The User’s Right to the City

Planetary-scale Computation and the Right to the City Benjamin T. Busch Matriculation Number: 6823 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Master of Arts in Raumstrategien of the Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin Supervised by Prof. Dr. Günter Nest and Dr. Elisa T. Bertuzzo November 2017

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Abstract

What are the implications of laying claim to “the right to the city” today? The phrase, coined by Henri Lefebvre in Paris in 1967, has come to be used as a rallying call for a variety of political movements and humanitarian institutions worldwide, yet its transformative potential remains hindered by habitual reluc-tance to engage with (and not only against) the technological infrastructures that sustain and shape urban life. In this thesis, I confront recent scholarly work that attempts to renew the right to the city for the Information Age, arguing that the totality of planetary-scale computation demands from city-dwellers a much more nuanced understanding of their relationship to technical infrastructures than previously sup-posed. Employing sociologist and design theorist Benjamin Bratton’s conceptual model of The Stack, I lay the groundwork for what I refer to as “the user’s right to the city,” a concept that attempts to fuse the revolutionary subject of Lefebvre’s right to the city with the computational user-subject of Bratton’s ac-cidental megastructure. Considering Lefebvre’s thought on autogestion (self-management) in relation to Bratton’s analytical model of planetary-scale computation, futuristic promises like full automation appear less as happy eventualities and more as inevitabilities that demands a renewed commitment to urban life, both from those who claim the right to the city and those who design the infrastructures they depend on. In the end, “the user’s right to the city” will not come about automatically: it is a figure on the horizon that must be continually struggled toward, an articulation of a concrete utopia no less impossible than any seemingly ineluctable dystopia.

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Declaration of Authorship

I hereby certify that this thesis has been composed by me and is based on my own work, unless stated otherwise. No other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgement in this thesis. All refer-ences and verbatim extracts have been quoted, and all sources have been acknowledged. Benjamin T. Busch Berlin, November 28, 2017

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Table of Contents

Abstract 2 Declaration of Authorship 3 Table of Contents 4 Introduction 5 1. The Right to the City 7

Defining the Right to the City 7

Beyond the Right to Information 14 2. Sensing the Stack 21

Infrastructure and Sovereignty 21

The Stack and Its Layers 26 3. The User’s Right to the City 51 Concluding Remarks 59 Bibliography 61

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Introduction

The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life. It does not matter whether the urban fabric encloses the countryside and what survives of peasant life, as long as the “urban,” place of encounter, priority of use value, inscription in space of a time promoted to the rank of a supreme resource among all resources, finds its morphological base and its practico-material realization.

—Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City1

Part of the design brief for The Stack is to disseminate a repertoire of accidents that might frustrate the more unwanted forms of centripetal incarceration. The ultimate challenge for this is to conjure alien genres of urbanization from the bounded universality of the generic User subject position: not an undead Kantian cos-mopolitanism but a geopolitical hypermaterialism for which the “right to the city,” and therefore to The Stack, is an essential suffrage of all meaningful Users, human and otherwise.

—Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack2

Planetary-scale computation has so drastically altered the geopolitical landscape that the brittle founda-

tions of national sovereignty have, for better or for worse, begun to tremble, crack, and break apart. As

the contradictions and catastrophes brought on by the new global technical paradigm mount, so do the

myths invented to cope with an alienation that stretches deep down into the most private aspects of eve-

ryday life. My position is that, rather than attempting to revert to some romanticized “simpler” time before

the onset of planetary-scale computation, which for many reasons represents a reactionary and fantastical

tendency, it is crucial to renew political and philosophical commitments for the world today without

shying away from its increasing complexity and contradictory nature. In the pages below, I will take the

case of “the right to the city,” a political slogan with a deep theoretical background, as an example of a

political struggle that faces a present situation very different from the one in which originated, a situation

that demands a renewal of the original concept. Fifty years after the emergence of “the right to the city”

in the lead up to the May 1968 events in France, new attention is being given to the slogan and its prove-

nance in Henri Lefebvre’s theories surrounding it,3 whose eponymous 1967 essay first articulated the

1 Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 [1967]), 147–159, 158. 2 Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016), 153. “The term right to

the city comes from Henri Lefebvre, who developed an urban materialism quite different from the one described here, though not necessarily incompatible with it.” Ibid., 404n10.

3 Shaw and Graham, “An Informational Right to the City?”, in Antipode (February 2017); Shaw and Graham, eds., Our Digital Rights to the City, e-book (Oxford: Meatspace Press, February 2017); Verso Books, eds., The Right to the City: A Verso Report, e-book (London: Verso, November 2017). The Verso Books report includes Shaw and Graham’s article for Antipode. At the time of writing, all three resources are available for free. See Bibliography.

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concept of “le droit à la ville.” Taking stock of what sociologist and design theorist Benjamin Bratton refers

to a “Copernican trauma” of planetary-scale computation, whose concept extend from the de-centering

of humanity in the paradigm shift of the Copernican Revolution to the de-centering effect that machinic

intelligence has on humanity today,4 I will explore what it means today to claim “the right to the city” in

a changing technological–infrastructural context.

In the first section of this thesis, I begin by detailing a definition of “the right to the city,” recounting

the context in which it was first vocalized and tracing the concept through its originator’s wider body of

work on space, cities, and everyday life. I then go on to consider recent scholarly work in the field of

internet geography that picks up “the right to the city” and attempts to amend or renew it for the present

situation, which succeeds at offering a pertinent analysis but more or less fails at drawing practical conclu-

sions that might constitute a renewal of urban life today or in the future under the paradigm of planetary-

scale computation. In the second section, I turn to urban studies discourse surrounding the concept of

infrastructure as a way to start chipping away at the complexity surrounding any contemporary claim to

the right to the city with regard to the infrastructures necessary for the reproduction of urban life. I then

go on to a close reading of Benjamin Bratton’s book The Stack, which presents a “diagram” or model that

describes the present global situation through the metaphor of stack architecture and serves a scaffolding

onto which political and design interventions on infrastructural layers can be realized. The third and final

section explores the subject position of the “user” through Lefebvre and Bratton and proposes an amend-

ment of “the right to the city” as “the user’s right to the city,” exploring the problematics of the current

transformation or de-centering of human agency. The concluding remarks make a move toward the ex-

pansion of the notion of “the user’s right to the city,” where the concept of autogestion gains new currency

in relation to the technological infrastructures of today as well as those on the horizon, and where aliena-

tion plays a pivotal role.

4 Anil Bawa-Cavia has referred to this modern phenomenon as a Copernican humiliation or Turning trauma that

sees the human as just one possible situated embodiment of reason. “Turing should be added to that list of humilia-tions inflicted on the human, which we call modernity, traced from Copernicus to Darwin, Freud to Marx. With each humiliation comes its own unique trauma, but the decentering of our own rationality represents the endgame of enlightenment. It could be said that the best hope for modernity is for inhuman intelligence to escape its logos, to diagonalize out of its prescribed commitments, to construct its own alien logics. This might be the only solace we can offer for all those forms of agency cast as inhuman and assaulted to the point of annihilation by that project we call modernity.” See Bawa-Cavia, “The Inclosure of Reason.”

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1. The Right to the City

Defining the Right to the City

The “right to the city,” a slogan that came into widespread use largely out of the May 1968 events in

France, was first introduced by the sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), whose 1967

essay Le droit à la ville (The Right to the City)1 articulated an idea of the right to the city as part and parcel of

a wider political struggle aimed at collectively overcoming the capitalist mode of production. Since shortly

after the turn of the millennium, the idea of the right to the city has begun to gain traction in policy circles,

in academic discussions, and among activists, yet full appreciation of its power benefits from a deeper

understanding of Lefebvre’s oeuvre.2 And while those contemporary initiatives, in almost all their forms,

understand it to be a struggle to augment the rights of people living in the city against the rights of property

owners, that is to say to prioritize the use value of urban space over its exchange value, they also tend to

conceive of the right to the city as a mere liberal-democratic right.3 When the right to the city is reduced

to a symbolic right, in other words one that can be achieved through coded systems of political represen-

tation — i.e. integrated into municipal codes, charters, and constitutions — its revolutionary potential is

neutralized, and it becomes abstracted from social practice in everyday life. In order to figure some of the

complexity of the idea, I will start by considering Lefebvre’s own nuanced conception of the right to the

city in its eponymous essay, which sees the right to the city as an inalienable right to urban life that, while

utopian, seeks to go beyond the capitalist system as well as the nation state in its final instance.

Lefebvre’s The Right to the City, in comparison to his 1974 magisterial work The Production of Space, is

more a provocation, a polemical text inspired by a unique political moment, than an exhaustive academic

argument for its implementation. In it, he defines the right to the city somewhat ambiguously “like a cry

and a demand” in comparison to more conditional rights granted to citizens by the liberal-democratic

nation state.4 Unlike a conditional right, e.g. a right to nature, which arises in reaction to life in the city

segregated from it, the right to the city “can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to

1 Lefebvre’s eponymous article “Le droit à la ville,” L’homme et la société 6 (October–December 1967): 29–35

appeared in the lead-up to the May ’68 events. The article was later published as a chapter in the volume Le droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968), whose first English translation is published in Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (1996).

2 For specific initiatives and their pertinence to Lefebvre’s theories, see: Mark Purcell, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City.” See also Margit Mayer, “The “Right to the City” in Urban Social Movements,” and Peter Marcuse, “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City.”

3 Purcell, “Possible Worlds,” 142. 4 Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 158.

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urban life” that elevates the “urban” as a place of social encounter, privileging the practical use of urban

space by society over its monetary value.5 The Right to the City calls for the theoretical elaboration of an

idea of the city and urban society that, pertaining to the aims of the student occupations and workers’

strikes concurrent to the book’s publication, might overcome capitalism and the nation state’s enforce-

ment of its normative values. According to David Harvey, whose essay also titled “The Right to the City”

(2008) was published 12 years after the first English translation Le droit à la ville, the larger dynamics of

this period of civil unrest were animated by a Paris campaign to hinder the construction of an expressway

along the Seine, and the destruction of traditional neighborhoods for new, monolithic high-rise towers.6

Lefebvre, on the other hand, witnessed May ’68 at the university in Nanterre, a northwestern suburb of

Paris, where the movement started with student discussions at the Faculty of Sociology, where he taught.7

The rationalist functionalist campus in Nanterre, whose first building were completed in 1964 before the

5 Ibid., 158. 6 Harvey, 28. 7 Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space, 190.

Aerial view of the functionalist Nanterre campus with the rail line to Paris. Source: Stanek, Lefebvre on Space, 185.

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opening of the Faculty of Humanities in 1966, was located in the midst of shantytowns, industrial enter-

prises, and low-income housing projects for workers,8 “a ghetto of students and teachers situated in the

midst of other ghettos filled with the ‘abandoned,’ subject to the compulsions of production, and driven

into an extra-urban existence.”9 The campus in Nanterre, as a gathering of contradictions, became a “dif-

ferential space” antagonized by functionalist logics that produced a twofold segregation: functional and

social, industrial and urban, environment and experience.10 Additionally, the attempts of university au-

thorities, not only in Nanterre, to oppose students’ demands for a more liberated campus life (negated by

the physical environment of the modern functionalist campus with gender segregated dormitories), led to

activists’ demand for a “right to sexuality.”11 For Lefebvre, the right to the city was born of a dialectic

movement — “social marginality against centralization, anomie against norms, contestation against deci-

sions”12 — that saw centrality, at least temporarily, shift from the center to the periphery, linking them

inextricably as the movement spread from the suburbs to the city center.13 All the contradictions of 1960s

French society came to the surface.

Amid the May ‘68 uprisings, Lefebvre wrote The Urban Revolution, published in 1970. It is based on a

plurality of Lefebvre’s empirical observations: from the replacement and displacement of agricultural pro-

duction with industrial enterprises, to the capitalist domination of all spheres of production, consumption,

and reproduction; from the concentration of people in cities and the subsequent abandonment of the

countryside, to the diffusion of the city through urban sprawl. In the face of these developments, both

destructive and productive, he made a strategic hypothesis: “Society has been completely urbanized.”14 By

doing this, he positioned the city as the level at which the contradictions and alienating processes of capi-

talism become both visible and unbearable, pushing city dwellers to struggle for a more adequate and just

social space. Lefebvre recognizes that his hypothesis of complete urbanization is virtual and deferred to

the future, but he nonetheless contends that it will be realized in time. Urban society, or “the urban,” a

result of this ever-virtual complete urbanization, is not defined as an accomplished historical reality, but

on the contrary “as a horizon, an illuminating vitality.”15 The urban “remains in a state of dispersed and

alienated actuality, a kernel and virtuality. What the eyes and analysis perceive on the ground can at best

pass for the shadow of a future object in the light of a rising sun.”16 For Lefebvre, another world is not

8 Lefebvre, The Explosion, 104. 9 Ibid., 105. 10 Stanek, op. cit., 186. 11 Ibid., 187–8. 12 Lefebvre, op. cit., 108. 13 Stanek, op. cit., 190. 14 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 1. 15 Ibid., 16–17. 16 Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 148.

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only possible, but inevitable, and urban society, catalyzed by the struggle of the working classes, will be

the agent of its realization. In other words, the right to the city as portrayed by Lefebvre belongs to a

revolutionary movement not set on enhancing individual rights under the sovereign governance of nation

states, but rather determined to go beyond the state, to abolish capitalism and with it the liberal-demo-

cratic conception of national sovereignty in favor of another, albeit uncertain, paradigm of generalized

self-management.

At this point, it should be sufficiently clear that Lefebvre was a dedicated Marxist, but by no means

was he an orthodox one, so his political convictions warrant further clarification. Lefebvre was vehemently

critical of the totalitarian state socialism that came about in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China,

and, like many of his peers in France, his work can be seen as a principled reaction against bureaucratic

socialism and the state in general as much as it is against capitalism.17 In sum, Lefebvre’s work gives rise

to “a Marxism that rejects the state, that maintains itself as an open and evolving project, and that comes

to understand itself as more than anything a democratic project, as a struggle by people to shake off the

control of capital and the state in order to manage their affairs for themselves.”18 This heretical Marxism,

including his ongoing critique of Stalinist theory and practice, led him to be ousted from the French Com-

munist Party in 1958. Dealing with this break in an essay titled “The Withering Away of the State,” he

elaborates on a series of indispensable political and theoretical points at the heart of his conception of the

state and politics. Among them is the Marxist idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat, through which the

majority of society gains control over the decisions that determine society. Counter to the orthodoxy, he

is unyielding in his conviction that this dictatorship cannot be imposed by any one workers’ party through

seizing the state.19 Lefebvre argues instead for the collective self-governing of society as a means for the

state to be made redundant and wither away. The idea of autogestion, usually translated as “self-manage-

ment,” therefore obtains acute importance. Lefebvre and others generalized the term, which originated

from the specific practice of workers in a factory taking control of the means of production and managing

production themselves, to imagine autogestion, or self-management, in all aspects of life.20 As a practical

critique of the “ideology of participation,” which sees self-management subordinated to the interests of an

17 Purcell, op. cit., 144. 18 Ibid., 145. 19 Lefebvre, State Space World, 87. 20 Purcell, op. cit., 147. The term “autogestion” may also be traced back to the Seerbo-Croatian term samou-

pravljanje (self-management). Under Tito’s leadership, the socialist economy of Yugoslavia was organized around workers’ self-management in contradistinction to the Eastern Bloc countries, which all practiced central planning and centralized management. See Klaus Ronneberger, “Henri Lefebvre and the Question of Autogestion,” trans. Helen Ferguson, in Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade, Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, eds. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 20019): 89–116, and Lefebvre, State, Space, World, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, eds.

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empowered managerial class, autogestion supersedes capitalism, under which use value has been so ex-

cluded for the sake of exchange value that the “user” must be invented, “a character who soils whatever is

sold to him new and fresh, who breaks, who causes wear, who fortunately fulfills the function of making

the replacement of a thing inevitable, who successfully carries out the process of obsolescence.”21 Opposed

to the capitalist relationships of producers and consumers, owners and users, habitats and dwellers, auto-

gestion is a process that prioritizes use value above all else, built on practices of collective deliberation and

self-awareness. When a social group refuses to passively accept its conditions of existence, of life or of

survival, and forces itself to understand and master its own conditions of existence, autogestion is happen-

ing.22 At the heart of autogestion is a revolutionary demand for social change.

Lefebvre’s right to the city, in its refusal of the status quo — but not its dismissal — and its insistence

on the imminent reality of revolution, however virtual, is a utopian claim. In his elaboration on the con-

cept of utopia, which he begins already in The Right to the City,23 Lefebvre differentiates between two

distinct typologies: “concrete utopias” and “abstract utopias.” In his book Henri Lefebvre on Space, Lukas

Stanek explains that concrete utopias, a concept originating from Ernst Bloch, are those which seek out

possible futures that could emerge from any entrenched situation, with its specific affordances and limita-

tions, while abstract utopias detach themselves wholly from the reality of everyday life and therefore must

remain permanently unattainable.24 Concrete utopias are “models,” a methodological concept, which refer

to possible transformations from within a given situation: they can be used as operative tools to test and

refine hypotheses against reality’s complexity and randomness, are as such never exhaustive, and must

always confront and be confronted by other models.25 Stanek additionally notes the importance of “mo-

ments” to Lefebvre, a concept similar to, but different from, the “situation” of the Situationist Interna-

tional, as described by Guy Debord and others.26 Specific to Lefebvre’ concepts of moments, models, and

concrete utopias, is an operation he calls “transduction,” after Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation,

which Lefebvre redefined as “an operation of stabilizing a virtual object by proceeding ‘from the (given)

21 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 187–88. 22 Lefebvre, State Space World, 135. 23 Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 151. In addition to transduction, Lefebvre offers “experimental utopia” as an

intellectual approach or tool to “give birth to the possible.” There are several utopianisms, the “worst” one being the utopianism of rationalist modernist planners. “Utopia is to be considered experimentally by studying its impli-cations and consequences on the ground. These can surprise. What are and what would be the most successful places? How can they be discovered? According to which criteria? What are the times and rhythms of daily life which are inscribed and prescribed in these ‘successful’ places favorable to happiness? That is interesting.”

24 Stanek, op. cit., 168. See Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life 25 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 471–3. 26 Lefebvre had a long-term dialog with the Situationists, though they didn’t always agree. Debord was critical

of Lefebvre’s “moment” for supposedly privileging the temporal over the spatial aspect, unlike “completely spatio-temporal” situations. See “The Theory of Moments and the Construction of Situations,” Internationale Situationiste no. 4; “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview,” October 79; and of course Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

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Constant, New Babylon – Paris, 1963. Ink on street map, 47 x 61 cm. Source: Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, www.gemeentemuseum.nl.

Ricardo Bofill, City in Space, 1970. Left: “Fabric or urban complex” resulting from a multiplication of basic elements according to the rules of “spatial chess.” Right: Macro-model consisting of sev-

eral elements combined. Source: Stanek, Lefebvre on Space, 208–9.

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real to the possible.’”27 Like Antonio Gramsci, Lefebvre was guided by Marx’s claim that revolution must

necessarily come from within the messy, entangled reality of the present, dominated as it is by capitalist

hegemony.28 Within a discussion of architectural projects that perform transduction by design, Stanek

offers examples of concrete utopias that Lefebvre admired, including Ricardo Bofill’s City in Space and

Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon, as well as Lefebvre’s own urban design proposal for New Belgrade

submitted together with Serge Renaudie and Pierre Guilbaud in 1986.29 The theoretical project, while

acknowledging the competition’s critique of modernist, functionalist urbanism realized in the construc-

tion of New Belgrade in the 1960s and 70s,30 also contrasted with the design brief’s absence of social and

political questions in its embrace of of self-management (autogestion), or at least Lefebvre’s idea of it con-

cisely defined by Stanek as “the possibility of the self-production of man within the community but beyond

the state.”31 Many of the ideas outlined in the proposal for New Belgrade would be repeated four years

later in an essay in which Lefebvre, together with the Groupe de Navarrenx, conceives of a project for

citizenship as a contract among individuals, society, and the state, where the citizen (citoyen) is reimagined

as a citadin, an urban dweller or someone dwelling in urban society.32 Next to the right to the city, six

other rights, including “the right to information,” are called for.33 These projects illustrate that, through

transduction, the right to the city — the right to urban life — must continually be renewed in relation to

the unfolding situation at hand, and that utopian thought, located in present reality yet imaginative of its

potential for transformation, is not only desired, but incumbent upon urban society.

27 Ibid., 158. For more on transduction, see Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 411–2; Lefebvre, The Urban

Revolution, 5; and Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992 [1964]), 297–319.

28 Stanek, op. cit., 166. Refer to Fredric Jameson, who contrasted Lefebvre with the architect and historian Manfredo Tafuri by linking them to two different strains of Marxism: Tafuri to an Althusserian Marxism of total domination and colonization that requires capitalism’s complete exhaustion before qualitative change can arise, and Lefebvre linked to another strain rooted in Marx’s claim that the conditions of new social relations must necessarily be realized within the capitalist mode of production, which they seek to surpass. Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology.”

29 Stanek, op. cit., ch. 4, 165–248. 30 Ibid., 235. 31 Ibid., 240. 32 Ibid., 234. 33 Lefebvre, “From the Social Pact to the Contract of Citizenship,” in Key Writings, 238–54. The “new rights of

the citizen” are the right to information, the right to free expression, the right to culture, the right to an identity within difference (and equality), the right to self-management (autogestion), the right to the city, and the right to services.

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Beyond the Right to Information

Interest has grown recently in updating the right to the city for the 21st century, examining to the role

technological infrastructure plays and could still play in that right’s immanent realization. This interest is

at least partly inspired by Lefebvre’s naming of “the right to information” in his “new contract of citizen-

ship.” The proposed political contract, meant to “form no more than a starting-point for initiatives, ideas,

even interpretations,” proposes the instatement of a contractual relationship between the state and the

citizens.1 For Lefebvre, “the citizen” is not only the political subject bestowed formal citizenship

(citoyenneté) based on place of birth (jus soli) or blood right (jus sanguinis), but more generally all those who

live in a city or country regardless of origin or ancestry: rather than by birth or by blood, citizenship (in

this broad sense) is acquired by the act of inhabiting. Lefebvre’s idea of citizens collectively reaching for a

stipulated, contractual form of citizenship with the state is meant to be adopted within a renewal of polit-

ical life, which could see the nation state wither away, without brutality, through the “creative discovery”

that would result.2 One could only begin to imagine the breeches of contract and ensuing conflicts that

would come to fruition when citizens, who uphold their part of the contract by abiding the law and paying

taxes, are granted in return but a faint semblance of the lofty promises made to them in cascading symbolic

gestures lacking the necessary power for concrete realization. Among the rights he defines, which also

include “the right to autogestion,” the right to information is defined by a series of information-related

questions and concerns, pertaining above all to surveillance and censorship. Lefebvre recognizes that in-

formation — a product and commodity that doesn’t stand to transfigure daily life, but instead stands to

reinforce its existing isolation and, through administration, program it still further3 — depends on cen-

tralized and centralizing databases that exist in the physical world, where data is collected and closed to

undesirable access, just as it is open to desired access.4 Read symbolically, in the sense of liberal-demo-

cratic rights, the right to information boils down to an amalgamation of individual rights to privacy, free

speech, and free (yet appropriately controlled) access to information. In the sense of the contract Lefebvre

proposes, the right to information would be better understood as part of the revolutionary struggle at the

heart of autogestion, which seeks to absorb the functions of the state through self-management, and which

now includes the self-management of information.

In early 2017, Joe Shaw and Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute, published a paper titled

“An Informational Right to the City? Code, Content, Control, and the Urbanization of Information,”

1 Lefebvre, Key Writings, 253. 2 Ibid., 253–4. 3 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 803–18. 4 Lefebvre, Key Writings, 251.

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which addresses concerns about the urbanization of information and the command of abstract digital rep-

resentation over urban life. The paper takes the form of an interrogation of Google’s power, arguably the

most powerful information mediator today, in which the authors ask a series of questions that expose the

corporation’s dominance over an informational right to the city, as well as possible vulnerabilities to its

spatial hegemony.5 Shaw and Graham contend that the right to information, as conceived by Lefebvre in

1990, has become a much more complex dimension of political struggle than he could have realized at the

time, 6 which today requires a fusing of the right to the city with the right to information in order to

reconsider both information’s relationship to the right to the city and the way new technologies complicate

Lefebvre’s original thesis on space, power, and urbanization.7 In addition to the paper, a freely available

companion pamphlet titled Our Digital Rights to the City adds further perspectives to the mix, topping out

with eight accessible, introductory essays that each rethink the right to the city today, ranging in topics

from exclusionary “smart cities” and the power of digital cartography to automation and digital labor prac-

tices.8 In both the paper and the pamphlet, Shaw and Graham largely focus on a Lefebvrian critique of

exploitative data practices driven by a mandate for profit (the accumulation of capital and its derivative

exchange value) masked by the perceived use value of technological products and services. Emphasis is

placed on information and communication technologies (ICTs) in particular, here understood as an iso-

lated system within a much larger and more complex global technical infrastructure whose appetite for

data is matched by its monstrous hunger for material resources.

For Shaw and Graham, the digital information produced and consumed by human users of ICTs, and

in turn capitalized on by Google and other corporations, is understood to occupy Lefebvre’s category of

abstract “representations of space.” Together with “spatial practice” and “representational spaces,” repre-

sentations of space, the derivative, deliberative, and projective space wielded by the managerial class to

perpetuate (consciously or unconsciously) the capitalist mode of production, complete the analytical spa-

tial triad that Lefebvre establishes in The Production of Space.9 Unlike the spatial practice of a society, which

“secretes” that society’s space (a society’s material operations that form and transform physical space) and

representational spaces, or space as directly lived and experienced by pre-individuated human beings (the

space dominated by symbolic regimes, the space “the imagination seeks to change and appropriate”), rep-

resentations of space (the conceptualized, coded space that belongs to scientists, urbanists, planners, en-

5 Shaw and Graham, “An Informational Right to the City?” 6 Ibid., 2. 7 Ibid., 15. 8 Shaw and Graham, eds., Our Digital Rights to the City. 9 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 33.

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gineers, and so on) are permanently symbolic or abstract, and such representations of space are the dom-

inant space in any society.10 For example, when the social act of dwelling becomes abstractly represented

as “housing,” it is turned into a concept devoid of dwelling’s poetic and artistic features, a quantifiable and

exchangeable commodity to be managed.11 However in social reality, the “users” of a universal generic

“housing,” belong to lived space, where they traverse heterogeneous concrete spaces and the ad hoc rela-

tions between them, irreducible in their complexity and functional adaptability.12 The right to the city is

therefore more than simply the liberal-democratic right to “housing,” that is a symbolic right tied to one

specific functional domain of the dominant representations of space. The spatial practice of dwelling,

dubbed “housing” for the sake of its representation and administration, gets reduced to an abstract space

offset from the multitudinous, irreducible ways it is realized as a human activity in lived space. Key to

Lefebvre’s spatial triad is recognizing that all three categories — perceived, conceived, and lived — are

integral to the production of space: it is the intricate relationships between these spatial categories that

together constitute the production of space.

Returning to the idea of an informational right to the city, one can begin to see ICTs and the data

pulsing through them as in-the-world agents of the abstract space administered by engineers, planners,

technocrats, and so on. In an earlier paper, Mark Graham et al. write about augmented reality in urban

places, differentiating four interlinked kinds of power that manifest through the blending of virtual and

material spatialities: communication power, distributed power, code power, and timeless power.13 Com-

munication power is constituted in the creation and interpretation of circulated digital content; Distrib-

uted power refers to the decentralized practices of content creation and re-creation by an amorphous

group lacking immediately knowable contours; Code power emerges from the performativity and ephem-

erality of software that mediates content; Timeless power refers to the evaporation of temporality from

material experience within augmentations.14 Augmented reality adds complexity to ordinary “reality,”

here understood as analogous to Lefebvre’s lived space, i.e. the representational space constituted in hu-

man beings’ subjective experience navigating through the symbol-laden spaces of everyday life: it makes

use of digital annotations about places available on the internet. Augmented reality is the “material/virtual

nexus mediated through technology, information and code, and enacted in specific and individualised

10 Ibid., 38–9. 11 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 766. 12 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 362–3. 13 Graham et al., “Augmented Reality in Urban Places.” 14 Ibid.

17

space/time configurations.”15 The old authority of the geopolitical map gets sublimated into the individu-

ally perceived authority of abstract, multi-layered, user-tailored, and therefore “duplicitous” digital rep-

resentations, built on software code that can just as readily serve up activist geographies pegged against

hegemonic representations of space as it can ethno-nationalist geographies promoting reactionary politics.

Augmented reality, enabled through the use of ICTs, upends the established geographies of place, over-

writing them with machine-generated lysergic hallucinations that elude a certain neutrality but are, in

truth, very far from it.

An informational right to the city therefore should not only examine the cultivated abstract represen-

tations that ICTs layer onto places, but also the profit-driven imperatives beyond the digital interface. In

their paper, Shaw and Graham do this by posing and answering (with Lefebvre) five questions for Google:

“What power have you got?; Where did you get it?; In whose interests do you use it?; To whom are you

accountable?; And, how can we get rid of you?”16 The authors determine that Google has the power to

produce space, predominantly through the development and enforcement of a proprietary abstract space

that depends on enormous, ubiquitous data flows.17 Google obtains its power with its ability to produce

consensus (which is mostly formed by an “informational elite” with access to the Internet) and to suppress

dissent (which has until now been a passive practice, but in the future could be carried out more actively).18

Because Google is both an advertising company and information broker worth billions in any fiat currency,

Shaw and Graham contend that their foremost interest is generating profit. Yet Google’s commodity interest

15 Ibid., 465. 16 British Labor politician Tony Benn quoted in Shaw and Graham, 3. 17 Ibid., 3. 18 Ibid., 7–8.

Submarine Cable Map, a regularly updated map of the world’s data-conveying submarine cables. Source: www.submarinecablemap.com.

18

is obscured by the company’s benign interfaces, their products’ actual use value for people, and the com-

pany’s masking of its interests in the form of exchange itself: in return for personal data, people are given

“free” services.19 An informational right to the city therefore presupposes recognition that the use value of

Google’s products will never outweigh the company’s interest in generating a surplus.20 To whom Google is

accountable is harder to answer with Lefebvre, whose focus on the state’s power over information doesn’t

fit in an era of disempowered regulatory bodies.21 The authors assert that the users of Google, as a collec-

tive audience, are ones culpable in enacting “the lived ideology of informational capitalism,” deducing that

“an informational right to the city depends upon a refusal to act.”22 This ambiguous statement suggests

that, in addition to an implied refusal to use Google’s products, an informational right to the city also rests

on a generic right to refusal of any ICT-based platform. While this right might be desirable, I would argue

that it resembles less a revolutionary demand and more a liberal-democratic right — a negative freedom

from the imperative to generate surplus value for corporations in exchange for useful (and often necessary)

tools. Furthermore, the possibility of realizing this right in any city today presumes that people are not

always already “acting” in the further development of Google’s data troves by simply going about their

daily lives: even if a person refuses to use Google’s products, information is continuously made about that

person by Google, filling out an uncontrollable if undesired user profile. Evgeny Morozov has recognized

that Google is not just an advertising company, though many of their tools stem from advertising: Google

has leveraged its AI to cut the company’s own energy costs, a service that they now sell to others; Google

DeepMind has partnered with the NHS to prevent kidney disease related deaths in the UK; and Google is

automating transportation, a service that it will sell to private and public actors in the future.23 And Am-

azon is not just an online retailer that, since purchasing Whole Foods, also controls the sale and distribu-

tion of food: it is also a leader in cloud computing service, which many other companies as well as gov-

ernments rely on for their cloud computing and AI service, e.g. batch image processing.24 So the extent

to which Google, along with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft reach into everyday life — in a

totalizing way and on a planetary scale — defeats any real possibility of outright refusal.

And now for the last question: Shaw and Graham suggest autogestion as one useful Lefebvrian concept

(among others) for thinking about how to get rid of Google, as well as what I believe is ultimately more

important, what comes after Google. Mark Purcell’s essay in Our Digital Rights to the City resonates with my

opinion that action is not only desirable, but necessary to bring about any qualitative changes in the way

19 Ibid., 8–9. 20 Ibid., 10. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 11. 23 Morozov, “Towards High-Tech Feudalism.” 24 Ibid.

19

information, and therefore space, is produced.25 Purcell clarifies that, instead of a utopia, autogestion gé-

néralisée (generalized self-management) is rather an ongoing project enacted by city dwellers, like the

project of the right to the city, to produce and manage space for themselves — a process that can never

be finished.26 The right to information, more than a struggle for access to withheld existing information

created by others, declares that information will be produced and managed by city dwellers for them-

selves.27 It’s not merely a liberal-democratic right for individuals’ access to protected information, nor is

it a right for individuals’ protection by the state from entities generating information about them; it is the

perpetual, collective act of creating and using information autonomously from, but in recognition of, the

representations of space that dominate lived space, including but not limited to Google’s. The continual

act of producing information, not just in the form of interpersonal communication but also in the form of

digital information and its circulation, mobilizes communities: the informational product is important,

25 Purcell, “The city is ours (if we decide it is),” in Our Digital Rights to the City, 30–33. 26 Ibid., 33. 27 Ibid., 32.

Dillon Marsh, Invasive Species, no. 6, 2009. Photograph of disguised cell tower in Cape Town, South Africa. Source: www.dillonmarsh.com.

20

but so is the practical act of producing it.28 If the right to information is enacted alongside the rights to

autogestion, free expression, culture, an identity within difference (and equality), the city, and services, as

Lefebvre proposed in the “new contract of citizenship,” then it stays part of the revolutionary project he

remained committed to throughout his life. While Lefebvre defines autogestion as “the effort of the people

… to take initiative in the organization of everydayness, to appropriate their social life,”29 Stanek argues

further that “self-management must be conceived as a struggle against both the state and the market …

[it] can be thus constituted only in a long-term process of overcoming both.”30 The right to information,

and therefore the right to the data-saturated city, is already a recognition that information is constantly

being produced about people, things, and phenomena, with or without given consent. For example,

Equifax and many companies like it collect credit data on seemingly everyone irrespective of permission

or use in their databases (which are sometimes breached, exposing millions to fraud),31 and Facebook

generates end-user-uncontrollable “shadow profiles” for people based on contact information given to

them by third parties (friends, relatives, professional contacts, fleeting romances):32 as desirable as it may

be to retain privacy, in effect no one can be completely outside such platforms’ data regimes. The right to

information is an affirmation that the process of overcoming the dominant representations of space re-

quires self-managed forms of information production, with diversity in scope and scale, making use of

existing infrastructures while building new ones. Most importantly, the social production of information

— whether data flowing through ICTs, hand-drawn maps posted for all to see, or verbal stories passed on

and continuously renewed by their tellers — is a creative, collective act that carries the potential to gen-

erate emancipatory spaces still inconceivable today.

28 Ibid. 29 Lefebvre quoted in Stanek, op. cit., 244. 30 Ibid., 243. 31 See Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Equifax Was Warned,” Motherboard, October 26, 2017, http://mother-

board.vice.com/en_us/article/ne3bv7/equifax-breach-social-security-numbers-researcher-warning. 32 See Kashmir Hill, “How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met,” Gizmodo, November 7, 2017,

http://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-figures-out-everyone-youve-ever-met-1819822691.

21

2. Sensing the Stack

Infrastructure and Sovereignty

The complexity of the urban, as well as that of any particular city, can be broken down and made percep-

tible by employing the idea of infrastructure as a conceptual interface through which its complexity be-

comes reduced. In the previous section, after exploring Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the right to the city in

respect to his larger philosophical project, it was made clear that more traditional forms of critique vis-à-

vis planetary-scale computation would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of today’s infrastruc-

tural forms and the power dynamics that emerge from them. The work considered in this section, pri-

marily consisting of Benjamin Bratton’s analysis of the Cloud and his model dubbed The Stack, can be seen

as part of what Ash Amin has identified as “the new infrastructural turn” in social science writing, which

“tends to see the material and cultural as hyphenated, each closely implicated in, and part of, the other.

Accordingly, both the social and the technological are imagined as hybrids of human and nonhuman asso-

ciation, with infrastructure conceptualized as a sociotechnical assemblage, and urban social life as never

reducible to the purely human alone.”1 Bratton’s work sheds light on today’s accelerating mechanisms of

accumulation enabled by computational infrastructures that have come to saturate the earth. The last sec-

tion’s example of Google will be revealed as something other than merely an information and communi-

cations technology company: a platform, a technology-driven institutional form that operates beyond the

logic of the nation state and the market, which overtakes existing infrastructures and generating new ones

in its path of expansion. Utilizing Bratton’s detailed analysis of how infrastructural power is constituted,

I will illustrate the complexity that the urban struggles of today and tomorrow must face before finally, in

the third section, making a case not for the refusal to act, but instead for the necessity to act with intention

and therefore greater awareness of the inhuman systems that govern humanity and indeed the whole earth.

What does it mean to look at the city, not to mention the world, in terms of infrastructure? Ryan

Bishop and John Phillips have written that diverse infrastructures can best be understood by taking them

apart and then examining the nature of the linkages that connect their elements together.2 To give a clearer

shape to their definition of infrastructure, the authors quote Michael Neuman’s influential infrastructure

network theory:

1 Amin, “Lively Infrastructure,” 137–8. 2 Bishop and Phillips, “The Urban Problematic II,” 121.

22

Infrastructure is the physical network that channels a flux (water, fluid, electricity, energy, material, people, digital signal, analog signal, etc.) through conduits (tubes, pipes, canals, channels, roads, rails, wires, cables, fibers, lines, etc.) or a medium (air, water) with the purpose of supporting a human population, usually located in a settlement, for the general or common good. It consists of a long-lasting network connecting producers and service providers with a large number of users through standardized (while variable) technol-ogies, pricing, and controls that are planned and managed by coordinating organizations.3

Bishop and Phillips note that Neuman’s twofold emphasis on the activity of connecting —both infrastruc-

ture’s ability to channel fluxes and its function of connecting producers and users — explains why it’s

difficult to give infrastructure a simple or more traditional definition today.4 The connections between

elements, which would have little or no value if they were not connected, are what matter most in this

definition of infrastructure, which can be formal, informal, or something in-between (as it often is). The

authors argue: “An infrastructure, considerably more complex than notions of the ‘economic structure of

society’ that Marx developed from readings of Hegelian legal philosophy, nonetheless shares some of those

properties … While we should grasp the ‘foundational role in its relativity (material productive forces of

society), we can no longer depend on an objectively identifiable model separable from the legal and po-

litical superstructures that supposedly arise upon them.”5 In the place of “foundation,” the authors describe

“an infrastructure not just of connectivity and displacement, but also of will and resolution: an infrastruc-

ture of communal intelligences.”6 Following Bishop and Philips, as well as Amin and other scholars of

infrastructure, including Keller Easterling,7 Felicity D. Scott,8 Eyal Weizman,9 and others, the rest of this

section will look at infrastructure in terms of sociotechnical assemblages and contingencies that have so

fundamentally transformed traditional notions of sovereignty as to have rendered them obsolete.

In The Stack, Bratton argues that planetary-scale computation, or the technical infrastructure of global

systems of which the Cloud is a part, has so thoroughly transformed the logics of political geography that

the model of sovereignty established with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 is no longer sufficient. For

Bratton, “‘computation’ does not just denote machinery; it is planetary-scale infrastructure that is chang-

ing not only how governments govern, but also what governance even is in the first place.”10 Historically

speaking, the Westphalian state, as a unit of political sovereignty, is a closed territory whose outline is

delineated by horizontal projections onto the ground, a sovereign territorial “loop” that has the right to

determine its own domestic authority structures separately from the other territories (and states it might

3 Neuman quoted in Ibid., 122. 4 Ibid., 122. 5 Ibid., 125–6. 6 Ibid., 126. 7 Easterling, Extrastatecraft. 8 Scott, Outlaw Territories. 9 Weizman, Hollow Land. 10 Bratton, op. cit., xvii.

23

recognize) outside its domain.11 In contrast, Bratton identifies platform sovereignty as a fledgling combi-

nation of legally articulated political subjectivity that may or may not be tied to a geographic position and

an infrastructural sovereignty that is produced in relation to platform infrastructures, regardless of who

owns them.12 This new idea of sovereignty, which Bratton poses as a question and not as a conclusion,

operates within new territories that form at the intersections of multiple infrastructural layers, crisscross-

ing national borders, often eluding site-specific jurisdictional oversight. Planetary-scale computation

brings forth new irreducible contingencies that transgress borders, challenging the Westphalian notion of

sovereignty without inherently overturning its hegemony or precipitating the withering away of the state.

Instead, platform sovereignty demands a redefinition of the state in relation to the platform infrastructures

it can neither contain nor be contained by. Bratton writes, “modern geopolitics is always based on a par-

ticular and arbitrary compositional alignment of territorial and governmental layers into a particular ar-

chitecture: no topography without topology.”13 Additionally, there is “also no nomos without topos: no

stable geopolitical order without an underlying architecture of spatial subdivision.”14 Bratton’s close read-

ing of German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose notion of nomos was tied first and foremost to the ground,

serves as a segue from established conceptions of sovereignty based on territorial subdivisions to his model

of platform sovereignty.

Whether or not the emergent totality of planetary-scale computation can be regarded as a nomos of the

present moment, it certainly brings the overall notion of nomos into question. In Schmitt’s own definition,

“the Greek word for the first measure of all subsequent measures, for the first land appropriation under-

stood as the first partite and classification of space, for the primeval division and distribution, is nomos.”15

Schmitt, whose worldview included the idea of an “empty American continent,” which is itself an invita-

tion to genocide, traced the emergence of the European nomos back to the continental encounter with a

territorial outside, the supposedly unpartitioned New World with its “free soil” for the European juris-

dictional imagination, giving priority to solid ground and autonomy to the air and sea.16 This break from

normal European politics presented a pressing challenge for continental sovereigns to give order to the

“unwritten” land abroad, symbolized by the Westphalian compromise half a century after Columbus first

set sail, which formed the Jus Publicum European. Bratton suggests that planetary-scale computation may

cause a similar break in today’s multipolar nomos constituted in the agreements between various economic

and political blocs of states: he calls the Cloud a new continent to be colonized, which trespasses Schmitt’s

11 Ibid., 20. 12 Ibid., 21. 13 Ibid., 24. 14 Ibid. 15 Schmitt quoted in Ibid., 25. 16 Ibid., 26.

24

metaphysical distinction between solid ground and liquid sea as the essential poles of geopolitical space.17

With the nomos of the Cloud, the sovereign decision shifts its focus from judging an enemy who might

invade toward designing new walls and partitions around territories yet unclaimed, the boundaries that

execute the decision over interiority and exteriority, boundaries that are, as a normalized exception, also

always reversible.18 The transformations brought on by the proliferation of Cloud infrastructures, which

both closes off space into smaller units and produces new territories equally physical and abstract, are not

just driven by planetary-scale computation, they are also mediated through it and therefore undermine

“any strong distinctions between a political geography supported by technical systems and technological

systems spread through agonistic geographic space.”19 In anticipation of this break with the still-hegemonic

Westphalian notion of sovereignty, a deeper understanding of platforms and the sovereignty it might bring

about is in order.

What platforms do and how they work might exhibit recognizable tendencies from certain perspec-

tives, but, as an aspect of infrastructure, their logic and transformative potential — for better or for worse

— calls for theorization that goes beyond a critique of political economy. While recognizing the use of

the word “platform” for a variety of intents and purposes, Bratton proposes a working technical definition

17 Ibid., 26. 18 Ibid., 32. 19 Ibid., 40.

Alexandra Pirici, Leaking Territories, 2017. Site-specific performance in the Friedenssaal of the Historical Town Hall in Münster, where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648.

Photo by Henning Rogge. Source: Skulptur Projekte 2017, www.skulptur-projekte.de.

25

of platform: “a standards-based technical-economic system that simultaneously distributes interfaces

through their remote coordination and centralizes their integrated control through that same coordina-

tion.”20 Bratton explicitly recognizes platforms as “a third institutional form, along with states and mar-

kets,” arguing that “the ‘political program’ is not only to be found in the legal consensus (or dissensus) and

policy admonitions of traditional ‘politics’ but also in machines directly.”21 Platforms generate “User plat-

form value” and “platform surplus value,” the former understood as analogous to Marx’s “value” and the

latter to “surplus value,” but not only.22 More than just technical models, platforms are institutional mod-

els too: polities are made by different ways of giving structure to a platform’s layers and its Users. Platforms

are formally neutral, but they each remain uniquely “ideological” in their realization of particular organi-

zational strategies, and they are also infrastructural, relying heavily on human-recognizable aesthetic ex-

pression to become visible to their publics.23 Unlike bureaucracies, where means are a function of ends,

platforms “set the stage for actions to unfold,” where ends are a function of means.24 In other words,

bureaucracies, which also depend on strict protocols and specified interfaces, are set in place to realize

pre-modeled institutional outcomes, whereas platforms begin with strictly specified means, but they can

be strategically agnostic to potential outcomes. Platforms are thus formed based on rigorous standardiza-

tion and specification; technological foundations upon which all further developments for that platform

must be built. Platforms also produce User identities whether or not they are desired, addressing humans

as well as nonhumans with their systems. Platform sovereignty comes about automatically under some

circumstances and is much more contingent under others, and multiple platforms can identify and mediate

the same object — person or not — and make claims on and provide sovereignty to it, although they may

be mutually constrained.25 In sum, platforms are an institutional norm that have come to exist at the scale

of states and markets through the expanded infrastructures, equally abstract-virtual and material-physical,

of planetary-scale computation.

20 Ibid., 42. Bratton also notes Annabelle Gower and Michael Cusumano’s alternate definition of the word

platform: “A foundation technology or set of components used beyond a single firm and that brings multiple parties together for a common purpose or to solve a common problem.” Ibid., 383. See Slinger Jansen and Michael Cusu-mano, “Defining Software Ecosystems: A Survey of Software Platforms and Business Network Governance,” Pro-ceedings of IWSECO 2012, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-879/paper4.pdf.

21 Ibid., 44. 22 Ibid. “Platform economics provide for at least two forms of “surpluses”: platform surplus value and User plat-

form value, which is characterized by how information entered into a platform is made more valuable for the User at little or no direct cost to that User. As an ideal model, Users will make tactical use of platform Interfaces to link existing systems (e.g., social, technical, informational, biological) and in doing so are incentivized to incorporate more of their own interests. Subsequent Users are incentivized to link their systems to benefit from the network effects set in motion by earlier Users, who in turn enjoy increasing network benefits as more User systems are incor-porated over time. In principle, the platform itself realizes platform surplus value from this cycle.” Ibid., 376.

23 Ibid., 46. 24 Ibid., 47. 25 Ibid., 51.

26

The Stack and Its Layers

Diagram of the The Stack with User-initiated “columns” connecting its six layers. Graphic design by Metahaven. Source: Bratton, The Stack, 66.

Bratton gives aesthetic form to the infrastructures of planetary-scale computation through his model of

The Stack, itself named after an early type of data architecture prevalent in the world today. A stack

(lowercase) is a generic linear data structure with discrete layers that allows data to flow up and down its

layers. The name for the “stack” is derived from a more concrete analogy to a physical stack of things,

placed one on top of another, where one of those stacked things is always on top. To gain access to the

lower layers of the stack, the things on top of the stack must first be removed (in the physical analogy) or

navigated through (in the abstract data type). “All stacks are platforms, but not all platforms are stacks”:

stacks are a kind of platform structured through vertical interoperable layers, both hardware and software,

global and local.1 While stacks can be relatively small and low-profile, invisible or negligible, some exam-

ples of more well-known stacks include those designed by Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook (with

Microsoft trailing behind), called by science fiction author Bruce Sterling simply “the Stacks.”2 Even the

1 Bratton, op. cit., 374. 2 Greenfield, Radical Technologies, 275.

27

NSA has its own stack, whose reach is predictably more extensive, including all people, their online per-

sonas, the logical networks and physical networks they inhabit, and the whole geographical earth at its

base.3 For Jay Springett, concept curator for #stacktivism — “a term that attempts to give form to a

critical conversation and line of enquiry around infrastructure and the relationship we have to it”4 — the

stack (as a model for infrastructural totality) is mapped around the means of not dying, i.e. the activities

and technologies that sustain the lives of, but are spread far beyond the reach of, individuals.5 Ultimately

for Bratton, The Stack (capitalized) is a “consolidated metaplatform” for all of planetary-scale computa-

tion’s various forms, conceptually organized into discrete layers, that are connected when Users activate

informational “columns” that travel all the way down and back up the stack again in a U-shaped trajectory.

It consolidates all of the earth’s physical and abstract structures into one diagrammatic totality — a dia-

gram that serves to break down the inhuman complexity of a totalizing technological–infrastructural sys-

tem in order to make it perceptible and actionable by humans — with six layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Address,

Interface, and User. As an object of extreme complexity, it resists uniform and concise definitions: “The

Stack is a model for thinking about the technical arrangement of planetary computation as a coherent

totality, as well as a conceptual model for thinking the contradictory and complex spaces that have been

produced in its image.”6 It’s an “accidental megastructure,” a descriptive model for analysis and under-

standing as well as a schematic model for active “geodesign.” Beyond the “state as machine” or the “state

machine” or the technologies of governance, Bratton poses The Stack in a position of “the machine as the

state.”7 Before going into the discrete layers of Bratton’s Stack, I’ll take a closer look at two aspects of The

Stack: megastructure and accident.

The Stack can be seen as an answer to a long line of theoretical megastructures that had their heyday

in the 1960s. Bratton attributes the emergence of this type of planetary-scale architectural design at least

in part to the widespread distribution of the first images of Earth taken from space, capturing the planet

for the first time as a coherent totality.8 Among the megastructures he discusses in this context, he iden-

tifies two specific types of megastructural models: closed ones and open ones. Closed megastructures,

3 Müller-Maguhn, et al., “Treasure Map.” 4 #stacktivism, http://www.stacktivism.com. 5 Jay Springett, “Seeing the stack,” http://vimeo.com/71087819. According to Springett, the infrastructure

stack, while vertically aligned, also leans through history: as one type of infrastructure emerges, it enters the stack as a layer and remains in place until it has gone or been replaced. People are subject to each infrastructural layer’s inbuilt biases, e.g. toward capitalist accumulation, and, for him, stacktivism is about seeing those invisible biases and infrastructures in order to do something about them.

6 Bratton, op. cit., 375. 7 Ibid., 8. 8 Bratton, “Epidermis, Interface, Alter-Cosmopolitanism,” http://youtube.com/watch?v=34RAzvHKHoE.

28

like Superstudio’s Continuous Monument and Rem Koolhaas et al.’s Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Archi-

tecture, contain space within them through the strict formalization of interior and exterior, negating the

Earth’s existing structures and inserting their own. These closed totalities resemble the “abstract utopias”

discussed above: the conditions of their realization can never possibly be met without the complete over-

turning the reality of the world as it is known today. If they were to be implemented, they could only

exist as enclaves: there would always be an outside to the totality, negating it in turn. In contrast to closed

megastructures, open models, like Archizoom Associati’s No-stop City and Constant’s New Babylon (here I

would add Bofill’s City in Space), function with a maximal perforation of their boundaries, either through

the open structure of the grid (No-Stop City) or the “ludic interface” (New Babylon). They fulfill the

criteria for “concrete utopias,” as they are rooted in the conditions of being in the world today, but they

also remain permanently just out of reach. Both of these types of megastructures, closed and open, are

attempts to see the world as a whole. They exhibit a desire for totality, either through the replacement of

Simple Critical Infrastructure Map (SCIM) for an individual. This SCIM show how a typical individual in the developed world is protected from six identified ways of dying by the multiple layers of infrastructure in their surrounding environment. See Bennett and Gupta, “Dealing in

Security.” Graphic design by Jay Springett and Andrew Brown. Source: resiliencemaps.org.

29

a geopolitical order with strong geometric or architectural authority, or alternatively through the over-

laying of a ludic urban field.9 Bratton’s model of The Stack, which can be used as a tool to test hypotheses

against the present backdrop of planetary-scale computation, pertains to the open type of megastructures,

yet it is itself less a concrete utopia than a methodological framework for designing new ones for the

present situation.

Not entirely intentional, The Stack is uniquely accidental: it wasn’t planned, instead it came about as

a byproduct of technological invention and intervention. Although it can be modeled, it is difficult to pin

down as any one specific thing, similar to the Internet: “As for ‘the Internet,’ we still can’t really point to

it as one network, or one technology, or one stack. It is a conceptual assemblage of billions and billions of

little machines that we treat as one thing. The Stack, as well, doesn’t really exist per se, and yet there it

is.”10 The figure of The Stack then does not represent one totality, but instead the continuous production

of multiple, incongruous totalities (including the monolithic Stacks above) that overlap each other, some-

times occupying the same terrestrial location horizontally but subdividing their processes vertically into

9 Ibid. 10 Bratton, The Stack, 64.

Archizoom, No-Stop City, 1969. Plan drawing made with typewriter. Source: quaderns.coac.net.

30

discrete machinic jurisdictions — all these totalities combined make this composite accidental megastruc-

ture called The Stack. Bratton cautions that working with its six layers, which move “from the global to

the local, from geochemical up to the phenomenological,”11 comes with one caveat, namely “Paul Virilio’s

axiom that the invention of any new kind of technology is also simultaneously the invention of a new kind

of accident.”12 He goes on to invert Virilio’s axiom, saying that its opposite holds: “the accident also produces

a new technology.”13 In other words, The Stack, itself an accident of planetary-scale computation, produces

further technologies, which in turn produce further accidents, and so on. Bratton presents his book as a

design brief, arguing that The Stack, a work of partly accidental geodesign, demands further, better, de-

liberative geodesign from humans, with each layer offered as a medium for design, a technology for gen-

erating new, productive accidents.14 Yet there is no guarantee that intervening in the layers of The Stack

will bring about a more socially just paradigm: “As a global platform, its demand for universality and

totality should be read in both utopian and dystopian registers equally. The Stack may represent an epochal

enclosure of the planet under an absolutist regime of algorithmic capital, or the fragility of its totality may

force new breaks as its infrastructural universality spawns new, even emancipatory programs of disen-

chantment, discovery, and design.”15 Going through the layers, it will become clear that the design of a

11 Ibid., 66. 12 Ibid., 13. See also Virilio, “The Museum of Accidents.” 13 Ibid., 17. 14 Ibid., 69. 15 Ibid., 72.

Superstudio, Il Monumento Continuo, New York, 1969. Photo collage. Source: www.artribune.com.

31

different Stack (The Stack-to-come) requires one thing: to act — precisely in an ethical and intentional

way, with acute awareness of the present situation.

Earth

The first layer at the bottom of The Stack is the Earth layer. It is the physical corpus of the planet, analogous

to Lefebvre’s space–as–produced, the object from which representations of space are drawn, and for

Bratton, “the substrate from which the power necessary to operate all other layers [of The Stack] is drawn

and from where the materials and minerals that comprise platform electronics are extracted.”16 The Earth

layer is where “the horizontal subdivision of land by normative Westphalian state sovereignty is broken

down by emergency challenges to the governance of a synthetic ecology,”17 that is by the challenges

16 Ibid., 370. 17 Ibid., 371.

Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, 1972. Cut-and-pasted paper and painted paper with ink, pen, and graph-ite on photolithograph (map of London), 50.2 x 65.7 cm. Source: The Museum of Modern Art,

New York, www.moma.org.

32

brought on by an environment ravaged by manmade ecological destruction.18 It is the layer where com-

putation wasn’t so much invented as it was discovered as a general force, where it’s important to distin-

guish between the limits of formal computation (established by Alan Turing) and the limits of what actual

computational technologies, including those of algorithmic capitalism, can do.19 Computers make the

world in ways that do not necessarily require human thinking to function, e.g. algorithmic trading.20 The

Stack is a “hungry machine,” and its “range of possible translations between information and mechanical

appetites” is limited by a real finitude of Earth-layer substances that force communication between both

sides.21 This digestive cycle can be seen as a “distributed composition,” whose flows are recomposable —

any sense of inevitability about the way they are n ow arranged is shortsighted.22 The Earth layer is The

Stack’s planetary base, always in flux and always contingent.

While utterly concrete, the Earth layer also expresses the workings of more abstract processes (com-

parable to Lefebvre’s representations of space). The nomic lines that form loops around polities also be-

come frames, and altogether they arrange and present political geography: contemporary governance rests

on a fragile pairing of law and geography in “mutually validating representational systems.”23 Indeed the

practice of “geo-graphy” (literally “earth-writing” or “earth-drawing”) pertains, together with geoscopy

and geopolitics, to the more ambitious and ambiguous operations of “geoaesthetics.”24 In dialog with new

externalized perspectives of Earth in the space age, there was an explosion of art and design (approxi-

mately 1964–75) that came into dialog with the space age’s new externalized perspectives of the earth as

a geographic whole, including the megastructures above as well as land art and earthworks of the likes of

Robert Smithson.25 The first images of the Earth taken from space that also inspired the first ecology

movement live today on in the apparently self-evident totality presented by multiperspectival composite

images taken by satellites orbiting the planet: Google Earth also promises an absolute frame and “draws

18 Bratton uses the concept of the Anthropocene to describe the current state of geological affairs by which

human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment to such as an extent that it warrants a new geological epoch. This concept has been thoroughly debated, supported, criticized, and negated. I will simply refer to this era as the “present situation.” For critical discussions about the Anthropocene thesis refer to Mike Davis, “Who Will Build the Ark?” (2010), Jason W. Moore, “Name the System! Anthropocenes & the Capitalocene Alternative,” (2016), and Donna J. Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” in Staying with the Trouble (2016), 30–57.

19 Ibid., 79. 20 Ibid., 81. For a philosophy of “human,” the inhuman, and the functional autonomy of reason, refer to Reza

Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: Human.” For an expanded discussion of those themes, see also Nina Power, “Inhumanism, Reason, Blackness, Feminism.”

21 Ibid., 82. 22 Ibid., 83. 23 Ibid., 84. 24 Ibid., 85. 25 Ibid., 86.

33

the Earth’s skin as an island to be measured and mastered.”26 Yet the information sensible to governance

platforms are more often not on the surfaces of a territory; likewise the image of infrastructure can be

compared to the infrastructure of the image itself.27 The process of mapping the Earth layer, whether or

not that mapping is visible or recognizable to humans, also turns out to be constitutive of it.

The ecological emergency presented by The Stack’s accelerating consumption of Earth-layer resources

brings about a variety of design problems. One problem is made obvious in the compounding energy

demands of the Cloud, which will eventually require the widespread use of smart grids to achieve sub-

stance-dictated efficiency, which in turn will also require additional computational monitoring.28 Main-

taining the permanent “Cloud landfill of postcontemporary data junk,” including all the world’s spam, is

power consuming.29 Limited growth based on energy limits will further distort infrastructural access be-

tween the global North and South. Furthermore, if ICT doesn’t become more deeply integrated into

industrial economies, where The Stack demands the most energy resources for its production, then their

26 Ibid., 86–7. 27 Ibid., 88. 28 Ibid., 93. 29 Ibid., 94.

Robert Smithson, Untitled (Map on Mirror—Passaic, New Jersey), 1967. Cut map on seven mirrors, 1 ½ x 14 x 14 in. overall. Source: Eugenie Tsai, ed., Robert Smithson (Oakland: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 2004), 132.

34

cumulative carbon footprint will not be able to be actively mitigated, begging the question: “Can The

Stack be built fast enough to save us from the costs of building The Stack?”30 Bratton says, “The really smart

grid is the one that still works once the climatic effects of its construction come back to bite.”31 Another

design problem centers around the response to emergencies. Design should be suspicious of remedies to

symptoms, because accommodating emergency is perhaps also how an illegitimate state of exception be-

comes stabilized and normalized.32 Rather, the real design issues of the Earth layer are not just about risk

calculation and disaster management, but rather how well designers can “engineer the path for one world

to strategically fall apart into another.”33 It is therefore time to stop regarding the Earth as something to

return to a previous purity that is no longer attainable and instead push forward, to design with (not for)

the impending Earth-layer emergencies that are now inevitable.

Cloud

Second from the bottom, the Cloud layer includes the hardware that Stack software depends on, e.g. wire-

less technologies, satellites, transmission cables, and data centers. The layer also includes Cloud platforms,

like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google, which provide services to their Users through their own ap-

plications or those they support.34 At once physical and virtual, the Cloud layer incorporates components

of Lefebvre’s conception of physical space (space–as–produced) together with representations of space

(like projects that map the Earth). The Cloud layer, measured in the scale of continents, results in a de-

lamination of normative Westphalian state sovereignty from its referent territory.35 The “trans-urbanism

of the Cloud layer is defined not just by the distribution of terrestrial borders, but also by the terraforming

recentralization of nodes — urban, financial, logistical, political — in the service and purpose of its net-

works.”36 Platform geography consists of the multiplication and superimposition of layers in a vertical,

sectional stack, that creates a patchwork of discontiguous enclaves and partial interiors: “Their double

exposures are the exceptions that constitute a new rule.”37 The Google-China conflict of 2009 illustrates

how differences in the service models of Cloud platforms, how they structure Cloud polities, in turn affect

geopolitical conflicts that arise from the juxtaposition of national geography and those services.38 Not a

30 Ibid., 95–6. 31 Ibid., 96. 32 Ibid., 103. 33 Ibid., 104. 34 Ibid., 369. 35 Ibid., 109–10. 36 Ibid., 111. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 369.

35

war between two superpowers, it was a conflict between two logics of territorial control. The Stack

coheres from such conflicts by accumulating tactical solutions into an immensely distributed inscription;

not land, but territory spreads across multiple layers in “vast sectional landscapes.”39 The Stack, rather than

merely a representation of space, or just information, is a diagram of an emergent totality that creates

alien spaces and territories in its own image.

Bratton offers the model of the Cloud Polis, in which Users are cohered into proto-state entities by global

Cloud platforms. Each of the big four companies mentioned above, which together have a great deal of

influence over the evolution of today’s platform ecology, have their own model of a Cloud Polis.40 These

entities, which are characterized by “hybrid geographies, incomplete governmental apparatuses, awkward

jurisdictions, new regimes of interfaciality, archaic imagined communities, group allegiances, ad hoc pat-

riotisms, and inviolable brand loyalties,”41 may operate at the scale of a true state and therefore come into

political conflict with states. Bratton outlines two possible models of Cloud Polis, giving priority to either

39 Ibid., 112. 40 See Ibid., 125–41, for an intensive differentiation between Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google. Each

platform has its own model for a Cloud Polis: Facebook’s model is a closed and largely opaque network; Apple’s model represents a triumph for design but can’t be separated from Cloud enclaves (utopian gated communities and their negative doubles, e.g. Chinese work camps); Amazon’s model emphasizes an agora of objects rather than humans, centralizing connections between producers and retail consumers at an enormous scale; and Google’s model is based on the business of generating platform surplus value (it makes more money in aggregate than it costs to provide its services) by regarding Users both as products (for advertisers) and workers (co-building the platform).

41 Ibid., 369–70.

The NSA’s five-layer stack. Source: Müller-Maguhn et al., “Treasure Map,” www.spiegel.de.

36

institution: one in which the state shape-shifts into a Cloud platform, and one in which platform function-

ality displaces states by assuming their functions.42 When states move into the cloud (with benign or sin-

ister intentions), the state’s optical positions, “how it sees the world and its constituents and how its citi-

zens see themselves reflected through the ambient qualitative commons,”43 are key. When Cloud platforms

become de facto states, they don’t just have geopolitical effects, they become a geopolitical constitution

in their own right: “The assignment claimed by planetary-scale computation is then not only to challenge

the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence (the force of material as well as of material force) but also its

monopoly on legitimate citizenships.”44 The Cloud Polis belongs to a hybrid geography, whose state control

is guaranteed only to the extent that private Cloud providers respect the practical sovereignty of national

jurisdictions, an arrangement that is both resilient and unstable.45 Bratton suggests that today’s ecology of

(centralized) Cloud platforms may be an expression of certain strategic decisions, but very different ar-

rangements are both possible and inevitable.46 The further decentralization of internet governance, for

example, is not necessarily a bad idea, while basing governance instead on the privileges of local govern-

ments, thereby making patriarchal authoritarianism more convenient, is a bad idea.47 Rather than eradi-

cating overlapping claims in favor of universal ones, “it is the mutual exclusivity and closure between

delimited sovereign spaces that allows multiple universal claims to coexist in different dimensions, even

as they claim the same person or site as a subject.”48 It is precisely the ability to generate multiple territorial

claims (liberating or not) that the Cloud layer enables.

City

The third layer from the bottom of The Stack, independently situated above the Cloud and the Earth layers,

is the City layer. The widely accepted fact that humans are now a majority urban species is compelling

evidence that it is time to reevaluate what sovereignties can be derived from one city’s, or all cities’,

infrastructures and surfaces.49 This position reflects Lefebvre’s thesis of total urbanization, but it does not

explicitly originate from it. For Bratton, any one city is regarded as a localized instance of global economies

of mobilization and partition, where platform sovereignties — in contrast to ideas of the political sphere

as a discursive realm that transcends physical urban space itself — emerge not so much through legislation,

42 Ibid., 120. 43 Ibid., 121. 44 Ibid., 122. 45 Ibid., 123. 46 Ibid., 142. 47 Ibid., 143. 48 Ibid., 145. 49 Ibid., 151.

37

but more through the “irregular but consistent access to public and private hardware.”50 The City layer

makes all humans inhabitants of a “composite urban territory,” where people are less political subjects of

one particular city but rather of the City, the “globally uneven mesh of amalgamated infrastructures and

delaminated jurisdictions.”51 A “politics of the envelope” extends from the normative architectural inter-

face of building envelopes to include the equally complex virtual envelopes that organize mobile Users.52

Different people’s unequal relationships to the City layer mean that political subjectivity is determined

differently for each User of energy, information, or land.53 This implies that inequalities are always visible

in the relationship individually differentiated Users have to generic urban infrastructure, though their po-

sition as Users does not necessitate or even imply that they are inherently disadvantaged. City dwellers are

situated in motion, in the “heterodoxy of urbanity as globality for which interlocking networks of passage

are leveraged to support mutually reinforcing rhythms of spatial consumption.”54 Before considering in

depth the “right to the city” in regard to the City layer, which will follow below, I first want to look at one

particular aspect of the City layer: spatial control.

50 Ibid., 152. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 167. 53 Ibid., 152. 54 Ibid., 153.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974. Source: www.criticismism.com.

38

The digitally mediated, hardware and software saturated City is a material extension of social struc-

tures, including those of exposure and control. Bratton considers two essays from the “Paleolithic years

of the digital era” that clarify some of what’s at stake for the City layer in regard to the “urban interface,”

namely Virlio’s “The Overexposed City” and Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control.” In the

former, the exposure of securitized airport environments becomes a model for cities that foster the critical

cohabitation of security and entertainment, where the decentralization of interfaces become the engine

for Cloud centralization.55 In the latter, Deleuze outlines a theory of the “societies of control,” which pro-

ceeds in succession from Foucault’s “disciplinary societies,” which themselves followed from the old soci-

eties of sovereignty. Deleuze observes that the enclosures of late capitalism are no longer those of molds

(factories, prisons, and so on) but those of modulations (controls), where people move about rather than

staying put in relegated spaces, consuming more than producing.56 In Bratton’s terminology, the “interfa-

cial regime” of the City, which no longer requires a disciplinary gate to block exit, already knows in ad-

vance which Users are allowed passage to and from the “generalized gated community,” and for some of

them there is never entry.57 Deleuze emphasizes the predominance of information and communication

technology as a “signal apparatus,”58 and concludes his essay with an anecdote from Felix Guattari, in which

he imagines a city where people gain access to their apartment and other places with an electronic card

that is tracked and modulated by a central computer, which can be used to disable access, say to one’s

apartment, just as easily as it can be used to enable access.59 Today, planetary-scale computation obviously

goes much further, with City layer sustenance being generated “not only through extractive taxation, but

through the network value drawn from perpetual interaction with the interfaces that constitute the city in

situated space … everyday living and thinking in the smart city become a form of information labor.”60

Bratton argues that while smart city discourse has been mostly built on enthusiasm for simple fixes and

broken urban politics, there is still potential in what has gone wrong. Cities are more than their itemized

spreadsheets: “Smart cities are also dumping grounds, platforms for human warehousing, telelabor dor-

mitories, floating prison ships, entropic megaslums, spontaneous war zones, colonial settlements and en-

croachments, contested archaeological dig sites, fabled ruins, periodic abandonments, dead malls, sleeping

cranes hovering over skyscrapers on pause, and similar things that defy easy tabulation and calculation. …

By design or by accident, they are all City-level expressions of The Stack.” The expelled people and places

55 Ibid., 155–6. See Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” in Rethinking Architecture, 358–68. 56 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6. 57 Bratton, op. cit., 157. 58 Ibid. 59 Deleuze, op. cit., 7. 60 Bratton, op. cit., 159.

39

studied by Mike Davis61 and Saskia Sassen,62 among others, might therefore be understood as part of the

City layer. In harmony with their research, Bratton writes of spatial production: “In effect, management

consultant–driven design has dislodged architecture and traditional urbanism from the prime seat of au-

thorship over urban form, as new built space become a form-finding by-product of speculative space-use

and site-cost simulations.”63 Thus the better or worse intentions of architects, whom Lefebvre was so

critical of, as well as the desires and needs of people who dwell in the city, who perpetually create social

space, remain dominated by the whims of a managerial institutions, now equipped full Stack tools for

control.

Address

Fourth from the base of The Stack, between the City and Interface layers, is the Address layer. Addressing

systems, like the idiosyncratic postal addressing system that assigns addresses to individuated buildings,

assign an address to any “thing” (a person, a device, a piece of data, a physical event, or some other ab-

straction) that makes it available for communication with any other addressee.64 The Internet, for exam-

ple, is based on the 32-bit IPv4 addressing system, which provides for a scarce 4.3 billion network ad-

dresses; because they were all claimed, the functioning of the Internet became dependent on centralized

61 In Planet of Slums, historian Mike Davis (2006) makes a dramatic account of the world’s “informal” urban

settlements at the start of the 21st century. Davis exposes a series of destructive economic reforms demanded of developing nations, including the IMF-mandated Structural Readjustment Programs in the mid-1980s, whose drive toward privatization has resulted in a new urban poverty growing quickly in the absence of state-led development strategies (151–173).

62 In Expulsions, Saskia Sassen (2014) examines the brutality and complexity of the global economy by cutting across established conceptual boundaries in search of what she calls “subterranean trends.” In a world where com-plexity tends to produce elementary brutalities, Sassen posits the concept of expulsions as something that “takes us beyond the more familiar idea of growing inequality as a way of capturing the pathologies of today’s global capital-ism” (1). She examines the world’s material conditions and links them back to driving forces in the global economy, allowing local differences to remain intact. Sassen characterizes the relationship of advanced capitalism to traditional capitalism as one marked by extraction and destruction, similar to the relationship of traditional capitalism to pre-capitalist economies (10). Inquiring at the systemic edge of the global economy, she argues that the systemic logic of inclusion following the Second World War has been replaced by a new systemic logic that primarily serves corporate economic growth under advanced capitalism (213). Home foreclosures, mass incarceration, and displace-ment due to environmental destruction are all material outcomes of a system whose logic results in the expulsion of human and natural life. Most displaced persons will never return home, because their home has become a war zone, a plantation, a mining operation, or dead land (16).

63 Bratton, The Stack, 162. 64 Ibid., 367.

40

ISPs who owned all the addresses and could make them available for (temporary) use.65 Another example

is “Hertzian space,” or the radio spectrum used for wireless data transmission, whose subdivided geogra-

phy is “as physical as the ground.”66 Addressing in general allows things that are present in any system to

send and receive information to and from one another, because they are made present and positioned on

a common plane.67 On its own, any given object is not inherently present: it must be made into an “it”

(given an identity) with a specified address (location in the system).68 Political space is both made and

made legible through the categorical presentations of the Address layer, whose governance depends on the

linking of “geographical site subdivision and the identification of untethered instances out in the ambient

wild,” making them mutually communicable and blending physical with virtual systems.69

Apropos of Address, Lefebvre writes in the second volume of Le droit à la ville that the right to the city

is neither natural nor contractual, but rather in the most “positive” terms that it “signifies the right of

citizens and city dwellers, and of groups they (on the basis of social relations) constitute, to appear on all

the networks and circuits of communication, information and exchange”70 Yet one of the challenges of

65 Ibid., 207–8. IPv4 is shorthand for Internet Protocol version 4, and ISP is for Internet Service Provider. 66 Ibid., 195. 67 Ibid., 192. 68 Ibid., 193. 69 Ibid., 196. 70 Lefebvre, “Space and Politics,” in Writings on Cities, 185–202, 194–5. This incomplete English translation

consists of the introduction and one chapter of Espace et politique, vol. 2 of Le droit à la ville, Paris: Anthropos, 1972.

RYBN.ORG, The Algorithmic Trading Freakshow, 2013/2015. The installation presents a collection of uncommon algorith-mic trading strategies, from the early 20th century to the most recent high frequency trading. Source: ZKM | Institute

for Visual Media, http://zkm.de/media/video/rybnorg-the-algorithmic-trading-freakshow-2013-2015.

41

appearing on the Address layer is that it flattens relations to the same level, indiscriminate of whether they

pertain to human–human, human–machine, or machine–machine interactions. To illustrate the im-

portance of The Stack’s indifference to the provenance of that which is addressed, Bratton confronts sce-

narios that prioritize human Users in regard to the Internet of Things that “divert discussions of the politics

of ubiquitous computing toward an overly local frame of reference within a larger landscape of humans

and nonhuman associations.”71 He offers a critique of the human-centric “Internet of Things Bill of Rights,”

whose drafting was coordinated by Usman Haque in 2011.72 Bratton writes that, while “all of those enu-

merated are strong and sensible principles … one can’t help notice that as a model governance of a land-

scape largely populated by nonhuman addressees, every sentence in this list of rights begins with the word

“people” and refers to the rights of individual human Users to retain individuated sovereignty over flows of

data that may very decisively exceed the boundaries of any one person’s practical domain.”73 Instead of

articulating governance in the terms of individual rights, Bratton calls for a consideration of politics from

the perspective of the addressed looking outward, because “each object [present in The Stack] is understood

not only as a discrete entity but as a durable intersection of multiple ancestor and descendant objects,

events, and processes.”74 Being an addressable “object” that “appears on all the networks” belongs then to a

much more radical project than Lefebvre could have intended.

Bratton’s concept of “deep address” theoretically expands practical addressing beyond any existing,

human-readable addressing system’s capabilities.75 He identifies deep address as a “mereological technol-

ogy,” or a technology that pertains to the abstract study of the relations between parts and wholes (e.g.

between parts and The Stack).76 Deep address has three principles: Address provides identity (by designat-

ing objects), it provides exchange (between objects), and it provides recursion (infinitely complex ad-

dressability) together with the capacity to govern the conditions of said exchanges and their traces.77 For

Bratton, the ultimate horizon of truly ubiquitous computing arrives when the scope of addressability ex-

ceeds the experiential limits of anthropometric and anthropocentric design.78 He argues that the term

“ubiquitous computing,” which has been used since the 1970s to describe an evolutionary transition of

71 Bratton, op. cit.., 203. 72 Ibid. It includes the rights of “people to own the data they (or their ‘things’) create,” to “keep their data

private,” to “own the data someone else creates for them,” to “use and share their data however they want,” etc. See Open Internet of Things Assembly, “Bill of Rights,” http://postscapes.com/open-internet-of-things-assembly.

73 Ibid., 203–4. 74 Ibid., 204. 75 Bratton presents a possible technical solution to artificial scarcity: IPv6, whose 128-bit architecture, if ubiq-

uitously implemented, would make available a staggering 5 x 1028 addresses for each one of the planet’s 7 billion humans.

76 Ibid., 206. 77 Ibid., 206–7. 78 Ibid., 197.

42

computation from generic equipment (like “computers”) toward a technical environment, will soon be

simply called “computing,” when computation, like electricity, becomes “a generic property of things in

the world.”79 Governance of the address becomes the governance of the addressee and of the addressable in

general, because the address controls the very possibility of communication between things.80 On the

politics of addressability: “If one is unaddressed, then one cannot speak or be spoken to, and so in turn,

resistance to official addressable geography and its enforcements characterizes so many histories of re-

sistance to authorities wishing to consolidate their power by consolidating ability to nominate space.”81

Deep address is furthermore not only a mechanism for capturing and formalizing what already exists: it is

also a medium for creatively composing those positions, relations, and interrelations.82 Universal deep

address could then operate as an infinitely granular system of representations of space that at once

acknowledges and represents the full resolution of every possible object and relationship, overcoming

abstraction through recursion. The concept of universal deep address remains utopian, more a speculative

aim than a realizable project, yet as a theoretical possibility situated in the present situation, it might still

serve as a foundational addressing system for some potential concrete utopia.

Interface

The fifth layer of The Stack, just below the User layer, is the Interface layer. This is the layer that most

closely resembles the affective field of augmented reality studied by Graham et al. in the paper discussed

above. Interfaces are the membranes and surfaces through which The Stack can address and is addressed

by Users, linking Users with Addressed entities up and down vertical columns.83 While the dominant con-

temporary genre of Interface is the graphic user interface (GUI), Bratton defines the interface as “any point

of contact between two complex systems that governs the conditions of exchange between those sys-

tems.”84 Examples of interfaces include: “Levers, steering wheels, doorways, mobile Apps, fences, office

layout schemes, international borders, telecommunications infrastructure.”85 An interface is necessarily

reductive: it limits, or presents a selection of, the full range of possible interactions that might be available

in a specific but also arbitrary way, in order to make complex systems legible so that people can realize

79 Ibid., 198. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 199. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 372. 84 Ibid., 220. 85 Ibid.

43

“platform value” from them.86 Interfaces link but also partition society, as belief systems (compare to

Lefebvre’s representational spaces), borders, and ballots: such points of contact are “everywhere and no-

where at once.”87 As multiple interfaces aggregate together or are strategically deployed as particular “in-

terfacial regimes,” they push toward naming everything visible in their scope: “The power (and danger) of

the Interface layer is this remaking of the world through instrumentalized images of totality; it is what gives

any interfacial regime even a politico-theological coherency and appeal.”88 Rather than the “critical inter-

face between urban infrastructures and urban politics” Bishop and Phillips describe above,89 the Interface

layer is concerned with the interface itself as a medium for politics. Bratton describes three ways interfacial

regimes organize the actions of Users in their own Interfacial image: through the visual structuring of an

aesthetics of logistics and global “assemblage line,”90 through the direct blending of geographical interfacial

overlays on Users’ perception, and through Apps’ counterprogramming of immediate User habitats, recast

as localized forms of Cloud hardware.91 While all three of these ways are important for understanding how

86 Ibid., 221. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 229. 89 Bishop and Phillips, 121. 90 “Assemblage line” definition: “The space of Logistics shifts from the spatially contiguous assembly line to the

more discontiguous assemblage line linked internally through specific interfacial chains. This delinking makes the arrival of material goods (and the processes of the world of production, in general) more opaque.” Bratton, op. cit., 368.

91 Ibid., 229.

James Bridle, Dronestagram, 2012. For three years, Bridle’s project Dronestagram posted images of the landscapes of drone strikes to social media (Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr). Source: www.jamesbridle.com

44

interfaces shape the world in the image of The Stack, I will focus particularly on the last one listed: Apps

and the programming of space.

Apps are a specific type of interface that pervades the space of everyday life, whose functionality de-

pends on the entirety of The Stack. While an App may appear on the surface to be a standalone piece of

local software, an App is better understood as a personalized interface to the immense Cloud applications

it activates and depends on to function, located in data centers somewhere else.92 The design this operable

visual surface, of a GUI for an App, is only one aspect of interface design, which moreover consists of “the

design of the succession of relays through an intended pathway of connections” linking that interfacial node

down through the layers of The Stack.93 Yet the entire depth of each informational transaction normally,

and necessarily, goes unrecognized by everyday human Users. Furthermore, when software, in the form

of Apps, gets embedded within a User’s proximate physical environment, it becomes part of their habitat

and contributes to how they are embodied by and also within that habitat: the App “renders the habitat to

the User and the User to the habitat … this dynamic of embodied prescription is built in to the habitus/hab-

itat circuit of geolocative apps in particular.”94 Bratton observes the usage of the term habitus in sociological

theory, particularly by Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre, to name “the productive circuit between a

contextually rich habitat and a disposition of bodily and cognitive habits.”95 In Bratton’s reading of

Lefebvre, “The repetition of habit produces an inscription, a ‘groove,’ in the figural contours of the built

environment, and in fact it builds the environment precisely through such repetitions … [Habitats] con-

dition and are the condition of the production of bodily habits and of the collective representation of those

habits fixing themselves as material culture.”96 With The Stack, the reinforcing circuits of habitus, not

merely organized by software, are in fact physically composed of software, materially produced through

software-mediated interactions.97 The Interface layer, as habitat, is a medium for all the levels of spatial

production, from the collective lived space of daily life, to the transformative representations of space

projected through and onto its surfaces, to the representational spaces that the effects of such representa-

tions in society’s secreted spaces might inspire. With billions of Users employing mobile Apps simultane-

ously, navigating spaces in the world today, “it is certain that over time, physical habitats are also remade

as architectural-scale Cloud hardware.”98 The Cloud Polis both virtually and physically extends into the space

of everyday life through Apps, producing space it in the image of The Stack.

92 Ibid., 236. 93 Ibid., 230. 94 Ibid., 236. 95 Ibid., 424n41. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., 237.

45

One more important concept for the Interface layer is the notion of “geoscapes,” where interfacial re-

gimes compete to encode the world after their own image of totality, whether archaic or utopian. Nomi-

nated as addition to Arjun Appadurai’s lexicon of “scapes,” Bratton defines geoscapes as “a territory of

territories, each competing over the right to describe the reality of a location, distance, borders, and

juxtapositions of the whole of territory itself.”99 As an element of the Interface layer, geoscapes are mate-

rialized in the lamination of virtual, site-specific content over the real-time perceptions of Users in lived

space through augmented reality technologies. Geoscapes comprise “both sacred and secular projections,

as they are in relation to one another: exceptional territories, patchworks of the enclave, and exclave

zones overflowing with competing totalities.”100 They are entered into and thereby made “real” through

occupation, though they are not de facto “real” places one might go to.101 The cumulative incongruity of

multiple totalities, those comprehensive images of the world made real through interfacial augmentation,

renders every whole only partial.102 The agonistic politics from which geoscapes set the conditions for a

space of dissensus, where multiple projections, also contradictory, can therefore occupy the same terri-

tory. Furthermore, through dissensus, established conceptions about space can be challenged by imagined

geographies: “The Interface layer becomes a medium not only for the transmission of utopian images but

for the composition of utopian spaces.”103 Bratton elaborates:

Any sovereign claim over a space is first a claim to define that space as such, and that ontological gesture is as necessary for satellite photography and Internet addressing protocols as it is for monotheistic political theology, even as their claims may be heterodox and irresolvable and in fact because they are. … As The Stack has elevated interfacial diagrams to the status of planetary infrastructure, linking event to image with the ambient interfaces and habitats of the City layer, it coheres Users around generic experiences of social confusion that may still germinate new forms of political universality. This productive dissensus will remain open as long as the political architectures of The Stack can situate multiple jurisdictional claims and generate new jurisdictional strata where none existed, such that no single combination can finally resolve into a con-sensus sovereignty of last instance (or last resort). This defense against totalitarianism comes not from any axiomatic reverence for nonhierarchical horizontality but from the multiplication of verticalized totalities one on another.104

The collapse of representational spaces into the interface itself implies a lamination of representational spaces

directly onto lived space. Whether generated by machines, by humans, or by machine-human assemblages,

these directly lived representational spaces (geoscapes) have fundamentally shifted the way space is and

will be perceived, enacted, and produced.

99 Ibid., 372. 100 Ibid., 246. 101 Ibid., 247. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 248. 104 Ibid., 249–50.

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User

The User layer is the topmost layer of The Stack, above the Interface, Address, City, Cloud and Earth layers in

vertical succession. This layer situates how Users see The Stack and initiate “columns,” or chains of inter-

action, that flow from the Interface to the Earth layer and back again, and it is also the position at which

The Stack sees those Users.105 Throughout the history of computation, the figure of the atomized human

individual separated from their environment came to organize systems in its image; its “synthetic replica-

tion through microeconomics and social psychology” prepared the conditions for its cohesion into what is

called the User by design.106 In practice, “the User is not a type of creature but a category of agents; it is a

position within a system without which it has no role or essential identity.”107 The position of the User,

whether human or nonhuman, is also a point of leverage in transforming the political geography of The

Stack, yet that position does not allow someone or something to enter it fully formed: it also forms them

or it into a certain suitable shape.108 The embodied biology of the human User shifts to fill its disembodied

profile (visual-symbolic outline) in The Stack, and vice versa: the two mutually form each other. Bratton

suggests that, rather than customarily assuming a singular-human User and designing for them, the more

salient design problem is to “design and redesign the User itself in the image of whatever program might enroll

it.”109 He identifies “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.”110 The Humanist register of the User-subject

is thus consolidated and exploded “by placing the biological materiality of the human subject onto a com-

mon plane with other [nonhuman] actors and events.”111 This brings about a “death of the user,” by which

Bratton means “the expiration of a specific kind of user, and the displacement of 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.”112 This universal User-sub-

ject, which collapses living and nonliving subjects onto the same level, is among the accidents produced

by The Stack. The fact that this subject need not be human to make a relationship with other agents or

dispositional groups suggests that nonhuman Users should not be restricted to merely human abilities, and

105 Ibid., 375. 106 Ibid., 251. 107 Ibid., 251. 108 Ibid., 252. 109 Ibid., 257. 110 Ibid., 260. 111 Ibid., 271. 112 Ibid., 260. The “death of the user” alludes to Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author.”

47

that the psychological-utilitarian User should be cast in a less reductive but also less familiar light.113 Rec-

ognizing one’s User-subject position changes political subjectivity: in place of a subjective relationship to

the state or the market, it becomes a relationship to the specific infrastructures required for the reproduc-

tion of urban life, whether “public” or “private.”

To examine the work of the nonhuman User, Bratton offers three exemplary guises: animal User, arti-

ficial intelligence (AI) User, and machine User. First, the animal User signals a “reverse prostheticization”

through the decentering disenchantment of human agency in regard to mastery over animals: with the

human body no longer at the center of the world, it becomes a prosthetic extension of the world, corre-

lated and piloted by it (“the human is now ridden and no longer the rider”).114 Likewise, “animals are no

longer prosthetic channels and metabolic reserves but collaborative co-Users,” therefore it’s important to

design reciprocal interfaces between human and animal Users that impact each side equally, or at least

accountably.115 Second, Apple’s personal assistant Siri is given as an example of an AI User, who engages

with The Stack in the User position on behalf of the human User (e.g. Siri acts as the User of a search engine

upon the human User’s command) in apparent subordination.116 He argues that AI agents must quickly

evolve beyond their current status as “sycophantic insects,” because “seeing the world through that menial

113 Ibid., 274. 114 Ibid., 274–5. 115 Ibid., 276. 116 Ibid., 277.

Natural language processing analysis of net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April to October, 2017 reveal that at least 1.3 million comments opposing net neutrality were generated by non-human users (bots). Source:

Jeff Kao, “More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked,” November 23, 2017, https://hackernoon.com/more-than-a-million-pro-repeal-net-neutrality-comments-were-likely-faked-e9f0e3ed36a6.

48

lens makes us, in turn, even more senseless.”117 Third, the machine User is figured in the example of the

car, a User of wider infrastructural systems (ground transportation, navigation, etc.) around it, where the

human figures as a nested User-passenger.118 In this context, Bratton says that Google’s driverless cars

should be seen less as a car than as than “a car-shaped end device within a larger Cloud platform … a robotic

device that a person gets inside and which carries her around.”119 He also notes that, while avoiding one

million car-related deaths per year, the centralized and standardized nature of driverless car systems would

initiate catastrophes (accidents) of their own nature.120 What these three possible User guises have in com-

mon — animal, AI, machine — is a forced decentering of the User position, an alienating “Copernican

trauma” that removes privileged humans from the absolute center of historical action.

Bratton makes a case for the move away from User-centered design and toward the design of the Users

— what comes next. He writes that, until today, “much 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 focus on individual privacy and autonomy from

systems does not help frame how Users that do not own the computational systems with which they inter-

face (which is to say almost the entirety of The Stack itself) can assert their interests.”121 A program that

117 Ibid., 278. 118 Ibid., 280. 119 Ibid., 281. 120 Ibid., 283. 121 Ibid., 285.

Addie Wagenknecht, Optimization of Parenting, Part 2, 2012. Interactive sculpture. A robot arm (machine user) reacts whenever a baby in the cradle cries or wakes up from sleeping.

Source: Addie Wagenknecht, www.placesiveneverbeen.com.

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permanently situates the User’s in subservience to sovereign property claims made by the apparatus itself

(state, corporate Cloud, or individuals) cannot possibly scale: “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.”122 Thus the design decision

shifts from locating sovereignty in the individual person who might step into the User position to locating

sovereignty in the User position itself.123 From the perspective of The Stack, the User exists as an edge-state

beyond the membrane of the Interface, but also as an agent initiating columns down through its layers;

what defines the User is what it connects to, not who or what it “is.”124 Bratton believes that, instead of

making demands to Westphalian state power, “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.”125 Following this shift in perspective, a redefinition of the political subject in

relation to the real operations of the User become necessary.

But before moving on to the next section, I would like to draw a distinction between Bratton’s User

and Lefebvre’s “user.” In his critique of consumerism, Lefebvre distinguished between users and consum-

ers: users, or inhabitants, use space, realizing its value, whereas consumers are compelled by statism,

privatization, deterministic urban planning, and so on, to merely consume space. But such “consumers”

are rebranded as “users” by the managerial class — architects, scientists, planners, technocrats — who

conceive space through their representations of it. Lefebvre observes the “pejorative” use of the word

“user,” which by the 1970s had already gained the connotation of “consumer,” as a way to identify certain

marginalized or underprivileged groups of people, whose own ability to realize use value in everyday life

is limited by the overarching (and increasingly unquestioned) primacy of exchange value over use value

under capitalism.126 Lefebvre writes objection:

The user’s space is lived — not represented (or conceived). When compared with the abstract space of the experts (architects, urbanists, planners), the space of the everyday activities of users is a concrete one, which is to say, subjective. As a space of ‘subjects’ rather than calculations, as a representational space, it has an origin, and that origin is childhood, with its hardships, its achievements, and its lacks. Lived space bears the stamp of the conflict between an inevitable, if long and difficult, maturation process and a failure to mature that leaves particular original resources and reserves untouched. It is in this space that the “private” realm asserts itself, albeit more or less vigorously, and always in a conflictual way, against the public one.127

Lefebvre’s “user” is inescapably human, while Bratton’s User is already or necessarily becomes inhuman.

Bratton’s User is seen from the perspective of The Stack, similar to how the irreducible inhabitant is seen

122 Ibid., 286. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid., 287. 125 Ibid., 288. 126 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 362. 127 Ibid.

50

as a consumer by the market, as a subject by the state. Bratton’s User might aptly belong to Lefebvre’s

category of conceived space, where the word “user” is code for “consumer,” the passive subject of capital-

ism who plays many roles but is never whole: inhabitant, passenger, student, etc. The challenge of the

next section will then be to map Lefebvre’s “user,” or more specifically his concept of the “citadin,” onto

Bratton’s computational User as an exercise in navigating a politics of alienation that sees the conceived

space of computation as an inseparable component of any current or future struggle in lived space.

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3. The User’s Right to the City

Compared to Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city,” Benjamin Bratton’s “right to The Stack” might at best

seem a compromise, at worst a wholesale surrender to the infrastructures of capitalism’s own making. I

believe the opposite of the latter is true: any meaningful realization of the right to the city today depends

on the recognition that infrastructures, including those animated by ICTs and all of planetary-scale com-

putation for that matter, are not inherently capitalist, thought they may presently be dominated by capi-

talism and have been generated within the capitalist mode of production. Moreover, infrastructures that

may serve the reproduction of capitalist social relations today might also serve a production of space under

different social relations in the future: an infrastructure may be the product of capitalism, but that doesn’t

necessarily make it a “capitalist” infrastructure. I will argue that Lefebvre’s right to the city, rather than

being taken at face value, should be renovated for the present global–ecological–computational situation,

in other words for its realization on an already unrecognizable, volatile planet so deeply transformed by

human and inhuman activity as to warrant a new geological epoch. Late in his life, Lefebvre already began

a renewal of the concept of the right to the city in his essay, “From the Social Pact to the Contract of

Citizenship,” which listed other crucial rights to be struggled for in tandem with the right to the city,

among them being “the right to services.” While I would suggest that this right, “perhaps the most im-

portant right, and yet the most implicit of rights,”1 could be recast as a “right to infrastructure,” my task

here is not to explore the right to infrastructure,2 but instead a possible right to The Stack — that “acci-

dental megastructure” modeled by Bratton that shapes the world in its image. Lefebvre’s “new contract

of citizenship” will serve as a basis for remodeling the right to the city as a process contingent upon other

rights — not liberal-democratic rights, but mobilized-for ones — entangled in any right to The Stack.

Extending Lefebvre’s “new contract” to Bratton’s Stack, the right to the city will be reconceptualized

through the User-subject position as “the user’s right to the city.”

Lefebvre’s “new contract” of 1990 can be read as an important supplement to his more influential Le

droit à ville of 1967–68, because it takes into account many of the transformative developments that took

1 Lefebvre, “From the Social Pact to the Contract of Citizenship,” in Key Writings, 238–54. In the French original,

“the right to services,” the last to be mentioned, is actually posed as a question: “Le droit aux services ?” See Lefebvre, “Du pacte social au contrat de citoyenneté,” 36.

2 The “right to infrastructure” was named by Alberto Corsín Jiménez in “The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (March 2014): 342–62. For a more Lefebvrian perspective on the right to infrastructure, see Jessie Speer, “The right to infrastructure: a struggle for sanitation in Fresno, California homeless encampments,” Urban Geography (2016): 1–21. Both recognize the right to infrastructure as part of a struggle for the right to the city.

52

place in the decades following the May 1968 events, as well as his own theoretical work carried out in

between. Going beyond Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract, which distinguishes between politics and

the social contract and sees the latter as a circumstantial effect of the “general will,” Lefebvre writes that

modern citizenship takes the form of a contract between the state and the citizen, diminishing the distance

between established power and civil society.3 He says, “To stipulate rights is first to negotiate them and

then to embody them in a contract. … Enshrining the relationship in a contract does not give the State

greater weight. A political formulation of the relationship, on the contrary, reduces the tendency towards

autonomy of the realm of the political and the State, their exteriority vis-à-vis civil society and its sovereign

authority.”4 The political contract he puts forward is meant as a point of departure for initiatives, ideas,

and interpretations around the idea of stipulated, contractual citizenship, fostering a renewal of political

life, a movement with “historical roots,”5 i.e. “a permanent cultural revolution.”6 Lefebvre’s contract

therefore bolsters a spatial strategy aimed at the transformation of the paradigm of the social production

of space, won through mobilization and struggle. Each of the “new rights of the citizen” stands for its own

struggle to be won: the right to information, the right to free expression, the right to culture, the right to

an identity within difference (and equality), the right to self-management (autogestion), the right to the

city, and the right to services. Rearticulating the right to the city, Lefebvre makes a link between citoyenneté

(citizenship) and citadinneté,7 a neologism that roughly translates to “being a city-dweller” — a link that he

says is inevitable in societies that are becoming urbanized.8 Taking Lefebvre’s hypothesis of complete ur-

banization to task, which proposes that society has become completely urbanized through the absolute

interdependencies between urban and rural spaces, now further realized on a planetary scale by The Stack,

one could formulate yet another hypothesis: everyone is a citadin (city-dweller). But crucially, a city-

dweller does not automatically become a citadin: one enacts citadinneté by reclaiming one’s right to self-

determined urban life (or autogestion). Like Bratton’s User-subject situated in The Stack, the virtual figure

3 Lefebvre, Key Writings, 250. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 253. 6 Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 181. 7 Lefebvre, “Du pacte social au contrat de citoyenneté,” 36. Four years earlier, in Lefebvre’s entry with Serge

Renaudie and Pierre Guilbaud in the 1986 International Competition for the New Belgrade Urban Structure Im-provement, he already makes a distinction between the citizen and citadin: “The right to the city becomes a com-plement, not so much to the rights of man (like the right to education, to health, security, etc.), but to the rights of the citizen: who is not only a member of a ‘political community’ whose conception remains indecisive and con-flictual, but of a more precise grouping which poses multiple questions: the modern city, the urban. This right leads to active participation of the citizen–citidan in the control of the territory, and in its management, whose modalities remain to be specified. It leads also to the participation of the citizen–citadin in the social life linked to the urban; it proposes to forbid the dislocation of that urban culture, to prohibit the dispersion, not by piling the ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’ one on top of another, but by inventing, in the domains and levels of the architectural, urbanistic, and territorial.” Bitter and Weber, eds., Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade, 2.

8 Lefebvre, Key Writings, 253.

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of the universal citadin (something that always remains on the horizon but can be struggled toward) situ-

ated in the urbanized totality can help figure what Patricia Reed calls humanity’s “generic situatedness.”

She defines this as a conceptualization of “where we stand as humans within reality” based on theoretical

models of reality (e.g. The Stack) and the human’s place within them (e.g. in the role of the User-subject).9

While Lefebvre’s citadin coincides more with a Marxist model of social reality tied to the very corporeal

aspects of human experience, Bratton’s User-subject coincides instead with a totalizing technological

model of reality tied to the very inhuman nature of computation, which flattens human Users and nonhu-

man Users onto the same operative and subjective level. Instead of advocating a celebration of the User-

subject, which is necessarily an abstraction of a more complex organism or mineral structure, I would

rather look for productive ways that Lefebvre’s whole, human citadin might be able to squeeze itself through

the informational bottleneck of planetary computation and come out the other side a User-subject with renewed

revolutionary potential.10

Situated within The Stack, Lefebvre’s right to the city becomes reconstituted as the User’s right to the

City: the citadin becomes the User by a process of abstraction (into machine-readable information) that also

grants the citadin access to material urban reality through its life-giving infrastructures beyond any one

citadin’s immediate control. In the contemporary urban environment, as well as in a probable future urban

environment where computation has finally become a generic property of things (like electricity), the City

is to be read as a vast landscape of interfaces that address everyone (and everything) first and foremost as

a User. When this becomes the case, one’s status as a User might count more than one’s formal citizenship:

“The right to address and be addressed by the polity would be understood as some shared and portable

relationship to common infrastructure.”11 Rather than an articulation of citizenship for any one city, con-

tained within its walls and firewalls, the “citizen” might emerge as a “citizen-user” of “the global aggregate

urban condition … a vast discontiguous city that striates Earth,” made of buildings and heavy material

infrastructures as well as “data archipelagos.”12 Of course, Bratton’s more optimistic speculations depend

on a development of The Stack in a more emancipatory direction that eschews any violent reinforcements

of nationality claims over human subjects by omniscient, omnipotent, post-Westphalian states-as-plat-

forms. While that outcome might be possible, there is no ultimate guarantee that it will come about.

Bratton asks, “Could this aggregate ‘city’ wrapping the planet serve as the condition, the grounded legit-

imate referent, from which another, more plasmic, universal suffrage can be derived and designed?”13

9 Reed, “Neuroses and Complexity, Alien Subjectivity and Interface.” 10 Beyond the scope of any end-user license agreement, could a “contract of usership” between The Stack and its

Users be fashioned? This is more a speculation than a proposal. 11 Bratton, op. cit., 10. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.

54

Taking on the structural logic of The Stack, Bratton pushes the User-subject to its theoretical limits, per-

suading his readers to participate more deliberately in its design. How then might the User, who navigates

the spaces of the City layer, compare to Lefebvre’s citizen–citadin? On the one hand, the User, like the

citizen of a state, belongs to Lefebvre’s category of representations of space. As such, the User takes part

in the production of space as it is produced in the image of its dominant representations, of which it is

one, albeit in a more nuanced way than the citizen of a state whose agency as a representation is constrained

to the ballot. On the other hand, the User-subject, like the citadin, is also described by its generic situat-

edness within an inescapable totality (The Stack for the former, the boundless city for the latter). As such,

the User-subject is less a singular instance of use, a reductive and hegemonic representation of one citadin’s

lived space, and more a subject defined by its generalized and perpetually differentiated being–user vis-à-

vis The Stack.

Like total urbanization, which lays waste to the countryside through urban sprawl and makes even the

most remote person a citadin, planetary-scale computation brings with it its own total territorial transfor-

mations, making every person, animal, and thing its User. Today, according to Bratton, the exact terms of

the notion of the right to the city “are as uncertain as the convoluted control structures of the City layer

against which the notion maneuvers.”14 Inverting Lefebvre’s right to the city, which involves the creative

appropriation of space, Bratton asks: “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.”15 Sensing the generic User-subject therefore requires a bidirectional optics: individu-

ated humans situated within the The Stack participate actively as User-agents; meanwhile, The Stack gen-

erates alien User profiles to be able to address humans and various human–nonhuman assemblages for its

own machinic purposes. The User’s right to the City therefore depends on the User’s ability to stipulate (or

design) the terms of the City’s right to the User that would otherwise emerge automatically in service of

the purely inhuman. Different from the right to the city, which is practically enacted as a de-alienating

struggle for urban life, the User’s right to the city is enacted first through an affirmation of alienation as a

means by which to strive toward and eventually achieve de-alienated urban life, to overcome alienation in

the final instance. The User-subject, human or not, singular or multiple, is always a partial projection of

something much more complex, yet the User is also granted a unique platform sovereignty. While states

begin to resemble platforms, citizens might already be Users of other platforms that offer access to banned

information, lines of communication, or even material goods declared illegal by the state. Bratton writes,

“Any sovereignty of the User draws less probably from established legal rights than from the contradictions

14 Ibid., 174. 15 Ibid., 404n42.

55

and slippages between how formal citizens are provided access under control regimes versus how platform

envelopes provide access to all Users regardless of formal political standing.”16 The emancipatory potential

of the User-subject position, when considered in relation to the citadin, cannot be taken for granted or

even guaranteed by design: it must be enacted in daily life by self-aware human users themselves as part of an active

struggle to go beyond capitalism.

Unlike Lefebvre’s right to the city, which erupts from city-dwellers “like a cry and a demand,” the

user’s right to the city is the strategic right of individuals and groups to real control over their relations to infra-

structure. This right does not come about organically or automatically, nor through superficial appropria-

tion by users: it needs to be strategically designed into infrastructures themselves in a way that at once

prevents the centralization of infrastructural power and also recognizes the site-specificity of each infra-

structure and its users. Two perspectives must be maintained: looking out from the point of view of the

infrastructures themselves, toward their users, where the always-reversible distinction between inclusion

and exclusion is upheld; and looking toward the infrastructures from the point of view of the user, from

the addressed looking out at the world, who inherits a unique set of characteristics based on where they are

physically located on the globe. Therefore, the user’s right to the city depends not only on individuals’ or

groups’ right to determine their relations to infrastructure; it also depends on deliberate design interven-

tion in the infrastructures whose relations users desire to determine. In some instances, design interven-

tion responds to recognized users’ demands; in others, it precedes the demands of users, generating acci-

dents that might productively “respond” to unarticulated demands or incite new ones from users. In regard

to the design of the City layer of The Stack, Bratton writes: “The reorganization of spatial access through

a new interfacial regime introduces new de facto ‘rights to the city’ to those with otherwise insufficient

political agency, and so it encourages alternative geographies to proliferate, not by decree but by physical

occupation (as even Schmitt would have to acknowledge). As they do, they promote and enforce innova-

tive claims over what the City layer is and does, and for whom and for what.”17 Thus the Interface, which is

not a natural occurrence but instead a product of design (whether by human or synthetic intelligence), has

the power to serve both restrictive and emancipatory strategies and create spaces in its own image. Ap-

propriating urban space for creative purposes might also mean appropriating existing technologies of con-

trol, refashioning them, and employing them to produce new social spaces through the construction of

sovereign Users that can challenge and even upend the dominant representations of space that place harsh

limits on their own creativity. Bratton writes, “The interface constructs Users, but it is also constructed by

Users, and so to remake the User-subject is to reform ‘the door’ to better reflect all of what is actually

16 Ibid., 252. 17 Ibid., 175.

56

present and active within any chain of exchange and to institutionalize these as interfaces into new norma-

tive systems. To innovate the agency of the User is then not just to innovate the rights of humans who are

Users but also to innovate the agency of the machines with which the User is embroiled.”18 One and the

same User is not necessarily one and the same person or thing that occupies its position at any given mo-

ment, therefor modes of accountability need to be designed at each layer of The Stack.19 Like The Stack,

“the user’s right to the city” is a design brief, at once for city-dwellers who appropriate urban space and

its infrastructures as well as for designers who might intervene at multiple levels to provide users with

accountability but also to generate productive accidents that might establish sovereignty for human users

where there formerly was none.

While the fusion of Lefebvre’s materialism with Bratton’s proves difficult to say the least, one of

Lefebvre’s concepts in particular gains new currency in regard to planetary-scale computation: autogestion.

Lefebvre’s own nuanced definition of the term, which opposes the institutionalization of workers’ self-

management by the state, reveals autogestion to be “a highly diversified practice that concerns businesses

as well as territorial units, cities, and regions … that also includes all aspects of social life.”20 Autogestion is

a fundamentally anti-statist tendency, not a system that can be established juridically or function without

clashes and contradictions — instead, it reveals the contradictions in the state precisely because it is the

trigger of those emergent contradictions.21 Like democracy, autogestion must be continually enacted; it is

never a “condition,” but a struggle:

The concept of autogestion does not provide a model, does not trace a line. It points to a way, and thus to a strategy. This strategy must exclude maneuvers and manipulations that render practice illusory; this strategy must therefore prevent the monopolization of the word and the concept by institutions that transform them into fiction. In addition, the strategy must concretize autogestion and extend it to all levels and sectors. This perpetual struggle for autogestion is the class struggle.22

Now, what about autogestion in terms of today’s computational infrastructures? Conveniently, Lefebvre is

documented as having once paraphrased Lenin’s slogan, “Socialism is electrification plus Soviet power,”

with the formulation, “Socialism is autogestion plus a modern information system.”23 Might there then be a

possibility to attain Socialism through the generalized realization of autogestion within and through a deep

transformation of The Stack? Would it be productive, ethical, or even true to Lefebvre’s conception of

autogestion to utilize contemporary infrastructural technologies to attempt to overcome the real challenges

and failures that autogestion has faced in the past? First of all, I want to reassert that, in Lefebvre’s definition,

18 Ibid., 348. 19 Ibid. 20 Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 135. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Vranicki, Geschichte des Marxismus, 902n29. Quoted in Ronneberger, “Henri Lefebvre and the Question of

Autogestion,” in Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade, Bitter and Weber, eds.

57

autogestion never presents itself with the clarity of a purely rational, technical operation,24 and it cannot be

enforced, only stimulated under optimal circumstances.25 Furthermore, in the second half of the 20th cen-

tury, autogestion was not only temporarily practiced (most notably in Yugoslavia under Tito), it was also

intensely debated (especially in France and Yugoslavia) before eventually being more or less abandoned as

a concept and generalized practice. What would be the implications of attempting to stimulate autogestion

today, and what party or platform would have the power and lucidity to do it? Would it be necessary to

first identify and address the working class or classes that might enact it? Would the citadin play a role, or

more so the generic User-subject? What would be the greatest challenges to grapple with while practicing

autogestion — the starving global population, widespread forced migration brought on by shifting biomes

and rising seas, the spread of antibiotic-resistant diseases, insufficient food supplies due to failed crops and

dead land, the will of the ruling class to dominate, control, and extract surplus value from the majority of

humanity — or would it even be possible to tackle such problems with autogestion? All these questions

demand closer reflection on the successes and failures, agreements and disagreements, that surrounded

the discussions and practices of autogestion before attempting to import the concept into the present situ-

ation. Following Bratton, one thing is certain: after decades of failed attempts through international de-

liberation to confront these problems as a human species, “We are left knowing both that impending

ecological calamity represents perhaps the most significant challenge to the very premise of governance

that we face today, and also that the Westphalian-looped state is a dangerously awkward sovereign unit

with which to assemble an effective quorum.”26 Bratton suggests that in the wake of failing states immobi-

lized by ineffective parliamentary deliberation, new “ecojurisdictions” could emerge, particularly in direct

response to emergency situations, that will freely bequeath (or worse, rent) alternative sovereignties to

those affected by disaster.27 Bratton states plainly, “Shared ecogeographic interests can matter more than

party lines when the transversal economic solidarities of energy production, and its consequences, come

to outweigh cartographic, historical, or ethnic proximity.”28 But importantly Bratton, in his call for more

deliberate geodesign of The Stack, cautions against designing for emergencies, and encourages instead to

design with emergencies (“accommodating emergency is also how a perhaps illegitimate state of exception

is stabilized and over time normalized”).29 Designers should understand the emergency not as an excep-

tion, but instead as the new rule. With this in mind, I will conclude by insisting that if autogestion is to be

identified as part of “the user’s right to the city,” or any other struggle against the status quo today, it must

24 Lefebvre, op. cit.., 134. 25 Ibid., 136. 26 Bratton, op. cit., 98. 27 Ibid. 98–9. 28 Ibid., 99. 29 Ibid., 103.

58

also be able to navigate the dense and confusing web of contingencies that are modeled by The Stack. It is

clear that any realization of “the user’s right to the city” (let alone the much more abstract right to The

Stack) demands an extensive political project to raise not only class consciousness, but also user conscious-

ness; furthermore, it demands the intervention of user–designers on behalf of the working classes, whose

design interventions in the infrastructures of planetary-scale computation might yet set the scene for the

realization of generalized self-management.

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Concluding Remarks

Ultimately, Bratton’s materialism is indeed very different from Lefebvre’s, but the two are not incompat-

ible. It is precisely the commonalities and differences, the overlaps and fissures between them that offer

new perspectives on both the revolutionary struggle for right to the city and The Stack’s revolutionary

transformation of the world in its own image. My concern in these concluding remarks is not to provide

solutions, but instead to test a way of thinking that might cope with the inhumanity of power as illustrated

by the following question: Is power a practical augmentation of human will, or is it an expression of

something inhuman — something that was once under the purveyance of humans, but has been unbound

by computation? Without giving a concrete answer to this question, I would prefer to plot out a possible

direction for expanding the notion of “the user’s right to the city” as discussed in the previous section. The

user’s right to the city, to reiterate, can be defined as the strategic right to real control by groups and individuals

over their own relations to infrastructure. The user’s right to the city cannot be realized as a liberal-democratic

right granted by the state: it must instead be continually enacted by the users themselves as part of a

renewal of urban life, whereby their activities can and are recognized as well as responded to by the de-

signers and implementers of infrastructures, even those infrastructures themselves. For this reason, auto-

gestion could again become a compelling strategic aim for conscious human users, but any realization of

generalized self-management would be contingent upon a revolution of the human mind: without actively

addressing the Copernican trauma of planetary-scale computation, the human species may remain hostage

to the inhumanity of capitalism and eventually to whatever alien paradigm supersedes it.

Lefebvre’s understanding of the concept of autogestion, when cast against the backdrop of today’s tech-

nological infrastructures, gains new utopian potential. With autogestion and automation, could the “social-

ist pricing problem” and the crisis of capitalism be overcome simultaneously? Any positive answer to this

question would be taken as utopian just as any negative answer to it would be read as dystopian. Neither

generalized self-management nor cloud feudalism are guaranteed, but it is becoming painfully clear for an

increasing number of people worldwide who are expelled from the state, the land, and the economy, that

the latter is the current trend, and unless it is challenged both in ways meaningful to users and recognizable

to the technical infrastructures they strive to govern, cloud feudalism may very well to come to fruition.

More than just an abstraction, computation forces users to recognize that the individuated human subject

of the Enlightenment, which may once have been believed to be at the center of the world, is no longer

the agent of social change (if it ever was) — arguably, neither is the industrial working class, whose role

in contemporary production is made redundant by automation. The user’s right to the city implies then a

60

willingness of users toward alienation: not an affirmation of alienation as such, but a willingness toward

alienation as a means to achieving control over the relations to infrastructure, a willingness to become

“representations of space” for the sake of tapping into an alien forms of intelligence that see the human not

necessarily as a unique and protected modality of existence, but simply as a fungible user (if even that).

Willingness toward alienation implies both a conscious recognition of one’s own alienation by inhuman

technical infrastructures as well as a libidinal dependency on those infrastructures for survival. The shift

in perspective I’m sketching out here implies a fundamental transformation of “human nature,” of the way

humans go about their daily lives, possibly in line with Lefebvre’s concept of permanent revolution, which

demands of users the active and continual renewal of their revolutionary commitment to urban life. For

Lefebvre, the city is important as a mediating level between the private and the global: it is the level at

which difference can be negotiated, where all the layers must be brought down to social space. The city

of planetary-scale computation can also serve as a mediating level, but a new language for revolution might

be necessary: not one that maintains a pure and inalienable figure the human, but instead one that insists

that the only way humanity can overcome alienation is through alienation itself. I’ll end with a quote from

the Xenofeminist Manifesto: “We are all alienated — but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and

not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is

not a given — and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not

less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom's construction.”1

1 Laboria Cuboniks, “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation.”

61

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