Protocol: How control exists after decentralization

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Galloway, A. R. (2004). Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

Contents 1 Foreword: Protocol is as protocol does (Eugene Thacker) 1.1 Networks are real but abstract 1.2 Protocol, or political economy 1.3 Isomorphic biopolitics 1.4 Jump offs 2 Preface 2.1 Jump offs 3 Introduction 3.1 Societies of control 3.2 Internet the most extensive system for info management 3.3 Domain Name System (DNS) 3.4 TCP/IP 3.5 Ownership, authority of the backbone 3.6 Defining Protocol 3.7 Responding to "contemporary critics" 3.8 DNS, protocological tension of the internet 3.9 Distributed network as Deleuzian "diagram" 3.10 "Dividuation" 3.11 Biopower, biopolitics, Foucault 3.12 Is protocol bad? 3.13 What, who this book does not address 3.14 Who does it build on? 3.15 Method: Institutional ecologies 3.16 Periodization 3.17 Periodization as a loose art 3.18 Jump offs

Foreword: Protocol is as protocol does (Eugene Thacker)

• "social change is indissociable from technological development ... thought not determined by it" (xii)
• "materialist media studies ... 'how does it work?' [==] 'whom does it work for?'" (xii)
• not lit crit, nor semiotics -- because code is executed
• not enough to explain how it works but to engage with it and "explain with it" (xiii)

Networks are real but abstract

• Networks are not (merely) metaphors (xiii)
  • Weakness of some earlier critique
• Limits of network metaphor: can only express relationships (xiv)
  • But networks are "material and materializing" machines
• Metaphors to resist, examine:
  • connectivity, linear improvement (xv)
  • collectivity, insofar as it implies inclusivity (xvi)

Protocol, or political economy

• Internet not simply "open or closed but ... modulated" (xix)

Isomorphic biopolitics

• Noting parallels, possible isomorphs between biology, CS
  • ontology, layers, portability, etc...

Jump offs

• Henri Bergson on "virtual"

Preface

• Challenges of working interdisciplinarily

"Like film was to André Bazin or fashion was to Roland Barthes, I consider computers to be fundamentally a textual medium" (xxiii)

• Code as "textual link" between computing and crit theory

Jump offs

• Hardt, M. and Weeks, K. The Jameson Reader
• Friedrich Kittler, "one must understand at least one natural language and at least one computer language"

Introduction

This book is about ...

• Diagram : "distributed network"
• Technology : "digital computer"
• Management style : "protocol" (3)

Societies of control

• Deleuze-defined "third wave" of civilization
  • Follows the Foucault-defined "sovereign societies" and "disciplinary societies" (3)
• Critical Art Ensemble explains it in a different way:
  • "Monuments of power still stand ... [but] command and control now move about as desired" (4)

Internet the most extensive system for info management

ARPANET, mil project

• Note: Hafner/Lyon dispute military tactical design (surviving nuclear war) in favor of scientific inquiry/communication (4)
  • (Gotta wonder if it's a problem of historiography, if .mil is paying the bills, you gotta explain it in their terms)
• Paul Baran wrote postwar network design for Rand, recorded in IEEE History Center, Rutgers Univ
  • Note: packet-switching independently invented by Donald Davies in UK (5)

Domain Name System (DNS)

• All addressing first handled by a machine at SRI in Menlo Park
• Paul Mockapetris invents DNS in 1984

TCP/IP

• Included with most flavors of UNIX
  • Esp. BSD UNIX from 1977

Ownership, authority of the backbone

• First transfer: from DoD to NSF, 1988
• Second: from Fed to privacy corp, (completed?) 1995 (6)
  • (Seen different dates for this ...)

Defining Protocol

"Viewed as a whole, protocol is a distributed management system that allows control to exist within a heterogrenous material milieu" (8)

• Protocol structures documents, communication largely indifferent to content

Responding to "contemporary critics"

• "It is common for contemporary critics to describe the Internet as ... a general disappearance of control (8)
• (Who are these critics? No cites yet...)

DNS, protocological tension of the internet

• TCP/IP, anarchic, egalitarian, all peers are equal
• DNS, rigidly hierarchical, centralized
• Nothing findable without DNS
• (Are there "anarchic" DNS servers? Trusted, not-for-profit, reliable?
  • Where, who runs DNS?)
• Not sure this description of DNS is exactly correct...
  • Aren't there DNS tables on my machine, my router, my ISP, etc?
  • Surely I don't resolve each and every URL with a root server?
• TBLee called DNS the "Achilles' heel" of the web (10)

Distributed network as Deleuzian "diagram"

• Deleuze defines the diagram as "a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field" (11)
• Each node in a distributed network may initiate contact with any other node so long as they share a protocol

"Dividuation"

• Another Deleuze neologism:
  • "dissolving of individual identity into distributed networks of information" (12)

Biopower, biopolitics, Foucault

"Foucault's treatment of biopower is entirely protocological. Protocol is to control societies as the panopticon is to disciplinary societies" (13)

• Likewise, biopower and resistance to power exist in the same site(13-16)
• Counter-protocological activities respond to protocological control

Is protocol bad?

• Not bad but "dangerous" (16)
• Redirect, reuse, learn, adapt
• "Active social actors rather than passive users" (16)
  • Re: Hans Magnus Enzensberger
• Deleuze suggests that piracy/virus maybe like strikes/ sabotage of the 19th c.
• To resist, one must direct efforts "through" protocol, not "against" it (17)

What, who this book does not address

Not about information society but about "the real machines that live within that society" (17)

• Doesn't engage with what Lovink called "vapor theory" that ignores the computer

Nor critique of third phase of capitalism "on social terms"

• Peter Drucker
• Daniel Bell
• Alvin Toffler

Nor singularity

• Kurzweil

Nor AI

• Minsky
• Dennett
• Searle
• Dreyfus

Nor cyber-optimism

• Negroponte

Nor law, policy

• Recommends Milton Mueller, Ruling the root

Who does it build on?

Engaging a material technology and its "specific functions and dysfunctions" (18)

• André Bazin
• Roland Barthes

Discourse shifts

• Friedrich Kittler, Discourse networks 1800/1900
• Foucault, Deleuze

Cybernetics, computer media studies

• Hookway, Branden. Pandemonium: The rise of predatory locales in the postwar world.
• Vannevar Bush
• Hans Magnus Enzenberger
• Marshall McLuhan
• Lewis Mumford
• Alan Turing

Net criticism

• Geertz Lovink
• Hakim Bey
• Critical Art Ensemble
• Timothy Druckrey
• Marina Gržiniƈ
• Lev Manovich
• Sadie Plant

Found in online venues

• CTHE0RY
• Nettime
• Rhizome

Offline

• Ars Electronica
• Next 5 Minutes

Method: Institutional ecologies

• Manuel DeLanda, "institutional ecologies"
• alternate path to writing
  • "recognizes the material substrate of media, and the historical processes that alter and create it" (19)
• Include: "the full complexity of institutional ecologies"
  • Military, bureaucracy, school, hospital, prison, market, anti-market, etc.

Periodization

• Assuming three sociopolitical eras:
  • Classica
  • Modern
  • Postmodern

Recognizing the danger of this arrangement

• But accepting it as a precondition for a historical method
• Bringing disparate thinkers, makers, events into a single space for comparison (20-21)

Third period, "distributed"

• Ernst Mandel, Kondratieff
  • Jameson credits Mandel with the concept
• Adorno + Horkheimer, "late capitalism" and "administered society"
  • Jameson credits Frankfurt School with the term
• Castells, "network society"
  • Supported by quantitative evidence
• Deleuze, Guittari, transition from "tree" to "rhizome"
• Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, "empire"
  • "Like Empire, if protocol dared to centralize, or dared to hierarchize, or dared to essentialize, it would fail" (26)

Periodization as a loose art

"At best, periodization theory is an analytical mindgame, yet one that breathes life into the structural analyses offered to explain certain tectonic shifts in the foundations of social and political life" (27)

"In much of the last hundred years, all three social phases described earlier existed at the same time" (27)

Jump offs

• Deleuze, G. (1990) "Postscript on control societies". Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 180
  • Alternate translation == "Postscript on the societies of contorl" in October: The Second Decade, 1986-1996, ed. Rosalind Krauss, et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997)
• Loshin, Pete. (2000). Big book of fyi rfcs. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
• Berners-Lee, T. (1999). Weaving the web. New York: HarperCollins, p.126.
  • On DNS as weakness
• Garrin, P. (1998). "DNS: Long winded and short sighted". Nettime, October 19.
• Castells, Manuel.
  • "Anchorman of the Third Machine Age" (11)
• Deleuze, Foucault, p. 34 on "diagram"
• Deleuze, G. "Control and becoming" in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia. pp. 175
  • On piracy, viruses as 21st c. strikes/ sabotage
• Geert Lovink, no more vapor theory (17)
• Mueller, Milton. Ruling the root.
  • On policy, law
• Friedrich Kittler, Discourse networks 1800/1900
• Hookway, Branden. Pandemonium: The rise of predatory locales in the postwar world.
• DeLanda, Manuel. (1999) "Economics, computers, and the war machine" in Ars Electronica: Facing the future, ed. Timothy Druckrey. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 325
• Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalsm. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Bruce Sterling. The hacker crackdown, 1993
• Michelle Slatalla, Joshua Quittner, Masters of deception, 1995