The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

An addressing regime does more than imprint identity onto an existing geography of things; a new regime of segmentation and organization overhauls relations between what is enrolled within it, and does so regardless of whether it is organizing physical or virtual space. As in Thomas Pynchon ’ s The Crying of Lot 49, the control of the postal address code is essential to how states, real and imagined, can see and manage both territory and the territorialized. As its authority delimits the addressed and is itself in turn limited by the addressed, the focus of its control shifts to the enforcement of these systems of signification and to how each system subdivides and individuates the world in different ways and toward different ends. For example, the number of possible addresses in any addressing scheme is based on the ultimate granularity of the total possible senders and receivers within that delimited space. According to the five-digit US postal code system, the entirety of US sovereign land can be subdivided into $1 0 ^ { 5 }$ possible zones (including all possible ranges from 00000 to 99999). Because this has proved insufficient for automated paper envelope routing, another four suffix digits were added in 1983. (Compare this to the Millionth Map project beginning in 1913, which would have subdivided the Earth into 1 million individual mapped zones.) ⁵ With the development of global information technologies, the capitalization of new forms of virtual space suggested additional addressing measures, including the subdivision of the frequencies within the radio spectrum and their defined allocation for specific public and private uses. Here the “ geography ” is as physical as the ground, if also invisible to humans, and measured not by longitudinal grids but in the incre ments of wavelength: kilohertz, megahertz, and gigahertz. At different frequencies, dif ferent communication networks are provided specific zones of operation so that they won ’ t interfere with one another, including commercial television, broadcast radio, cellular telephony, satellite communication, aeronautical radio, commercial Internet, and secure military lines. For this, the division of space into specific discrete plots is less to identify sites within a point-to-point messaging network, as it is for post, but to delimit and corral mutually incompatible signals and channels from one another. For the former, the governance of addressing ensures the triumph of signal over noise by making sure messages arrive only where each is intended and meaningful; for the latter, it ensures that unlike messages don ’ t trample over one another as they occupy different parts of the spectrum but pass through the same physical location. A per spective that foregrounds the infrastructural agency of Hertzian space in relation to territories of ground and water might understand the entirety of that spectrum as a kind of atmospheric megastructure, another invisible architecture enveloping and organizing the world within itself. Inside it, two channels compete for the ability to occupy a certain enumerated frequency according to their physical distance from one another in the spectrum and by the sheer strength of signal. The antagonisms of Hertzian geography aren ’ t an oceanic or aerial smoothing over the striated limits and edges of mountainous land; their addressing is based more on resonance within a field than on discrete position and on relative amplitude more than simple presence and absence. Nevertheless, in order to make practical use of the spectrum, humans require tangible hardware that can carefully tune, send, and receive signals, and each piece of hardware often requires a single discrete address, as if it were a house on a street, in order for a particular message to be properly relayed to it and to it alone. At the social level, when particular pieces of hardware, such as a telephone and its telephone number, are linked to particular individuals, we are accustomed to saying that this person has this phone number, so that he or she is known by that spectrum address. In ye olde times, people kept “ personal phone books, ” paper volumes in which they wrote names and numbers, to associate people known to them and the addresses of the telephones they were most likely to answer if called. People even committed some of these numbers to memory so that intimate friends and family could be reached on a moment ’ s notice by entering a code string into local hardware. Today with Cloud-based contacts Apps, those device codes are hidden one layer beneath a roster of proper names or faces, and once entered into a private database, they are possibly never seen again no matter how often you activate the spectrum to connect with that person ’ s associated address or “ phone number. ”

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The Address layer of The Stack develops through both geographical site subdivision and the identification of untethered instances out in the ambient wild, and its governance depends on the linking of one to the other and making them mutually communicable. This combination blends physical and virtual systems and sets the stage for the overlapping of multiple address geographies, some open and some proprietary, one on top of the other and without necessary resolution (as discussed in relation to Google and China in the Cloud chapter). At the level of everyday objects and processes, that proliferation of addressing schemes extends into the tracking of individual commodities through the supply chain, to the tracing of real and virtual data instances within the City layer, to the enumeration of fictional currencies for online economies, to the specification of agricultural, ecological, medical, and bacteriological objects of interest, and so on. Not surprisingly the centralized and decentralized control of these interlocking systems is a matter of considerable debate. For example, the domain name system (DNS) and the global Internet addressing system is overseen in general by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which, in principle, functions as a neutral technical standards body but is sometimes seen, both fairly and unfairly, as extending US influence over the global development of the Internet and its digital economies. Because of this, we entertain the possibility of wide-scale alternative DNS systems, introduced by states or by companies (the .amazon domain name was recently proposed and rejected for recognition by ICANN, but perhaps in time it will appear in some way without ICANN ’ s consent). If some are adopted only locally, the principle of a single universal Internet addressing geography would be undone. (Is the price of universality always the acceptance of a totality?) This plurality of addressing schemes could theoretically result in a flowering of novel forms of identification and cartography or the proliferation of incompatible schemes and networks walled off from one another. The mutual opacity between the worlds of different addressing systems may enable forms of network speciation and diversification by their separation, and also new hierarchies of who and what can and can ’ t communicate in certain ways.

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For the Address layer of The Stack, however, our interest is focused less on “ the Internet ” as it exists than on the expanded fields of addressability per se to coordinate communication between things, whether through a single universal geography or multiple competing systems. We ’ re interested not just in how the essential procedures of addressing do more than tally up the digital world as we see it, but also in how they can allow us (force us) to engage with scales and qualities of communication otherwise inconceivable. We can understand addressing as a formal system, regardless of what it is organizing. Addressing depends on the identification of a singularity (the thing, site, event, however heavy or ephemeral, that is enumerated as a discrete entity), on a system of bifurcators (the names, hierarchies, and sets that include the singularity as a member, such as a street name, a postal prefix, or an IP address quadrant), and on a resolver (a universal or idiosyncratic table that can route messages by matching any enumerated address string to the proper entity in the world). As we ’ ll see, this combination can produce several productive accidents for the Address layer of The Stack. These include the enforcement of social hierarchies based on the capitalization of private addresses by some actors and an exploitable exposure of addresses for others. In this, address spoofing and the misidentification and misrecognition of addressable entities as something other than what they really are can have strategic consequences. The most interesting accident, however, may be a cracking open of the scope of what ultimately can be (and cannot be) specified as an addressable singularity in the first place. This will frame the greatest challenges not only to technological infrastructure but to our conventional understandings of what is and is not available for communication, human and nonhuman, physical and immaterial. It is there that the material ambition of The Stack may be most clearly demonstrated.

1. Deep Address

As said, any “ thing ” that is incorporated into The Stack must be known by it. To be known, it must be locatable as a discrete entity among all others. To the extent that The Stack, as megastructure, provides a global and universal architecture for planetary computation, the space of potential location in which any thing may be situated is equally global and universal. That universality is necessary because the addressed “ things ” may be of very different kinds and qualities (an entry in a particular spreadsheet, a light bulb in a remote street lamp, a single gateway on a single transistor, a component on an orbiting satellite, or a unique chemical process in a Petri dish). The Address layer of The Stack organizes this telescoping from a global grid of locations to the specific local instance of the addressed and back again. This is the ultimate horizon of a truly ubiquitous computing that exceeds the experiential limits of anthropometric and anthropocentric design by enrolling entities into a scope of addressability across and between natural scales, from the infinitesimal to the astronomic, and across natural tempo, from instantaneous to geologic duration. This is deep address; it is where the scope of addressability expands to the point of breaking common sense of what is and is not a sender, a receiver, and message as the theoretical landscape of information promiscuity explodes.

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What has been called “ ubiquitous computing ” since the 1970s (and will soon simply be called “ computing ” ) refers to an evolutionary transition of computation from a generic type of equipment object ( “ this one thing is a computer but that one is not a computer ” ) toward a technical environment in which synthetic computation is, like electricity, a generic property of things in the world. We say that light bulbs, toasters, and remote controls are electric but not that they are electricity or “ electricity machines. ” Instead, for them, electrification is just another physical aspect alongside plastic compounds and steel wire. For better or worse, so too for computation: cars, doors, lights, window switches, and all forms of significant gateways and networked pebbles become computational media. On this general computation, Cory Doctorow observes that “ the world we live in today is made of computers. We don’t have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in; we don’t have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers; a 3D printer is not a device, it’s a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it’s a generalpurpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software. ” ⁶ Sensor nets and smart surfaces transform whole landscapes into intelligent territories (or remake their dumbness in new ways). As the ubiquity of computation extends to finer and finer granularity, smaller and smaller, it enlivens the things of the world (we hope) in perhaps startling and even animistic ways. The share of traffic dedicated to humanto-human communication (or even human-to-thing) is overwhelmed by tidal waves of object chatter coming online all around us. As it extends to envelop yet more vast gestures, the oscillating chatter of stuff that is now given voice only gets denser and more intricate. Perhaps instead of inaugurating some full-spectrum mastery, our own attempts to communicate with a ubiquitously computational world become but one vernacular voice among the object legions.

For such a computational landscape of things to communicate with itself, it must map and enumerate all the things that can send and receive information, and so provides each with an (at least temporarily) unique address, regardless of what that address might resolve. As said, that addressability does not replicate the proximity of those things in the real world (the way a sequential postal address does) but instead organizes them according to a universal indexical simulation that provides a bewilderingly high resolution of possible addresses and even produces new routing geographies and locations in its own image. In that it controls the very possibility of communication between things, the governance of the address becomes more than the management of an addressing schema; it becomes a governance of the addressee and of the addressable in general. ⁷ Besides the technological and epistemological complexity, it also suggests possible channels of direct economic relations between points within this vast address cloud, any single instance also a node of, for example, supply, demand, valuation, or debt. Consider the 2008 financial crisis. One effect of planetary computation on economic geography is the virtualization of sovereign currencies into n-dimensional abstractions and the consequent disturbance in the force of money to represent the exchange value of commodities, assets, work, and debt. What does money point to? The ultimate reference of a currency is always mythic ( “ Gold? Seriously? ” ), but when it is reduced to absolute pulses of light, the link between a currency, the value that it contains, and the thing or process that is exchanged for that currency becomes even more unwound. Among other things, the financial crisis is a crisis of addressability, a de-addressing of things, and one that continues consolidating a shift within global market economics (when not also collapsing them). We can only anticipate what forms of high weirdness will ensue, as the paired computerization of matter-into-monies (i.e., carbon credits trading, where the value of money is itself measured in carbon) and monies-into-virtuality (i.e., the light pulses of high-speed trading) continues to evolve and accelerate. ⁸ New addressing schemes to locate and coordinate instances of value are multiplying, both as generic currency (bitcoin blockchains) and as platforms for brokering things-with-value (various sharing economy schemes). At stake in all this is also the design of the economy of information itself, from the smallest-scale object or gesture to the largest topological frameworks, and interrelations across scales by drawing and managing an orthodox map in the form of an address table. ⁹ What gets to count and to whom, and who profits from merely counting? If one is unaddressed, then one cannot speak or be spoken to, and so in turn, resistance to official addressable geography and its enforcements characterizes so many histories of resistance to authorities wishing to consolidate their power by consolidating ability to nominate space. ¹⁰

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But deep address is not only a mechanism for the capture of what exists and a formalization of its space of juxtaposition; it is also, as conceived, a medium for the creative composition of those relations, positions, and interrelations. It is a machine for mapping states and procedures of interrelation that are as ancient as they are ephemeral. If we were to think of interaddressability in this way (and even abstracted from its integration with planetary computation as the Address layer of The Stack), we see that its practices are analogous to the intertextuality that links and delinks written texts, one to another, in varying scales of reference, quotation, association, and categorization. “ Textuality is massive addressability, ” claims digital humanites scholar, Michael Witmore. ¹¹ By this, he means that any text provides “ multiple provisional scales of unity ” (inscriptive, semantic, intertextual, formal) and that such “ levels of scale and provisional objectness are as historically-phenomenologically determined as technical. ” ¹² Any layer of addressability, internal or external to what is individuated as a single text, is then so open to alternative logics of subdivision, categorization, and direct and indirect association that any one coagulation of addressability is always provisional if also historically overdetermined. This allegorical provisionality is what allows a reader to produce new momentary conceptual framings of a local instance within a text or an association between multiple texts, within or across logical sets on the fly, so to speak. That simultaneous decoding and production of intertextuality is an essential task (and risk) of readership. ¹³ With deep address, that process is augmented by a platform for the real numerical explication of such provisional intensities and the communication of them into a global network of mutual, formal, technical interaddressability for which the trace (i.e., any writing) is made durable and directly available outside itself and a “ reader ’ s ” experience of it. The addressable space could range from the molecules in printed ink, to an individual letter on a page, to a complete sentence, to scenes or passages, to a citation or thematic link to another passage that is written about it, to metacommentary on that theme, and so on. Each instance could be traced in different ways by different people for different purposes, all of which in turn could also be addressed over again, with their queries themselves searchable: data and metadata, text and reading, object and event. All fold into origami-esque fields of interpretation, referencing, and mapping. Thereby, any local address no longer comes and goes in the same way. It now leaves a durable marker on the “ text ” (any site, object, event, person) such that it can be reconstituted later and can be incorporated into a reframed public life of that text. In this case (the one most familiar to the digital humanities), deep address represents a kind of second-order intertextuality, an artificial superimposition of a linking mechanism into techniques of reading, quotation, archiving, analysis, archaeology, and so on. However, once again, the wider interest for The Stack is not only as a mapping or interpretation tool, even for leaving bread crumb trails through deconstruction or tracing cognition in real time, but as itself a first-order compositional medium through which gestures of nomination, measuring, localization, linking, delinking, association — in other words, articulation— are developed with due virtuosity so as to produce new creations in their own right, built of nothing perhaps but the addresses that codify and arrange each gesture for others to sample and appreciate.

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1. Objects in The Stack

Before we consider the terms for that kind of compositional exploration, let ’ s revisit the more familiar, visible, human-centric, utilitarian program for ubiquitous computation developed for an “ Internet of Things. ” One could be excused for assuming that the future of computing involves primarily the proliferation of calculation and networking into domestic appliances, so that rolling waves of suburban kitchens may be refashioned as smart spaces and interactive habitats. However, this forever stale vision predates general-use computing by many years, and Architecture has had better plans for information spaces for at least as long. For example, in the 1960s, the definition of architecture as a container and conveyer of information was central to Christopher Alexander ’ s project, while the reprogramming of Apollo-era cities as a lattice for interactive media technologies was sketched out by Cedric Price, Archigram, Reyner Banham, and others. Before MIT ’ s Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte founded Architecture Machine Group, which focused on the problems of human-computer interaction at the environmental scale and what came in time to be called “ information architecture. ” ¹⁴ Today, as suggested, many speculative information space design questions are not only coordinated around building automation but also for the conjuring of exotic materials such as smart dust, a generic name for different kinds of millimeter- to nanometer-scale sensor arrays with ultralow power budgets connected wirelessly and which gather hyperlocal data as they swerve. Some of these perhaps even also in turn react back on their microcosmos and our macrocosmos — what Vernor Vinge calls “ smart motes with effectors. ” ¹⁵

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Other programs focus on the design of the spatial, temporal, and semantic relations between physical and data objects. Bruce Sterling ’ s influential Shaping Things introduced the term SPIME to designate the hybrid profile of an object, as accumulated all the way from its virtual design, to sourcing, to assembly, through its use and consumption, and its ultimate disassembly back into entropic matter. He situates this at the end of a schematic history of artificial objects, from artisanal craft to post-Fordism, and suggests that the SPIME is the modality of objects defined by the conjunction of computer-aided design, pervasive big data, computational logistics, global sourcing, and waste materials management. It is less the object as melted into the computational solvent, but one that talks to the platform through the long arc of its conception and assemblage, oscillating between virtual and tangible states and shedding metadata all along the way. This “ thing ” is ultimately indistinguishable from (if not reducible to) the traces that it produces about itself and its various relations with the world that brought it into being. ¹⁶ The SPIME is then a kind of meta-diagram that precedes the object ’ s manufacture, couches its real physical life in the world, and outlasts its recycling; it is the “ thing ” defined as an artificial temporal instance of digitalphysical relations from beginning to end. The politics of the SPIME motivates interest in making global supply chains deeply transparent, and in principle more accountable and sustainable. The hope is that if any interested User can “ read ” the complete biography of a thing, measure all of the conditions of its appearance, use, and disappearance now captured as extensible metadata, then the politics of its chemical and mineral origins (as discussed in Earth chapter) or factory labor conditions, or nutritional authenticity, or post-use death cycle might become more legible currencies of everyday material culture. From other highly controlled perspectives, such transparencies are common in global supply chains but are guarded proprietary sources of competitive information, not public platforms (see the discussion in the Cloud chapter on Amazon and Walmart). But as object fashioning also moves from far-flung extraction-design-factory-distribution chains to scenarios associated with networked 3D printing, then the public constitution of the thing as a traceable data shell is perhaps both more apparent and more salient for end Users. Every time that the schematic instructions of physical object are downloaded and rendered into atoms, that transformation and the relevant information about who, what, where, when, how, and why that took place might be added to the cumulative “ objectivity ” of an object that is itself already a networked entity. Given the disruptive potential of a tectonic shift toward the economies of additive manufacturing, including the decentralization of the “ industrial Internet, ” the related control and governance issues are uncertain. They might range from the dangerously annoying (such as digital-rights management schemes for tangible objects crippled by remote rentier platforms attempting to collect royalties and fees on forks, lamps, and chairs) ¹⁷ to the annoyingly dangerous (the widespread distribution of tools of mayhem, and new forms of virus spread through distributed object networks, either a real biological virus ¹⁸ or physical malware or combinations thereof ¹⁹).

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For any human or nonhuman User to locate any “ instance ” (physical or virtual) within this expanded address field requires not only that it has a predictable and available location, but that the career of that thing and the history of its relations must in fact be queryable. Internet search has largely focused on the sorts of data that are publicly available at IPv4 addresses, namely web pages, but both the Internet of Things and the more comprehensive theoretical SPIME spaces suggest radically expanded search domains (and deep addresses exponentially more so). These range from the prosaic (Google “ my car keys ” to find them under the couch) to the barely fathomable ( “ search the contagion distribution of the RNA in the virus that laid me up ” ). Just as for today ’ s web pages, search providers are eager to provide more direct services built directly into query results themselves by predictively interpreting the intention of the query and providing its likely solution along with tools for the User to accomplish that intention as part of the search result. These are techniques sometimes associated with the semantic web, for which structured data are linked and associated to allow instrumental relations with other data, making the web as a whole more programmable by Users. Through various combinations of open or proprietary exigetics of data, and perhaps a sequence of application programming interfaces (APIs), a query entered as “ book me a ticket to New York ” can activate a series of secondary inquiries to calendars, banks, flight schedules, airline databases, bank accounts, and so on and, through this, initiate the cascading programming resulting in that booking. For this, to search is also to program. Such tidy consumer use cases require enormously difficult standardizations of interoperability between competitive services (not to mention beyond-Esperanto level standardization of all Users’ conceptual taxonomies). The goal of linking data into semantically relevant and accessible structures so that “ search ” would also provide more actionable results, and in turn allowing queries to program those results for specific ends, remains compelling for search engines, if less so for individual down-service-stream providers, such as airlines and banks, which see their business absorbed into a handful of search platforms. ²⁰ By comparison, physical search may be based on a similar tissue of interrelation between addressable entities — in this case, a mix of physical things and data of interest — and might be a necessary condition of a really viable Internet of Things or SPIME space. The designation of semantic relations between objects, according to some disinterested (or extremely interested and capitalized) graph of addresses and their interlocking sets, might reorganize what we take to be the natural proximities of one thing to one another and introduce another map (even topology) of queryable association between them. This resulting platform might provide for the programming and counterprogramming of the resulting object landscapes and event graphs, putting them to direct use, as well as providing secondary metadata about their efficacy or accuracy. Just as most of the traffic on the Internet today is machine-to-machine, or at least machine generated, so too a semantic web of things ²¹ would be correlated less by the cognitive dispositions or instrumental intentions of human Users, but those of “ objects ” and other instances within the larger meta-assemblage all querying and programming one another without human intervention or supervision. In the hype, it ’ s easy to forget that the Internet of Things is also an Internet for Things (or for any addressable entity, however immaterial).

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Control of this multitude of chattering things would represent enormous power, and the danger of overcentralization paired with a monetized opacity of data flows is real. The capture of the “ general intellect ” by search and other mechanisms of “ cognitive capitalism ” is one lens through which to imagine a future in which tracing objective knowledge about the appearance and disappearance of material culture is a proprietary narrative. ²² At the same time, Internet of Things scenarios that prioritize human Users sensing and interacting with their responsive habitats, as masters of the data that appear in their midst, divert discussions of the politics of ubiquitous computing toward an overly local frame of reference within a larger landscape of humans and nonhuman associations. Among the most thoughtful perspectives on this problem is that of designer and programmer, Usman Haque. In 2011, he helped coordinate a drafting of an “ Internet of Things Bill of Rights, ” which included the rights of “ people to own the data they (or their ‘ things ’ ) create, ” of “ people ” to “ keep their data private, ” of “ people ” to “ own the data someone else creates for them, ” of “ people ” to “ use and share their data however they want, ” and so on. ²³ All of those enumerated are strong and sensible principles, and the beneficent blossoming of ubiquitous computation would be more assured should they be widely adopted. But one can ’ t help notice that as a model governance of a landscape largely populated by nonhuman addressees, every sentence in this list of rights begins with the word “ people ” and refers to the rights of individual human Users to retain individuated sovereignty over flows of data that may very decisively exceed the boundaries of any one person ’ s practical domain. Given that so much Internet of Things traffic will be object-to-object and that any object may directly affect and be affected by many people at once or over time (some owners, some Users, some passers-by), how can anyone be sure what “ person ” we are talking about? By articulating the terms of governance in the terms of individual rights, we limit how design might govern in advance the emergence of addressable computational-material communication to a narrow, even parochial subsection of invested Users who happen to resemble this kind of profile.

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