Userscapes: The Ambiguous Agent in a Computational Paradigm - Genevieve Costello 

 In the proliferation of computational technologies the user emerges as an increasingly necessary subject-position to traditional regimes of modernity/globalization. The notion of user is no longer a design or platform affordance, but a bio and geopolitical position. Benjamin Bratton’s conceptualization of the User Layer put forward in The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2016) conceives of the user currently as an extension of traditional geopolitical systems (nation-state/economy). I’d like to use Bratton’s theoretical framework, which distinguishes the computational reality of the Stack from the felt experience of it, to further differentiate the tangible and ethical elements of user experience. I argue that when the management of multiple user identities and political positions within popular online platforms are treated as the normative politics of everyday life, it diffuses user agency by dissociating individuals from computational structures.1 It is crucial to reconceive being in relationship to the force of computation, unique to the contemporary moment’s technological affordances at local and planetary scale. I propose the idea of userscapes to help alternatively orient the user as an agent within an unfolding era of computation and infrastructure, rather than the subject of interface narratives..

(via Userscapes: The Ambiguous Agent in a Computational Paradigm)

A technology born of the Web and accelerated by mobile is now blossoming inside businesses. Ignored for years, application programming interfaces—a key layer of connectivity between disparate software—are undergoing a renaissance.