What is the quality of the address? What is the nature of that thing which can be addressed, the haecceities? In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 addressing systems signified an essence of political authority and the interplay of the transparent and the undisclosed. That characterization is true.
As is often described in the literature on ubiquitous computing, IPv6 allocates a theoretical limit of 5 x 1023 addresses per human. This begs the question of whether over the course of a natural life one comes into contact with that many potentially addressable instances? What is the ultimate granularity that might exhaust this supply? Addressing every letter in every book? Every blood cell? Every neural network? As part of some planetary computational apparatus, what would it mean to address and account for temporal constructs as they emerge? ””The logic of a truly universal addressing resolver would include not only "things" we process and communicate as discreet information, things much bigger than us and much smaller than ourselves in scale, things much slower and much faster, would also resolve "us" as points within their possible communicative fields. Whatever characteristics that compose our recombinant selves ”"proto-events, words, gestures, preferences, perhaps even neuronal and chemical patterns, genetic figures and expressive dispositions”" are potentially part of a process of tagging and addressing worldly singularities.
Beyond the "spime,"there is a politics of the network address that may come to redefine other political geographies and jurisdictions in its image. Combining aspects drawn from critical sources (such as Bruno Latour's parliament of things, some insights associated with Object-Oriented Philosophy, as well as Martin Heidegger's definition of "the thing" as a relational field of forces and origins) with a consideration of the real and implied digital haecceities (a functionally addressable entity within a mature internet of things), this paper will outline how the logics of the digital address field change our understanding of the quality of objects, and how problematics in the social philosophy of objects can frame our ongoing design of that addressing system as global infrastructure.
In 1936, the year before Turing's critical essay, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Walter Benjamin published his seminal The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. That essay begins with a very brief quotation from a work by the poet and essayist, Paul Valéry, Pieces sur L'art, Le Conquete de l'ubiquité, itself published earlier in 1928. Read today it stands as a remarkable ancestral prophecy of ubiquitous computing, and well beyond Benjamin's short citation, worth quoting at length,
"At first, no doubt, only the reproduction and transmission of works of art will be affected. It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. We shall only have to summon them and there they will be”They will not merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be. (”) Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign. (”) Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of energy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality""
The term, "ubiquitous computing" is generally credited to Mark Weiser at XeroxPARC, who as described in his now famous white paper, defined it as the shift from a computing epoch in which one computer serves per many people ("mainframe era"), to one computer per person ("PC era") and now instead, an condition of many computers per person. Weiser was thinking in terms of a multiplication and scattering of processors or individual computing machines. Today the contemporary implication however is that this enveloping swarm of very small computers, when paired with wireless information input and output channels and networked into cluster fields of various sizes, would constitute not just a many singular instances of computers that a person might possess, but an emergent ambient ecology of information flux that would equally possess a person as any habitat does. Computing becomes then less an overt machine, than a dissolved quality of the fabric of the world, and its communication embodied less as artificial signification than an immanent event.
The radical granularization of computing capacity and addressability is a necessary precondition for true ubiquitous computing, and the operability of pervasively addressable nodes within a network points to magnitude of scale that Weiser's original metaphor doesn't capture. Consider IPv6, a preferred standard addressing system for web-connected entities, sites, objects, data-objects, etc. We as a global polity are currently running out of IPv4 addresses and most banks of unused addresses are controlled by the world's 4 largest economies, privately and publicly. This restricts other agents, states, countries, peoples of literally being on the map at all, to have address and location within this emergent territory, and their earthly territories to have address within their artificial geographies of ubiquitous computation. IPv4 allowed for 4 billion possible addresses, and now IPv4 address exhaustion has spawned several technical work-around, but moving to a much larger, more granular addressing matrix is the logical transition. IPv6, as a 128-bit string, provides for an enormous number of addresses: a theoretical ceiling of 5.1—1028 addresses per person (note: as sets are dedicated to encryption, structural addressing, the number is actually smaller, though still incomprehensibly large), or 6.67 X 10^27 per square meter.
The level of practical granularity built into this protocol, considered as a designable plane to fill with addressees, boggles the mind, and begs the question as to whether anyone actually encounters that many singular addressable "things" in the course of one's life. This sum is greater than that of known stars and far more than all cells in human body. If you were to address everything you ever encountered how granular might you go before exhausting that individual allotment? Is it sufficient to address individual molecules as needed, and if so what might we do with that sort of communication and accountability? The built-in capacity of the protocol challenges our our notions and practices regarding what is an addressable entity is and will involve as an information singularity, or a single signal differentiation from noise, or a much larger aggregation of information punctualized into a provisionally single assemblage; and other figures, plants, animals, rocks, their constitutive molecules, pollens, cells, or immaterial agents, memes, concepts, conceptual or practical networks of any of the above, are all, in theory, able to claim some position within this sufficiently large addressing territorial apparatus.
What is the relationship then between a comprehensive computational addressing mechanism and the geographies of the world that already possess and provide addresses? Between a first planetary plane and a second artificial universalizing machinic layer? Is there a way to qualify the simulation and counter-simulation that must flow both ways? Surely it's not simply that another virtual layer is constructed at scale so that it could overlay the first like Borges' 1:1 scale map, causing the original geography of positions to fade, crackle and blow away. Rather these interlacing territories would blend, perforate, signifying upon other, feeding back such that we come to realize finally that each is equally interior to the other. It is not only connecting things otherwise disconnected but a re-inscribing of the boundaries of potential aggregations and structuring their capacity to communicate as discrete things, redrawing what what imagine as a discrete thing, including ideas, events, one at a time or in groups. The scenario drawn is of an "internet of things" to be sure, but what is a "thing" but the temporary product of its multiplied relations, and so when does it recognize its own dependency, sovereignty, conditionality to finally fix a thing other than through potential addressability ? In that even the correlation between an address and a discrete "thing" is an assemblage as potentially provisional as the addressee itself, wouldn't the eventual program be instead for an internet of haecceities, addressable specificities that might name particularities as they come and go, even also before and after they exist per se.
The logic of a truly universal addressing resolver would include not only "things" we process and communicate as discreet information, things much bigger than us and much smaller than ourselves in scale, things much slower and much faster, would also resolve "us" as points within their possible communicative fields. Whatever characteristics that compose our recombinant selves --proto-events, words, gestures, preferences, perhaps even neuronal and chemical patterns, genetic figures and expressive dispositions-- are potentially part of a process of tagging and addressing worldly singularities. Even the structure of law may be redrawn, as things are now newly bounded. In that these haecceities, these instances of informational difference, and their qualia could be queried and made part of any number of analytic patterns regarding their presence in the world, whether through us, as us or around us, comes to over-determine the practical specificity of the individual subject to such a degree that its status as a legal-philosophical envelope may be evaporated through the emergent autonomy of its qualifying sub-components and supra-individual assemblages. There are parallels in neuro-philosophy which identifies not singular, resolved subjects but temporary neuronal networks, formations and intensities shifting their priorities in the chaotic jumble that is consciousness and cognition. Seen from the vantage point of the fields of metadata in which we are embedded we become subjective and intersubjective with other people and things through the possession of mutual qualities.
Another way of conceptualizing the design problematic of such a geography is in the artifactualization of objects, and how they come to absorb traces of memory and significance we impart to them by using them. Whether through ritual or repeated use, or iconic significance, or by genealogical possession simple objects are a repository of intentions and are haunted by them. In another essay I am currently writing with Ben Cerveny, we explore how the ubiquity of a communicative universal addressing system would serve to literally materialize these traces as explicit information in and through the objects they mark. Who has encountered something, what its arc of production might have been, what affective intensities it absorbed? What emotional baggage does it carry? The limit of what the thing can remember about is intersubjective relations with the world is that of what can be rendered as calculable information (in essence the same limit for the Turing Machine). As that limit is pushed further and further away as more and more things and proto-things are addressed, the critical social relations organized around the production of value in become reflexively themselves transposed into addressable clusters and empirically queryable entities. These spawn addressable metadata that spawns addressable meta-metadata, all of which requires visualization tools to make sensible. The image of things that literally absorb and communicate the conditions of their production, and the installation of people and things as both subjects and objects in the same network, is a challenge to our ethical stance toward the dignity of both. Marx characterized a certain logic of capitalism as the absorption and employment of people as if they were things. That is, the economic relations drive and are driven by a productive rationality that reduces things to their most apparently efficient conditions of production and circulation so as to maximize the surplus value realized in their transaction. One inverse of this is the treatment of things as we have learned to treat people, or imbuing of things with qualities of intrinsic agency, value and meaning. Perhaps the social and economic transformations of a strongly ubiquitous computation would threaten if not explode the parameters of brute humanism into an alternative, more rigorous materialism that extends an ethical purpose into the entire global ecology by demanding an empathetic recognition of ourselves in and as things.
Lastly then, to indicate two directions for research around the same question, what is the quality of the address? What is the nature of that thing which can be addressed, the haecceities? In the Oblong OS, we see a model of the data-object that is to a degree independent of potentially independent of the hardware on which it resides for the essence of its literal and experiential addressability. It is experienced that a data-object can move from device to device, even from physical to digital worlds and back again, from screen to surface to screen, because in a sense it is actually doing this. Here we see a mode of addressability that is closer to that of identity, a quality of irreducibility that is determined relationally by what is in effect non-relational and singular. The passport, as opposed to the street address on your drivers licence, marks you gives you addressability as you move through jurisdictional space whereas that street address gives you relational locatability within the geography of that jurisdiction. The paradox of addressability/identification as a mutually constitutive relation of a thing's quality as such in motion and its relational location within a differential and indexical addressing scheme is also the geopolitical subtext of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, wherein addressing systems signified an essence of political authority and the interplay of the transparent and the undisclosed.
As such the larger project of designing resolvers for the open horizon of an internet of haeccities must allow for this particle/wave, physical/virtual transposability by conceiving the objectification of what we have otherwise taken to be purely ideational and immaterial fields. Eliminative materialism in neuro-scientifically-informed philosophy provides one channel toward a radically materialist comprehension of thought as an objective worldly event. the internet of haeccities, in that it suggests the addressability of cognitive events -human, non-human, machinic- not only as relational points but as points in subsequently designable relational fields, provides another.
The logic of a truly universal addressing resolver would include not only "things" we process and communicate as discreet information, things much bigger than us and much smaller than ourselves in scale, things much slower and much faster, would also resolve "us" as points within their possible communicative fields. Whatever characteristics that compose our recombinant selves --proto-events, words, gestures, preferences, perhaps even neuronal and chemical patterns, genetic figures and expressive dispositions-- are potentially part of a process of tagging and addressing worldly singularities.
Beyond the "spime,"there is a politics of the network address that may come to redefine other political geographies and jurisdictions in its image. Combining aspects drawn from critical sources (such as Bruno Latour's parliament of things, some insights associated with Object-Oriented Philosophy, as well as Martin Heidegger's definition of "the thing" as a relational field of forces and origins) with a consideration of the real and implied digital haecceities (a functionally addressable entity within a mature internet of things), this paper will outline how the logics of the digital address field change our understanding of the quality of objects, and how problematics in the social philosophy of objects can frame our ongoing design of that addressing system as global infrastructure.