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# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty
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Speaking of reserve currencies, Bitcoin introduces addressable scarcity not in direct relation to the sum of mined minerals or national currencies, but by the mathematics of solving increasingly difficult problems toward an eventual arbitrary limit of 21 million “ coins. ” There is much to explore with Bitcoin, blockchains and related initiatives, such as Ethereum, but it is also the monetary platform of choice of secessionist projects for which the metaphysical expulsion of externalities is the paramount program, as important if not more than the disintermediation of central banks. The version of Bitcoin that we have (other currencies may fork or follow) is exemplary of the futurearchaic quality of many Stack innovations. It is, as Paul Krugman puts it, “ both a 17th century and 21st century currency at once, ” a currency mechanism that would freeze the sum total of possible liquid value tokens in the world, now and forever. 64 In this regard, for certain persuasions, it is better than magic rocks (like gold) because incrementally more gold can always be mined, allowing rootless cosmopolitans to upset “ the natural order ” of hierarchical hereditary accumulation. If nothing else, Bitcoin has made money into a general design problem, as it should be, and not just the design of financial products or the look of paper bills, but of vessel abstractions of time, debt, work, and prestige. Better alternatives are needed soon, before today ’ s digital platform currencies are prematurely entrenched in the wrong direction (artificially attenuated to closure and scarcity of the wrong stuff). Bitcoins also appear not only in mathematical space but through the energy-intensive mining of coins using special hardware with names like AntMiner, Minerscube, TerraHash HashCoins, and so on. The math is a function of the processing power of the servers, which is also a function of the amount of energy that a server pulls, which for some custom clusters is tremendous. The value of a single Bitcoin is also then a direct expression of carbon-intensive energy brought to bear on powering and cooling chips. Perhaps the transparency of that chain of transference, from energy to money, may lead toward even more direct reference to the heat and carbon at the real bottom of this particular financial stack.
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The ultimate granularity of that reference, how it might address and identify value or debt by trace-routing production and consumption, both physical and conceptual, is but one fenestration through which deep address enters into the design of Stack money. In addition to some massive sensing, sorting supercomputational platform needed to track and pay all this — some terrestrial amalgamation of Planetary Skin, Google Gosplan, and whatever else — mechanisms are needed to identify every single instance of economizable matter, action, event, and procedure that can be accounted for in the first place. The deep and wide adoption of some massively universal, spatially and temporally expansive addressing schema is required to individuate, nominate, and enumerate something like Avogadro ’ s number of instances per person, such that this absolute accounting of everything might have a map of its own charge. If so, then solving the capitalist pricing problem becomes practical. While the exaflops might in theory be available for such a mechanism in the future, its energy costs may be insurmountable, save for quantum computing or some such deliverance — especially if those costs are themselves priced in reserve currency of network addressable carbon.
73. Interface Layer to Come: Ambient Interface
The voyage stacks space upon space, concrete space upon the space of knowledge, the space of practical communication upon the former two. It therefore stacks map upon map, world-map upon world-map, the uniform space of plains and seas, the space of techniques, the space of knowledges. When the first cycle is exhausted, a second cycle is constituted from it; when the second is finished, a third, and so forth.
— Michel Serres, “ Jules Verne ’ s Strange Journeys ”
The Interface layer may come to situate a new architecture of algorithmic governance that draws and enforces the conflicts in layers above and below. It may come to absorb an automated sovereignty over decisions of inside and outside and deploy it through the surfaces of everyday computational habitats. How so? It links the User to the other layers by radically reducing the possible network relations between these sprawling infrastructures and the individuated agents who may initiate columns up and down, back and forth. As discussed in the Interface chapter, an interface may take any form that supports that work of reduction and translation, and today that is it is often the GUI, through which the User observes and controls things, events, or data. However, the Interface layer at work for the deep address platforms described may be almost any object or surface with which a User could conceivably interact and which could then affect, in principle, any other such object or surface, nearby or far away: instead of a hyperlink, a true hyperobject. 65 These are all ways that something we are comfortable doing might be automated by ubiquitous computation, but the deeper design program is to allow for other kinds of Users to do other kinds of things that may seem uncomfortable or even illogical to us today. The pairing of a deep address with ambient interfaces — the field of interfaces both physical and virtual that surround a User at any given moment — allows us to imagine a computational solvent imbued into any bit of matter, providing it with additional intelligence and a universal and/or highly curated network addressability. As discussed, this would allow “ things ” that exist at very dif ferent physical scales to exchange information and form unusual confederations, with or without human involvement. It would also imply that either of these could be an interface allowing a User to point to, control, or play with the other. If a plastic stick in my hand can be used to control a video game character whose actions are calculated on a server inside a mountain drawing power from a nearby dam, then many even more bizarre chains of remote agency and distributed responsibility are possible. This pile of smart sand could be a haptic interface that precisely guides a robotic surgical tool inside another person ’ s body across the ocean as he lies prone, enveloped in the loving embrace of several twenty-four-axis machine hands and their cushiony little arms. That cuttlefish changes color in relation to the presence of prey, which causes its linked avatar, several meters tall, to do the same, which causes the birds to flee just as a human player of a popular augmented reality (AR) game walks by, ruining his chances of capturing their fountain for his aligned forces. The factorial combinations of the chains of interfaciality that are possible go well beyond automating smart home use cases.
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As computation becomes more deeply ubiquitous and the agency of the User is shared by any addressable thing or event, then for many people, the world may become an increasingly alien environment in which the privileged position of everyday human intelligence is shifted off-center. To my thinking, this strongly recommends this program. As discussed in the Interface chapter, one of the chief functions of the GUI ’ s reductions is the simplification and narration of all possible interactions to a understandable set of options for the User to easily manage. Long before we achieve anything like a deep address hypermaterialism, the design of any sufficiently advanced Internet of Things infrastructure will have to deal with ongoing complexity issues for human Users and, it is hoped, will do so in ways more imaginative that simple physical skeuomorphisms for which an object “ looks like ” what it does (i.e., tiny models that are synced with their full-size counterparts elsewhere, like little tanks on a big war gaming table). As designers learn to accommodate nonhuman Users, those kinds of correspondences may or may not prove useful, but the basic function of the interface, graphical or objective, will persist: to reduce the complexity of systems by presenting some selfreferential closure that will allow for directed entry into that system and into how that system differentiates itself from its own environment. 66
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Among the essential features of the emerging geopolitics of The Stack is how entire interfacial regimes cohere not just into functional reductions of complex chains of interaction, but also into total images of The Stack and of the world as whole, 67 and it is from that perception of a totality — an augmented cognition for a synthetic ontology — that any Cloud Polis draws its authority, and as those totalities multiply, so do their jurisdictions. A strong interfacial regime prefigures a platform architecture built of total interfacial images and does so through the repetition of use that coheres a durable polity in resemblance to the model. As suggested, the process is mutually constitutive; the representation gives rise to what it describes, on the one hand, and that polity articulating itself through interfacial systems eventually comes to resemble those structures of articulation, on the other. The regime ’ s interfacial images are the instruments through which their particular diagrammatic description of “ what exists ” on other layers of The Stack is directly enacted by its Users. In other words, those circuits of interfacial relay are never only cognitive models of action but establish real physical links between things and events, and in the cumulative agglomeration of those traces, they eventually cohere into a higher-order system and are realized as the physical transformation of the world itself. 68 Every totality, every little utopia, may arise from the correlation and coherence of one or more interfacial regimes evolving to express itself as an autonomous sovereign platform, as an informal imagined community or an actual nation-state. Each of these platform states may provide the experience of internal closure and “ autonomy ” even as they are structurally dependent on other platforms, including ones against which they may define themselves in opposition and by double-exposure. Not only is the instrumental coherence of The Stack coordinated by the interfacial regime, that regime becomes for its User the primary means by which the world itself is made to appear, and through which it is experienced in relation to that appearance. Whatever is assigned an Address by that regime appears may appear and whatever is not addressed simply does not exist as such. Each regime, and hence each mature Cloud Polis, state or nonstate, represents a different world of sites, things, events, processes, valuations, causes, and effects that is internally consistent for the User. But because it must reduce the world in order to provide that coherency, the regime ’ s mapping is always incomplete; some things are identified as addressable entities and located in an interactive narrative, and some are not, some are Addressed as figures and others as ground. No two regimes ’ reductions need be alike (or different) in how they specify a specific element, and nor does anyone need to acknowledge the existence of any others, though one could also demand some drama of allegiance or opposition to another regime as part of its worldview (e.g., the ancient DOS versus Mac schism). 69
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Where will those regimes get their raw material for this artificial coherency? As Users go about their days and lives, dragging their phone-shaped homing beacons hither and yon, they may pass by millions of sensors, each peering out into the world like a tick waiting for mammal heat. Together they form a cloud of machine sensation, each listening or looking or feeling or smelling something about the world or about the Users in the world, or both at once. A sensor may even be a User if it also initiates columns up and down The Stack from its little perch. With this new infrastructure now active, the churn of social interactions that so interested Tarde is now not only made up of human-to-human communication; it is also a din of bodies, machines, and other chemistries signaling to itself about itself. Human Users are both the subject and object of this system, sometimes piloting it and sometimes piloted by it. We leave little traces of ourselves as we march through the sensor cloud, traces of our presence, our attention, our interests, the biological specificity of our person, and the risk and reward that we represent to the different Cloud polities here “ sensing like a state. ” 70 This stigmergy of data, like ants communicating by leaving tracks of pheromones, is another way that human interact with one another indirectly, anonymously, and perhaps unconsciously as the impact of one User’ s presence, her habits, is part of the information that another User may observe or be observed by when passing along the same route that is accumulating input and output. On the ground, this is where the interfacial regime of a particular Cloud Polis is formed and is how it guides and frames the worldview of the embedded User as a visual, graphical interface would.
We see then that Internet of Things operates at the Interface layer in relation with the specific patterns of Users’ physical movement, gathered up into secondary images, which then in turn contribute to how other physical interfaces will or will not interact with a given User and enforce the logics of a given regime. As the User establishes place through the interfacial lens of possible engagements with a site, the accumulation of these interfacial events upon events and connections upon connections generates another scale of interconnection through its own patterns, densities, rules, and durations. The stigmergic currents of clustered groups of people moving though the City form nodes by the cumulative overlapping and gathering of multiple itineraries around common interfaces. In order to form, a node requires a heterogeneous field of possible interfacial sequences, some of which will bind into a specific, meaningful pattern. Like possible moves on a game board, there must be capacity for a multitude of patterns to arise by the addition of new groups and new possible links. That there would be one pattern and not another is what makes the social reality of one network significant — its inclusiveness, exclusiveness, duration, centrality — especially to itself. It is here that all these crisscrosses take on that secondary order of abstraction as an emergent metaimage of all these situated interfacial events and their cybernetic back-and-forth. Ubiquitous computation may be for the most part a nonvisual interfacial array, but it is also capable of describing itself as an image, even as an image that can govern and design how that array is recomposed. By design, this image of the nonvisual network can also govern other interfaces up or down an order of scale such that their use would result in desired outcomes at the User layer. 71 This reflexive cycle of intentions, decisions, sensations, and filters governing the processes to which it refers (and to which it is itself referred) is another name for algorithmic governance. 72
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As we outline the long course of platform governance (both with a nomos of the Cloud and without one) the seat of that governance may be neither in the formal sovereignty of states nor in the headless tournament of markets, but in interfacial couplings themselves. Platforms govern in and as algorithmic decision-making machines. They decide what an interface will or won ’ t do for which User and when. For Agamben, the sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception and on the internal exception of the camp (for him, the “ nomos of the modern ” ) but in the more mundane but pervasive decisions made several times a second by the computationally active interfaces of the User’ s world, the decision over the exception and the reversibility of the interior and exterior is automated. This is the essence of algorithmic governance. In a way, all machines represent ways that we have learned to automate decision and action (and it is at this juncture that the edge of “ the political ” terminates and something else takes over). Laws are also a way to automate decision; they codify decision into precedent, norm, and exact interpretation to be followed over and over again according to code. Laws refer to how interfaces should and should not operate in the future by attempting to articulate in advance all possible variations according to plan, whereas algorithms may automate a decision at the exact point where it needs to be made and where it will affect a User and a User will affect it at the interfacial seam.
In Stanislaw Lem ’ s Summa Technologica (1964), his treatise on the future of technology (including space travel and things that closely resemble nanotechnology and virtual reality), the Polish science fiction author warns — with clear fascination — against possible totalitarian perils of cybernetic governance ( “ Electrocracy ” ) and what he calls “ The Black Box: The Regulator of the Highest Kind. ” In any conflation of legal regulation, such as a formal statute, with mechanic regulation, such as a thermostat, there always exists the potential for enforcement to become either dangerously opaque, unavailable to redress, or dangerously stupid, demanding compliance even against the logical goals of the regulation, or both. In some recent discussions of algorithmic governance, it has been suggested that such platforms may work best when desired outcomes are well known and understood and when system performance can be quickly measured and finely tuned. 73 Instead of dictating every step along the way, stifling improvisation in the face of contingency, the system is free to find its own best means toward that particular and consensual end. There are, however, at least two problems with this heuristic. The first is if insufficient care is given to who or what is desiring a particular outcome and how these may be determined in general before they are decided in the particular by an interfacial regime. 74 The second is that platforms often just do not work this way. As discussed in the first chapter, a “ plan ” fixes outcomes and may also fix means, a “ bureaucracy ” fixes outcomes and means, whereas a platform can fix means (such as protocols, APIs, data standards) but not the content of outcomes ( “ Google does not ‘ make ’ what you search for ” ). It sets criteria for outcomes, but not the outcomes themselves; that is the point of them. The top search result is the one that algorithms deem the most “ relevant, ” but it could be anything at all (to the chagrin of large content providers that would wish to foreground their highly leveraged content assets). That is, the deciding of outcomes is something that happens in the course of interaction itself and could be a result of the User’ s disciplining the algorithm of automation as much as it is the algorithm delimiting User behavior by what it shows, hides, allows, or prohibits. The relative symmetry or asymmetry of this interfacial relationship is, of course, situation dependent and is itself decisive. 75
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Designing the modulation of symmetry and asymmetry between User and system is much easier written than done, but anticipating some “ outcomes ” is obviously also necessary. When a User is providing input through an interface that alters the algorithm that governs that interface, and so also affecting that algorithm by unconsciously reprogramming it, we say that the balance of interfacial asymmetry tilts toward the User. When an algorithm is controlling and curtailing User behavior, cognition, desire, or affect, for example — or, better, when it is producing these things — then we say that the interfacial asymmetry tilts toward the algorithm. As discussed, sensors are likely to become at least as predominant mode of interface design as GUI are today, and the attendant design questions are only beginning to resolve. For one, interaction may take place by a complete absence of interaction. A smart thermostat, to take a prosaic example, learns as much about an inhabitant ’ s space use patterns by when she is not home as when she is. Her absence and lack of interaction is not an absence of information at all; it is information of absence. To the consternation of suspicious persons, the “ mobile phone ” with a CCD (charge-coupled device) absorbing light and a microphone absorbing sound waves is also a sensor, and for it the principle of information by absence of interaction holds true. One sensor makes use of the information haul of another, such as an autonomous vehicle that can navigate terrain based on LiDAR mapping (a portmanteau of “ laser ” and “ radar ” ), motion detection sensors, and street maps (among other sensors). Ultimately, as a User experience design problem, the sense of a device ’ s relative autonomy and intelligence will be a key criterion in everyday
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HRI (human-robotics interaction) but is a separate issue from the actual autonomy or dependence of that device. Interfaces may sustain and nudge Users toward systemically optimal interactions, but for The Stack-to-come, the nudging must work both ways. 76 No platform can only anticipate how Users will make use of it. The most basic principles of infrastuctural resilience dictate that the algorithmic correlation of new sensed information must be able to reprogram even the most fundamental assumptions of that interfacial regime ’ s model of governance and how it obligates decisions of inside from outside. If not, then that platform is a theocracy, and surely there are far too many theocratic platforms already plotting their ascendance. I hope, however, that those interfacial regimes will be dissipated by exit , as others are correspondingly swelled by entrance.
74. User Layer to Come: Inventing Users
The names don’t matter. The biomass does: so much of it, lost. So much new experience, so much fresh wisdom annihilated by this world of thinking tumors.
— Peter Watts 77
For the most part, people would like to believe that the future of The Stack depends mostly on the geopolitics of the User and that the more human and humane the User layer becomes, the better resolved the rest of the accidental megastructure. Resolution at the User layer may prove decisive in some ways, but very different from how one might expect and perhaps from “ human ” in any normal sense. The world is still full of pre-Copernicans, across the political spectrum, and disturbances to human privilege will continue to invite violent pushback. The status of the User as a political and technological creature will stage much of this conflict to come, and it will draw both our deepest intelligence and stupidity to the surface.
An early work by Douglas Engelbart from 1960 is “ Special Considerations of the Individual as User, Generator, and Retriever of Information. ” Among the considerable effects for “ the individual ” of Engelbart ’ s later work, as one of the key designers of many of the interfacial systems we today take for granted (he was key contributor to the design of the mouse, pointer, and pull-down menu, among other techniques), has been the conflation of the use, generation, and retrieval of information under a single actor, the User. It is however also an identity that can easily also pluralize the singular agent into composite groups of users, generators, and retrievers, and it does so not only by what it allows people to do but by how it sees them as doers. For architectural space, the singular User is the generic identity of passengers, customers, drivers, shoppers, bench sitters, door-knob turners, the fenced in and the fenced out, and those cut-and-pasted inhabitants of rendered visualizations. 78 For the Cloud, the User is also the subject created by available means of measurement and discrete identification, markup languages, online ID checks, avatars, and click paths, and for the law, the User may be whoever has a searchable cellular phone on his person, as his person, as part of his person, or simply in the proximity of his person. As discussed above, the conventional User-subject ’ s neutral utilitarianism relates him to homo economicus, but it is not identical to him; he is defined as much by how technologies delineate him for their purposes as he, she, or it uses technologies for perceived self-interest. The User is whatever The Stack senses at its top layer initiating columns up and down with means and ends in mind. This is where and how User subjectivity opens up beyond the borders of the human, and if all the sensors and bots are included, the clear majority of Users are already not human or even organic. This rerendering of the human in the image of the bot, as filtered through microeconomic compulsion, is as a task-solving sentient agent who will complete tasks for micropayments, just like other Cloud utility computing services that provide liquid markets of gigaflops. 79 The cultural complexities to be negotiated (or to be simply made irrelevant) are uneven and irregular. It is interesting to note that the transposition of human labor into simple puzzle solving is taken by some as straightforward market efficiency and not as a transformation of humans into diminished automatons, whereas other Stack technologies that may ultimately allow for greater individual pleasure and safety are seen as affronts to the dignity of Creation.
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I recently heard Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab say, “ Google didn ’ t just design a self-driving car. They designed a driver. ” This focuses attention on the hardware-data-Cloud path dynamic that comes into play as the car navigates the City layer, partially or fully autonomous from human passenger intention. Among the most interesting features of what we call today the “ driverless car ” ( “ horseless carriage ” ) is how it decenters the agency and authority of the human pilot from the cockpit and disperses it into ambient networks operating at multiple scales. For some, this is a welcome innovation, and for others, it will prove an unacceptable emasculation or even dehumanization and will be met with violent resistance, and various forms of human-centric identity politics. Should driverless systems become commonplace at some point in the near future (uncertain at this point), we might expect considerable policy interest in preventing legacy human-driven cars from hazarding public roads and killing tens of thousands of people per year due to human driver error. One can expect pushback as fervent as it is irrational. There are some affinities with technologies, however fictitious or bizarre, that are thought to embody the essence of human mastery. Guns and cars are among these. They are seen to amplify the human, not contaminate it by mediation and hybridization. I would go so far as to predict that there will be a movement to identify human-driven automobiles as a type of “ arms ” and that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, now used to shield gun owners from obvious liabilities and to protect their sense of personal dominion, will be flown to keep human beings behind steering wheels. 80 Your life may be ended by someone encased in a two-ton steel box careening down the asphalt vista trying to prove a point about how technology will never capture his natural humanity. 81
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The individuation of populations into single Users is not a technological necessity, but from the perspective of The Stack looking up, it is an accommodation and a way of making its own emergent platforms interoperable with the conventions of identity we have inherited. 82 The function of User individuation is as much to accommodate the cultural logics of human self-identity predicated on naming, autobiography, lineage, moral self-accounting, and bureaucratic management as it is a real systems requirement. User IDs make it easier to regularize patterns among multiple variables, but they are a function of the fact that Users understand their interactions with platforms over time as the accumulation of events that are temporally unique to themselves. Some people are surprised to learn that many Cloud platforms are not overly interested in their name and address, only in their actual and predictable behavior. The idea that their identity could be reduced to what they do instead who they are seems counterintuitive, even insulting. At the same time, interfacial security regimes can demand highly specific identification of one exact User versus all possible other Users. Access to secure locations, such as a data center, is controlled by highly demanding interfacial apertures. In general, a combination of identification criteria must be satisfied, all of which are effective for identifying human Users but equally effective identifying nonhuman Users as well, and so as in Kafka ’ s “ Before the Law, ” all who come before the door are made equal, but this door will open only for you. This triumvirate of User identity is: “ something you know ” like a password, or a specific response to a specific question; “ something you have ” like an identification card, a dongle, key, or specific chip; and “ something you are ” like a fingerprint, retina pattern, or other hard-patterned information. These are the three sides of the triangle that individuates one User from a population: knowing, having, being. So long as something can know, have, and be, it can be a User. To some, that may seem unnatural; to me, that looks like universal suffrage.
In order to design more robust transformations at the User layer, it is not enough to expand the criteria for admission only to who and what counts as a User; it also demands a shift in how (and indeed if) the User is made to account for the intentions and effects of every column that he, she, or it initiates. A crash may be put down to driver error, but from a wider perspective, the entire transportation system collaborates in allowing for the possibility that this error might result in catastrophe. The preponderance of attention paid to the legal rights of human Users to interact with one another without regard to “ externalities ” and largely without governance other than the carnival of “ reputation, ” has the secondary effect of diverting energy from these other two (likely more) important design problems: the representation of nonhuman Users and the codification of enforceable accountability within a complex composite technical system. One starting point is to peel apart the User of an interface from the owner of an interface, as the demands of each may continue to diverge significantly. As discussed above in in relation to the ownership or stewardship of data within an Internet of Things ecology, it is not enough to simply say that the legal owner of a device should have control over its data, and not only because “ the ” owner is not likely a single identifiable entity. A sensor may be owned by X and capture data about Y, and here the former is the owner while the latter is the User, who may also claim durable rights over what the sensor senses about themselves. The owner can ’ t possibly own all that what he knows about everyone, but at the same time that User (person Y) cannot possibly claim that anything and everything any sensor senses about himself is really a part of his expanded sovereign person and should remain under his control. The sound waves disturbed by your voice that my eardrum picks up are as much mine as yours, and in a world of trillions of sensors, dividing the City layer up into zones of reasonable privacy and zones where one has no expectation of privacy makes no sense because, if no other reason, no zone is ever discrete; it is always overlapped and overlapping. In some cases, we will definitely wish for the interests of the User to trump those of the owner. As in Cory Doctorow ’ s example cited in the User layer chapter, someone who falls behind on the payments for his or her child ’ s smart ocular implants and has to choose between a bankruptcy and an ability to see should rightly claim that the needs of the User, in this case her daughter, trump those of its owner, her bank. 83 Whether the same is true of driverless cars that drive themselves back to the dealer lot, automatically repossessing themselves from delinquent Users, is less clear. It is precisely this fog, this gray area the size of the User layer itself, that needs our most concentrated and critical design attention. 84
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