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# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

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26. The core parable is from Heidegger ’ s “ The Thing ” essay from 1950.

27. By contrast, with the connotation of both for Graham Harman, for example: Graham Harman, Toward Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (London: Zero Books, 2010). Whereas the veracity and value of Object-Oriented Ontology would be as true or false 1000 years ago as it is now, or as true or false or 1000 years in the future, the “ flat ” addressable terrain I discuss could only exist and function when a particular set of historically contingent technological substrates could make it so. It is mechanically flat, not ontologically flat.

28. This concept of global network topology is all but axiomatic after the work of Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen, and after a thousand and one telecommunications and airline commercials showing arcing lines pinpointing senders and receivers over a rotating globe.

29. For readers with a Continental bent, the reference here may be to Jakob von Uexk ü ll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O ’ Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010; originally published 1934) while others may consider information theory in the context of quantitative biology. See, for example, John Avery ’ s introduction: Information Theory and Evolution (River Edge, NJ: World Scientific, 2003).

30. See the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) Foundation site at http://www.doi.org/. See IBM and Eurotech, “ MQTT V3.1 Protocol Specification, ” IBM, http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/ webservices/ws-mqtt/mqtt-v3r1.html.

31. Ben Edelman and Michael Schwarz of have modeled an auction market for scarce IPv4 addresses: “ Pricing and Efficiency in the Market for IP Addresses, ” Working Knowledge, November 3, 2011, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6849.html.

32. For an interesting perspective on this, especially as it relates to Internet mapping, see Kimberly Claffy, Ten Things Lawyers Should Know about the Internet (San Diego, CA: Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, 2008), http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2008/ lawyers\_top\_ten/lawyers\_top\_ten.pdf.

33. For an overview of IPv6 and the server-edge problem/opportunity, especially as related to early Internet models, see Jim Stogdill, “ IPv6 Day and the State of the Edge, ” O ’ Reilly Radar, June 6, 2012, http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/06/ipv6-internet-addresses-scarcity.html.

34. See Jorge Luis Borges, “ Library of Babel, ” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald Alfred Yates and James E. Irby (London: Penguin, 1970; originally published 1941), 58 – 64. From the Wikipedia entry for “ The Library of Babel ” : “ The Library contains at least 25 <sup>1,312,000</sup> books. (The average large library on Earth at the present time typically contains only several million volumes, i.e. on the order of about $1 0 ^ { 6 }$ books. The world’s largest library, the Library of Congress, has $2 . 1 8 \mathrm { ~ x ~ } 1 0 ^ { 7 }$ books.) Just one ‘ authentic ’ volume, together with all those variants containing only a handful of misprints, would occupy so much space that they would fill the known universe. ”

35. The theoretical space of IPv6 can be measured in a number of ways, many of which boggle the mind and none of which guarantee anything whatsoever about future implementation: 6.67 $1 0 ^ { 2 3 }$ IPv6 addresses per square meter of the surface of Earth, or $6 . 6 7 \cdot 1 0 ^ { 1 7 }$ per square millimeter, or $6 . 6 7 \cdot 1 0 ^ { 1 1 }$ per square micrometer. The image shown of an IPv6 address the size of a red blood cell seems tiny, but in principle, it is big enough to contain 1 trillion addresses according to that distribution. Imagine if every Google search received an individual IPv6 address. If we were to assign an individual address to 1,000 searches per day for all 7 billion people (or $2 . 5 6 \cdot 1 0 ^ { 1 5 }$ addressed searches per year), it would take $1 0 ^ { 2 3 }$ years to run out of addresses. The age of the entire universe since the Big Bang is only about ${ 1 0 } ^ { 9 }$ years. And so on. Thanks to Sean Crowe for helping to sketch out these figures.

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36. An IPv6 address is not a random number but a hierarchical addressing structure, like a postal address. It is a categorization and mapping schema, in which some numbers are subsets of others, used for routing, and so on. Like any other widely adopted addressing platform, it is a kind of geographical and jurisdiction technology. For what that political technology is ultimately used for, if anything of significance, we do not know.

37. Secure hashes may be another worthwhile model to pursue. Julian Assange outlines lays out a vision for this in his When WikiLeaks Met Google $( \mathrm { N . p . }$ : OR Books, 2014).

38. Once again there is a correspondence between the universal addressability of discrete assemblages with mass and indiscrete assemblages without mass, things, or concepts, with the flat ontology of Latour ’ s “ irreductionism. ” One could borrow any Latour litany of possible objects and imagine them as addressed in relation to one another and supported by an artificial infrastructure for the exchange of physical information between each other. That said, it may be tempting to overinterpret apparent resemblances between the generic universalities of deep address with the various flat ontologies of object-oriented philosophy, and any direct conflation of the two would be a mistake. The Address layer is an artificial superimposition of a symbolic cartography onto the world according to a specific, contingent diagram, and like any other symbolic cartography, it is totally limited by the prejudicial finitude of its own structure. Its ontology is tactical, not metaphysical. That its structure, as a layer within The Stack, would come to materi ally affect whatever “ objects ” it may address demonstrates only the power of categorization to mobilize complex systems. The litany of things that may be identified by Address sets does not actually flatten the plateau any further than it already is, or support any additional withdrawal of objects from one another. To the contrary, it nominates each as an instance with a location to which and from which information could be communicated. It is only cartography and communication, not chemistry or ontology.

39. I will quote a standard definition of the term. Haecceity (from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as “ thisness ” ) is a term from medieval philosophy coined by Duns Scotus. It denotes the discrete qualities, properties, or characteristics of a thing that make it a particular thing. Haecceity is a person or object ’ s “ thisness. ” Charles Sanders Peirce later used the term as a nondescriptive reference to an individual. See Martin A. Bertman, Classical American Pragmatism (New York: Humanities-Ebooks, 2010).

40. Furthermore, the specter of deep address should not be seen as a necessary justification for a cosmically inflated ontological “ computationalism ” whereby the whole universe is understood at its essence as algorithmic unfolding, with deep address cast as infinite drawing by which such cosmic calculations can be mapped. Instead, deep address should be taken for what it is: an emergent global logic for the de-differentiation of things and events by their common entry into a common, artificial platform of identification and exchange. And for this already and without decoration, it already represents a sufficiently disruptive and provocative aspect of The Stack infrastructure and its relation to the omnivorousness of Anthropocene capitalism (as well as to the fragility of the totalities that its growth program composes for itself and which may prove its undoing). See Alexander R. Galloway, “ The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism, ” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2013): 347 – 366, doi:10.1086/668529, and Reza Negarastani, “ The Non-Trivial Goat and the Cliffs of the Universal ” (lecture at the Abrons Playhouse, New York, November 15, 2012), and my own “ Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics, ” 2013, http://www.e-flux.com/issues/46-june-2013/.

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41. I refer to Latour ’ s well-known “ parliament of things ” : We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1993). While despecializing modernist divisions of scientific and interpretive labor is laudable, a “ parliament ” is an inadequate politico-architectural metaphor for the designability and composability of the tumult he describes.

42. Gean Moreno, “ Notes on the Inorganic, Part I: Accelerations, ” E-Flux, no. 31 (January 2012), http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article\_8946775.pdf.

43. Galloway comments on the tactics of black bloc juxtaposed with the black box, the opaque machine that affects the world within open explication. The goal of black bloc is not to redraw the map or to take a different position within an alternative territory, but to refuse formal appearance altogether, to exist and operate under a cloak of aterritorial nonaddressability. See his “ Black Box, Black Bloc, ” in Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles, ed. Benjamin Noys (New York: Autonomedia, 2012), 237 – 249. With far blunter wit, Brian Holmes articulates resistance to the prevailing “ technosemiotic order, ” its molar enclosures, and their “ cybernetic lines of latitude and longitude … speak[ing)] of exploration and conquest, of industry and trade. ” These can be eluded through the cultivation of alternative schizoanalytic cartographies, and toward this, he warns us solemnly that we must “ Escape the Overcode ” See https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/book-materials/.

44. On the Aozaki project, see Nobutaka Aozaki, “ Value\_Added #240950, ” 2012, http:// www.nobutakaaozaki.com/value\_added.html, and his “ Artist Project/Value Added: # 240950 DM NOSLT WHL KRNL CR, ” Cabinet, no. 47 (Fall 2012).

45. Aozaki ’ s project is also a nice demonstration (and inversion) of the “ double spend problem ” that could plague any digital or networked currency: without discrete physical tokens that guarantee each unit of value is in only one place at a time, how to ensure that the same “ dollar ” is not spent more than once at a time? Blockchains offer the solution of distributed clearing of all transactions so that bitcoin ’ s realm of value-representation remains uncompromised. It does not, however, solve the “ problem ” that Aozaki introduces, which we could perhaps call the “ double acquire problem. ”

46. Rachel Swaby, “ Big Ideas: Spray Wi-Fi Hotspots on to Everything, ” Wired UK, March 30, 2013, http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/03/big-ideas/spray-wi-fi-hotspots-on -to-everything.

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47. Thanks to Aaron Fooshee, a student in a workshop I taught at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, in 2013 for exploring the idea of object-to-object spam.

48. See my “ Root the Earth: Peak Oil Apophenia, ” in Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, ed. Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, Nicola Masciandaro, and Eugene Thacker (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012).

Interface Layer

1. Deleuze, Gilles. “ The Brain Is the Screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze on ‘ The Time-Image ’ , ” Discourse 20, no. 3, Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in This World (October 1, 1998): 47 – 55. See also Gregory Flaxman, The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

2. A widely quoted quip from McLuhan, with numerous sources in print, many quoting television appearances.

3. We should be careful, as William James once said, that the word dog does not bite.

4. It ’ s always possible that a technical relay between button and effect is in good working order but that the appropriate semantic association is scrambled, such as when the button that says Open in fact closes a door, or the knob for watering flowers opens the garage door instead. Jacques Tati ’ s films elevated the lampooning of these interfacial crossed wires into his own conservative lament against modernity.

5. Conversely, phatic interfaces — those that interstitially interrupt attention, such as a phone ring — as well as geolocative tracking of devices revealing User trajectory, like a tagged shark, are examples of interfaces that the User accesses The Stack, but interfaces through which The Stack accesses the User.

6. The etymology of interface dates the word back only to the late nineteenth century, and is now defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “ a surface lying between two portions of matter or space, and forming their common boundary. ” “ interface, n., ” OED Online, July 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/97747?rskey=BpuToj & result=1 & isAdvanced= false (accessed July 12, 2014). Only much later does it come to mean components in a machine, then specific components in a computing machine, and finally the tools used to engage with a computer. In fact, each of these connotations is still active in our use in regard to the Interface layer of The Stack. It is interesting nevertheless that it took the emergence of computation for the interfaciality of the world to warrant a separate disciplinary mode of design. Now the program of interface design is to expand (some would say inflate) its portfolio toward the diagnosis and designation and all manner of complex systems in the physical world, including common boundaries in the physical world. See my “ What Do We Mean by ‘ Program ’ ? ” Interactions: Experiences, People, Technology 15, no. 3 (2008), 20 – 26. See also http://www.bratton.info/projects/texts/ what-do-we-mean-by-program/.

7. This definition is drawn from my introductory remarks at Ambient: Interface, the 54th Annual International Aspen Design Conference, which I cochaired with Christian Moeller in 2005.

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8. For a much detailed elaboration of these different performative typologies of interfaces, see my “ All Design Is Interface Design ” (presented at SoftWhere, University of California, San Diego, June, 25, 2008). See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSoGFzLlLYQ.

10. “ Nicolelis Lab, ” http://www.nicolelislab.net/.

12. In this conjunction of a generalized interfaciality with the technogenesis of the human form, the reference is, in very different ways, related to the work Gilbert Simonden and Bernard Stiegler, but recall also Maurice Merleau-Ponty ’ s discussion of the cane becoming part of the body of the person who uses it to sense the world.

14. Peter Galison, “ The Lives of Images: Peter Galison in Conversation with Trevor Paglen, ” Aperture 21 (Summer 2013).

15. Like most visual economies of love or war, this depends on the identification of “ objects of interest. ” See “ Cyborg Astrobiologist Put Through Its Paces in West Virginian Coalfields, ” MIT Technology Review, September 24, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519576/ cyborg-astrobiologist-put-through-its-paces-in-west-virginian-coalfields/.

16. John Underkoffler ’ s work on large-scale gestural interface systems has helped define this avenue of design research.

18. What groups these together is the use of the motor body itself as a signifying machine, not a source from which a signifying trace remediates between body and machine. The model is kind of an inversion of modern dance notation systems, which code the slightest gesture with incredible nuance and flexibility.

19. I should explain this folding/unfolding allegory in more detail. The “ Thing ” is, at least in the German, a “ gathering. ” Invoking this etymology, Bruno Latour extends Heidegger ’ s four-foldedness of the thing into new domains. We could say, however, that the interfaciality of a thing inverts the gathering and its network of relations. According to the Latour-Heidegger story, drawn from Heidegger ’ s 1950 essay, “ Das Ding, ” and Latour ’ s recent essays on the “ parliament of things, ” a thing is an assemblage or index of those actors and forces that gave rise to it, which are combined and folded within one another in marvelous ways to result in a given thing. The “ thing, ” however stable or temporary, gathers its particular forms and forces of earthly production into itself and presents them (each one of these — sun, water, metal, work — is still present in the thing) toward a new use or encounter. Conversely, the interfaciality of a thing inverts the direction of that gathering. In connecting one thing to another by remote control, by action at a distance, the interfacial thing unfolds out toward the world of other things in looping cybernetic circuits of relay and interruption. It doesn ’ t fold in; it explodes out. The unfolding, degathering interfaciality of the thing is equal and opposite to its infolding gathering as assemblage. See Martin Heidegger, “ The Thing, ” in William Lovitt, trans. and ed., The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), and Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

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20. And before this, the network city was already well understood. The Romans, and the informational city by French pneumatic tube engineers who largely perfected the point-to-point packet, switched distribution analog information units. By the 1960s, continental-scale computational network systems, such as the SAGE early warning system, suggested more comprehensive transformations of urban pathways and partitions according to information processing perspectives, especially in cinema and architecture. A short and scattered list might include Jean-Luc Godard ’ s Alpha 60 (1965), overseeing a future Paris in Alphaville; Dennis Crompton ’ s Computer City (1964); and John McHale ’ s 2000+ (1967). All are part of a milieu popularized by Marshall McLuhan ’ s publication of Understanding Media in 1964, which made the redefinition of the city into a landscape of smart networks, informational prosthesis, a cocktail party commonplace. That figure of the city, less a vast industrial machine than an unfolding collective sensory apparatus, couched many of the important cinematic projects of the time, from Stan Van Der Beek intermedia experiments to Gene Youngblood ’ s expanded cinema; they explored the architectural potential of cinema as an architectural material and the urban environment as a cinematic surface. See also the early music video for Pierre Henry, “ Psyche Rock, ” 1967, http:// www.dailymotion.com/video/xcjrav\_pierre-henry-psyche-rock\_music.

21. The ambition of the BioBricks Foundation is to introduce general-purpose modular blocks of DNA for do-it-yourself biotechnologists. See “ About BioBricks Foundation, ” http://biobricks.org/ about-foundation/.

22. The resolution of real events in the physical world will be determined as much by operations made through software as not, and from within the substance of that real world, perhaps processed by nanometric smart motes and their yet-to-be-invented atom-scale effectors, to remote sensing and management through various sensors and interfaces. If so, then the implicit or explicit association of the digital with the virtual and the virtual with the immaterial or unphysical (and, conversely, the analog with the actual, material, and physical) is well beyond the point of impasse. More pressing is the physicality of computing and the materiality of the virtual and the actuality of digital/analog as state conditions of the same matter. This holds for architectural and urban-scale matter as much as any other, and so the question of architecture at the edge of physicality is less interesting if it underwrites interest and evaporation of interest in physical systems through a relentless investment in computation as a numinous and gnostic portal to pure algorithmic autonomy, or some opposite thereof. Better to serve the physicalization of urban material as the computational figuration of what we used to call virtual toward the physical, toward data in-the-wild and as-the-wild.

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23. This connotation of “ hyperobject ” — as in hyperlink, a human-computer interaction mechanism in the guise of a physical object — is very different from that already defined by Timothy Morton in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

24. For this foregrounding of the agency of interfaces, the project that might define the political design ends of the spectrum may be Aldo Van Eyck ’ s urban playgrounds for children. Thanks to McKenzie Wark for this comparison.

25. “ What if the architectonic in Kant were not an overarching system but something that has itself to be constructed anew, in each case, in relation to fresh problems — something looser, more flexible, less complete, more irregular, a free plan in which things hang together without yet being held in place? ” John Rajchman, Constructions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

26. As already noted, Koolhaas captured this exact dynamic in his Delirious New York study. See Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994).

27. Franco B. Berardi, Neuro Totalitarianism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014).

28. Logistics here refers to both the expert mobilization of things, but also the aestheticized image of mobility in action. For the latter, logistics is a technical imaginary for the world in choreographic motion, an image that in turn becomes a technique for organizing the world as a distributed, generalized complex of distributed, integrated interfaces.

29. A possible methodological framework: Interface design is less about the design of a thing than of a condition of transference (that could become a thing) and can take at least three main forms. First-order interface design produces the conditions of interassemblage between people, things, or places — making it good, smart, fast, flexible, sustainable, and so on. This is how urban planning and public policy are also interface design. Second-order interface design produces images of interassemblage that give order, predictability, and clarity to how people use systems. These images are very powerful guides — so powerful that they really are the interfaces to what they represent. This is how graphic designers are interface designers. Third -order interface design produces the image-instruments of interassemblage that allow for the system to be governed, controlled, and optimized according to plan. These are maps of a system that, because they are interactive maps, become tools to engage that system.

30. For a more in-depth discussion of assemblage not as a rigid system but as a temporally fragile coming together and falling apart at once, see Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2009).

31. On the aesthetic engine of cosmograms, see Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux, Cosmograms (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005). The visual language of the logistical sublime has a specific graphical and photographical style. It is a dramatic mix of the now overly familiar landscapes of Andreas Gursky, Edward Burtynsky, Bruce Mau, and Jennifer Leonard, Massive Change (London: Phaidon Press, 2005).

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32. Keller Easterling ’ s work is paramount in tracking how the logistical aesthetic works itself out through corporate and academic architecture. See Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014).

33. “ Switches ” in this case would include the aggregate number of transistors on all the networked and embedded processors (a kind of cumulative and total Moore ’ s Law of interfacial capacity) but also non-computational interfacial gateways that contribute to the overall flux and flow, and ranging from object-scale to urban-scale to transcontinental-scale.

34. Articulating this insight in every way possible seemed to define fin-de-millennium social theory in relation to the network society, the global city, the information bomb, sociology against society, supermodernism, and so on. See Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardoso, The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy (Washington, DC: Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, 2006); Saskia Sassen, “ The Global City: Introducing a Concept, ” Brown Journal of World Affairs 11, no. 2 (2005): 27 – 43, http://www.saskiasassen.com/pdfs/publications/theglobal-city-brown.pdf; Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (London: Verso, 1999); John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000); and Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization (Rotterdam: NAi, 1998).

35. “ Binding collective representation ” is meant in the sense central to the grand unifying social theories of both Emile Durkheim and Niklas Luhmman.

36. On “ punctualization, ” see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

37. A result examined with nuance by Alexander R. Galloway in his essay “ The Unworkable Interface, ” in his book The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 25 – 53.

38. For example, the recent editorial work by Manuel Lima and visualization work by Laura Kurgan.

39. There is resonance with Fredric Jameson ’ s discussion of images of totality as an active response to systemic complexity in ways that would contradict the notions that information visualization brings an eclipse of active and prejudiced interpretation (Manovich) and undermines any need for macroscopic and global theories of the social (Latour).

40. The term utopian imaginary is used more or less in Jameson ’ s sense of a progressive (if frustrated and sublimated) desire for the comprehension and reform of social totality, especially as seen through speculative science and technological fictions, across all media. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005).

41. The design problems related to nonvisual (or least nongraphical) interfaces, such as those conceived for our many ubiquitous computing environments, are less clearly outlined before us now, especially when these interfaces are employed for the benefit of nonhuman Users. When software is embedded within a User’ s physical environment, it becomes part of his habitat and contributes to how he is embodied by and within that habitat. In sociological theory, the term habitus has been used, by Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre in particular, to name the productive circuit between a contextually rich habitat and a disposition of bodily and cognitive habits. In Lefebvre ’ s connotation, habitus speaks to how the production of social space is a kind of mimetic extension of bodily movement, a habitual wearing of grooves into the surfaces of the world, which by its material repetition produces the artifacts of habitat. In the plural, such spatial practice results in the channels, monuments, and activities of the city, a collective artifact of spatial life. Among the most important of such collective spatial productions is the border and boundary of the city, the edge system of membranes that governs internalization and externalization. For the individual, habitus can also refer to how embodied dispositions become codified into the organization of place and how this comes to reconfigure how they are occupied and programmed in their reflective image. The repetition of habit produces an inscription, a “ groove, ” in the figural contours of the built environment, and in fact it builds the environment precisely through such repetitions, while habitats in turn produce and enunciate themselves though bodies, manifested as habits. Spaces contain and constrain, and are configured by the bodies they constrain. Spaces are not just expressions of embodiment; they also express themselves as and through bodily form (prisoner, worker, individual, mass). Habitats (cage, desk, car, savannah, bed, corridor) condition and are the condition of the production of bodily habits and of the collective representation of those habits fixing themselves as material culture.

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In this circuit, Bourdieu identifies a crucial nexus of power. The cultural legitimacy of any sort of regular exercise of power depends on how it can structure a part of society into its own shape, according to its own program, and on its ability to then reproduce itself formally and institutionally. For Bourdieu, that reproduction decodes dynamics of social class, and certain patterns of cultural capital — access, expertise, and information — replicate themselves over generations. The sociological tradition from which Bourdieu worked understood technology as only enabling or reflective of more essential social dynamics, whereas my own would situate as being indissoluble from the genesis of complex material cultures ( “ social ” and otherwise). Today the reflexively reinforcing circuits of habitus are not only organized by software; they are also physically composed of software, literally built out of software-mediated interactions. In the activation on ambient interfacial fields of everyday life, software participates on both the habit and habitat sides of the equation. As computation becomes an increasingly generic property of objects, software envelops us with no greater novelty than electricity did decades before. In the interface ’ s predefined terms of action — the dispositions of inhabitation that it presents, on a screen or through an object — software affords a reproducible form of habit, inhabitation, and practice. Between Users, differential access to certain interfaces in certain combinations comes to define their individuated biographies within the wider production and reproduction of social capital and as a function of the interfacial regimes that both consolidate and disseminate power. The Interface layer of The Stack, especially as habitat, is a medium of cultural, technical, symbolic, and economic capital at once. As played out every second, from Bangalore to Boston, software acumen is also access to the dispositions of practice it embodies, which in turn compose access to the frames of reproductive capital-formations they afford.

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42. The App ’ s real installed size varies somewhat with each device.

43. See for example the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize. http://tricorder.xprize.org/. From the site ’ s promotional copy: “ Imagine a portable, wireless device in the palm of your hand that monitors and diagnoses your health conditions. That ’ s the technology envisioned by this competition, and it will allow unprecedented access to personal health metrics. The end result: Radical innovation in healthcare that will give individuals far greater choices in when, where, and how they receive care. ”

44. One version of this platform of and for nonhuman Users of Apps and App markets is partially articulated as the industrial Internet. See Jon Bruner, “ Defining the Industrial Internet, ” O ’ Reilly Radar, January 11, 2013, http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/01/defining-the-industrial-internet.html.

45. A variation perhaps on the death of affect. See Boris Groys, “ Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ” E-Flux, no. 4 (March 2009), http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article\_49.pdf, and Groys, Google: Words Beyond Grammar (Hatje Cantz: Berlin, 2012).

46. During a personal conversation about this essay, “ Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ” Boris Groys offered an argument regarding what he took to be the political theology of Google. It was an anecdote about some of his Islamic students in Germany. His argument, developed in this short essay “ is that the digital logic of infinite reproducibility (not of a substantial image as in mechanical reproduction, but of a binary substance that is itself nothing but a potential formal pattern) is well suited to a flattening of the affect of religious experience into a kind of rote, mechanistic exercise whereby the mere execution of a ritual program constitutes a supposedly successful theology. Most of his students, he said, had not really studied the Koran nor, he presumes, experienced much of anything we might take to be an ecstatic vision of transcendent truth through it or any other religious medium. Instead those who fancy themselves radicals merely download entire radical websites, largely unread, and store them on their laptops. The implication is that they needn ’ t be enthralled by the theocratic utopian energies of the actual particulars, but merely to possess the imagery-discourse there contained, regardless of any unnecessary affective experience, and that this is not only sufficient but preferred. Simpler.

Groys ’ s remark, however, as distant from or attuned to the actual intentions of his students it may be, is telling in the intellectual attitudes that it inverts. Foucault ’ s fascination with the function of Islam for the Left, not so much as a model of communitarian equity but simply as a wedge in the door keeping the conceptual possibility of radical political difference from slamming shut, was to see in political Shi ’ ism a heterological alternative to the cynical European Liberal doxa. It is also a (perhaps more learned) variation on the predictable tendency to romanticize (both positively and negatively) the presumed depth of faith and conviction of jihadists, radicals, and especially suicide bombers. For this, “ we ” who are too cynical to believe in anything other than fatal self-interest and the impossibility of something other than capitalist realism are in awe of the resolved single-mindedness of “ their ” unwavering fanaticism. Their naivet é , so unencumbered with the burden of postmodern nuance and ambivalence, signifies the remaining possibility of actual, ecstatic effervescent experience in the direct midst of global malaise. As Slajov Ž i ž ek jokes, “ they have faith for us ” in perfect inverted symmetry of our own secular disenchantment. But this is perhaps very wrong. Quite apart from Mumbai, the suicidal assignment can be seen as the expression not of certainty but of doubt, not as sacrifice but as evasion. While the bombers themselves have doubts, their suicide becomes a way of confirming their belief: “ If I kill myself in this way, I can calm my doubts and prove, even to me, that I do believe. ” The act does not happen because of the belief; the belief is retroactively testified by the reality of the act: from radical conviction to autonomic nihilism to an eventual leap of faith.

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