The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

This voice, often absent, physically inaudible, which each one felt welling up within himself, founded on an inner perception of the Fatherland, became materialized in an irrefutable way. Every Algerian, for his part, broadcast and transmitted the new language and the reality of the renewed nation. ...The radio receiver guaranteed this true lie. Every evening from nine o’clock to midnight, the Algerian would listen. At the end of the evening, not hearing the Voice, the listener would sometimes leave the needle on a jammed wavelength or one that simply produced static, and would announce that the Voice of the combatants was here. For an hour the room would be filled with the piercing, excruciating din of the jamming. Behind each modulation, each active crackling, the Algerian would imagine not only words, but concrete battles. The war of the sound waves in the gourbi, re-enacts for the benefit of the citizen the armed clash of his people and colonialism. As a general rule, within this marvelous psychopathology, it is the Voice of Algeria which wins out. ...Very often, only the operator, his ear to the receiver, had the un-hoped for opportunity of hearing the Voice. The other Algerians in the room would receive the echo through the privileged interpreter, who, at the end of the broadcast was literally besieged. Specific questions would be asked of this incarnated voice. ... [If something specific had not been heard], by common consent, after an exchange of views, it would be decided that the Voice had in fact spoken of those events, but that the interpreter had not caught the transmitted information, and that the preferred outcome had been relayed. ⁶⁴

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Fanon ’ s account gives a glimpse of the future politics of the Interface layer of The Stack. Whereas radio relies on speech and active description, AR provides direct and automated perceptual annotation; however, just as for Fanon ’ s example, noise reinterpreted into essential significance will surely play a key role in the dissensual interfacial politics to come. It should not be difficult to imagine two different AR regimes, both describing the same City layer but with completely different maps of what is there, what it means, and what interactions are rewarded or discouraged. ⁶⁵ In the tension between two or more narratives, their diagrams not only describe events; as the medium of some omniscient command, they also partially determine them. Pulling laws off from the safety of the page and projecting them onto the surfaces of the real world is also to alter their weight and accentuation. AR media don ’ t just imply their intentions for bod ies in motion; they explicate them, and they don ’ t just signify power they pronounce and program it in distributed cognition and artificial embodiment. AR adds the world to the interface, as much as, if not more than, it adds the interface to the world. Regard less of whether any two alternate interfacial totalities are locked in a dualistic battle, one drawn across the other in some friend/enemy division (as for a war of decoloniza tion or for Ingress) the mingling of overlapping totalities brings some degree of noise and ambiguity. Any given site in the City may be overcome by multiple competing perceptual totalities, systems, or sovereign geographies, but for any of these, what are the terms of encounter with the alien software platform and belief circle? Only war? If this were so, then the societies sustained by these would be impossibly fragile. As the Cloud layer may be where competing political geographies are interwoven, as for the Sino-Google conflict, the Interface layer is where those overlaps are literally inscribed at the level of everyday action. Again, each interfacial regime, total or not, articulates its specific reductive version of the world in which its own geography is sovereign, and through these diagrams, the User composes actions through The Stack that enforce and reinforce that same totalizing worldview. But that any single User may be interpolated not by one but by many such interfacial regimes at once, any one site is defined not by purification but by the alloy of multiple totalities at once (even if each totality would explicitly exclude the others in principle). The User must then manage more than one exclusive totality at once, and the multiple identities and agencies that each regime provides to the User position. Modus vivendi gets you through the day, as one User occupies multiple walled gardens at the same time and place, as she co-occupies them with other claimants, friends, and foes. This jumbling may be essential to how The Stack works as a platform for totalities by cohering the agonistic and dissensual drawing of geographies, simultaneously exclusive and inclusive of one another. This tangle of utopias is another integral accident of the Interface layer as it attempts to host the various investments in this geography of multiple geographies. ⁶⁶

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While The Stack is a real physical construction, it is also a canvas on which spatial imaginaries are screened, and the spaces over which that competition moves and fills what we call geoscapes. Why this term? Interfaces, and most especially interfaces like AR, locate competing master dogmas not just about what the world does but what it is about. ⁶⁷ This projective geographic image is one means by which specific interfacial regimes govern the mediation of their Users, The Stack, and the parts of the world they can access. The Interface, as an image of this territory, becomes a means by which territory is written and managed, and finally the medium through which other territories are challenged and the whole apparatus is contested. To augment Arjun Appadurai ’ s now canonical lexicon of “ scapes, ” I nominate this addition: geoscape. A geoscape is a contested terrain of contested terrains, a shifting landscape made up of shifting land scapes: image maps, projections and plans, irredentist land claims, borders and jurisdictions, strata and striations, imagined worlds, macroeconomic forecasts, projected homes and homelands, addressing systems, and various terra incognita. All of these can, but need not necessarily, enter into irregular public exchanges whereby contrasted spatializations are both supplied and demanded according to a panoply of capitals. Compiled into one, geoscapes are a form of content that cannot not be designed and designed for. They represent a population of territorial alphabets mutually interiorizing and exteriorizing each other, which includes cosmograms, images of the entirety of global space and the order that it is seen to frame, govern, and distribute. For example, the revived global caliphate, as envisioned by the Lashkar-e-Taiba , ISIS, and some others, is an image of the whole world captured under a particular interpretation of Islam. It is a cosmogram that describes, validates, motivates, and delimits their program by its image and for this, we have to count their vision as kind of geopolitical design agenda. ⁶⁸ Google, China, the US State Department, or a diasporic community lodged in a remote enclave: each of these may have its own projective geographic solidarity in play. Everywhere, as cosmograms fight it out with other cosmograms and with other local situated claims, they compose together a cumulative territory of territories over which such antagonistic actors compete to enforce a primary, sovereign description of the geographic distribution of things, location, distance, borders, and their significant juxtapositions. Geoscapes comprise then both sacred and secular projections, as they are in relation to one another: exceptional territories, patchworks of the enclave, and exclave zones overflowing competing totalities. ⁶⁹ In turn, the inscriptions of the nomos, drawing and framing sovereign interiors, can find traction to the extent that the surface on which it writes is recognized by its neighbors.

This multiplicity of territorial claims and types of claims is held in an overflowing and finally incommensurate, if also interdependent, polity of quasi-fictitious illustrations, and perhaps at the end of the day, this is all that geopolitics ever is. Geoscapes are a conceptual assemblage of territorial claims as well as the conceptual space that it might occupy. That is, the geoscape is not an empty arena into which territories would move and be counted or installed, but an irregular territory never empty but always exactly as full as the spaces that comprise it. Whatever highly conditional equivalence or exchange that exists is not an a priori feature but the result of the real operations of encounter. Instead of being real spaces into which we might go, geoscapes are entered into and so made real by their occupation. By contrast, other versions cosmopolitanism presuppose global space as a self-evident panorama into which politics might take place. They often depend on representations of that space derived from mapping platforms that are supposedly so secular and neutral that they can absorb and position all interested geographies that might course through them (something perhaps like Google Earth). However, geoscapes emerge from a more agonistic politics for which the juxtaposition of difference is not within a shared consensual mechanism, not a spectrum of opinion inside a given frame, but is itself an irreducibly dissensual array of positions without a common master plane of situation. The geoscape extends in all possible directions at once and is held only by the tensile strength of the imagined geographies that compose it by their co-occupation. One geography on another, interfacial regimes interlace but cannot ultimately resolve into any last instance. Their geopolitics are driven instead by a generic fissiparousness, and so while any given interfacial image map may be (part of) a total image, the cumulative incongruity of multiple totalities renders every whole only partial. The geoscape stages these incommensurate projections, including those that deny the legitimacy or even existence of other projections with which they share the same physical location, and it is that incompatibility, the noisy grinding of incompatible terms for addressing things, events, and territory, that is, in practice, the engine of geopolitical design.

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For this turbulent territorial economy, some purposes may be intentionally designed while others seem to emerge as organic mutations in response to apparently normal conditions. In the case of the Mumbai attacks in 2008, the cosmopolitan platform of Google ’ s interfacial regime is used to serve a reactionary vanguardism, a future-historical irredentist imaginary projecting backward into an alternative past or future, so as to arrive back at the desired state condition (one, of course, with very different conditions for states). When advanced technologies of globalization, closely associated with secular cosmopolitics, are employed opportunistically by political theologies for their own particular purposes, then unplannable and unresolved territories, jurisdictions, and programs are put in play. Truth be told, such monster projections and warring claims on space are also generative of the essential qualities of the spatial as a political medium. As we might hope to guide a comprehensive geopolitical design of The Stack, now constructed piecemeal all around us, we confront the perilous legacy of atavistic political utopias of the past and the present and how they force us to question the logic or purpose of totality in geopolitical and political theological thought in general. Totalities (plural) are everywhere. In the Mumbai example, the lesson of the interoperation of seemingly incommensurate layers of the geoscape — the archaic and the ultracontemporary — is less that jihad could “ fit inside ” Google Earth than Google Earth fit inside the conceptual jihadi map of a caliphate-to-come and the situation of Mumbai within it. ⁷⁰ One partition folds and is folded into another, from Kashmiri valleys to hotel rooms in Mumbai, to privatized satellite data, to interaction design conventions, technologies, and accidents and embryonic formats of extrastate citizenship emerging from one from another. In this, the contradictions of The Stack ’ s totalizations are made clearer. As we contemplate a future Stack geography, we recognize that nothing guarantees designable outcomes. As played out over and again, modernity is itself an open platform for the design and development of antimodern designs. Not only does modernity disembed and reembed traditional social forms, traditional and fundamentalist social forms also disembed and reembed modernity.

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Put into sharper relief by the Mumbai attacks is the volatile economy of contemporary warfare: contested urbanity, exceptional violence, civil architecture, geographic projection, networked software, motivated interfacial maps, all rolled into one. For this, Lashkar-e-Taiba is, among other things, also a sort of politico-theological urban design practice. It is one that follows maps and plans, that creates them, challenges received maps that draws them and makes them real, and is clearly willing to die over them. Obviously the tactical use of Google Earth in providing situational awareness during the attack was a practical choice, and in no way do I suggest that it is their literal intention to remap the caliphate directly onto Google Earth, making the software some new sort of illuminated Word. I am also not blaming Google. Instead, I observe that the ultimate asymmetry between these two spatial logics, jihad and Google, is less absolute than we might presume, and in their unlikely compatibility and alignment, something critical about how geoscapes operate above and beneath the state is discovered. Because they must be reductive in order to even work as interfacial regimes, even those secular interactive cartographies are not a truly universal plane into which all competing political ontologies can be embedded and arranged; rather, the polyphonous perversion of their translatability, even and especially into anticosmopolitan fundamentalisms, is the means by which the geopolitics is given form.

These slippages depend on the immediacy of the interfacial image, as both a technique for spatial inscription and a screen on which a geographic imagination is projected. The Interface layer is simultaneously a site for the direct aggregation of flows, a technique for the representation of those assemblages, and a vocabulary of contentious alternatives. It is the social need for total images of dispersed assemblages and invisible interfacial chains that makes an economy of purified imagined geographies possible. The Interface layer becomes a medium not only for the transmission of utopian images but for the composition of utopian spaces. Whereas the nomos of The Stack refers to an ordinate, enumerated spatial logic, geoscape names the agonistic territorial images of the world, any of which may be a direct expression of the architectures of The Stack, or which may be driven by another doctrine or megastructure. When the terms of geoscapes are contested through the instrumental images of an interfacial regime, the geographic framings of the Earth can congeal into total and cosmographic diagrams. As active instruments, those projective and idealized inscriptions are more than maps; they are also the means to realize their particular compositional arguments about how the world should be idealized; the interface becomes the very tool to bring about the conceptual arrangement that it would want to represent. At the same time, images of interfaces come to connote futuristic speculative design. From summer movie science fiction to corporate vision of future marketing videos, advanced GUIs have become part of the global visual culture, signifying expressivity, contemporaneity, security, omniscience, secrecy, and, most of all, a future world in which frustrated desire and agency are resolved by graceful and powerful technical apparitions-to-come. ⁷¹ For these, the drawing medium of the interfacial regime takes leave of any immediate machinic pur pose and serves instead a dreamworld canvas on which utopian social relations are evoked. In this utopian cinematic subgenre, if possible geographies are prototyped for later instantiation as geoscapes demanding enforcement, they are first drawn into fantastic infrastructures, transhumanist overcoming, transcendental experiences of speed and immersion, and calming day-in-the-life use for personal control, ease, clarification, groundedness, and affluence. In these clairvoyant fictions, we see how techniques of the Interface layer, especially GUI, are mobilized toward the management of platforms that may almost exist, but are at least partially illegible or unresolved and so demand our active participation, even vigilance. They are the visual languages available with which to explore, express, and communicate unrealized desires and ambitions for realities only imagined and wished for, which find shape as design fictions and so have permission to absorb utopian and dystopian energies at that level. The real complexity of discontiguous assemblage lines and interfacial chains requires that fictional resolution of the interfacial diagram in order for Users to comprehend and participate within them, and the utopian projection of fictional alternatives to these uncertain social and technical conditions onto surfaces of real technologies of interfaces is how they articulate those wishes. The agonistic politics of geoscapes and their claims on the territories of The Stack oscillate back and forth between both of these projects. The inspired utopian interfacial landscape-to-come (from Thomas More ’ s diagrams of the island Utopia to Tony Stark ’ s schematics for an omnipotent heads-up display) is also a geoscape-tocome specified by the images that would reflect and represent it. ⁷² They conceive possible technology and possible social connections, possible powers and abilities, possible sovereignties and polities, and possible social realities to be drawn.

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This is unavoidable, and so let ’ s not avoid it. Any sovereign claim over a space is first a claim to define that space as such, and that ontological gesture is as necessary for satellite photography and Internet addressing protocols as it is for monotheistic political theology, even as their claims may be heterodox and irresolvable and in fact because they are. In the balance between an infrastructure over which territorial claims are made and an infrastructure through which those claims are drawn, the ultimate geopolitical design of The Stack can ’ t possibly be decided in advance. Too many inversions are part of the process, and yet it is clear that our existing geopolitical machines desperately require intervention at scale. And so the interfacial regimes that give narrative form to The Stack are image-instruments of governance both here and now and yet to come, and for this, perhaps their momentum is too fast and their topography too dispersed for states to capture on their own, and too bound up with slow-to-change human anthropology for algorithmic Cloud platforms to merely abscond with them. At the same time, these instabilities are also what give stability to the whole. As The Stack has elevated interfacial diagrams to the status of planetary infrastructure, linking event to image with the ambient interfaces and habitats of the City layer, it coheres Users around generic experiences of social confusion that may still germinate new forms of political universality. This productive dissensus will remain open as long as the political architectures of The Stack can situate multiple jurisdictional claims and generate new jurisdictional strata where none existed, such that no single combination can finally resolve into a consensus sovereignty of last instance (or last resort). This defense against totalitarianism comes not from any axiomatic reverence for nonhierarchical horizontality but from the multiplication of verticalized totalities one on another. In that each of us, as a User, is also a living site over which that dissensus competes — not only over the right of legitimate violence, but also of the right of legitimate citizenship and political agency — then our own immediate experience of our interfacial regimes demands from us the management of several often incompatible personal identities, perched within these double-exposed platform totalities. It is the condition of any site, including any single User, to be enrolled into more than one regime at once and to suffer or enjoy a surplus of utopian total images, dual and treble citizenships, and fractured and noisy names and aliases. As discussed in the following chapter, on the last and top layer of The Stack this confusion first compels an overidentification with the reflective contours of User subjectivity, which is then followed by a more productive dissolution of the User-subject back into the indifferent churn of worldly interfaciality.

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The modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual (have codetermined) each other’s emergence.

— Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics¹

… I marveled that these bits and pieces stayed isolated one from another, held the same shapes for so long, that the labeling of individual aliquots of biomass actually served a useful purpose. — Peter Watts, “ The Things ” ²

Among the accomplishments of the Enlightenment, one amplified considerably by industrial apparatuses, is the dubious fabrication of the atomized human individual, a magical figure separated from the world by his mastery over it. ³ This construct is resistant to implications of Copernican traumas, as it continues to appreciate not only humanity but individual humans at the radiant center of the action. ⁴ As this figure came to organize systems in its own image, its synthetic replication through microeconomics and social psychology set the stage for its cohesion into what is called, by design, the User. In practice, however, the User is not a type of creature but a category of agents; it is a position within a system without which it has no role or essential identity. Think of the Apollo astronaut, the Vitruvian Man of the McLuhan era, floating in space wrapped in a body-shaped bubble and linked by his umbilical tube to the mother ship. The astronaut is not the somatic homo economicus denuded of dependencies; he is rather a composite effect of interlocking organic and inorganic skins and metabolisms, from the mechanical life-support systems without which his bubble bursts to the trillions of microbes inside his gut without which his body will fail more slowly. Even the space cowboy ’ s role as “ pilot ” of his spaceship its debatable. Recent scholarship underscores that ground control and on-board computers did the bulk of the work to land the Apollo assemblage onto Earth ’ s moon and that the human hood ornaments sent up with them were also marketing devices to ensure a species-centric exploration narrative. ⁵ Remember too that the first earthlings launched into outer space were not humans; they were monkeys, dogs, microbes, robots, and others. We stand in their place, as much as they did in ours (even here on Earth, inside our atmospheric skins, we are all already astronauts). ⁶ Another view would foreground how the human mind, body, and species, while appearing as the center of phenomena and perception, is instead, like all other matter, an open field irreducibly dependent on forces both larger and smaller than its own shell. This cascade of Copernican traumas — from Darwinian evolution to postcolonial and ecological inversions, to transphylum neuroscience and synthetic genomics, from nanorobotics to queer artificial intelligence — should erode conceptual models of the atomic individual human as historical actor (easy come, easy go). Instead, the conceptual gravity of the humanist illusion not only persists, but seems to draw some dark nourishment from these shocks. The more that the fantasy is disenchanted, the more entrenched the borderlines of what makes people “ special ” and the more that the hallucinated autonomy provides mystical shelter from the storm. Through it, the individual sees his poetic reflection everywhere, including in the positions configured for it as User of the systems on which it is dependent. By contrast, the platform sovereignty of the User in The Stack as identified for the Interface and City layers is derived not from some essential dignity of the particular human who “ uses, ” but from the agency of the User position in relation to the envelopes against which he or she or it is situated. Any sovereignty of the User draws less probably from established legal rights than from the contradictions and slippages between how formal citizens are provided access under control regimes versus how platform envelopes provide access to all Users regardless of formal political standing. One envelope may open up territories in ways the former cannot, and when it does, the position of the User is not just an empty suit, but a point of leverage in reorganizing the political geography of The Stack. Even so, that position never allows someone to enter into it fully formed; it also forms that person (or thing) into shape as it provides them tactics for shifting systems and their apparatuses. ⁷ In this, the User layer of The Stack is not where the rest of the layers are mastered by some sovereign consciousness; it is merely where their effects are coherently personified.

User Layer

This chapter focuses on Users (human or nonhuman) at the top layer up in The Stack and how they are interpolated by The Stack as comparable and interchangeable through various qualifications and quantifications of behaviors and impact. The User of this layer is not the universal persona that collapses design research into reductive and manipulative psychologism, a fixed term toward which design must orient its interfaces and artifacts, but as a model that is not given in advance and must be construed by interfaces and constructed for platforms. Its position at the top of The Stack, where driving agency is situated momentarily, is slippery, fragile, and always enmeshed in its own redefinition, an uncertainty that underwrites the formation of subjectivity in general, always a manifest image cobbled in relation to available technologies of self-reflection, from cave walls at Lascaux to Quantified Self Apps. ⁸ The Quantified

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Self movement enrolls available digital tools into the willful fabrication of autonomic self-interpolation and may be where the current political logic of the User reaches a certain apotheosis. While the empirical tracking and analysis of one ’ s personal biological processes is surely diagnostically important in many ways, especially as such data are aggregated and pluralized beyond private individuals by the surfacing of ecological, economic, and microbial forces, but the currency of personal performance optimization leans toward something rather different. It elevates the principles of User-centered design into an existential mandate for biological disclosure and epistemological closure tuned to harmonize with the hyperindividuated self-regard native to the zones that link transhumanism and Atlas Shrugged. I will argue that its animating desire for selfmastery through the quantification of system interactions over the course of autobiographical time is premised on a fundamental misrecognition — one for which the visual coherency of the object tracked is taken as validation of the subjective coherency of the “ self ” that stares back at it. As before, mirror reflection makes a false guarantee of the self ’ s apparent outline.

For anything that is situated in the User layer of The Stack — he, she or it — the interplay between technical delineation and stable self-image is volatile. In that it is entwined with feedback loops up and down the layers, the position of User is obviously in some ways always “ cybernetic, ” but it does not bend toward any homeostasis or necessary resolution. It is a limited effector of processes bubbling up and down layer to layer. To and from its location, the User is both an initiator and an outcome of those vertical paths that in the introductory chapter I called columns. But because this is also where actual human beings are most unambiguously situated within The Stack, it is also where political constitutions, end-user agreements, linguistic and cognitive cultures, psychoanalytic conundrums, and so on, together structure how platforms (including states) see Users and how Users model their own interests and actions, as seen in Interfaces large and small. As a given column tracks up and down, there is no single necessary path from layer to layer that must finally resolve a User through Interfaces and Addresses, within a City and Cloud platform and all the way down to the Earth layer. There are only possible routes among possible routes, and the durable form of one layer might guarantee or prevent variation within another layer that coexists with it in the same context. For example, one Cloud platform in one City may provide very different sets of interfacial possibilities than it would in another City, and in this case, it is a layer located well below the User and Interface that frames and limits how social formations can and cannot cohere. What a state sees or what any other Cloud platform sees is what it can see and wants to see through its particular capacities of perception and institutional dispositions of looking as it strategizes its own reflection up the columns toward the User. Looking back down, it is the contact between the User and the Interface, the recursive image of The Stack ’ s procedural totality, that informs how a User’ s habits of thought and action, no matter how fantastic or delusional, become at least for a moment validated by the concreteness of global information infrastructure. Indeed, it should go without saying that precisely because the claims by and for Users can be so diverse, and so deeply bound to a dynamic heterogeneity of human cultures, the historical and political textures of the User layer are also the most anthropologically complex. That said, where do Users come from?

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