Column

The unit of activity in The Stack: a User-initiated message tunnels down through Interface, Address, City, Cloud and Earth and back up to another User, a U-shaped path in which "the whole is 'folded' into each single instance of activation." A User initiates millions of columns over time, so no column ever resolves a User to one layer "for good" and no sovereign claim can capture all six layers of a column at once — Bratton's structural case that The Stack is "a totality resistant to totalitarianism." In the User chapter the column, not the person, is what metadata surveillance polices ("the query becomes the quarry"), and what a future accountability regime would have to address.