Automotive in "The Stack": a Cross-sectional View of the Field from Earth, through Platforms and Nonhuman Users to Anti-Users

Abstract

"The Stack" is the world vision developed by the American digital philosopher Benjamin H. Bratton, in his namesake ponderous essay. It is an abstraction describing a layered taxonomy based on the increasingly dominant ubiquity and pervasiveness of computation. Although "The Stack" is more a philosophical abstraction than an engineering model, it is very useful in understanding a specific technological field as a whole. Since a car is more and more a computational object, a high-speed computing platform on wheels, it is interesting to apply such a vision to the automotive field, starting from its rooting into the planet from which it draws the energetic and mineral resources, passing through the integration in clouds of services, delivered by platforms, and the "autonomization" of vehicles, up to a new form of user, that can even be "nonhuman" (see for instance the case of the autonomous vehicle). Drawing hints and visions from philosophical dissertations, technical and marketing news, white papers and academic research, this article scans the automotive field and more in general mobility and smart cities, going up the six interconnected layers of The Stack (Earth – Cloud – City – Address – Interface – User). In this frame, pushed towards a future sometimes utopian, dystopian scenarios also arise. Furthermore, vulnerabilities give place to that special kind of user that normally is called "hacker", but in the context of The Stack we call the "Anti-User", the category of users that we introduce.