The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

1. Distortion and Genesis

As indicated in the first chapter, each layer of The Stack prioritizes the structural ideal of an independent technology, and like all other sufficient technologies, it generates its own integral accidents. In turn, each layer in conjunction with other layers of The Stack generates the interweaving and composite accidents of The Stack itself as a metatechnology. The logic of absolute communication for which any haecceity must appear to a common, commanding network platform is a utopian gathering of all into one (the first hint of totality and totalitarianism blurring). But in that guise, it is just that, a utopian projection of a master perspective from the heart of algorithmic capital, and like any other utopia, its purity in principle is also its fragility in practice. Consider the performance piece, Value Added (2012), by Nobutaka Aozaki, in which he takes a single can of Del Monte corn to multiple supermarkets and rebuys it over and over again. “ The single can of corn has been re-bought from 100 supermarkets for a total of \$107.42 (as of December 30, 2012). ” ⁴⁴ The UPC barcode on the side of the can is a present-day ancestor of deep object addressability, but it can address not this one particular can of corn but can communicate only that the object in hand it is a member of the set “ Del Monte cans of corn. ” ⁴⁵ Once the barcode is shown to a laser and then to an inventory database, its printed information is translated into a price, and the fact of its purchase in turn demands and activates its replacement through a supply chain from store shelf to farm and back again. Aozaki ’ s can is an archaic prototype of the deep address haecceity, and his simple maneuver to multiply its moment of addressable translation one hundred times over suggests at least two lessons. First, any haecceity can be addressed multiple times by interested addressing territories, each of which need not have any knowledge of the fact that others have already claimed this thing. Second, when in the future that universal object identifier is not a dumb barcode but an active online address and its resolver is something more ambient than a fixed-in-place laser scanner, then that haecceity ’ s identity can be spoofed as easily as any IP-networked computer can be today. In this regard, Aozaki ’ s work should be seen not only as a performance of repetition and ritual and the failure of the object to retain its official memory, but also as a smart object hack that doesn ’ t require any end-User software reprogramming. When IP-networked haecceities are not just anthropometric objects but also, for example, blood cells, pollen, oceanic wave formations, or abstract concepts, then hacking and spoofing their identity becomes much more provocative. We already have many Users online pretending to be other things, or forced by some exploit to mimic the appearance and value of other things on behalf of strange plots. Darknets allow for peer-to-peer sharing between devices without openly revealing their IP addresses and by actively obscuring addresses through the anonymizing rerouting of traffic. For the design brief of the Address layer, what is “ dark ” is any material that is connected to the rest of the world based on mischievous or accidental departure from its natural location or quality. As the saying can go, online no one knows that you are (not) a hurricane, a bee, an implanted organ, a crab nebula, a legal procedure for the packing of fish in the Solomon Islands, or a can of Del Monte corn, if you say that you are. By comparison, today ’ s DoS (denial of service) attacks on devices operating at the scale of the Internet of Things seem pedestrian. But DoS attacks on living tissue or on active concepts (!) suggests difficult new domains of cyberbiowarfare, either beyond the immediate scope of NSA/PLA privilege or as their next assignment. Both state and poststate security apparatuses already familiar with ruse surveillance and camouflage are drawn deeper into the viscous mire of networked performance.

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So if deep address evolves in such directions, its geopolitical effect may be driven more by these accidents, doublings, and reversals than by immaculate chambers of unventilated order. Should the day come when we are flying over cities spaying aerosolized smart motes with effectors, then not only will “ Street View ” come to mean a trillion possible perspectives at once, but also that the fertile soup germinating in every sidewalk crack will overflow the business models of today ’ s enterprises, to say the least. ⁴⁶ When our lives are linked by the deeply addressable traces, shed like dead skin cells, then the biographical and cognitive contiguity of the individual User will rupture into a thick cloud of shadows (more on this in the User chapter). Moreover, given that today at least 75 percent of all e-mail sent is spam, and that if you were to add together spambots, search engine spiders, scrappers, and so forth, well over half all Internet traffic is initiated by nonhumans, then for the deep address, how difficult a problem will object-to-object spam be? If the current net is any indicator, even the everyday Internet of Things may involve equipment, furniture, driverless cars, and sensor arrays ruthlessly direct-response marketing to one another. ⁴⁷ But perhaps it is not spam, and the presentation and exchange of alluring information is exactly what happens already in the coordination of sympathetic and symbiotic relationships in nature, say, between a bee and a bright flower or a peacock displaying for a peahen. One would have to stretch the metaphor well beyond snapping point to suggest that a field in spring bloom is “ spamming ” insects to come and fly their pollination routes, but to observe a slice of any complex ecology, at any scale, is to see that things are already communicating with one another, and with incredible intensity and intricacy. Some deep address scenarios would augment these lines of communication with formal addresses, sensors, and effectors, a prospect that leads in directions that are disruptive, destructive, creative, and outlandish. Would the interweaving of the existing matrices of communication between things with the secondary blanket of addresses introduce, in the intermingling of their tempos, their resiliencies and fragilities, their defenses, immunities, and fitness selection dynamics, some sort of second-order synthetic evolution at least in some local sites? Distortions emerge that are unknowable in advance, and with them the universality of the Address layer makes it always suspect to idiosyncratic purposes and outcomes. If its network topology is apparently flat and affected by endothermic perturbations from any point, then it is not just a map; it is a medium, an ecology even, and it can and will evolve. Gray goo scenarios of out-ofcontrol molecular manufacturing and discharging entropic sludge in its wake are now best understood less as a real existential risk than as a parable for mindless industrial rapaciousness. Similarly, perhaps federations of the Addressed, across scales, become catalysts of a countercomposition of the world, generating unthinkable new ground and air, and so instead of an Anthropocenic future in which fewer and fewer conglomerates own, license, or otherwise capitalize more and more things, perhaps the evolu tion of the infrastructure results in an inversion of the ratio, whereby something on the order of 340 undecillian haecceities (in IPv6 address space) come to recompose and govern a vastly smaller number of assemblages. But there is a countervailing scenario (perhaps equally parabolical) in which the unfathomable legion of haecceities lurches not toward entropy but toward a new and more heterogeneous and complex jungle, one that is perhaps mostly unrecognizable and incommunicable for us. ⁴⁸

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The integrity of these sorts of accidents emerges not against the grain of the Address layer ’ s ambition of universalization and totality but along with its emergence, and this may be how the dehierarchicalization of natural denotation can be approached.

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Any haecceity can enter into incongruous economies with unlike addressing territories without final resolution or conflict. Any haecceity can also appear to any addressing territory as what it actually is, or instead as what a strategic exploit (perhaps launched by another object) would have other Users believe that it is, and thus baking principles of simulation and deception into the genetic code of the system. Instead of freezing every addressable instance in place, gathering them into a maniacal, brittle central geography, the universality of deep address as a platform may unleash allochthonous, spooky ecologies that bend and disfigure any master program of homeostatic order. Lastly, the radical ubiquity of addressing may allow the entire project of planetary-scale computation to survive the eventual transition out of the Anthropocene in ways that our lumbering, hungry Internet will not. If so, deep address may outlive The Stack, and it may even be part of whatever post-Anthropocenic platform infrastructures of energy and information come next.

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This whole question of the cinematic author is certainly about ensuring the distribution of films, since creative work solicits a whole other temporality, but it is also about keeping open the possibility of creating films that do not yet exist. Maybe cinema is not capitalist enough. There are circuits of money with very different durations: short-term, mid-term and long-term cinematic investment should be recognized and encouraged. In science, capitalism does now and then rediscover the interest in doing fundamental research.

— Gilles Deleuze, from “ The Brain Is the Screen ” ¹

I wouldn ’ t have seen it if I hadn ’ t believed it.

— Marshall McLuhan ²

No system as complex as The Stack could actually work without some way to simplify its functions and render them legible for the end Users who make it all go on a second-by-second and year-by-year basis. ³ Users can use and be used by The Stack only to the extent that they are provided the Interfaces that make the Earth, Cloud, City, and Address layers available and sensible for them. Without that Interface translation layer, User actions can ’ t affect those infrastructures or be affected by them in any regular and scalable fashion. While interfaces fix and limit possibilities, they simplify them in different ways for different Users. How interfaces mediate between people, things, and the technical layers lower in The Stack also depends on how a User perceives the natural world and is already able to make some sense of it. For example, if those Users are machines or other inanimate objects, then the interfaces through which they recognize The Stack may be specialized sensors, codes, switches, or chemical surfaces. If the User is a more phenomenologically intuitive subject, such as a human, then the exact semantics of interfaces (perhaps icons, symbols, indexes, and diagrams) work not only to synthesize some affordances of The Stack, but also to narrativize the meaning of possible actions that someone might take. In this weave of signification and significance, and in the potential to order the world through intense narrative diagrams (geographical, theological, ideological), the human-Stack interface also locates everyday interactions within larger contests over what should count as the form and content of political geography by connecting between local and global scales. To do this, graphical user interfaces (GUI) in particular offer a kind of diagrammatic map of what they interface between and what they interface toward, be that a machine or an imagined territory. But unlike drawn maps, GUI not only describe the spaces they refer to; they also allow a User to directly act on them in a way that is (one hopes) both cognitively and semantically consistent with its demarcations. ⁴ It can provide this in different ways for different translations, each drawing out a slightly different world for a User. Ultimately it is the arbitrary precision of interfacial diagrams of specific interactions that allows them to delimit in advance what the User can and cannot do with The Stack as a whole. Beyond just the framing of possible actions, the active responsiveness of the interfacial diagram allows its unique mapping of reality to seem not only valid but also functionally real to the User. Through The Stack, interfaces are tools for remapping what they map, and as interfacial drawings multiply, their alternate geographies overlap and juxtapose. This accumulation of incommensurable recursive projections back into direct perceptual reality (however inaccurate, false, stupefying, and illegible they may be) is the first generative accident of the Interface layer.

Interface Layer

1. What Interfaces Are

The Interface layer consists of any technical-informational machine, compressed into graphical or objective formats, that links or delinks Users and the Addressed entities up and down columns within the Stack. Its role is to telescope, compress, and expand layers of The Stack, routing User actions both up and down as they go. ⁵ We need to think of interfaces not only in terms of the GUI (as “ buttons with words on them ” ) but as a more generic structuring of links and boundaries within a given form or field. ⁶ An interface is any point of contact between two complex systems that governs the conditions of exchange between those systems. ⁷ Levers, steering wheels, doorways, mobile Apps, fences, office layout schemes, international borders, telecommunications infrastructure: these are all interfaces. The conditioning of exchange that any interface provides could be variously promiscuous or prophylactic, physical or virtual, accelerating or decelerating, signifying or asignifying, symmetrical or asymmetrical, territorializing or deterritorializing. ⁸ The interface could be a line that links two things together into one, or a line that cleaves them apart. Buttons and levers are interfaces to machines and to what machines do. Familiar architectural interfaces organize interior and exterior zones, and borders between countries are interfaces between sovereign polities. Once an image can be used to control what it represents, it too becomes technology: diagram plus computation equals interface. As a computationally intensive interface, the image is not only a picture of the network; it is also an instrument through which a user of this image-interface can effect change back on that network. Computation turns the image into a technology, just as it then turns technology more generally into fields of actionable images — in this case, maps that also reprogram territories. In other words, for the GUI specifically, interfaces are diagrams of possible actions, a menu of simulations that when activated (clicked, touched, pinched, waved at, chosen from a delimited array of options) executes some information loop resulting (it is assumed) in an outcome approximating what was on the menu. The veracity of that loop between interface and event depends on both a technical correspondence between one part of a machine and another (i.e., a button on a keyboard linked to a peripheral device across the room) as well as a semiotic correspondence between a visual simulation and a relevant outcome (i.e., between an icon on the screen that resembles X and the X-like event that it initiates in the world). We could have one loop working without the other, and often do in fact, but our expansive interfacial modernity depends on a universally usable and effectively compelling alignment between these two correspondences. For interfaces to be systematic, clicks must work and do what they promise.

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For this, an interface necessarily limits the full range of possible interactions in a specific and arbitrary way. Any interface, because it is a specific summary, must eliminate or make invisible a whole range of other equally valid possible interactions. This is not in itself a negative aspect of interfaciality. Only because they reduce and simplify complex systems can they make it possible for people to use those systems at a systematic scale and realize platform value from them. Without coercing us, the interface cannot properly interface anything to us. This essential persuasive and rhetorical work of interfaces can obviously have ambiguous and negative consequences (one augmented reality interface for a video game might “ suggest ” to the User which unworthy strangers in a crowd to kill, another might give deliberately misleading nutritional information about food, and another uses everyday keystrokes to execute remote, unadjudicated violence). But the subtraction of possible interactions to a manageable set leaves behind clearer channels of systemic legibility. With the Interface, the User sees what she can do with The Stack. At the same time, the range of possible interfacial circuits into The Stack may not be identical for every User even for the same machine, and so for the Interface layer, the governance is also the modulation and enforcement of the differential possibilities available through a specific interface and for a specific User. Interfaces slice, cleave, and individuate. Each is open for some and closed to others.

For software polities derived from intermodal networks, the provision of contact itself is condensed into these buttons and icons, menus and dashboards, familiar pathways and arresting surfaces. These are nodes along lines of urban flow: terminals, spectacles, ports, and stations. Interfaces link and partition society itself, as belief systems, ballots, and borders. Such points of contact, everywhere and nowhere at once, are not just our interfaces to the world, but also the world ’ s channels to us. What is open for me may be closed to you, and so our vectors are made divergent. As we ourselves are hurtled through logistical space, the world discloses itself to us as interfaces: activated and unactivated interfaces, fast and slow interfaces, synchronous and asynchronous interfaces, graphical and tangible interfaces. As discussed regarding the City layer, what Deleuze called “ control ” is based on the computational intensity of interfaces and governs through its differentiation of the capacities of Users to do and make things in accordance with whatever interfaces they can access (and that can act on their behalf). Some Users are sent drifting through the City, bouncing across zoning boundaries, given provisional subjectivity by interfaces that allow for their mutual communication, governed less by what captures them in place than by what programs their aimlessness and what alegally inserts them into demand chains without names. Others are sent very intentionally into the urban storm, bound by formal zones with explicit legal projects. Both assemble tactical habitats and tradable assets, and are in turn absorbed by them in accordance with how their individuated profiles as Interface Users can be monetized by sacred and secular Cloud capitalizations.

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1. Interfaces at Hand: From Object to Sign to Object

About our hands, those prehensile interfaces with which we embody cognition and manipulation, Michel Serres writes that they are never finished. Unlike animal limbs and their ecological niches, the hand is “ despecialized ” and adapted not to one specific task like the crab ’ s claw but open to the limit of the world. The world is the place where hands are usable. ⁹ Evolutionary biologists may differ, but the hands of Serres ’ s parable are, unlike, say, the fur of a cheetah, which camouflages her only in the savanna niche, adaptable to any number of unforeseen environmental and technical challenges. As adaptations, hands are general-purpose interfaces; they are machines that allow for the fabrication of all manner of subsequent machines (clothing, shelter, tools, weapons), which in turn allowed us to accelerate evolutionary advantages by transforming our environment faster that it would be possible to evolve our bodies (capturing and wearing the fur of another animal is far more expedient than waiting to grow fur after having migrated north, for example). This story of prehensile environmental embodiment, a self-animating circuit of habit and habitat, also speaks to the City ’ s ambient informational fields through which we learn to mediate spaces both near and far. Such spheres of influence need to be learned, and while it takes time to master remote controls, let alone the control of remoteness, we are fast learners. There are monkeys that, as part of a project by Michel Nicolelis, have learned to control a robotic arm and hand through interfacial electronics connected to the brain. ¹⁰ The primate ’ s dispositional impulses become informational pulses that, properly mediated, effect a remote grasping prosthesis to do its bidding. Just as we learned QWERTY in order to type by internalizing the feedback of expression and arbitrary inscription machines, we also now learn to operate the interfaciality of other habitats and ambient surfaces. As we negotiate the interfacial density of the urban fabric, our own primate bodies are infused and intersected by its rhythmic extensions, controlling its machinery at a distance and triangulated as subject- Users by that machinery in the course of our movements. Cloud infrastructures seep and rupture through the orifices of the city into the open view of people and their mobile screens, and around them we proprioceptively map our displacements in real and imagined geographies. ¹¹

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With Serres ’ s lesson in mind, I am looking at photos that I happened to take of the moment when my son Lucien, then two years old, became interested in a certain remote control that turned on and off an overhead light and a fan in our home office. That night he spent at least an hour clicking them both, light and dark, spinning and not spinning, in various combinations. He was lost in a fundamental discovery about his new world: that some things are not like other things and possess an inscrutable power to affect other things at a distance in predictable and repeatable patterns and according to some invisible force controlled by buttons. He had discovered a basic principle of modern interfaciality, and for him this was very big news. Like many other kids, he entered a phase of button-pushing mania, investigating which objects, surfaces, and icons possess this capacity, serving which effect, and which did not. He may also have deduced, in his own way, that this interfaciality is not reducible to the physical qualities of any object. A plastic button by itself, disconnected from any relay or absent that invisible force of effect, has no interfacial power. Isolated, it is all but useless, just a button. Only when it is embedded in some system of input and output, usually involving waves or wires, he soon learns, does the thing become interfacial. Then it takes on its capacities of sorting, transference, and vicarious causality. But of course, that particular discovery is limited to interfaces with local and observable cybernetic circuits. Remote interfaces, linking Users across time zones perhaps, are more difficult to keep straight. More broadly, any effective tool has some interfacial capacities in that it transforms, encodes, or transmits some worldly dynamic in a specific way. A rock is an interface if you use it in the right way. We could say, at the risk of teleology, that the mastery of a tool, already a kind of embodied internalization of its own effects, entails a specific intelligence regarding the mutual interfaciality of objects in the world. That is, any reflexive knowledge of effects and environments must also include an understanding of the intrinsic and extrinsic interfacialities of available objects. ¹²

But what about GUIs and their links, both simulated and mechanical? For them Charles Sanders Peirce ’ s full range of “ signs ” (icon, index, symbol, diagram) is put to use in order to represent what interfaces do and the programs they present to us. Instead of manipulating objects as tools, we have learned to manipulate signs that have the same technical effects of tools. A general conversion is at work in this transference of interfacial knowledge from things to signs for things, from objects to icons.

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