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# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty
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The baseline design brief for the User layer of The Stack may go something like this: In the image of planetary-scale information infrastructure, comprising trillions of addressable haecceities, the resolved scale of the platform need not be for one User at a time, drifting into and out of narcissistic virtual reality, but for pluralities of partial users, quasi-users, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, intermingling in intersubjective alliances, sharing perceptions, memory, algorithms and techniques, visualization rhetorics situated among the semantic graphs of aggregate User experi ences predicated not just on autobiographical interoperability, but on direct physica and cognitive promiscuity. Imagine one sort of User logging the totality of her perceptions and interactions not as an atomic iota lost in her own manifestations (like Bell ’ s MyLifeBits QS persona) but as a population of 10 billion absolute Users, all generating content and all feeding off one another ’ s issuances. Plural systems provide plural images, which provide plural Users— two of us, ten of us, a hundred of us, an entire city of us — literally seeing through each other ’ s eyes, remembering through one another ’ s experiences, walking in one another ’ s shadows. Imagine Jakob von Uexk ü ll ’ s foray through the garden of Umwelten, where he encountered the interweaving but exclusive lifeworlds of plants, animals, flowers, and insects, but in our biosemiotic field, everything can now swap points of view. Tomorrow, may I have your yesterday? Unexpected alliances, continental organizations, linguistic traditions, and politico theological communions ensue, any one User moving into and out of several of them, just as they move into and out of him. The profile reflected back is not of a resolved individual but of empathetic assemblages across multiple spatial and rhythmic scales. Furthermore, as nonhuman users (sensors, animals, artificial intelligence, what-haveyou) are enrolled into these collaborative perceptual-interfacial affiliations and platforms, the contingent hierarchies between physical subjects and objects are put once again into play. So instead of the Shanghai Expo ’ s universal User scenario, where the cosmopolitan apparatus of The Stack would interpolate each human as an interoperable atomic profile, however comparable and equalized they might appear, can it instead come to provide and even demand far more alien subjectification en masse? These would perhaps be unaccountable, even invisible to, the dynamics of individu ation versus collectivization, physicalization versus virtualization, localization versus globalization — neither solution nor dissolution, only strange columns up and down The Stack, and from strange columns new geographies and geopolitics for a post-Anthropocenic User.
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61. Trace and Frame
But even without such anastrophic departures from the world as we know it, the geopolitics of data-driven User subjectivization can evolve in other ways. As the User profile shifts from one based primarily on the observation of individuated intrinsic variables to include also the weight of the world into its measure, then as any one actor (human or nonhuman, singular or plural) moves into and out of different assemblages, it not only produces new territories of action, but develops meaning and strategy for its actions in relation to the comprehensive images of territory available to it. The image of totality that any fully formed interfacial regime provides as part of a platform is not only the composite pattern made by crisscrossing atomic grains in flux, drifting, charging, and discharging with one another; rather, those interactions are situated within cartographies produced not only by the traces of their instantaneous encounters accumulated over time, but also in relation to slow macrologic images of the territory as a whole. Remember that any deep address haecceity can enter into and withdraw from an exchange of information, appearing and disappearing over and over again, but its specification by the Address not only makes it discrete from any instances, it also enrolls it into a larger-scale architecture through which it contributes to new linkages across otherwise incommunicable scales. This architecture precedes those links and is preceded by them, just as the map precedes an itinerary through the territory that is reduced in that map ’ s image but is itself produced by the accumulation of movements through it.
For example, in Exit, a series of stunning panoramic data visualizations designed by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgen, Ben Rubin, and others as part of the Native Land-Stop Eject exhibition curated in 2008 by Virilio and Raymond Depardon, we see this dynamic pedagogically demonstrated in the service of several information narratives about the conflicts and paradoxes of globalized space, time, population, and value. The panoramas render the world in the image of an ongoing intercourse of datum with datum, and ask us to identify with the individual element and the summary patterns that emerge. The former and the latter coalesce in second- and thirdorder recursive cycles, less refractions of perspective than reverberations feeding back on themselves. Global visualizations such as these sift patterns produced by actors who may already be piloting themselves according to more local indexes, diagrams, and feedback loops, which in turn may also be responding directly to modulations in the global system in which they see themselves as embedded actors. Ponder the drivers who all refer to the same Google Maps road traffic data updates and switch freeways all at once, effectively causing new traffic jams or even alleviating the snarl from which they tried to escape: the regulatory equilibrium of self-mapping swarms. In one of Exit’ s panoramas about the future of transcontinental migration, “ every person is represented by one pixel. ” Its global visualization describes a universal system monitoring particular events, which in turn are monitoring themselves in relation to the universal system and back again. In Exit’ s visualizations, the multiplied accumulation of smallerscale assemblages — information events such as a single cash remission or cross-border movement — cascade across the plane of the Earth composing the global scale as the pattern space of these interlocking network flows. At the same time, the scale of the global assemblage provides top-down structural forcings (legal, geographic, semiotic) governing and delimiting bottom-up multiplications, and so recompose forces “ back down ” to regional and atomic levels, determining in advance the kind of flows that can and cannot be initiated and sustained by Users. In this telescoping geography, the global and the local are neither dichotomous nor fixed scalar operations. Planetary scales such as the “ global ” framed by the installation panorama should not be seen as the closure of master abstractions, just as the local, drawn here as the individual pixel in flight, is not only the monadic mote of autopoietic flow. Both are interlocked and mutually embedded scales of assemblage that comprise and delimit one another (and are by no means the only such recursive scales). While this is not, by itself, big news for social theory, it is worth pointing out again for the context of User formation and dissolution across intrinsic and extrinsic profiling: the part and the whole are one.
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It ’ s perhaps easier to conceptualize this than to draw it. For example, Bruno Latour ’ s recent interest in network visualization in relation to actor-network theory passes through a reenactment of the 1903 Gabriel Tarde – Emile Durkheim debate, social monadology versus macrological abstractions (with Latour playing Tarde and speaking on his behalf). 24 He concludes that because we can now identify and track social interactions at the immediate scale that Tarde sought, and have the computational means to model boundless instances according to as many different scalar prisms as we choose, therefore the vocabulary of individual (as element) and society (as aggregated structure) is an unnecessarily reductive schema. For its part, working to speak as/for Virilio ’ s theories, Exit does and does not succeed in reslicing the data sets so as to demonstrate this recursion, relying in many cases on the optics of individuals caught up in global flows within the bounded array of the Mercatur projection. We appreciate this multitude of intersecting systemic perspectives, as escaped from the single structural plane, but want to extend beyond secondary analytical images of social interactions. As discussed in the Interfaces chapter, the images of systemic interrelationality found in GUI and in dynamic visualizations not only diagram how platforms operate; they are the very instruments with which a User interacts with those platforms and with other Users in the first place. At stake for the redesign of the User is not only the subjective (QS) and objective ( Exit) reflections of her inputs, states, and performance metrics within local/ global and intrinsic/extrinsic variations, but also that the profiles of these traces are the medium through which those interactions are realized. The recursion is not only between scales of action; it is also between event and its mediation. Put differently, the composition with which (and into which) the tangled positions of Users draw their own maps (the sum of the parts that busily sum themselves) is always both more and less whole than the whole that sums their sums! This interfacial recursion — the identification and measurement of Users that already organize themselves with the very mechanisms that are used to do the measuring — underscores that planetary data infrastructure, now general-purpose equipment, are means not only to scan a world but to compose one as well. Data visualization is, for good or ill, more than world-mapping; it is also world-making.
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62. Maximum User
World-making is always also world-erasing, especially at the User layer, and appearance and disappearance themselves show up and go away at strange times and in strange ways. The case study of another exemplary maximal User draws us back into the heart of the QS movement, and also brings us more through the solution and dissolution of the individual User than toward a more expansive and inclusive population of Users. That this maximal User has also been called “ the patient of the future ” underscores the strange biopolitics at stake. 25 I wonder, not without some perverse pleasure, what Virilio might make of my friend and colleague Larry Smarr ’ s nearly decade-long interest with the rational self-quantification and observation of data pertaining to the health of his biological person. Originally a mathematician and astrophysicist, Smarr is the founding director of Calit2, the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, the University of California system ’ s flagship IT research institute, in La Jolla. Smarr was also the founder of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which among other things brought forth Mosaic, the web browser that became Netscape. 26 He is among the key pioneers in cyberinfrastrucure, scientific visualization, and what he calls “ planet scale distributed computing. ” But as of late, the information platform that has captured his most intense interest is his own body. While QS has many ancestors, Smarr ’ s own quest brings to mind Buckminster Fuller ’ s notebooks, the “ Dymaxion File, ” in which he recorded his every activity. The personality type of those who see the design of planetary technologies as their vocation seems to suggest an interest in modeling everyday activities as if they were astrophysics. For others in the QS scene, their own comparatively subdued pursuit may instead have more to do an unhealthy internalization of Office Park evaluative criteria of systems performance and benchmarking. Smarr and I have discussed this at some length, and it ’ s clear to me that his interest is much deeper and less individualistic than the psychology I have ascribed the QS movement as a whole.
Smarr tracks his health at a finer grain level than most of us could manage, or even likely want to. It demands forms of data mining that he is uniquely prepared for (he diagnosed himself with adult-onset Crohn ’ s disease years before doctors confirmed this). He has not only monitored and quantified his food intake for years, but has his blood drawn and analyzed according to a dizzying array of tests every few weeks. He ’ s had his personal genome mapped at a resolution few others ever have, and perhaps more interesting, he has also done the same for his microbial gut biome, the ecology of microscopic life that inhabits us and helps keep each of us healthy. The genome of the microbial biome inside our guts has evolved over millions of years in correspondence with the host human species, sometimes beneficially and sometimes pathologically. Over the course of our individual lives, our bodies provide selection pressures on how our individual microbial biomes change and evolve inside us. What we eat, in particular, can fundamentally alter the alien ecology in our gut, for better or worse. A poor diet can force the evolution of the biome toward an unhealthy state in which it no longer supports our health and instead could contribute to significant malaise in the entire biological mechanism. Smarr ’ s personal medicine is somewhat unusual in that the focus is shifted from the self-regard of his own somatic body toward the curation and gardening of this internal microbial civilization.
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Inside the shell of one ’ s skin, there is far more DNA that is nonhuman than DNA that is human. You, the skin bag, are all too less human than human. Even to the extent that your individual corporeal machine is to be taken as the base unit of medical analysis and political subjectivity, it is already a multispecies arrangement. Smarr ’ s broader intellectual project for the systemic establishment of digital medicine envisions the coembodiment of information at the scale of 7 billion humans and zillions of genes, environmentally bound molecules, proteins, and microbes, all contributing to a comprehensive diagnostic simulation and treatment metabiopolitics, a universal biocomputation intersecting with the universal ecocomputation that Griffith ’ s demonstration popularizes. As a research model, it draws an explosion of traditional, individuated patient models into pluralized platforms in which every User ’ s genomic, nutritional, neuronal, microbial, and environmental data would be systematically aggregated into an information commons where new kinds of analysis and pattern recognition could mature. The thickened interrelations of intrinsic and extrinsic force further dissolve the individuation of the singular patient toward alternative, as yet unnamed patterns of biological plasticity. The tracing of pathologies across multiple biological scales, over time and over multiple populations at such comprehensive scope and granular detail, would surely also reform basic concepts of “ disease, ” from one recognizing swatches of individuated symptoms toward one governing nuanced economies of symbiotic infection, transfer, and immunization across multiple host sites, and smart enough to see some contamination as enabling health, not preventing it. 27 In time we see projects designing artificial intelligence systems that could interpret the exabytes of real time and archived data and produce interpretive causal models, images of emergent patterns, that startle diagnosticians and patients alike. This hyperilluminated medicine would surely show that causality and pathology zigzag from microbe to bioregions and back again in utterly surprising ways, and that today ’ s folk conceptions of organ, body, group, and toxin demand more rational recategorizations (and Addresses), likely ones that will appear as self-evident when revealed but that today we can scarcely anticipate. 28 In parallel, the various technologies and concepts gathered under the rubric of synthetic biology can engage this absolutized commons as an open-ended toolkit for biological refashioning (if it is actually held in common) and in doing so bring its own controversies and contradictions. Further, in the institutional transference of tracking, diagnosis, and treatment expertise toward the tracing of super- and subindividual forces by computational infrastructures, and away from the one-on-one observation and interviewing of individual persons, the necessary role and proficiencies of “ doctors ” would evolve as well. While the expert arts of high-touch treatment don ’ t abdicate their positions, the computational support of pattern recognition and robotic support of therapeutic abscission do alter how health is provided, just as they alter what health is and make very different demands on those trained to do the providing.
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To be sure, the biogeopolitics of all this are ambiguous, amazing, paradoxical, dangerous, and weird. Our at-hand ideas about sovereignty, transparency, therapy, jurisdiction, and privacy provide unreliable models for a biopolity based on the composite information that each of us physically secretes. This also makes projects like Exit incomplete, in that they draw prematurely conclusive images of totalities now overflowing their global frames. The pluralized User position may include melancholic information traces bearing witness to injustice, but this cannot develop in isolation from a far less certain politics of the stigmergic smear and stain. 29 With this in mind, it should be noted that Smarr the permanent patient, also collects his own feces and has them expertly analyzed. This is the best way to keep tabs on the state of his gut microbes, and through their cipher, the general state of his own health. Grandparent toilet bowl stool diviners, you were right: considering the density of DNA from microbes, from one ’ s own internal fluids, and from the DNA of the remaining foodstuffs that one ate, the human stool is one of the most information-dense substances you are likely to regularly encounter. Bit by bit, your stool is far more information rich per cubic centimeter than the flash memory in your iPhone. Lesson: We secrete more information than we ourselves constitute on our own. In their aggregation, are our shadows more substantial than what casts them? If so, where, if anywhere, do we finally pin down the stable sovereign of the User (or the individual person) as a systemic agent? For quantitative biomedicine (not just for deconstruction), presence finally guarantees less than the trace. Can we imagine an inversion, then, for which the sovereign interface to the platform is tethered to the structured information simulacrum instead of to the discrete entity from which it slips? Of course. We call this the profile, and platforms are built on economies of their administration. However, we need to more forcefully activate the back-and-forth between the profile and the individuated humanist subject so that the simulation ’ s work as the expression of multiple geopolitical and biopolitical intersections can do more and say more. What responsibilities the entity has to the profile, the profile has to the entity, and how the User position can or should mediate them are thankfully still open questions. Constitutional resolutions on privacy and permission seem feeble, both intellectually and strategically, without better options for what preferred policy actually might be. Do they hint of a bioethics in which a User person/profile ’ s refusal to submit data trails to holistic biomedical platforms, and by this endanger the care of the larger commons each of us is inevitably both consuming and secreting at once, would be analogous to today ’ s idiot stunt of refusing vaccines? Put another way, in such radically transparent environments, when do systems and individuals become indistinguishable, not to mention redundant? Is the design of one indistinguishable from the governance of the other, and if so, is the accountability of human individuals, as the subjects and users of digital regimes, really the most viable sovereign unit to enforce?
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Considered in relation to Exit, these questions might be clarified by juxtaposing them with a remark by Gayatri Spivak, from her lecture on “ planetarity, ” to the effect that “ the most pernicious presupposition today is that globalization has happily happened in every aspect of our lives. Globalization can never happen to the sensory equipment of the experiencing being except insofar as it always was implicit in its vanishing outlines [my emphasis]. ” 30 I am perhaps more at ease with this perniciousness than she, but I take this this to mean that globalization (only one weak guise of planetarity) does in fact happen to the sensory equipment of the experiencing being exactly by making the outlines of that being appear and disappear, including to itself, according to regular rhythmic terms. Odysseys of self-quantification (such as Smarr ’ s) might confirm that disappearance must be preceded by an appearance of the cybernetic User-subject and of a world made through his embodied biology and disembodied profile. The cultural resonance of big data and their participation in the formation of the User position within The Stack is defined by this oscillation between appearance and disappearance realized in finely grained logistical techniques now reassigned to make heretofore unseen autobiographical patterns visible and actionable as interfacial compositions. That position, filled with subjects and other effectors, is strongly optimized as a visual object of knowledge, and so situated Users are invited to see themselves within the stabilizing outlines of the exabyte ego. In this regard, Spivak may have it wrong. Globalization, as she defines it in the planetary career of electronic capital as ubiquitous grid, is very much experienced at the level of sensory equipment precisely because it, at least initially, makes appearance possible and validates subjects produced accordingly. This validation is not just perceived; it is experienced (and for some, it is experienced as synthetic User experience). But the inclusion of information from extrinsic (if also corporeally internal) sources into an economy of identity has the opposite effect, and it is exactly the vanishing of outlines that Spivak suggests is basically impossible. To the extent that the composition of the User as a biopolitical subject also includes vectors of data — genomic, microbial, microeconomic, metaecological — into the living diagram of interpolation, then the site of the subject is experienced as fully infused and overcome with extrinsic flows such that the coherence, stability, and confidence previously invested in the visual fade away. The visual outline of the User perforates and liquefies because the biological apparatus itself comes to observe its own becoming from the temporal perspectives of the inhuman forces congealing to give it form. Looking inward from the outside, the somatic homo economicus, especially the one reflected in the mirror of big data, burns brightest in the sharp relief of its own extinguishment. 31 As ever, economic imperatives fabricate subjects, even universalizing them as transhistorical actors, only to melt them down as the raw material of another project — in this case, one that is not limited by the self-regard of a single species.
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63. Death of the User
In the disappearance, or at least displacement, of the essential human User, a multitude crowds into and overflows the evacuated position. 32 As the existential incorporation of information into the User-subject works to consolidate and then explode its humanist register, it does so by placing the biological materiality of the human subject onto a common plane with other actors and events. It doesn ’ t unwind human privilege into formlessness; it leverages and augments its form with other, perhaps livelier posthuman (nonhuman, inhuman, ahuman) agents and subjects. Along a legal axis, this spans from the recognition of the prospective “ personhood ” of other species (dolphins, apes, rainforests, artificial intelligence, robots) to the formalization of the personhood of corporations, complete with constitutional rights to free speech and to bear arms beyond those of the individual people who may comprise them. 33 We may see interesting combinations of these claims, for example, artificial intelligences or rainforest carbon sinks, not just as possessed by corporate persons but which are corporate persons in their own right and enjoy the political benefits thereof.
We ’ ll visit some of the current denizens of this space, but first, I consider what the appearance of these kinds of posthuman Users means for the more general understanding of User subjectivization already discussed above (including in the City chapter). When “ things ” are subjects, then what are the “ apparatuses ” that provide platform subjectivity to Users? Only other apparatuses and envelopes? Or do people subjectivize things and give them platform sovereignty through interaction in the same way? Turning momentarily back to Agamben ’ s disposition on dispositif, he writes that “ we have then two great classes: living beings and apparatuses. And, between these two, as a third class, subjects. I call a subject that which results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses [emphasis added]. Naturally, the substances and the subjects, as in ancient metaphysics, seem to overlap, but not completely. In this sense, for example, the same individual, the same substance, can be the place of multiple processes of subjectification: the user of cellular phones, the web surfer, the writer of stories. ” 34 So while any one entity can surely step into many different User positions depending on the demands of different apparatuses, for Agamben the very possibility of that position arises in the interplay between organic and inorganic bodies (and given his example, the humanist agent is the presumed exemplar of the former). He goes on to concede (a half-nod in the direction of Gilbert Simondon, perhaps) that while, yes, it is true that technological individuation is insep arable today from species-becoming ( “ apparatuses are not a mere accident in which humans are caught by chance, but rather are rooted in the very process of ‘ humanization ’ that made ‘ humans ’ out of the animals we classify under the rubric Homo sapiens” ); the sheer proliferation of such apparatuses demands, however, a different kind of encounter between that (already-formed?) “ human ” and the bewildering gizmos in his midst, asking strange and unwanted things of him. “ It would probably not be wrong to define the extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses. It is clear that ever since Homo sapiens appeared, there have been apparatuses; but we could say that today, there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus. In what way, then, can we confront this situation, what strategy must we follow in our everyday hand-to-hand struggle with apparatuses? ” 35 While he goes on to say that that the appropriate response is not one of simple refusal or acclimation, it does not seem for him that the landscape of apparatus might make worlds (and User-subjects) through encounters with things other than what he would qualify as (human) “ living beings. ” In fact, for Agamben, our engagement with apparatuses seems to work in the opposite direction: “ We must also immediately consider the apparatuses that crowd the Open with instruments, objects, gadgets, odds and ends, and various technologies. Through these apparatuses, man attempts to nullify the animalistic behaviors that are now separated from him and to enjoy the Open as such, to enjoy being insofar as it is being. At the root of each apparatus lies an all-too-human desire for happiness. The capture and subjectification of this desire in a separate sphere constitutes the specific power of the apparatus. ” 36 Not only do animals and machines have no place inside this User position, they are, he observes, foremost subservient apparatuses through which humans inject, invest, and sublimate their own desires for reconnection (through disconnection). It would seem that by this doctrine, a more active subjectivity for machines and animals is, if not impossible, then at least archaeo logically or politically perverse. Things (and other humans) are what make humans into subjects; humans don ’ t give subjectivity to things, nor do things do this for other things. The “ third class ” of subjects between “ living beings ” and “ apparatuses ” is his diagnosis, now a unidirectional accomplishment.
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Everyday examples suggest that this provides an inadequate explanation of the apparatus and platform sovereignties, and an empirically suspect description of how the contemporary career of the User-subject is formulated in apparatus economies. Clearly sometimes apparatuses (e.g., machines, systems, animals) are the User-subject of and for other machines, systems, and animals without the immediate human involvement and interference, though human-directed invention may set the stage for these interactions. Sometimes these Users are living, nonhuman beings with rather different desires regarding the recapture of some lost animality (in that they are already on the other side of the human-animal political divide, as articulated by Agamben in The Open). 37 Perhaps as living systems, their valence and variance is encapsulated by the consistent encounter with a particular apparatus, such as a rainforest whose “ inputs, states, and performance ” are sampled as a continuous calculus by ambient sensor arrays. Sometimes they are not living at all in any conventional sense. Machines possessing varying innate capacities or artificially imbued intelligences can work from the position of the User with Stack systems at every layer and are addressed by those layers in ways that are functionally agnostic as to whether such agents are motivated by human desires or not. It is still important to recognize that any one machine, just like any human, can be subjectivized by different external systems in different ways, and so can take on different effective profiles, just as a person does. The available range of User positions that a machine can inhabit is as diverse as the demands and interfaces that are made available to it. Its possible performances are also as diverse as those of any other User that derives its platform sovereignty by interacting with the surrounding apparatus and envelopes. We anticipated this decentering of human perspective in describing the potential plurality of deep address haecceities, invoking potential Users across an abyssal spectrum of scalar abstraction and physicalization. Of more immediate concern for the User layer of The Stack, however, is to understand the multidirectional and mutual capture of being (living or not), apparatus, and subjectivization. Giving them more depth, Agamben ’ s formulation echoes theories of machinic prostheticization, so important during the McLuhan era, whereby “ Man ” pilots various tools and technologies through which he extends himself and becomes reembodied by those media. 38 The high-tech Vitruvian Man, radiating waves of “ desire ” and “ needs ” out through the successive concentric relays of television, architecture, automobiles, and robotics, is like Earth within Ptolemaic astronomy, always sited at the center of his technical cosmos and believing his own perspective view rather too much. Economies of prostheticization are in fact important to understanding the posthuman User position, but their shape is not that of a one-way concentric radiation, from human into apparatus. It is, rather, a crisscrossing field in which humans themselves are just as likely to be the prostheses, and the apparatus is just as likely to be the User that prostheticizes the human, as the other way around.
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If, as this book argues, technologies can be defined by the quality of accidents that they produce, at least as much as, if not more so than, by the uses for which they were intended, then for The Stack, we can include the universal — once again human and nonhuman, living and nonliving — User-subject among these. Foregrounding the fact that this subject need not be human in order for it to constitute a relationship with other agents and apparatus suggests some conclusions and projects for the User layer. The first might suggest that the User is an obnoxious subject, derived from the simpleminded and self-affirming utilitarianism of consumer cybernetics and defended mostly to make humans easier to locate and monetize as end points in systemic relays. In this light, putting nonhumans into that User position should be seen as a temporary station at best, but perhaps a means to invent different kinds of agencies, not just mimicking this degraded human. We must save the nonhumans from being merely humans, so that they could show us a different way for us to be both human and not. Another project might steal from the surfacing of posthuman actors through the medium of the universal User, that these simple utilitarianisms cannot hold and that the psychological-utilitarian User is thereby recast in a far less reductive and less familiar light. In its place we imagine a re-wilded landscape of inhumanist intentions, mapped by multipolar points of control, composing a more polysynchronic and less chauvinistic system of systems. It is probably prudent to acknowledge the first conclusion and design on behalf of that second project. In doing so, we should pay special attention to the risks incurred by legacy User positions, including the tendency to individuate the subjective outcomes of interactions with The Stack ’ s apparatuses and envelopes. With these caveats at hand, we examine the work of nonhuman User in three exemplary guises: animal User, artificial intelligence (AI) User, and machine User.
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