The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

1. Origins of the User

Design has been an active participant in the formulation of the User as a privileged and practical subject position. It has refined the construct over at least a century into order to engineer the things that we all use every day — cars, globally unique identifiers (GUIs), hand tools, furniture, cities — by reflecting this shadowy hypothetical identity back onto real people. As part of a design research process, the formal postu lated ideal users for intended products, messages, or services are known as “ personas. ” In 1955, for example, Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss published his Designing for People, which featured “ Joe and Josephine, ” two extraordinarily typical people, one man and one woman, both described in minute detail. They would be used as the literal ergonomic standards against which things might be made to measure. They were, in this way, an Adam and Eve of use case personas. The premise of a scientific measurement of people and their movements as a way of designing systems to accommodate or to train them goes back at least to the proportional guidelines of Vitruvius ’ s Ten Books of Architecture (around 15 B.C.E.) and da Vinci ’ s Vitruvian Man (1490); many other genealogical threads are not hard to identify. Foucault ’ s genealogies of modernity painstakingly recount how typical and normative human bodies were served and served up by the design of disciplinary institutions of knowledge. By observing machine shops and workers and replanning how their bodily movements could be abstracted and optimized so as to be better incorporated with their laboring habitats, Frederick Winslow Taylor pioneered scientific management theory and the efficiency movement as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. Concurrently, Max Weber would identify a tendency toward depersonalized rationalization through the formulation of people into interchangeable bureaucratic components as a key sociological feature of industrial capitalism. Paul Lazarsfeld ’ s audience studies for the Princeton Radio Project (which momentarily included Theodor Adorno on the team) was among many midcentury attempts to apply the scientific method to the deduction of typical patterns in consumer thought and behavior used as templates for the formulation of products and propagandas. Information about audiences and Users would be used to inspire and validate the authorship of representative fictional personas that stand for those people by typifying them as ad hoc archetypes. ⁹ Later, the requirements of software and interaction design came to rely on the specification of diverse groups of multiple hypothetical Users, each with different needs, all put into overlapping fictional worlds where optimum click paths could be modeled, categorized, and used to perfect possible GUI solutions. ¹⁰ Whereas Joe and Josephine were absolutely generic, extranormal people, the complexities of designing dynamic interfacial systems means that any thing must be usable for people with heterogeneous aptitudes and intentions. If you could make software just by measuring people ’ s fingers and eyeballs, things would be easy. But the design of interfaces that have to link together various machines, forms of human cognition, and totalizing images of logistical networks demands more nuanced abstractions and optimizations than ergonomic verification of the angle at which “ Joe ’ s ” elbow bends can tell us.

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Today persona design and use case modeling is widely taught as a basic design research methodology, and as a result, for better or worse, a plurality of our material artifacts were conceived to suit the nuanced interests of completely fictional people following fictional scenarios. We, the actual consumers, are the shadows of the personified simulations of ourselves. Now real-time Cloud-based User-response-driven systems (such as Google AdWords and geolocative advertising schemes) work to close the gaps between upstream observation of Users and the microcustomization of services that are provided to them. Instead of abstracting a few typical personas out of the patterns seen through cumbersome, representative studies (we hope), and then designing offerings to suit those abstractions, the cycle between analysis and provision is more instantaneous. Whereas the standardization of large-scale industrial production demanded standardized Users, this is not as true for Stack economies. Instead of one User served by her supposed resemblance to one of a handful of personas derived from n population of all Users, Cloud platforms with access to each User’ s specific profile (previous search history, purchases, geographic location, circle of friends) can hypersegment services and content. The ratio between number of Users and possible personas is then trending toward a 1:1 ratio; your profile is your persona, and in principle, every data User gets his or her own version of any offering. To be sure, this doesn ’ t conclude but rather intensifies the interfacial apparatus processes of artificial subjectivization.

“ User ” is a normative figure of subjective agency for The Stack, not just a dummy sovereign held in an empty (if also supervisory) position at the head of a table with words put in its mouth. It also brings with it residual and sometimes discredited concepts of human agency and cognitive transparency. While the differential design of one apparatus versus another must modulate how each does or does not construct User-subjects, any entity positioned as a User, however briefly or permanently, brings with it a contextual history that is not reducible to software instructions and can twist the terms of subject delineation for its own purposes. An apparatus ’ s ways of subject making set terms of disposition and articulation, but it does not magically flatten the history of the world into its single interface (even as much as it might want to do exactly that). It also cannot hold onto all Users for the same duration, and so we must be equally attentive to the dissolution of subjects, in and out of User positions, as we are to their formulation. As described in the City chapter, apparatuses and envelopes situate the indissolubility of technical and subjective systems, drawing them together and unwinding them in equal measure. This dynamic of making and unmaking Usersubjects is neither exhausted by discursive shifts and play, as assiduously mapped by poststructuralism, nor excluded from them, and often it innovates on them directly. The open entanglements of multiple apparatuses express different postures and positions, some of which can innovate cultural norms and invent new Users on the scene. More often, however, at the global scale of The Stack, the User position is reserved for a reductive regularization into customized utilitarianism, and when that is mobilized for planetary-scale interfacial regimes, then its identification with the local reflections of computational mirrors can make it alien even to its own experiences. It can do this in at least two ways: by the “ informatization ” of self-identity as a project of individual care and management and in the revelation of the robust subjectivity of other nonhuman but computationally complex Users. As we ’ ll see, both of these work to first overdefine and overdetermine their subject (sometimes by bizarre constraints) and then work to dissolve its individual boundaries through a radicalization of that same overarticulation. For the User, from solution comes dissolution. Across the two, the geopolitics of The Stack in no way requires the alleviation of these unsettled identifications, externalizations, and counteridentifications. On the contrary, I would argue that anthropocenic humanism is not a natural reality into which we must awake from the slumber of machinic alienation; rather it is itself a symptomatic structure powered by — among other things — a gnostic mistrust of matter, narcissistic self-dramatization, and indefensibly pre-Copernican programs for design. By loosening the grip, alternatives can be modeled, midwifed, cultivated, cared for, radicalized, soothed, executed, extrapolated, rendered, exported, and accelerated.

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1. Finding the Universal User

User is a position not only through which we see The Stack, but also through which The Stack sees us, and so the platform sovereignties that it is most disposed to support are those that align with how the other layers organize their own intersecting interfacial regimes. The Earth layer spins out polities of the electron and emergency, the Cloud layer enrolls proto-citizens in global platform totalities, the City chapter maps out spaces of filtering control and accidental alegal access, the Address layer discloses a landscape in reserve filled with things and events available for interaction, and the Interface layer diagrams reductive images of all of these processes, served up as total or tactical instrumental regimes. All these are put in motion for Users, as Users are put in motion for them. This singular-generic User pinpoints where proto-cosmopolitanisms overlap and contradict the acquisitive platforms of cognitive capitalism and its blurry alternatives. The more salient design problem seems less to design for Users, as if they were stable forms to be known and served, than to design and redesign the User itself in the image of whatever program might enroll it. ¹¹ For this, any User is always a step behind itself as it moves along its path of potential use cases, realizing some and not others. When one virtual possible path collapses into a real interaction with a real interfacial regime, it alters the profile and the persona, which in turn transforms the interactions to come. The evasive distance between the predicted path and the one taken directs the portraiture of future Users, one by one or in populations, as the repetition of irregular interactions is normalized into new models from which Stack geopolitics coheres second by second and measurement by measurement.

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Wandering around the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 and into the Urbanian pavilion, I encountered this User, perhaps in its metaphysical essence (or so it seemed at the time). ¹² The core pedagogy of the sensurround urban-scale propaganda for urban-scale systems instructed that global citizenship is based on the quantitative comparability of how much energy, water, land, and other resources a person uses and produces. For this material cosmopolitanism, humanity is held in a planetary commons, not merely because we share Earth ’ s territorial surface (as it was for Kant) but because each of us generates a resource footprint that can be known to us and made known to one another. Visitors learn that it is our quantitatively comparative shadows that make us all one. Across apparent differences in appearance, culture, and lifestyle, each User consumes energy and produces things that others consume in turn, and so Users consume not only carbon and energy but also one another within an infrastructural metabolism. The geopolity staged here in the Urbanian pavilion is a governing commonwealth of urbanized electrons, one demanding a material ethics of biographical measurement and comparison. On display, literally, are several sample Users: towering use case personas extruded in zoological exhibition as if by Charles Ray. We have big mannequins of the Reids from Phoenix and the Hagens from Ghana, for example, and through the pavilion ’ s displays, we examine cinematic and sculptural vignettes of their daily lives, learning about what each of them does in the morning, what they consume at night, whom they love, what they produce, how much of the urban platform of information, energy, and carbon they use. All the while these immersive qualitative accounts of their lives are overlaid with alphanumeric dashboards of total consumption and production data, per User family unit. Their distant lives and situations are brought together and made comparable, if not also interchangeable, by these standard metrics for evaluating their relative performance. Here the City (the world, really) is posited as a mesh of semantic chemistries subordinated to their logistical administration. This isomorphic standardization of human survival — biopolitics entwined as usual with the statistical imaginary — underwrites an autobiographical geopolitics of the User, opening its position up to whatever it might acquire or make use of it so long as platform interactions can be traced, weighed, and optimized in relation to a planetary resource totality.

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This particular Sino-futurist cosmo-urbanity of information, energy, and architecture is as generous as it is omnivorous. Can we really expect full interoperability without some degree of cannibalism? ¹³ The Shanghai exhibition pedagogy is ecumenical, fair and strict, democratic and autocratic at once. But here, “ we, ” the persona and use cases of the world, cohere as a polity to the extent that we are all agents of the urban commonwealth of the digitally articulated electron, water molecule, and land use event. The foundation of a User’ s proto-citizenship falls within this Stack-scale urban fabric, feeding into and off its provisions of life. There is a correspondence with the platform sovereignties derived from urban envelopes, discussed in the City layer chapter, and their capacities to project unexpected User-subject positions and pathways, but in Urbanian, we are asked to contemplate with wonder the arithmetic fairness of closed loops and the social diversity possible within them, not lines of flight from them. Fear and surprise, work and play are all equivalent in that they can be deduced equally in our common shadows. As the User is drawn deeper into urban platforms, drawing resources from them and providing cognitive and physiological value back to them, tensions between entertainment as labor and labor as entertainment move front and center, and the attendant paradoxes of economic privacy and civic transparency grow louder. This consolidation of City, smart grid, and Cloud produces new aggregate technology and aggregate territory, not only by blanketing one on top of the other but by linking them into a composite apparatus ( “ itself the network established between … elements ” ) by enforcing a universal regime of comparative metrics. ¹⁴ This Cloud Polis model of a planetary urbanity, integrated under the sign of full-spectrum macroeconomics of energy production and consumption, is rendered as an ethics of autobiographical self-identity.

On this side of the Pacific, we can explore further how this ethical methodology works to construct the political subjectivity of the User in the image of resource totality and the quantification of the feedback loops initiated with infrastructural systems. This might entail the monetization of cognition (as for Cloud platforms) or of the calculation of a User ’ s carbon footprint toward other ends, but what matters most is the optimization of the User ’ s profile as the source of its economic viability and its political agency. Perhaps the bravura performance of User quantification as autobiographical anthem was by Saul Griffith for a talk at the Poptech! conference in 2008. ¹⁵ His talk begins by recounting the procedures he underwent in order to come up with a viable measure of the number of watts of energy that he, as one person, draws from global platforms. Because one uses so many different systems, from airlines to highways to processed meats, it ’ s necessary to calculate not just immediate interactions but the percentage of vast wholes that one individual is arguably responsible for. It took a year, but this is what Griffith and his partners did, quantifying every big and small systemic interaction, from food and diet to transatlantic flights to taxes paid toward the paving of roads. He concluded that he uses around 17,027 watts per year, which not extraordinary for a US citizen. The world average, however, is 2,250 watts per person, with several billion people filling out the long tail of energy access. Even so, Griffith ’ s confessional might nominate his practice of self as the ideal universal User ( Homo persona?) far more than comparatively blunt profiles available for the Reids or the Hagens in Shanghai. Not only are his interactions with The Stack quantified with exacting candor and offered up for critique and comparison, but his intelligent efforts also provide those systems a valuable measure of their interactions with him. He then performs a similar heroic act of statistics for the collective User inclusive of all humans and their aggregate effects on the planetary situation (my words, not his). His point then is to demonstrate exactly how difficult will be the necessary transitions from current infrastructures to those required to stave off ecological calamity. At the time of his talk, the United States had put about 90 gigatons (GT) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (China had put about 26 GT). Before industrialization, the climate held about 270 parts per million carbon dioxide, and we ’ ve recently passed 400 parts per million. Griffith asks how the collective User could sustain a still very dangerous 450 parts per million and still produce the same 16 terawatts of energy currently demanded by the global population. He surmises that we ’ ll have to come up with about 10 terawatts of clean renewable energy, in addition to the 6 terawatts from other sources in order to have any reasonable hope for stabilization at 450 parts per million. Getting 10 new terawatts of clean energy in twenty-five years, however, may mean the immediate, simultaneous, and comprehensive transformation of almost all of our entire industrial infrastructure. We would need one 3 gigawatt nuclear plant to go online every week for the next two decades. Plus we would need to install 100 square meters of solar cells every second. Plus we would need twelve 3 megawatts of wind turbines every hour. Plus, to grow enough biofuel-producing algae, we would need to fill a space the size of Wyoming. To have a chance of accomplishing these feats, he says, Coke and Pepsi would have to switch entirely to making sheets of reflective mirrors instead of sheets of aluminum for cans of sugar water. GM, Ford, and Toyota would have to team up to achieve the goal of one wind turbine every five minutes. Obviously such lurches would bring their own negative consequences, and so even “ solving for carbon ” is sure to cause other problems. In other words, it seems impossible. It is true, he concludes, that we have brought 10 terawatts online in the last forty years, and so who knows? Without the deus ex machina of miraculous nanotechnological quantum fusion from Mars, the prospects for the comprehensive stabilization of atmospheric carbon without dramatic reduction in energy use by people like himself seems highly unlikely. Most interesting, however, is not Griffith ’ s individual apologetics but the shift from the unit of the individual User of The Stack to a profile derived from the total sum of all Users, gauged as one enormous meta- User. Perhaps this shift in scale provides some hope that deliberate redesign of governance is possible. The political identities of Users are produced through interfacial regimes, and the public profile and legitimacy of those regimes appear in the composite mosaic of the Users that it generates. The whole makes parts, which make wholes: the apparatus individuates User, and the totality of Users comes to define the scope and quality of the apparatus as infrastructure for their lives.

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1. Quantified Self and Its Mirror

Above I identified two tracks by which the User-subject is at once synthesized and made alien to itself: the experience of the self reflected through visual-quantitative technologies and the granting of subjectivity to nonhuman agents imbued with computational intelligence. The following sections explore both of these in greater depth. Elsewhere I have identified what we can call the “ death of the user. ” By this, I mean the expiration of a specific kind of user, and the displacement its soft humanism from the conceptual center of design strategy by the proliferation and predominance of both nonhuman and nonindividuated actors within the expanded field of ubiquitous computation. ¹⁶ “ Joe and Josephine ” are no longer generic; they would now be seen, in comparison to all possible Users, as specifically and idiosyncratically primate. As discrete human individuals believe themselves in charge of their tools, they nevertheless represent an increasingly particular, even marginalized type of User-agent within a diverse throng of alternatives. At the same time, this same dispersion and diversification of User-agency into the wider landscape of the world provokes a belligerent overdetermination and overappearance of the individuated human as the base unit through which that world is measured.

As we human Users reflect on our selves with images of quantified digital traces, the richly detailed portrait reflected back convinces us of our individual coherency and efficacy. However, as this User is outpaced by nonhuman actors and multitudinous objects, he appears to himself as another one of these things. Like the addressable haecceity tracked through logistical space, you are a smart object held together by platforms for deep biographical comparability. The apparent stability of the profile image reflected back conceals the necessary fragility with which any one thing holds the position of User-subject. That fragility is a bit like Theseus ’ s paradox, which questions whether an object, having had all of its parts replaced one by one over time, remains essentially the “ same ” object. You may have heard a version of this as a story using George Washington ’ s axe instead of Theseus ’ s ship: “ The handle has been replaced three times and the head twice, but it is essentially the same axe. ” The new axe occupies the same “ place ” as the old axe, but even so, it is not the same bunch of molecules. What we have at hand is a double within the exact outline of what is now displaced. It is the same for the positions of User subjectivity into which we step for a moment or more.

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Like the axe, the User is situated by the myriad relations that produce our worlds and the things that we do in them. There is a “ there ” there, but it is plural and in motion. In our profiles, our names, ideas, organs, identities, rights, licenses, tools, itineraries, and genomes can each be peeled off, however provisionally and artificially, from those that also belong to other Users and so can be made to cohere into the composite image of one self. But not only do these always move in and out of that frame, moment by moment, each is constantly attaching itself to other profiles and to another positions. Sometimes one of these can even take on the position of User all by itself, leaving all the others elsewhere. As discussed for Griffith ’ s movement between the scales of individual and collective Users, the part is determined by the whole, which achieves its identity through the coherence of its parts (even when the whole is one User and the parts his partial component characteristics). But inside the economy of the User position, profile components cohere into the temporary resolution, but they do so without belonging exclusively to it. ¹⁷ They travel into external places and positions, leaving behind the afterimage of the resolved User into which so many people invest their own identities.

As suggested, this slippage is exemplified by the Quantified Self movement, an extremely Californian subculture that seeks “ self knowledge through numbers. ” It champions the use of data capture technologies to track an individual User’ s “ inputs ” (i.e., food and air), “ states ” (mood, energy level), and “ performance ” (mental and physical metrics). This administrative auto-objectification turns the gaze of user-centered design research inward on itself, inflating it toward existential closure. This “ care of the self ” is a fabricated hypertrophic self-interpolation, a hyperindividuated diagnostics perfectly suited to cube farms. For the User, the reflection provides recognition and misrecognition, not so unlike Jacques Lacan ’ s mirror stage parable, whereby the visual coherency of the body reflected back is believed to confirm the psychological coherency of the self who stares at it. ¹⁸ Before the primal encounter with a mirror, the temporality of inner experience was confused, unable to differentiate the mental imagery of direct experience from memory, from a desired wish; present, past, and future are all a jumble. On seeing the coherent image reflected back, seeing outlines following movements following outlines, the grounding of a coherent sense of self as a self-directed subject, and as an object in the world among others, was not only possible but imperative. The visualization comes with a false guarantee but provides for more interesting detours by those inevitable failures.

Consider, by way of example, a project that Gordon Bell developed at Microsoft in the late 1990s, MyLifeBits, which considered the User and his individuated biography as the locus of a kind of computational infinity. The experiment draws on a simple and ambitious question: What if everything you ever saw, heard, and felt, every object you ever touched, every location you ever shadowed — every externally trackable experience — could be recorded at some incredible lossless resolution and fidelity, fed into practically infinite storage, and available to recall and replay at any time?

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Where Turing ’ s artificial intelligence test attempted to detect machine intelligence by testing its reflection in human cognition, projects like Bell ’ s suggest capture of the totality of autobiographical experience by couching it within a personal universal Turing machine and so (as the research was for Microsoft) to prototype the sorts of data management, visualization, semantic sorting, editing, and indexing interfaces necessary for the yottabyte-fluent absolute User to come ? Of course, in that future, part of what would be recorded are her sessions during which she plays back past experiences, which would then also be available for review later on, and so on, and so on, a mirror held up to a mirror, reflecting up into the darkness. ¹⁹ The phenomenology of metadata would be overwhelming. Certainly new vistas of self-mastery might open up for her, but at the same time new psychopathologies would emerge in her attempts to manage the infinite regression of reflections of reflections. Leaving aside the service design implications for Microsoft and focusing on the vertiginous depth of this kind of autocognitive technology, wouldn ’ t the absolute User at some point lose (or let go) the ability to differentiate present experience from past memory and from future wish? A kind of transcendental infantilization or enlightened disindividuation? Would memories of memory become unwound such that the consciousness of a situated subject is forever unwound as well, leaving little piles of neurofabric throbbing in the feedback of its own disassembly? ²⁰ If so, then can those be rewoven into different, less individuated User-subjects, after the fact?

To define this process more formally, in the short term, an increase in the intensity, granularity, and reflexivity of information about a User’ s traces in the world first produces a cartoonishly overactualized diagram of the self as a continuous individual unit. In the long term, the quantity of information reflected back becomes too great, and so these same technologies undermine the boundaries of self and other, resulting in an open, incoherent, and discontiguous identity. The self burns brightest just before falling apart; more is more, until it is actually much less, and in this case, less may be a more fruitful accomplishment. (For this, intensity refers to the scope, scale, and computational capacity of a diagram to capture an event or life; granularity refers to the detail it can capture; and reflexivity refers to how much the diagram can be meaningfully acted on, either as a GUI that controls a feedback loop or social connections providing surveillance, and a stage to show off the self-events under the social microscope.) Where exactly the threshold point between solution and dissolution sits, we can only hypothesize, but we can anticipate, and not without optimism, the crumbling of the psychologized single-serving human User as the generic universal User position in relation to The Stack, and consider instead the soupy ingredients for alternatives that are left behind. Nicholas Felton is an information designer famous for his obsessive and ironic annual reports on himself, as if he were a corporate client needing to comply with shareholder reporting requirements. ²¹ He also was a major contributor of a redesigned Facebook timeline in 2009, which shows how Quantified Self, turning accounting techniques born of big box supply chains and reassigning them to the surfacing of unseen patterns in our everyday lives, is not an isolated subcultural phenomenon but increasingly central to Stack culture at large. From the Reids, the Hagens, Saul Griffith, and Gordon Bell, and toward the mainstreaming of QS logics, especially for social networks of Users online and offline, what will be their societal impact more generally? Are billions of Users being convinced that their individual profile biographies are more real than they actually are, or are they being trained toward the distributed realization of the opposite ultimate conclusion? In aggregate, will each of us become further atomized, more grotesquely overindividuated, staring dumbly into our own templated reflections of profiles, feeds, and complimentary feedback, or will we become even more hive-like, drifting in the wake left by the memes of our curated externalized cognition? The better question is: What kind of User can be designed instead?

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This hyperattenuated version of the User is claimed by myriad relations, and in stepping into its position, one is “ already a crowd. ” ²² The overdetermined QS is analogous to the blackened canvas, overwritten with layers and layers of figures, colors, diagrams, and abstractions, all targeting the same referent and in so doing generating multiple means and medians. As for Theseus ’ s paradox, identity is tuned and retained, but despite all attempts at resolution and actualization, it remains an open field into which and out of which any of these layers might travel. That overdetermination does not prohibit creativity, but it does shift its terms of operation. When the canvas is full, completely blackened with overlapping content, the act of creation doesn ’ t mean adding paint, more black on black; it is instead subtraction, that is, the introduction of absence and silence so as to make room for information now made visible by this negation — scratching the black away to let the light in, removal as design strategy. We see this play out with the absolute User’ s slide into an abyssal dissolution of the self when confronted with the potential totality of virtualized experiences. In response to the white noise of his infinitely refracted subjectivity, he reflects this entropy by sliding back into perceptual incoherency (or potentially stumbling toward secular hypermaterialism). It ’ s true that the real purpose of QS is not to provide all possible information at once, but to reduce systemic complexity with summary diagrammatic accounts of one ’ s inputs, states, and performance metrics. But adding more and more data sources to the mix and providing greater multivariate fidelity also produces other pathways of dissolution. By tracking external forces (e.g., environmental, microbial, economic) and their role in the formation of the User-subject ’ s state and performance, the boundaries between internal and external systems are perforated and blurred. Those external variables not only act on you; in effect they are you as well, and so the profile reflecting back at the User is both more and less than a single figure (and as we ’ ll see, sometimes those extrinsic forces live inside one ’ s own body). This is one site from which alternative User positions can be invented. It ’ s where the fictional resolution of the individual person as the core unit of the User position gives way toward something else, where nodes begin to work like edges and edges like notes. The ocular appearance of the resolved first person, first seen in the outline reflected back in the mirror and then verified in the continuity of feedback from input, state-condition, and performance diagrams, multiplies into a mosaic of new components clinging to other subjects, bigger and smaller than the individual person. 23

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