DESIGN AND USER<\/em>
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\nThe book dives deeper into its own hubris: not only does it take on the challenge of drawing a new and up-to-date geopolitical world map, but it does so with a view to make the whole planet available for (re-)design. The author himself presents it as \u201ca book of design theory.\u201d By that, one should not understand a manual of political theory for designers and architects; what is at stake is not the translation of a discourse about governance into one of design. Rather, design is recognised here as the key problem \u2013 as well as the primary mode of actualisation \u2013 of the new configurations of power that the book attempts to grasp.
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\nIn this regard, a close companion to \u201cThe Stack\u201d is Keller Easterling\u2019s \u201cExtrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space\u201d (Verso, 2014). Arguably, once brought together under the same lens, these two works open up an important new chapter in the examination of the problem of agency which has haunted the architectural discourse since the early seventies, offering a new line of flight out of the dialectic of autonomy and contingency. Following that very line, it is no longer a question of assessing whether architecture\u2019s ambitions are aligned with the discourse of power; and if they aren\u2019t, debating whether architects should withdraw into an introspective yet righteous disciplinary practice, or to engage and negotiate with murky urban agendas. Here we are venturing beyond the political \u201cas a discursive realm transcendent of the physical urban polis itself\u201d \u2013 a framework within which architecture was expected to merely symbolize, manifest, or actualise a political project existing somewhere else. The sovereignty of platforms, the power of infrastructure space, are essentially immanent to their technical organisation, to their spatial configuration, to their \u201cdisposition\u201d. As such, design is to such forms of power what rhetoric is to forum-based politics: a crucial means of bending opinions, of activating policies, of doing politics. Another way of expressing the notion of \u201ccomputation as governance\u201d is to speak about the conflation of \u201carchitectural, computational, and political\u201d programs into one, which is nowhere more manifest than in the operation of platforms. Increasingly, governance is what we get as an attachment to service-provision.
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\nAs design moves to the forefront of this new political geography in the making, it brings alongside with it an unescapable question: design for whom? Who is the target user? Far from reducing platforms to their coercive effects, in several occasions the book highlights their emancipatory potential; namely, how platforms may help users to circumvent policies of exclusion and denial or rights that states implement against them. Taking the example of illegalised migrants crossing into the US helped by GPS devices they purchased at a WalMart in Mexico, the idea that platforms grant users access to their infrastructure regardless of their status as (non-)citizen in the eyes of a state is particularly telling about the on-going reconfiguration of power relations that this overlapping of sovereignties is generating. On the one hand, everyone is increasingly a subject of multiple sovereignties and jurisdictions simultaneously, which, at times, opens up the possibility of playing one against the other in order to pursue one\u2019s own goals. But more importantly, the hybridisation of states and platforms profoundly transforms the status of the user-subject \u2013 the latter no longer being attached to a given individual human, but rather to a mere position within a system, a data shadow, that can interchangeably be occupied by a crowd or only a segment of an individual entity. Deleuze\u2019s \u201cdividuals\u201d are pullulating. The author is right to quickly shift the question of \u201cdesign for whom?\u201d, to one of \u201cdesign of whom?\u201d. As we entrust platforms with the management and mediation of ever more facets of our lives, the particular architecture of each of those platforms ends up, by extension, delineating the contours of our own contingent subjectivity. What is more, the universally inclusive character of platforms \u2013 most often a mere manifestation of their ruthlessly expansionist agenda \u2013 means that we, as in us humans, are just one of the different substances that new composite target users are made of. And perhaps already a secondary one.
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\nRather than warning us against it, the author appears to welcome the emergence of not- quite-human platform users and their gain of importance as valid subjects of planetary governance. After all, isn\u2019t the excessive anthropocentrism of human societies largely responsible for their messing up of the whole planet\u2019s ecosystem? This is where \u201cThe Stack\u201d\u2019s most daring proposition is articulated: a call for a form of design \u2013 and consequently a form of politics \u2013 that doesn\u2019t start nor end with the individual human as its subject. Reminding of Donna Haraway\u2019s invocation of the \u201ccyborg\u201d as a potential figure of emancipatory politics to be constructed, or Sadie Plant\u2019s call to move from \u201ca question of liberation\u201d of women and men to one of \u201cengineering\u201d, the kind of design invoked in the book is one that addresses its subjects and objects in a single movement. Design as an equation in two variables.
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\nAs inspiring as this idea may be, the book does not expand much on its concrete implications and possible applications. The question of the imagination and design of new valid subjects for the planet can only be a politically pregnant one when posed alongside the companion question: \u201cdesign by whom?\u201d. On this critical point, the book would have benefitted from a more grounded discussion on how platforms are to be appropriated and inflected, how they can be shaped by users\u2019 desires, how new users and subjects are to be shaped in return, and who will actually design the Stack to come. The West may well be undergoing another \u201cCopernican trauma\u201d with regard to the dislocation of the individual human subject from the centre of the computational universe. But the impending climate catastrophe also means that there is little time to muse over the fabrication of the post-human(ist) subject of the future; unless we \u2013 the privileged users of the very technology that largely contributes to climatic deregulation \u2013 declare that, as we endeavour to re-design ourselves and our world as hybrids, we do not mind doing without the radical subjective alterity of the indigenous communities in the front lines of climate change, which are being wiped out at a faster rate than the Western capacity to learn from their already hybrid cosmologies and subjectivities. No doubt that we need the far-reaching gaze of speculation to push the limits of the possible today; but speculative efforts won\u2019t be of much help if they don\u2019t consolidate in a theory of design and politics capable of supporting action in the present \u2013 within and against its emergencies.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Diagram of the Stack by Metahaven (2016) A new Leviathan has risen. It has wrapped itself around the entire planet, spreading its fibre-optic tentacles through the depth of ocean beds, voraciously feeding on rare-earth metals and dwindling energy reserves, regurgitating trillions of interconnected smart things that mediate nearly every inch, second, and calorie of humans\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":651,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[45,39],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":673,"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644\/revisions\/673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsbrg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}