The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

1. From User-Centered Design to the Design of the User

These three models for the design of posthuman User— the animal User, as exemplified by the design of reciprocal interfaces between species; the AI User, by the design of idiosyncratic companion personalities; and the machine User, by the infrastructural driverless car platform — in no way exhaust the range of problems and opportunities, but they are instructive in several important ways. First, their dynamics aren ’ t contained at the User level into a single subject position. Beyond the User and City circuit, they draw all layers of The Stack into volatile but particular configurations, such that a design intervention at any other layer ( Address, Interface, Cloud, or Earth) could determine the character of the whole, and in turn configure the User’ s position differently. Second, they don ’ t simply replace humans with nonhuman actors, but incorporate diverse living and nonliving agents into nonexclusive assemblages, from which any of them can come and go and still retain their unique profile. As design problematics, the models in different ways also demonstrate a principle of the platform within a platform. That is, for each scenario, The Stack metaplatform provides interoperability through the central coordination of information produced and consumed by autonomous, if also regularized, Users at the far edges of its networks. But the incorporation of many different types of actors (human, machinic, bots, animals, infrastructures) into recombinant User assemblages, all with differing regular morphologies and temporalities, means that inside the User position itself, rather different kinds of platform logics between individuated actors can occur. That is, not only is the User served (and does it serve) the platform logic of The Stack, but the possible form and affective content of the User position is itself engaged by different intelligent actors negotiating among one another. That empty shell of the User position is itself a microplatform within the macroplatform of The Stack. Finally, as the future governmental complexities of a continental-scale autonomous Cloud vehicle system in full bloom make clear, the surfacing of nonhuman Users can ’ t simply inherit legacy sovereign positions available to humans, like citizen or legal individual or driver or “ person. ” They don ’ t fit, and the Cloud Polis we will constitute with them will have to include other durable, enforceable political positions for human and posthuman Users alike. The development of these new sovereign formats necessitated by the revelation of nonhumans in User positions, may be the most effective driver for retooling how the territorial visions of nonstate Cloud platforms and state Cloud platforms intersect and collide. In short, as more and more unlike figures come to occupy the User position, smashing up against one another and plugging into one another, they contort that position into different shapes, sizes, and durations. As such, design cannot possibly continue to refer to “ user-centered design ” without a radical complication of each of these terms (or risk reactionary failure), and so as new actors crowd that position, the longer-term geopolitical design problem is the design of the User itself — its limits, vulnerabilities, velocities.

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Cockroaches, Siri, and driverless cars, taken together, make a strange confederation, but from the perspective of The Stack, no stranger than the Reids, the Hagans, Larry Smarr, or you or me. At the same time, this agnostic flatness of the User subject does little by itself to adjudicate what the “ best ” “ sovereign ” position for any of these Users might be. While we are optimistic that posthuman Users contribute in some way toward a post-Anthropocenic geopolitics, that does not mean necessarily that visualizing Siri ’ s carbon footprint or mapping the microbial biome in the cockroaches that pilot Google cars is the shining path. To date, much of the discussion about the political “ rights ” of the User have conflated the “ property rights ” (and privacy rights) of a computer ’ s owner with the interests of a User who may or may not own his or her apparatuses. The scope of rights that the individual owner to protect his machine and information from surveillance, malware, DRM, and spyware, for example, has animated discourses around data freedom, cyberlaw, and the electronic frontier for decades now, and as the NSA revelations show the disturbing depths of how far these policies (if that is even always the right word) have skewed. For as much as is at stake in these controversies, the focus on individual privacy and autonomy from systems does not help frame how Users that do not own the computational systems with which they interface (which is to say almost the entirety of The Stack itself) can assert their interests. Cory Doctorow ’ s “ The Coming Civil War over General-Purpose Computing, ” draws several dark scenarios for what happens to human Users who may be renting (financing) biomedical robotic components (e.g., artificial eyes or legs, cochlear implants) and for whatever reason are not able keep up with the financial terms of this particular “ use/not own ” service economy. It cannot be acceptable for a biomedical Cloud service provider to suspend service on the smart medical components that the provider owns, leaving the User blind or immobile or deaf. Surely the User that merely uses and not owns should be able to assert individual interests against the harm brought by property rights to determine what an apparatus may or may not do.

For The Stack, this issue is crucial. As discussed in the Address chapter, as computation becomes a general property of all apparatuses, from the implantable to the infrastructural, then over the course of the day, a human actor may be the User of thousands and thousands of different “ computers ” at various scales and in various collaborative combinations with other actors, human and otherwise. A program by which that User position is always subservient to the sovereignty of property claims made by the owner of the apparatus itself, whether on behalf of state publics, corporate Cloud platforms, or distant individuals cannot possibly scale. While there may be versions of The Stack megastructure that could withstand and even enforce that kind of totalitarian monologic, to do so would likely go against the catalytic platform logic for which end Users in the network regularize autonomy so as to introduce information, modify it, and reprogram the whole according to local and instantaneous needs. Clearly the better design strategy is instead to imbue the User who is not the property owner (and who may never own property such as a robot or an animal or a rainforest) with some real control over his or her relations to The Stack, as broad or as delimited as any one of those addressable relations might be. Even if the User position is occupied by software, such as Siri, this model is in some ways the opposite of the Taylorist archetype of the User as automaton. In practice, this means not just that the specific entity that may enter the User position requires some form of sovereign identification, but also that the columns that this User makes up and down The Stack, linking intention through interface, to addressable haecceity in the City, to energy-intensive Cloud provision and back up the column to another User, do as well. An alternative is to address every single User-Stack relation and every column initiated as a discrete haecceity and as the instantaneous mutual property of all the actors contributing to its realization. ⁶³ However, this leaves the simplistic notion of sovereignty derived from property unimproved, and as a design solution, it merely translates the opposed interests of some owner- Users and some tenant- Users into the legacy vocabularies of a property conflict and all the structural inadequacies that entails. It does nothing to adjudicate their claims, or enforce the mutual interests of good actors, or protect them from the cost of bad actors, and more.

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The User cosmopolitanism on offer at the Shanghai Expo to the Reids and to all the rest of us is based on the constitutional precondition that total statistical transparency of the User as the composite weight of his interactions is the price to pay for political voice, exit, or entrance. For some, that social nudity may be nonnegotiable, whereas for others, privacy and opacity are just like other premium services and allow them some measure of protection. ⁶⁴ Framing the User as a free agent whose person, privacy, and actions are his property to be leased and fortified according to market demand, and couching User sovereignty in privacy markets, is but one suspicious point of agreement between Assange and neo-Austrian libertarians. ⁶⁵ “ Privacy, ” of course, is a deeply paradoxical ethos that does very different things under different circumstances. ⁶⁶ The axiomatization of individual privacy as a first-order principle of political systems is also a salve for those made insecure by an insulted sense of self-command, and it ’ s a very limited program for the geodesign of the User layer of The Stack. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the design decision should not be to locate sovereignty in the encapsulated person who steps into the User position but instead into the position itself. ⁶⁷ Particular agents may step into or out of composite User assemblages (as tangible as a Google Car or as intangible as a trace over time), and their interests do not remain stable as they do so. From The Stack ’ s perspective, the User is both the edge-state on the other side of the Interface and the agent initiating columns back down into its layers; it is defined by what it connects to, not by who or what it “ is. ” In a way, the NSA revelations demonstrate this. The target of message interception in many cases was the metadata attached to any communication of interest. “ It ’ s only ‘ metadata, ’ ” some scoffed. “ What ’ s the big deal? ” ⁶⁸ Of initial interest is how a particular thread within the larger landscape is located in time and geography, what systems and networks it passed through, and, most important, the corresponding metadata for the receivers of the thread. From these, we believe that analysts can reconstruct specific networks of Users, monitoring their rhythms and intensities. ⁶⁹ While the semantic content of what a message says is obviously of some interest to the analyst, in order to knit the haystack in which needles hide, he collages metadata to reconstruct its patterns. In the terms of The Stack, this is more directly a policing of columns than it is of individual persons who are Users. The regular channels of association across layers and scales become the target of opportunity. Palantir ’ s analysts, for example, use the company ’ s software to provide structure to unstructured government data, and so their work provides for us at least a reasonable model for the sort of activities that Snowden ’ s leaks shed light on. But instead of watching from some sterilized perch, even the User of the Palantir software is participating in the tracing of the column. “ Palantir ’ s central privacy and security protection would be ... ‘ the immutable log. ’ Everything a user does in Palantir creates a trail that can be audited. No Russian spy, jealous husband or Edward Snowden can use the tool ’ s abilities without leaving an indelible record of his or her actions. ” ⁷⁰ This meta-metadata recursivity is a key aspect for how such systems function. The fact that analyst B has already established links between persons X and Y becomes the trail that analyst C explores. The query becomes the quarry. Meta-meta-metadata of any event in the world becomes in a sense the event itself, and just like you or me, the event itself, the column, also secretes more information that it contains within it. The policing of columns, their metadata, all the way down into the abyss strongly suggests that tolerance for vertigo is an important attribute for designers of Stack governance.

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The expansion of suffrage toward ever more universal inclusion is almost always met with indignance (at the very least) by many of those whose privileged position is shifted that much off center. The same is true for Copernican rotations of human autophenomenology off its axis. When the two combine forces, there cannot not be trouble, and the ongoing geopolitical surfacing of the posthuman User will be a far more complicated political and anthropological event than is a technological one. ⁷¹ Engineering for animals, AI, and robots is much easier than designing and enforcing the terms of their participation acceptable to those now asked to make room, but what some will call a fundamentalist reification of the atomic private human as the sovereign core for the User layer of The Stack cannot sustain that engineering for very long. It ’ s not sufficient. In the short run — yes — the blunt-edge illuminations regarding surveillance platforms are to be defended against duplicitous cynicism and opportunism; but in the long run, the agenda that matters most is that another User position must be composed and defended. The atomic citizen User, forever scandalized and seeking revenge against the inevitable failures of a enemy regime, wearing sacralized revelations of wrongdoing, cannot be depended on to provide the resilient geopolitical design that is required. Assange can nail his 99 Theses to the virtual door of power as many times as he needs to, but it will not bring forth the necessary atheism but rather retrenchment of the wrong fundamentals. I believe that instead of pleading the Jeffersonian wounds over and over, the more radical and prudent line of sight is toward carving defensible space around the nonhuman User in order to explore the literatures by which human beings can become part of their set. This plays with role reversal and drag, as in Jean Genet ’ s The Balcony, or the old Google Glass App that let the User control the pitch and yaw of a quadrotor drone by tilting his head, even though we all know the drone is really controlling his neck muscles (sic). ⁷² Recording becomes playback and playback a variation on recording, swapping tempos: the ultimate promiscuity of the roles — apparatus, interface, and subject — all can be recast by one another in the arc of watching someone else watch you, and to watch yourself watching it over again while pretending to be the camera. ⁷³

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Put differently, at the same time that the User encrypts its membranes against violations from the outside, the system itself always inoculates itself against bad actor Users. Corporate IT departments are funded precisely to ensure this biopolitical security, but the platform commons demands guarantees of resilience and coherence against both vectors of risk. A different model User is required, but how? Benedict Singleton has developed a design theory based on metis and cunning, for which design is the instigation of traps. ⁷⁴ All species are at work to design their interactions with the world so as to trap what they need, and for humans the institutionalization of these traps is where design and governmentality intersect. This is not just an immoral tendency for natural and sexual selection; it is how intelligence leverages ecological interdependencies so as to modulate them by strategies and tactics. ⁷⁵ Like Grosz ’ s framing of the Earth presents design as a primordial geography, a design ontology of traps foregrounds instead a violent symbiosis as the frame ’ s actual strategy revealed. Different things require different traps, and each becomes ensnared in the trap of the other, around and around, a trap within a trip within a trap stabilized over time: flowers and bees, orchids and wasps, bees and wasps, Venus fly-trap and fly, fly and dirt, dirt and flower, photograph and memory. Ensnared one within the other, the “ user ” of each design encapsulates another while being itself encapsulated, infecting and infected at once, integrities crumbling. ⁷⁶ This is part of the architecture of biology, this is a model for communities of Users one inside the other. Far weirder than Larry Smarr ’ s gut microbes, nested parasitic biostrata are in some cases embedded five levels deep inside the other (fifth-order hyperparasitism): animal inside animal inside animal inside animal inside animal, user inside user inside user. ⁷⁷ This symbiotic recursion could be called a microplatform, but it ’ s more than that; it is not just the negotiation among actors within the User position; it is a durable interpenetration of actors, mutually embedded one within the other. This is the primal scene that should have been on display at the Shanghai Expo as the root pedagogy of the universal User, not the mannequin zoology of the Reids and the Hagens. This dissolution of the private human User comes not through the white noise of absolute quantification or mathematically guaranteed withdrawal from appearance, but through the plodding evolution toward alternative phenotypes in relation to manic apparatuses, both internal and external. The dispersant is not thanatos, a slouching toward deliquesce, but an activist attentiveness to the more open geographies available to our composite inhuman alternatives. So, again, forget human-centered design; we need to design for what comes next, what comes outside, what has already arrived, for the synthetic User-subjects for which another geopolitics is derived. These come from the division, segmentation, and multiplication of partial and compound Users into diagonal organs, both bigger and smaller than any one body or person. In this, the geopolitical design problem is drawn as a planetary resorting and redistribution of envelopes, interfaces and membranes, hard and soft, enabling forms of political sovereignty and geography that will enforce a more adventurous futurity, along a path of anguished falling toward our own special void. That, as well, is the design brief.

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The Stack to Come

Secrets are lies.

— The Circle, company policy ¹

Surveillance is theft.

— Writers against Mass Surveillance ²

Autonomy is abstraction.

— Chris Anderson, 3D Robotics ³

Convenience means not secure.

— Jacob Appelbaum, Tor project ⁴

Fear is awareness.

— Charles Manson

1. Seeing The Stack We Have, Stacks to Come

The Stack we have means: borderlines are rewritten, dashed, curved, erased, automated; algorithms count as continental divides; the opposition of chthonic versus geometric territory is collapsed by computation; interfaces upon interfaces accumulate into networks, which accumulate into territories, which accumulate into geoscapes (territories comprising territories, made and so entered into, not entered into and so made); the embedded is mobilized and the liquid is tethered down into shelter and infrastructure; the flat, looping planes of jurisdiction multiply and overlap into towered, interwoven stacks; the opaque is transcribed and the transparent is staged, dramatized, and artificialized; irregular allegiances are formalized (the enclave and exclave, for diasporic and satellite expatriates); both futurist and medievalist scenarios confiscate, one from another, the program of supercomputational utopias; and the incomplete(able) comprehensiveness of Earth ’ s archives is folded back on itself as a promiscuous, ambient geopolitics of consumable electrons.

These are predicaments that condition us, but design is out of sync with them at present. Some design appears in advance of what it wants to describe, while other designs lag behind what has already arrived but may not be recognized and named. The Stack-we-have does both, and so The Stack-to-come is drawn by a geoaesthetics and a geodesign that is, at best, seen now in a kind of double exposure: one future that is anonymously present with us, arrived but unnamed, and one that is already named but not yet here. As discussed at the very beginning of the book, to grasp that other geography, our attention is split between these two concurrent images that we must hold in mind at once, even as they blend into the other, both with and without our control. Our capacity to now design, govern, and draw sovereign geographies depends on the management of this blur. First, how has sovereignty already been redesigned, whether or not we can properly name or comprehend the character of all effects, and second, how can the genesis of another geopolitical geometry deliberately recast the terms of sovereignty that would give those realized formations some preferable structure? The unseen and arrived is interlaced with the seen and the delayed, the blur is precisely this oscillation between “ what is ” but does not yet have a name, and “ what might become ” because we can give it name in advance of its arrival. The challenge requires imagination but also enforcement, the establishment of foundations, the techniques of strategic position and material fabrication, such that they can form one another and form us through them. To hold the two images in mind is also to bring into focus the variables of their interpolation and to trace the pixelated translation between them. At the same time, the sorting of any single User-subject effect, yours or mine, is also an arc of decay, marked for itself only in passing, such that any entry point into The Stack is fixed by what we exchange among one another in passing: money, carbon, electrons, affect, law, territory — one serving as the referent standard for the other without final grounding. Its scope is global, but the interfaces into the machine, and the visible diagram of the work that it does, are always only partial.

With these caveats and limits, it is possible to see what appears to us as a reasonably complete image of the whole, and even to leverage this totality as a way to draw what might replace it, sooner or later. Perhaps we can see all the layers at once, both as what they are and as what they do. We start at the bottom of the image and move up, from Earth to User, in one vertical tracking shot. ⁶ The black death of oil is formed into brilliant plastic mobile decks; heterogeneous minerals are pulled from mountain streams in central Africa and elsewhere; satellite networks expand the circumference of the Earth, bearing down with optimized images of a denuded whole, now turned from a map into an interface and, in turn, into a vast planetary epidermis to be governed as a total living image. All this is powered by an Ouroboros-shaped energy grid that distributes electrons in peer-to-peer packet networks and so may rationalize and lighten the carbon burden of industrial computation, or may consume the last remaining terawatts and carbon dioxide gigatons into a black hole of data center – shaped future ruins. In doing so, it spawns new jurisdictions of those causing and those affected by climate change, turning the ecology itself into the final emergency against which we try to defend ourselves in a losing battle with the mathematics of systems biology.

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Moving our gaze just upward to the Cloud layer, we see vast logistics archipelagos and far-flung subterranean server farms, some outside normative jurisdictional control, and all superimposing irregular partial polities over locations and Users, interweaving themselves with state claims. Google Grossraum delaminates polity from territory and reglues it into various unblendable sublayers, weaving decentralized supercomputing through increasingly proprietary networks to hundreds of billions of device end points. Each of these is also a sensor and tracking node feeding information back into the proto-sovereign Cloud platform, which uses this to draw new maps of state space and also to absorb it into new formats ( Clouds becoming de facto states, states becoming Cloud platforms). This activates open-ended platform wars over identity, currency, logistics, devices, services, and infrastructure, with no player capable of fully remapping all links between the mobile citizen-user, data center location, and national laws. And so, we are left with specters of Cloud feudalism and cosmpolitanism, both at once.

We try to trace where this goes and from where it came. Archaic states drew their authority from the regular provision of food, and over the course of modernization, more was added to the intricate bargains of Leviathan: energy, infrastructure, legal identity and standing, objective and comprehensive maps, credible currencies, and flag-brand loyalties. Bit by bit, all of these and more are now provided by Cloud platforms, not necessarily as formal replacement for the state versions but, like Google ID, simply more useful and effective for daily life. For these, the terms of participation are not mandatory, and because of this, their social contracts are more extractive than constitutional. The Cloud Polis draws revenue from the cognitive capital of its Users, who trade attention and microeconomic compliance in exchange for global infrastructural services, and it in turn it provides each of them with an active, discrete online identity and the license to use that infrastructure. Before the full ambition of the state cybersecurity apparatuses were so evident, it was thought by many that the Cloud was a place where states had no ultimate competence or maybe even a role to play; they were seen as too slow, too dumb, too easily outwitted by using the right browser. ⁷ States would be cored out, component by component, until nothing was left but a well-armed health insurance scheme with its own World Cup team. In the long run, that may still perhaps be the outcome, with modern liberal states taking their place next to ceremonial monarchs, stripped of all but symbolic authority, not necessarily replaced but displaced and misplaced to one side. But now we hear the opposite, equally brittle conclusion that the Cloud is only the state, that it equals the state and that its totality (figural, potential) is intrinsically totalitarian. Despite all, I wouldn ’ t take that bet either.

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