. This distribution provides the raw material and competitive channels for new forms of concentration and capture, not in citadels but platforms. 232 Interface Layer ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=249 | PRINTED_PAGE=233 One of the most complex social effects of that generalized acceleration and centripetal consolidation is a sense of systemic incoherency for the end User and a corresponding need for interfaces to then renarrate whatever they connect. From the perspective of the User, as the intensification of computational power of each interfacial node and of the aggregate networks that link them gathers momentum along its accelerating axis and provides for more intense logistical linkages across even more nonlinear routes, then the temporal integrity and cognitive coherency of the worlds mediated by them are correspondingly dissolved in equal measure. Unlike a capitol building, corporate headquarters, or medieval prison where the corporeality of power was embedded into the site-specific dramatic choreography of architectural form and program, the architecture of The Stack delocalizes User experience of interactive cause-and-effect and its chains of interfacial transference. They may appear invisible, ungraspable, or insubstantial, despite (or because of) the friction and fragmentation that they carry up and down its layers. This well-known tendency of modernities to melt what is solid and disembed institutions is turned once more back on the forms that those earlier modernities had established. So, as a therapeutic response, Interfaces are asked to soothe the stress that they have caused by presenting their remedy images of orderly resolution as data visualizations, as GUI, as mind maps, as tools and trackers. Some of these are real medicine, some are placebo, some are dissimulation, but all are territorial claims on the geographies and geometries of The Stack by competitive interfacial regimes. Because the increase in computational intensity of each node in an opaque global network and of the network ’ s circulatory capacity as a whole helps to produce the radically diminished contiguity of the interfacial landscape, and less transparency of far-flung assemblage lines, a tremendous demand is then placed back on its own images, especially interfacial images, which can represent the totality of these nodes into coherent wholes. Instead of appeasing the desire for a “ binding collective representation, ” 35 nonlinear connections of the Interface layer seemingly intensify and radicalize it. The Interface Layer 233 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341.md?start=250&limit=10)