The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

User demands visual resolution with descriptions, diagnoses, and coherent projections of how important interfaces are dispersed and their impact on our lives. This is the essential comfort of information visualization, especially dashboards, because instead of being elusive and rare, data arrive in bewildering excess. This complicates its assignment to clarify things for us, as any query of the world results in so much raw information coming back to the User in response that another question must be asked of the first answer in the form of a reductive visualization, and inside the bounding frame of that diagram, pattern recognition begins to take over for interpretation.

This drawing of coherent wholes gathers multiple events and effects into a conceptual whole as if they were a single thing, and in the interfacial landscape, they in fact are one and many at the same time (just as an automobile comprises hundreds of smaller machines, not to mention legal, political, and cultural attributes and determinants, but these are understood in the singular, a car, and the plural at the same time). This kind of putting together is different from an assemblage, which would refer the real physical intermingling of material into a new composite. This conceptual gathering refers instead to how a massively discontiguous assemblage line, bound together by exceedingly complex interfacial relays linking continents, must be understood and represented as if it were a single pattern or machine. ³⁶ For The Stack, such apparently comprehensive interfacial images of assemblage lines that themselves comprise interfacial relays, are, for the User, a necessary tool to manage otherwise illegibly complex chains of interaction. It draws the discontiguous assemblage line into that resolved diagram, but to do so, it must, like all diagrams, necessarily reduce and conceal the complexity of the processes it represents (and as indicated above, that reduction is also necessary to its ability to function as a broadly useful social tool). Further, as interfaces are reductive in how they compress information — in their foregrounding of certain things and not others — they are also inevitably “ ideological. ” ³⁷ Their reduction toward resolution is doctrinal. Ultimately the provision of an affectively compelling and instrumentally effective image of a composite interface chain becomes a strategic expertise, as information designers carve out a niche to provide convincing images of organization, tempo, and narrative. ³⁸ For Users, they compose cognitive maps of multiple layers of exchange drawn at once, gathered into provisional total images (for which pattern recognition and intentional, motivated interpretation can start to merge.) ³⁹ Moreover, such image interfaces are not only maps of flows as they exist according to whatever logic of reduction they invoke; they are also tools that reproject and extend their conceptual gathering of relations back out onto the world. Once more, unlike static diagrams, such interfaces can directly affect what they represent; as the chain of signification runs both from the event up through a chain of representation to the image represents it, it also runs back down to the event, and so the User-manipulated image of the thing becomes the medium through which the thing can also be manipulated. In this recursion, the semiotic and instrumental loop is closed, and so these images of assemblage that are also machines to make those assemblages are a third-order interface design. Within the broader history of images, these diagrammatic tools are innovative in that they not only provide a convincing and concise minimal diagram of far-flung processes; they actually do what they represent (see the above reference to “ weaponized skeuomorphism ” ). Conversely within the history of interfaces, which would include fences, levers, latches, knobs, switches, handles, buttons, and plugs, these interfaces rely on visual representations of the effects on the menu.

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For this reason, the ideological reductiveness of the interfacial image is more than a conceptual problem; it is also how systems enforce themselves, one against another. An image of totality, which when acted on configures cause and effect in the literal terms of its own totalization, makes its reductive map incrementally truer each time it is used. The User clicks X, and X happens, and so the world has more X for this and more images representing X-making interfacial tools, and so on. This recursion, both mechanical and semantic, is how the Interface layer telescopes between the local and global, enrolling its own resources and the User’ s simultaneously to put both in order according to the logic of that interfacial regime ’ s particular vocabulary of reduction. The ongoing competition between multiple platforms, both state and nonstate, to define the nomos of The Stack includes a kaleidoscopic collection of interfacial regimes, each projecting its own specific grids, one on top of the other, superimposing their differing self-referential claims on the nomination and arrangement of various territories. Critically, because their comprehensive images are not merely descriptive of what they diagram but are driven by a motivated narrativization of The Stack as a totality for Users to make and remake it over and over, they are ripe for investment by utopian imaginaries. ⁴⁰ Interfaces are composed images of an encapsulated totality in the here and now, but they can also function as projective total images of a world clarified — cleansed — according to its idealized master diagram. Whole interfacial regimes can then function not unlike cosmograms, offering prototypical geographies for worlds to come. The political volatility of a future interfacial regime is not only in the drawing of an imaginary resolution directly overlapped onto the real and available landscape, but also its technical ability to affect those realities by User action. When counterprograms for the whole world are drawn from acutely selfserving platform strategies or from delusional political and theological doctrines, then whole User populations can lose the interpretive distance between a merely tactical reductive description of the world on the one hand, and its ecstatic idealization or exploitative distortion on the other (more on this phenomenon below). In that such futural projective images of utopian totalities are, like all such graphical interfacial tools, not only simulations but also fantastic instruments aimed directly toward The Stack ’ s mega structure, this is perhaps, for better or worse, the most essential productive accident of the Interface layer.

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1. Interfaces in The Stack 2: Apps and Programming the Space at Hand

I shift the discussion here from the theory of Interfaces in general to a study of the App, an important type of everyday interface sitting between the User in motion and the rest of The Stack. What are Apps? On the one hand, Apps are software applications and so operate within something like an application layer of a specific device-to- Cloud economy. However, because most of the real information processing is going on in the Cloud, and not in the device in your hand, the App is really more an interface to the real applications hidden away in data centers. As an interface, the App connects the remote device to oceans of data and brings those data to bear on the User ’ s immediate interests; as a data-gathering tool, the App sends data back to the central horde in response to how the User makes use of it. The App is also an interface between the User and his environment and the things within it, by aiding in looking, writing, subtitling, capturing, sorting, hearing, and linking things and events. Depending on how it senses the world, the App mediates between User and environment, and so also between the Cloud layer and that particular environment via the User. Accordingly, it renders the habitat to the User and the User to the habitat, and it does this in ways that may be variously exacting or vague, prescriptive or reactive.

This dynamic of embodied prescription is built into the habitus/habitat circuit of geolocative Apps in particular, and especially, perhaps, those that superimpose descriptive layers on a device ’ s mobile camera view. ⁴¹ We should consider with caution (and a bit of awe) how emergent genres of Apps that project interfacial elements onto what is seen through the device ’ s eye, including augmented reality (AR) may come to radicalize absolutist and fundamentalist dispositions by making them seem real. These may be sacred or secular visions, inspired by religious or politics or economics, and may also spawn bizarre and as yet unimagined new Cloud/AR-based politico-theological mutations (this is discussed in more detail below). In many AR applications, synthetic textual annotation of the world is fused with direct perception, and for these Apps, visual symbols don ’ t signify things as much as they are directly laminated onto real things in real situations. As these Apps become more commonplace, how might this collapse of representational distance within the immediate perceptual field undermine the power of metaphor and contingent interpretation to guide User thought and action? Does an immanent and tactile sign demand a more exact duty from the believing reader? It seems likely that selecting from a categorized interface, like a GUI ’ s choice-array of menus and buttons, must work differently when that interface is perceived as a real object out in the world, as opposed to a screen event at a distance that merely refers to things iconographically. More troubling is when its annotations are labeling and dividing not just commodity X from event Y, but instead the absolute categories of the sacred and the profane, clean things from unclean things, our land and their bodies. Seeing the world through such an apparatus, can the primate brain manage to keep the critical space of doctrinal metaphor open against absolutism? Does it want to? Are the User’ s cognitive abilities extended by this reality, or are they amputated?

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But first, we will unpack Apps and App platform economies within a mobile ecology of interfaces. Compared to most consumer software, an App is tiny. The Google Earth iOS App puts a genuinely total geography into your pocket for a mere 29.5 megabytes. ⁴² It can do this because most of the significant information that the App displays is stored, calculated, and served from the Cloud layer. The App is a thin membrane on top of a vast machine, but one that nevertheless allows its User to pilot and be piloted by that machine with the slightest gesture. It is at the intersection point between these two far more complex reservoirs of intelligence: the intentional User and the Cloud and Stack infrastructure on which the little App is perched. As that tiny membrane, it can synthesize and make useful vast continents of data and computational intelligence gathered from afar in the instance of a single User interaction, and so the real utility of a single piece of code that the App may contain vastly outleverages its relative parsimony. For this, an App condenses the Interface layer within the larger Stack, pitched between User and the Addresses that link the User to the Cloud, City, or environmentally embedded software. Within the governance logic of platforms, an App then transforms and translates some capacity of the Cloud, rendering and framing it for the User as an at-hand service. In turn it also draws the interactions of the User into a larger aggregation of data (e.g., location, path, preference), capitalizing their qualities and feeding the updated information back to the User in a virtuous loop. Whatever the App happens to be interfacing (geolocative routing, portable banking services, stored files, news or music streams, site-specific games) is provided to the User as a Cloud-based service. In that the service is provided to a device- User that is in motion, moving through the City layer and encountering different contexts on the go, the App platform provides that provisional link between a preexisting physical spatial context and this User-directed overlay of a Cloud service onto immediate circumstances. As discussed in the City layer chapter, there is then a kind of programmatic blending between the urban situation through which a User moves and the interactions he may be having with a specific App and Cloud service. A mall becomes a game board, a sidewalk becomes a banking center, a restaurant becomes the scene of a crime in a crowd-sourced recommendation engine, birds are angry and enemies are identified, and the experience of these may be very different for different people and purposes. At any given moment, multiple Users interacting with different Apps in the same place may have brought their shared location into contrasting Cloud dramas; one may be ensconced in a first-person shooter game and the other in measuring his carbon footprint, further fragmenting any apparent solidarity of the crowd. With billions of Users wielding mobile Apps at a time, and to varying degrees navigating their domains accordingly, it is certain that over time, physica habitats are also remade as architectural-scale Cloud hardware. They are not just where Cloud Polis works; they are a physical extension of it. As a blended coprogramming of space and software, habitat and habitus, the terrain modulates itself to the dictates of the navigation tool, a thin, User-facing membrane of a larger Cloud platform. The App is therefore not just the interface through which the User works on the world; it is also the aperture through which the Cloud (and The Stack) redraws the City and its Users.

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Back to Serres ’ s parable, the App also transforms the ubiquitous device into a modulation of the hand, and so over time, it will also dissipate the hand as machines settle into another kind of User agency. The platform structure of App, device, plus Cloud locates global computing directly into the palm of the ambulatory User. The mobile device, not laptops or desktop machines, is the first and still primary computing experience for most Earthlings. In this natural motion, the App interface on the device (what some still insist on calling a “ phone ” ) is often a kind of extension of the hand. It points, grabs, selects, draws lines, pushes, and pulls. It may also extend the eye and the ear, the voice and even the skin, but the combination of a Cloud platform device that can alter its function to suit a near-infinite range of potential challenges (over 1.4 million Apps approved for the Apple App Store in early 2015) suggests comparison with Serres ’ s characterization of the hand as a technology that is “ never finished ” because it is so adaptable to new uses instead of being held to a fixed niche. The mobile device has a similar generic anatomy, as the App enables an endless array of techniques, simulating the palm, finger, or fist, and so the device “ at hand ” extends the work of the natural hand to inscribe and coax digital information into and out of the pathways of the world.

Beyond the single device, the platform logic of the App can be, and is already, extended from the mobile deck into a wider range of machines and networks. Some doctors prescribe health care Apps in addition to medications as part of a therapeutic regime, and the race to design low-cost clinical tools (a “ tricorder ” ) redefines the administration of medical equipment. ⁴³ Cars are already App platforms, but the real innovation in specific Apps for transportation hardware is still to come. Driverless cars (or cars that are simply more autonomous along a generic spectrum) would change what passengers are expected to do and not do while hurtling through the City layer and on what events they are expected to focus their attention. Apps that connect cars to work or play, some using windows as screens, will, for better or worse, further virtualize the experience of automotive drift. Some cars might be bound to an Android or iOS platform lock-in, or new manufacturer-specific operating systems might support neither or both, but cars already contain multiple software and hardware systems, and by extending these to control how cars navigate streets and how passengers interact with the world and one another, it ’ s not difficult to see how the redefinition of “ a car ” as a high-velocity computing platform, enveloping the user inside, initiates new genres of in-motion Apps. As it does for the mobile device, this would redefine the individual car, or a swarm of cars, into another kind of hardware-extended habitat of a wider Cloud platform. As the single “ car ” becomes a fast and heavy computer that you can sit down in, so do “ cars ” also become components of the larger computational network infrastructure. But here the anthropocentric bias of construing the User as necessary like a human, who extends his primate hand into the world, reaches an impasse. Cars with Apps, medical devices with Apps, or any machine with Apps also suggest design assignments for modular forms of bottom-up artificial intelligence. Any machine, whether general or highly specific, could be imbued with the narrowly focused intelligence of the App linked to a wider Cloud and could download any particular sensing, sensory, storing, calculative, or transmission function programmed for it. Each can do that without addressing humans or requesting our interference in the communication flow between machine User and Cloud. The most important, viable, and effective Apps and App market platforms may serve the nonhuman Users that interface across scales and systems — manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, transportation, agriculture, retail service — by linking and delinking modular functions of component machines working in interoperable concert. ⁴⁴ In this economy, the universal flexibility of the “ hand ” dissipates into a more open field of tactical computation animating all programmable platform components more equally. As any piece of equipment, regardless of its shape or mammal origin, can be augmented by downloading a needed App function, it too can now serve any number of unexpected niches.

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1. Interfaces in the Stack 3: Theo-Interfaciality

This slow transference of the human body onto a landscape of software subroutines is not limited to the hand. It also includes other forms of embodied thought and intelligence, but the blossoming of fully fledged nonhuman Apps does nothing to prevent traditional anthropocentric Apps from operating with the full spectrum of stupidity that our species is capable of bringing forth, and among these are doctrinal cognitive fundamentalisms. Etymologies of “ religion ” describe a binding and a rebinding of a community of belief, or of a bond between a believer and a covenant or commitment. The repetition of prayer, of ritual, of weekly services is all testament to the procedurality of the sacred. These are techniques of anamnesis and the invested memorialization of the divine into sites and objects. For example, by sublation the Eucharist involves the masses of the Mass into a divine symbolic cannibalism, and through this, the spectacle of sacrifice and resurrection at the core of Christianity is repeated over and over again. Rebinding upon rebinding, there is the first incanted memorialization of Christ ’ s body into the bread and wine, and the second memorialization in the devout cycle of the eating and drinking these every Sunday. Are these processes of binding the social at work in The Stack? In his essay “ Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction ” (and his book Google: Words Beyond Grammar), Boris Groys laments the eclipse of anamnesis by software regimes that do the work of memory and memorialization on the User ’ s behalf. ⁴⁵ We, the Users of Google, need not exercise our faculties of memory in order to remember anything, it seems, and so the mind is free to wander through a vast flat moment, presented as an endless archive. As Groys tells it, the devout need not consciously perform the work of memorialization, or even really comprehend the work that is done for them, when it is sufficient, for example, to download a portfolio of important texts and carry them along on one ’ s hard drive. ⁴⁶ He shakes his head in pity at his wannabe-extremist students for whom it ’ s enough to possess copies of incendiary, uncompromising (unread) PDFs on their laptops in order for the act of identification to stick, or so they think; radicals not even radicalized, merely fanboy collectors. ⁴⁷ Groys laments that without the necessary and difficult investment of interpretation and an exacting self-transformation into the position of faith through the physical training of repetition and memorialization, however arbitrary it may be, then the rebinding (and the religion itself) is empty. By this view, today ’ s Cloud theology without anamnesis is actually a self-dispossession of commitment by which the experience of faith, now without opinion or interpretation, is outsourced to cognitive prostheses. Devout Apps can have devout opinions for you. For Groys, this subcontracting is not just an externalized memorialization of belief into digital artifacts, a sacralization of interfaces with theological distinction; it is, rather, religion evacuated of religio. Even if so, it does not mean that such interfaces cannot also motivate extraordinary acts of motivated devotion and violence.

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The mobilization of automated opinionlessness is perhaps most clearly illustrated by a subgenre of Apps that uses the device ’ s built-in camera to superimpose interfacial content on top of the ambient world as perceived by the user, such as for AR. As mentioned, the layer of interfacial icons and indexes on a given perceptual field transforms it by subtitling objects and events, offering navigational tools, overlaying GUI menus on real-world systems, cinematic insertions, and elisions, and other artificial sensations by which the ambiguities of local signification and significance are eliminated for the User. The ultimate effect of this programming may be to transform semiotic techniques into direct ideological, even theological, articulations of the world. Whereas for tangible media and conformal computing, interfaciality melts into tactile objects, for AR interfaciality melts into the perceived surfaces of objects and environments. In extending the cinematic language of new media, AR is an aggressive subtitling of the phenomenal world now rendered as interactive narrative. It does this in ways that may be highly contextual, or perhaps instead according to a strange juxtaposition of a description with what it describes, like a film subtitle with only tangential relation to the screen image and event. ⁴⁸ For the latter, the User is thrown into confusion, forced to not only interpret the correlation between the interface and the world but perhaps to invent one on the fly, relying only on his own actual thinking. In most cases, however, semiotic correlation is easy, and it is the absence of any work of interpretation, of reading even, that would characterize a successful AR User experience. The job of the software is to explain what is seen and to automate active sorting of how it should be encountered, valued, and qualified — with reverence, indifference, or violence. As religio, or for the Schmitt App, AR draws lines and differentiates friend and foe, automating even intentional belief, subcontracting the neocortex ’ s manipulation of metaphor, offloading it to the algorithms strapped to your face.

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As operative for the Interface layer within The Stack, AR performs the imagistic and linguistic mediation between Users (one layer above) and the ubiquitous computational capacities of their habitats (one layer below). As a design space, it is a way to stage, animate, compose, and account for communication between Users and their worlds, and unlike traditional mechanical or screen-based user interfaces, it performs this as artificially embodied perception; it is a new genre of physical cinema in which spaces between fantasy and projection are collapsed. ⁴⁹ In AR, just as for the interfacial image in general, its descriptions of space also become a medium for the recursive reinscription of a broader politico-geographic diagram back on the world through its direct instrumentalization as an interface. ⁵⁰ Put another way, AR Apps, in all their baroque banality, augment the world more than they augment vision. As we define the interface as any point of contact that governs the conditions of exchange between two complex systems, then within AR, the GUI melts, so it seems, into reality itself, and is seen as another property of surfaces, things, and events. That melting becomes the scope of design, the registration of labor, the touchpoint of advertising, and even (perhaps especially) the domain of activist belief, sacred and secular. Slavoj Ž i ž ek ’ s definition of “ the Real ” as that which is negatively defined by fantasy is here given a literal, if dull, gloss. ⁵¹ If so motivated, we could then locate AR among modern media and their psychological or psychoanalytic effects and might say, in line with Friedrich Kittler ’ s association of film with the imaginary, the typewriter with the symbolism and the gramophone with the real, that in AR, the imaginary is so directly inscribed into the symbolic, as the content of the interface, that the real is also itself collapsed into the imaginary, making the reality of AR perhaps irredeemably occult. ⁵²

One supposes that the most pressing and initial nonaccident of AR is a deeply granular and pervasive advertising by which our embodied perceptions and gestures generate the monetizable surplus platform value of the network User profile, but it should not be confused with the technology ’ s ultimate social impact. ⁵³ AR is where the microtargeting business models of cognitive capitalism melt into the choreography of the mobile User-subject. The effort that the User already makes to perfect targeting algorithms for search engines, in exchange for useful search results, can be scaled from finger points and clicks to the very musculature and dance of dwelling itself. However, a less secular danger is latent in AR in that its most killer application would prove to be not marketing but those fundamentalist religion and politics (as well as security Apps and their monetizations) by which the segmentation of the polis into friend and enemy becomes a direct literal annotation of the lifeworld (again, clean and unclean, ours and theirs, empire and rebel forces, kill it or eat it, and so on.) It is then with a lack of astonishment that we note that Google ’ s inaugural AR game is based on a science-fiction alien religious warfare story embedded into the lived urban fabric. Developed as part of its internal Niantic Labs, Ingress divides users into two opposing camps: Enlightened (green) and Resistance (blue). Players “ enclose regions of territory on the surface of the earth with virtual links between virtual portals, which are visible in the game software. The top-level goal of the game is for one ’ s faction to control large numbers of Mind Units, the estimated number of humans within the regions of territory controlled by the faction. ” ⁵⁴ It should be a surprise only for those who have not realized that Star Wars is an al-Qaeda-esque parable (rural religious cult flies into the architectural core of the empire and blows it up) that the Manichean ludic demands of Ingress are to send people out into their cities training them to see, attack, and defend against the territorial incursions of enemies perceivable only through special software-enabled perspectives. ⁵⁵

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Will mature AR initiate a wave of bizarre new sects, scams, and activist versions of fundamentalist monotheisms and ideologies for which the metaphorical nuance of holy books is collapsed by the direct imprint of virtual words onto real things? ⁵⁶ There are some indications that this is so. We can see the use of Google Earth, Google Maps, stolen SIM cards, and other advanced off-the-shelf spatial command and communication technologies by, for example, Lashkar-e-Taiba during their attack on Mumbai in 2008, as a prototype of the weaponized AR that concerns us. ⁵⁷ The dozen attackers used these tools to see and navigate the city, identifying targets and keeping a closed communication loop intact (to what extent any given technology was employed, we can only speculate based on press and court accounts). One assumes that their movements were planned beforehand to advance through the overhead and tilted satellite images of the city ’ s buildings, streets, alleys, and squares. As much as classified reconnaissance, simulation, and situational-awareness tools are war technologies for states, declassified tools can be for nonstate actors; and the trail of representation and counterrepresentation of contested space through these specific tools and specific events is knotted. For example, in Mumbai, Google Earth was a mechanism of the attack itself, but news agencies also mapped the attacks in near real time using Google Earth as part of their own coverage. In this awkward recursion, satellite views of the City layer serve as medium of violence by those who would enact it, witness it, report it, or defend against it, as Google Earth ’ s cosmograms are deployed by politico-theological geographies that may appear at first to be outside its intended program. ⁵⁸ Here a proto-AR is not only the territorial index through which such projections play themselves out; it is, as much as the City that it maps, the very means to project their activist and in this case irredentist imagination.

This episode is a more violent and extreme variation of a Christianist AR overlay of the Grand Canyon in Arizona that explains how the canyon proves creationism and disproves evolution for those willing to peer through the looking glass and see what it sees. ⁵⁹ An App simply called The Bible is already installed on over 100 million devices and helps its Users navigate their days according to a personalized devotional itinerary, positioning them into the rhythms of religio as they move about, and translating various homilies into a closely curated experience of the everyday. ⁶⁰ We anticipate that Apps like these may innovate a close integration with the geolocative tracking to enforce by surveillance a particular pathway though City space, knowing and logging whether Users went to good places or bad places and inferring behavior accordingly, perhaps suggesting the confession of sins as appropriate. The automation of repentance can now be based on real evidence of wrongdoing instead of the unreliable guilty conscience of individual worshippers. Perhaps the tallying of sins was the first big data play (numinous omniscience as panopticon archive), but now it can be done with greater worldly precision as repentance is now supported by information visualization. In time geotheological innovation may give us new commandments and invented prohibitions based on the ability to trace movements through the City layer. Today there are many widely used Apps that provide some moral frame, for example, Qibla direction indicated from any spot on Earth, and others that allow users to scan bar codes to determine if food is kosher or halal, or vegan, free-range, or GMO free, or if your new colleague is a “ suppressive person, ” or even perhaps if he is a Cylon (or if you happen to be a Cylon, if someone shares your particular form of monotheism), and they all may seem benign and obvious. Most are. But once again, one truly hopes that the poetry and metaphor of the monotheistic cognitive cultures that they reference can withstand the unambiguous literalism that AR might afford them and the violence that absolute explication demands of adherents. Interfacial regimes such as these are more than visual technologies; they are indeed cosmograms (Umberto Eco ’ s 1984 essay arguing that Mac is Catholic and DOS is Protestant isn ’ t obsolete; it ’ s prophetic). ⁶¹ As the spawn of logistical aesthetics, these regimes are not only a programmatic diagram of how a particular machine network works but, in aggregate, of how the world works and what its proper configuration is or should be, and what is to be done about it, right here and now, by you. It is this capacity to project an alternative global space, in some cases a vision of purified utopia, through an interfacial system of symbols that are also active tools, that allows AR and similar interfaces to function as theological media. Utopian political theology becomes projective interfacial geography, and vice versa in some cases. This is borne out by observing that any closed self-referential platform is also a belief circle. Other much stranger platforms to come will certainly coalesce as belief circles as well, and together they will help design, map by map, the spaces over which the geopolitics of The Stack is claimed and contested.

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1. Geoscapes: Interfaces Drawing Worlds

That an interfacial regime could encode the world so as to activate an archaic imagined community, or even to conjure a new one, in no way guarantees that absolutist and fundamentalist cultures will determine the future of the platform. In no way does it prevent it either. Just as for older forms of “ new media, ” such as the transistor radio, which provided a singular voice and explanation for tumultuous political change, the results can be as dramatic as they are contradictory. Such precedents provide models, especially those that demonstrate the role of a motivated imagination, aligned with rote determination, in the mobilization of fabulous media. For example, in the short span from D-Day to decolonization, France was on both sides of transistor radio ’ s power to script and mobilize the national imagination. De Gaulle came to national prominence through his broadcasts to occupied France from London during World War II, giving a semiofficial voice to the occupied nation. By the late 1950s, pirate broadcasts to contraband radios also played a role in the organization of Algerian independence from colonial France. As Franz Fanon relates it, the Voice of Fighting Algeria (VFA) was a pirate radio project set up by relatively disorganized resistance fighters to spread news about the military and cultural struggles of Algerian nationalist forces in response to the press (and public meetings) blackouts imposed by the occupation forces. In lieu of other public venues, the broadcasts contributed to the shape and mobility of the imaginary battalion of resistance for its listeners. ⁶² The voice of the VFA was even given a role in Gillo Pontecorvo ’ s classic simulationist film, Battle of Algiers, in which street-fighters are shown to stop, listen, or follow the explanatory cues of a nondiegetic and disembodied commander-narrator. ⁶³ In effect, the Algerian public came to order in thinking that there was a strong, effective military resistance in early battles with the French when there was not, largely because the radio Users, already literate in the fantastic narrative, conceived there to be one. While Algerians previously had little interest in the radio receiver device in their homes, the VFA broadcasts allowed for its enthusiastic inclusion. Fanon writes that through the broadcasts, “ the nation’s speech, the nation’s spoken words gave it shape. ” Crowded around receiver sets, listeners actively formulated that voice:

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