The Stack On Software and Sovereignty

1. See William Gibson ’ s Sprawl trilogy novel Mona Lisa Overdrive (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1988) , and MVRDV ’ s drafting of “ cyberspace ” in Metacity/Datatown (Rottterdam: 010 Publishers) (1999).

1. Also MVRDV KM3: Excursions on Capacity (Barcelona: Actar, 2006).

1. Adam Greenfield, Against the Smart City (New York: Do Projects, 2013).

1. See Patrik Schumacher ’ s evolving parametricist manifestos that list many of his key claims on behalf his understanding of this design methodology: “ Parametricism as Style — Parametricist Manifesto, ” 2008, http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/Parametricism%20as%20Style.htm.

1. Keller Easterling discusses this consultant-driven urbanism in The Action Is the Form: Victor Hugo ’ s TED Talk (London: Strelka Press, 2012).

1. We are left to wonder who the real architects of the architecture actually are: Zaha Hadid, Cisco, or McKinsey? Shall we now acknowledge the collaborations with more transparency, and in doing so expand the landscape of parameters that can be admitted into a Luhmannian design strategy? See also Sam Jaco, “ Where Cities Talk to Money, ” Domus, no. 970, June 19, 2013, http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2013/06/10/where\_cities\_talktomoney.html.

1. See J. G. Ballard, Super-Cannes (New York: Picador, 2001), a novel of seething, barely suppressed mayhem, set in an exclusive technology park enclave.

1. Greenfield, Against the Smart City.

1. The urban armatures of Masdar City are in some places raised off the ground like server racks in a data center, allowing the replacement of components ’ building parts to be done quickly from backstage.

1. Gilbert Simondon, a French philosopher, sees the individual as a process — through individuation rather than as fixed entity. Neither matter nor form is fixed, as they too go through a process of development. See Simondon ’ s The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Individuation; L’individu et sa gene se physico-biologiquè (Paris: University Presses of France, 1964); and Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1989). On Agamben ’ s take on the apparatus, see Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Deleuze offered a strikingly different interpretation of Foucault ’ s dispositif in his “ What Is a Dispositif? ” in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. T. J. Armstrong (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 159 – 168.

1. Agamben makes extensive use of such theo-politico-etymological binaries to push his arguments forward, for example, his well-known, “ Anthropological Machine, ” which differentiates humans from animals according to their inclusion or exclusion from political representability. See his The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

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1. I use the American program to indicate both architectural programme (in British English) and computational program. It is precisely the promiscuous ambiguity between one and the other that I wish to convey. After the appearance of the computer but before the mobile phone, Reyner Banham called for a revolution in the technologization of the environment, a complete folding of architectural and cybernetic programs. Reyner Banham, “ Architecture after 1960, ” Architectural Review 127 (1960): 253 – 260. See also Anthony Vidler, “ Toward a Theory of Architectural Program, ” October 106 (2003): 59 – 74. For a fascinating discussion of the role of program as a technique of provocation in the late-1970s architectural avant-garde, see Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi, “ Two Architects 10 Questions on Program Rem Koolhaas + Bernard Tschumi, ” Praxis 8: Journal of Writing and Building, May 18, 2006.

1. It may be a matter of debate whether for parametricism that a shift away from representation is at work, or whether the style has introduced a formal vocabulary for the indexical expression of fast finance in building form. Schumacher, however, may not find this such a problem. See “ I Am Trying to Imagine a Radical Free Market Urbanism: Conversation between Peter Eisenman and Patrik Schumacher, ” Log 28 (Summer 2013). However, this is not the only perspective available. Luciana Parisi has outlined a more promising alternative grammar of algorithmic thought and practice in contrast to deterministic homeostasis and formal closure in her Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Instead, (through her reading of Alfred North Whitehead) architecture is staged as a mereotopology of points, parts, and wholes, and put into motion by algorithmic machines toward open-ended, ultimately contingent and indeterminate cascades of formation, information, and deformation. It overflows the authority of a given designer, design, or transactional urban context, and in this way, algorithmic “ thought ” escapes from stylistic, methodological, or economic strategic fields and becomes an alien machinic irruption into urban fabric according to its own self-directed aesthetic and procedural programs. The torsion between individual points resolving continuous surfaces and the mutualism between the smooth and the striated (the work of parametricism) as a platform logic refocuses attention on the agency of envelopes and surficial complexities to mediate those programs. This serves the critical path of connection between the larger career of algorithmic operation in The Stack and the agency of the line, envelope, and epidermis to organize its effects.

1. Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “ The Politics of the Envelope, ” Volume 17 (November 2008): 76 – 105.

1. Without rehearsing Zaera-Polo ’ s entire schema here, suffice that he focuses on four envelope types (flat-horizontal, spherical, flat-vertical, and vertical) and the types of polities they configure. The flat-horizontal envelope, such as a very large airport, stadium, or big box retail, organizes flow into artificial environments; the spherical, which dislodges representation and function and has the most to offer for the presentation of building facility; the flat-vertical, which presents a sectional diagram, organized tessellation, and segmentation of public and private at the plinth; and the vertical, which works at a much larger perceptual scale and organizes variation within a projection of power.

1. Zaera-Polo ’ s schema is meant to index the architectural envelope ’ s status quo and provides terms of speculation on what it might do differently. He concludes that we think of the politics of the envelope as a set of possible strategic maneuvers and tactical tricks that can be insinuated into projects as a supplement to a client ’ s conservative plans, but which can restructure spatial publics in ways to which he may not be attentive and incapable of perceiving. For him, while his politics of the envelope is pragmatist design within the presumed formats of capital cultures, modulations in the envelope might constitute a transformation in the possible enrollment of publics and of the urban-scale diagram of their configuration, and thereby a new political ecology of things and people. We can certainly add to his index as needed and expand it perhaps to include the scope of interfaces accounted for as The Stack. What about the megacity slums and shanties that are arguably the dominant urban typology of our era? Would their envelope be the flopping door, a shifting envelope as unclear as the barriers between legal and alegal occupation? Is the whole favela one vast shared envelope, or should we look instead at each individual construction? Should we assume that its politics of the envelope can be deduced by measuring operations at the aggregate scale or the individual? To add a fifth wall to the taxonomy, we might also nominate the elongated wedge, exemplified by the US border fence, the Israeli security barrier, parts of the Berlin Wall, or any of the hundreds of similar geopolitical membranes that have appeared in recent years. It is, in some ways, our moment ’ s most characteristic political envelope, and at least as much as the original four typologies, its spatial, political performance is guaranteed by an animal physicality irrespective of whatever ideological symbolism may accompany that concrete posture ’ s purpose. The elongated wedge represented aspires to be an ideal envelope cleaving an absolute inside and outside, without hosting any regular interior program within itself, diluted by no perforation (the bunker and the camp depend on the wedge-like envelope but also host human habitation within them, one for protective exclusion the other for protective inclusion).

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1. Some updated version of Perec ’ s typologies, perhaps? Georges Perec, Species of Spaces (Melbourne: West Space, 2009).

1. For example, for the designer (or the User), the function of “ illumination ” can come from a window (architecture) or a lamp (furniture), sitting from a chair or a fold in the wall, cooling from a walk-in freezer or a refrigerator, and so on. Choosing which will be solved by fixed designs and which by unfixed, by architecture or by furniture (that is, by envelope or by apparatus), underwrites all programmatic strategies.

1. Perhaps, however, the disciplined section for which OMA and its descendant studios are known for will in time come to play a different but equally important role. Instead of registering and exacting an orderly subdivision of urban programs according to a deep sociological insight into these behaviors placed on an architectural stage, the fixing of program into an overdetermining plan will be more and more at odds with the normal flow of things. Instead of anticipating and accommodating the City’ s organic self-organization, sectional strategies of are used as a slowing, braking, and grating technique of resistance to those flows. They may be modern space ’ s revenge on the programmatic confusion of the virtual envelope.

1. Virilio remarks from the same interview, “ In this case too, if time is money, speed is power. This is why we are constantly in a race. What is a race? It means taking hold of power by getting there first. And at the same time we are on horseback, on foot or driving a car. It ’ s very clear that speed = power, and power = speed, and instantaneity, ubiquitousness and immediacy are the prerogatives of the divine. ” Quoted from the filmed interview with an interview with Sylv è re Lotringer “ Itineraries of the Catastrophe, ” Film presented by Lotringer at Mandrake Bar, Los Angeles, July 1, 2007.

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Notes

1. See Brian Massumi. “ Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible, ” Architectural Design, Hypersurface Architecture 68, no. 5/6 (May/June 1998): 16 – 25.

1. Maximum liquidity partitioned by a security barrier that ironically also causes massive flooding.

1. The exhibition Native Land/Stop-Eject, curated by Paul Virilio and Raymond Depardon at Cartier Fondation, Paris, 2008-09 promoted the estimation that 645 million people will be displaced by wars and other catastrophes by 2050. Today it ’ s estimated that there are perhaps 300 million internal illegal immigrants within China. Mostly these are migrants from rural areas who live in major cities like Beijing and the southern factory metropoles without the appropriate hukou, or urban license. They often make their way without official social services and schools for their children, let alone voting rights. Even though they have crossed no national border, they can be counted with the other hundreds of millions of alegal migrants, stateless persons, and stateless ethnic groups. Taken together, perhaps they represent a kind of transnational political prototype of whatever may follow the modern Westphalian model of state and sovereignty. If a shared relationship to urban infrastructure is a source, if not the source, of that sovereign model to come, what public do they constitute? What urbanism should they demand? What, if any, cosmpolitanism do they enable or deflate? Outside the law, are they the left-behind or the avant-garde?

1. Ricardo Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll, Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, and Elle Mehrmand. Videos of the tool explained and in action are on the B.A.N.G. Lab page at http://vimeo.com/ banglab. See also Electronic Disturbance Theater, and B.a.n.g. Lab. Sustenance, A Play for All Trans [ ] Borders (New York: Printed Matter, 2010).

1. Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 17.

1. It also begs the question as to the City’ s right to the User. To what extent does the City have a corresponding “ right ” to use the User for its own creative purposes? The tracking of phones for spatial service optimization is a relatively banal example, but points toward controversies to come that cannot be solved by the axiomatization of individual privacy.

1. The way that TBIT activates the virtual territorial envelope can also be compared to US federal efforts to augment the physical international border with electronics sensors. In Sustenance, B.A.N.G. Lab notes that “ in March 2010, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that the virtual portion of the separation barrier erected along the U.S.-Mexico border thus far had proven ineffective, manifesting numerous technical glitches (notably, a hyper-vigilant inability to distinguish among wind, sage brush, and human beings). ” They ask, “ Did an aesthetic unconscious will the fence ’ s malfunction? Wabbit trans/nation? Mayan meets queer technologies? ‘ Earth Telephone ’ ? Sleep Dealer ’ s nod to node-to-node resistance? It ’ s your turn to try to circumvent borders with this ‘ true story ’ — the borders falsely constructed between the university, the gallery, the museum, the library … and the ‘ real world. ’ ” The project is described in greater detail in B.A.N.G. Lab ’ s “ Sustenance: A Play for All Trans [ ] Borders ” http://www.thing. net/\~rdom/Sustenance.pdf. They also note that their tool is hardly the first, or most reliable, navigation technology available: “ The outdoor GPS devices from Garmin and Magellan are indeed useful aids for the long distance overland orienteering required to walk into the United States. Readily available at Wal-Mart and Best Buy in Mexico, they have been utilized for a long time in border crossings. In other words, capitalism long ago accomplished what the atavistic right and neoliberal administrations fear most! ”

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1. In his capacity as University of California, San Diego visual arts professor, Ricardo Dominguez bore the brunt of the official backlash against TBIT, including a formal accounting inquiry instigated by the university at the request of at least three Republican congressmen. On August 31, 2010, Glenn Beck launched his site, The Blaze, with the headline, in all capital letters, “ UCSD PROFESSORS: DISSOLVE U.S. — GIVE GPS PHONES WITH EXPLICIT POETRY TO ILLEGALS FOR BORDER CROSSING. ”

1. Michel Foucault and Michel Senellart, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Colle ge de France,̀

1978 – 79 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

1. We will revisit the potential of the User as geopolitical subject and “ the death of user ” in the User chapter.

1. As compared to, for example, Aaron Koblin ’ s “ Flight Patterns, ” 2006, http://www .aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/index.html. For a more nuanced discussion of the telescopic scales of planetary striation, see Reza Negarastani ’ s lecture, “ The Topos of the Earth: Telescopic and Stereoscopic Visions of the Abyss-in-One, ” at the James Gallery, New York, February 21, 2013.

1. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

1. See Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976). The recent lineage includes the New Monumentality, Fuhimiko Maki ’ s Collective Form, Kenneth Frampton ’ s Megaform, Italian neorationalists ’ typological piazza, Oswald Mathias Ungers ’ s Grossform, and Rem Koolhaas ’ s Bigness. See Antonio Negri ’ s essay, “ On Rem Koolhaas, ” and Martin Van Schaik and Otakar M á čel, Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations, 1956 – 76 (Munich: Prestel, 2005). See also Sabrina Van Der Ley and Markus Richter, Megastructure Reloaded: Vision ä re Stadtentw ü rfe Der Sechzigerjahre Reflektiert Von Zeitgen ö ssischen K ü nstlern = Visionary Architecture and Urban Design of the Sixties Reflected by Contemporary Artists (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008).

1. The Bilbao region in Spain experienced significant economic growth concurrent with the opening of the Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim Bilbao and opening in 1997. The “ Bilbao effect ” is a termed coined by Peter Eisenman to refer to the misguided hope of second-tier cites that adding some flashy new architectural icons would magically boost their city ’ s brand and regional economy.

1. Perhaps a future Erich von Daniken will interpret Foster ’ s structures as proof of alien intelligence on Earth ’ s moon.

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1. Yes, “ Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space. ”

1. Easterling reaches the same conclusion for different reasons in “ New Monuments: Keller Easterling on Norman Foster ’ s Crystal Island, ” Artforum International 46, no. 10 (Summer 2008).

1. There is no lack of attention in the popular press as to how Cloud platforms affect Bay Area urbanism. See, for example, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, “ How the Tech Industry Is Quietly Changing the Face of American Cities, ” Gizmodo, June 18, 2013, and Daniel Safarik, “ The Spell of Hot Desk, ” Unfrozen (blog), May 28, 2013, http://arch-unfrozen.tumblr.com/post/51615608029/ the-spell-of-hot-desk.

1. A grand organizational chart, like D ü rer ’ s massive print, Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I.

1. See the Google 2.0 campus video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3v4rIG8kQA.

1. See for example, no author cited, “ Googledome, or Temple of Doom? ” http://www .economist.com/news/business/21645747-tech-firms-are-building-pharaonic-head-offices-again -googledome-or-temple-doom, March 7, 2015, and Nick Allen, “ Google Faces Opposition to New Headquarters, ” Telegraph, February 25, 2015. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/ google/11435802/Google-faces-opposition-to-new-headquarters.html.

1. As this book was going to press, we learned that the Mountain View city council voted for Linkedin ’ s alternative proposal for the site, perhaps preventing at least delaying, the eventual construction of some version of Ingalls ’ and Heatherwick ’ s plan. See Conor Dougherty “ Google Loses to Linkedin in Silicon Valley Headquarters Pitch, ” New York Times, May 6, 2015, http:// nyti.ms/1F68CMI.

1. Adam Greenfield compares “ Zee Town ” to company towns of years past in “ Is Facebook ’ s ‘ Zee Town ’ More Than Just a Mark Zuckerberg Vanity Project? ” Guardian, March 10, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/10/facebook-zee-town-mark-zuckerberg.

1. See Kirk Johnson and Nick Wingfield, “ As Amazon Stretches, Seattle ’ s Downtown Is Reshaped, ” New York Times, August 25, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/us/ as-amazon-stretches-seattles-downtown-is-reshaped.html.

1. See for example, Colin Marshall, “ Amazon ’ s New Downtown Seattle HQ: Victory for the City over Suburbia? ” Guardian, May 22, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/may/22/ amazon-futuristic-new-downtown-seattle-hq-microsoft-nintendo.

1. For a partial list of the locations of Amazon fulfillment centers in North America, see Jennifer Dunn, “ Locations of Amazon Fulfillment Centers, ” Bottom Line (blog), March 17, 2014, http:// outright.com/blog/locations-of-amazon-fulfillment-centers-2/.

1. In the essay “ Utopia as Replication, ” in Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), Fredri Jameson draws links between Walmart and certain infrastructural utopian potentiality.

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Day around a Warehouse, Their Every Move Dictated by Computers Checking Their Work. Is This the Future of the British Workplace? ” Mail Online, March 1, 2013, http://www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-2286227/Amazons-human-robots-Is-future-British-workplace.html. Amazon also purchased Kiva Systems, a leading manufacturer of warehouse automation systems. See Scott Kirsner, “ Amazon Buys Warehouse Robotics Start-Up Kiva Systems for \$775 Million, ” Boston.com, March 19, 2012, http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2012/03/amazon\_buys \_warehouse\_robotics.html.

1. Stowe Boyd, “ If Amazon Is the Future of Work, Then Be Afraid, ” Gigaom Research, February

22, 2013, http://research.gigaom.com/2013/02/if-amazon-is-the-future-of-work/.

1. This dynamic is the central problem drawn out in Jaron Lanier in Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), and it leads him to advocate for, among other things, a revaluation of how tacit human knowledge might be rewarded by ubiquitous micropayments. See also Jaron Lanier and Douglas Rushkoff, “ The Local-Global Flip, or, ‘ The Lanier Effect, ’ ” Edge, August 29, 2011, http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip.

1. See Jobs ’ s presentation of the proposed Campus 2 to the Cupertino City Council at Cupertino City Channel, “ Steve Jobs Presents to the Cupertino City Council (6/7/11), ” YouTube, June 7, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh\_M.

1. Alexandra Lange, “ New Apple HQ, 1957, ” Design Observer, June 11, 2011, http:// designobserver.com/feature/new-apple-hq-1957/28018.

1. Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, trans. Gavin Bowd (New York: Vintage International, 2007). More than one person has also remarked to me that their first reaction to seeing Jobs/Foster ’ s proposal was to recall the “ silver seed flying to a new home in the Sun ” from the Neil Young song, “ After the Gold Rush. ”

1. An impression that is not discouraged by the company ’ s international tax avoidance strategies. See Nelson D. Schwartz, “ Apple ’ s Web of Tax Shelters Saved It Billions, Panel Finds, ” New York Times, May 20, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/apple-avoided-billions -in-taxes-congressional-panel-says.html.

1. On the “ disappearance of the outside ” that comprehensive views of the whole planet suggest or enforce, see Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, eds., Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013).

1. Geoff Manaugh, “ The Planetary Super-Surface of San Bernardino County, ” BLDGBLOG, April

15, 2013, http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-planetary-super-surface-of-san.html.

1. For a glimpse into the everyday life of workers at Apple City in Zhengzhou, see this photo essay, Gilles Sabrie, “ Off-Hour Escapes for China ’ s Workers, ” New York Times, July 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/07/16/world/asia/20130717-CHINA.html. The accompanying text states, “ Unlike Apple ’ s modernistic new campus in California, which will be surrounded by apricot trees, the Zhengzhou facility has all the charm of a penal colony. Employees, who must wear matching uniforms, say supervisors routinely curse and yell. ”

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1. Herbert G. Wells, The Time Machine (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984).

1. Perhaps the most significant Cloud megastructure is not one built to house the higher brain functions of a private global platform, but one built to house the intelligence and surveillance operations of a global platform in the form of a state, namely, the United States, and specifically the National Security Agency ’ s Utah Data Center. See “ Utah Data Center, ” Wikipedia, November 7, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah\_Data\_Center, and the helpful “ NSA Utah Data Center: Serving Our Nation’s Intelligence Community, ” NSA Utah Data Center, https://nsa.gov1.info/ utah-data-center/. If there ’ s one building the in the world where The Stack lives, it might be here. I think not, actually.

Address Layer

1. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and William Scott Palmer (London: G. Allen & , 1912), 276.

1. Franz Kafka, “ An Imperial Message, ” in The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, trans. Edwin Muir and Willa Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 1 – 2.

1. In some objects, you can see the entire Stack at once.

1. See “ CeNSE, ” Wikipedia, March 21, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeNSE. If Cisco had Planetary Skin and HP has Central Nervous System of the Earth, then we eagerly anticipate claims of the Planetary Immune System and the Earth Lymph Node Network.

1. Beginning in 1913, the International Map Project (also known as the Millionth Map, because of its use of 1:1,000,000 scale standards, and by the number of total maps necessary to complete the set) sought to subdivide the Earth ’ s surface according to a standard alphanumeric gridded matrix of longitudes and latitudes. The Central Bureau of the Map of the World was established, and a few thousand maps were produced using the standard system. Germany withdrew in 1914 as the European powers were more preoccupied with reinscribing borders than capturing their status. Later it was assumed by the United Nations in 1953, after which it lost momentum.

1. Cory Doctorow, “ Lockdown: The Coming War on General-purpose Computing, ” Boing Boing, January 10, 2012, http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html.

1. This is not lost on the handful of Internet of Things consortia that are positioning for a position of “ generative entrenchment ” with regards to ubiquitous computing protocols, languages, and standards. Among these are the All Seen Alliance (Qualcomm, Microsoft, LG, Cisco, among others), the Industrial Internet Consortium (GE, Intel, IBM, AT & T, among many others) and the Open Interconnect Consortium (Intel, Samsung, Broadcom, Dell, and others). Just as for the circuit versus packet-switching battles during the early years of what became the Internet, for the emergent Internet of Things, which standards can achieve dominant platform status and which are forgotten will help determine the winners and losers among all the alliance member companies. Bruce Sterling argues that the interests end-users and consumers will likely not be wellserved by how such standards are adopted. See his book The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014). One lesson of TCP/IP ’ s adoption over OSI is that whatever platform can make use of existing systems fastest and easiest has an advantage over those that demand all new implementation. What turn out to be the real “ killer apps ” of Internet of Things (indeterminate at best at the time of writing) will in turn drive what (and who) is linked with when, where and when, and so it may be that end-user adoption will be a function of needs after all. However, whether those “ end users ” are advertising companies, search engines, or actual persons is an equally undecided question

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1. It also inspires a new wave of currency speculators interested in refashioning “ money ” as a system of valuation, exchange, and references.

1. This is taken up in a different way by Hiroki Azuma in his “ Postal-Ontological ” in Ontological, Postal Basis: For Jacques Derrida (Tokyo: Shinch ōsha, 1998).

1. That axis of resistance was core, for example, to the situationists ’ reimagination of the modern city through unitary urbanism, and the impetus for Guy Debord to scramble (or unscramble) le Plan de Paris into the psychogeographic Naked City, though for Debord, as for others, the impetus is not necessarily to retake the territory but unmake the possibility of a universal addressability in the first place. See Guy Debord, “ Guide psychog é ographique de Paris, ” in Discours sur les passions de l’amour (Copenhagen: Permild & Rosengreen, 1955).

1. See Michael Witmore, “ Text: A Massively Addressable Object, ” Wine Dark Sea (blog), December 31, 2010, http://winedarksea.org/?p=926, and “ Digital Inquiry, ” Digital Humanities @ the UW-Madison, http://dighum.wisc.edu/digitalinquiry/.

1. Witmore wrote, “ The book or physical instance, then, is one of many levels of address. Backing out into a larger population, we might take a genre of works to be the relevant level of address. Or we could talk about individual lines of print; all the nouns in every line; every third character in every third line. All of this variation implies massive flexibility in levels of address. And more provocatively: when we create a digitized population of texts, our modes of address become more and more abstract: all concrete nouns in all the items in the collection, for example, or every item identified as a ‘ History ’ by Heminges and Condell in the First Folio. Every level is a provisional unity: stable for the purposes of address, but also: stable because it is the object of address. Books are such provisional unities. So are all the proper names in the phone book. … To have this thought is to dispose relevant elements in the dataset in much the same way a spreadsheet aggregates a text in ways that allow for layered access. A reader is a maker [emphasis mine] of such a momentary dispositif, and reading might be described as the continual redisposition of levels of address in this manner. We need a phenomenology of these acts, one that would allow us to link quantitative work on a culture ’ s ‘ built environment ’ of words to the kinesthetic and imaginative dimensions of life at a given moment. ” Witmore, “ Text: A Massively Addressable Object. ”

1. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

1. See Keller Easterling, “ An Internet of Things, ” e-flux, no. 31 (January 2012), http://worker01 .e-flux.com/pdf/article\_8946204.pdf, and Molly Wright Steenson, “ Architectures of Information: Christopher Alexander, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte & MIT ’ s Architecture Machine

414

Notes

Group ” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University School of Architecture, 2014). Richard Saul Wurman is widely credited with the first use of the term information architecture, and for this we may be glad. He was also the founder of TED, and for this we may be sad.

1. Consider the following regarding potential interfaces between viral systems of various scales. John Baichtal, “ 3D Printed Model of a Virus Self Assembles When Shaken, ” MAKE, August 16, 2011, http://makezine.com/2011/08/16/3d-printed-model-of-a-virus-self-assembles -when-shaken/.

1. Cory Doctorow, “ Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-men of the Meta-Utopia, ” Well, August 26, 2011.

1. Yann Moulier-Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism (London: Polity Press, 2012).

1. Open Internet of Things Assembly, “ Bill of Rights ” http://postscapes.com/open-internet-of -things-assembly. (July 17, 2012).

1. For an overview, see “ Universally Unique Identifier, ” Wikipedia, November 1, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally\_unique\_identifier. However, in a practical context, the separation between designation and the designated is not so clean. For example, with some GUID (globally unique identifier) schemes used to identify unique information in distributed systems, instances (such as file system IDs) are sometimes generated by an algorithm that incorporates the network interface ID of the User’ s computer as well the exact moment at which the ID was generated, measured in 100-nanosecond increments since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar.

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