Benjamin Bratton’s concept of the User Layer reframes “the user” as a position within a vast technological and geopolitical infrastructure, rather than a discrete human individual. Within The Stack, Bratton maps the layers of computation, networks, and planetary-scale systems that structure how actions are mediated. For us, this challenges the conventional humanist lens of UX design and user-centered thinking: the user is not sovereign, but a node, a relational interface between systemic forces.
This perspective opens the possibility of designing not only for human experience but also for the dynamics of layered systems—where agency is distributed, emergent, and sometimes invisible. The user becomes both an actor and a conduit, entangled with protocols, infrastructures, and artificial intelligences that shape behavior and perception.
"The user is not a person. The user is a position."
This reframing opens up new questions about how we design and understand user experience in systems that are increasingly complex and distributed. If the user is not a person but a position within a system, what does this mean for the design of interfaces, the allocation of agency, and the distribution of power? It suggests that user-centered design must evolve beyond individual human needs to consider how users function as nodes within larger infrastructures.