From Grey Room 17 (Fall 2004): 6–29.
We identify in the current literature a general willingness to ignore politics by masking it inside the so-called black box of technology.
What is needed, then, is an analysis of networks not at the broad level of political theory but at the micro-technical level of nonhuman, machinic practices. To this end, the principle of political control we suggest is most helpful for thinking about technological networks as protocol, a word derived from computer science but which resonates in the life sciences as well.
The question we aim to explore here is What is the principle of political organization or control that stitches a network together? Writers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have helped answer this question in the sociopolitical sphere. They describe the global principle of political organization as one of “Empire.”
Summary
Galloway and Thacker argue that political power in networked societies operates through protocol—the technical and procedural rules that govern digital communication. To understand control today, one must analyze the micro-technical mechanisms through which networks function, not just their political or economic effects.
Analyzing politics in the black box
Contemporary discourse often conceals politics within the “black box” of technology, avoiding the material and procedural operations that actually produce power.
Micro-technical analysis: Understanding networks requires studying how nonhuman, machinic practices—such as code, standards, and data formats—enforce order and discipline.
Graph theory (first tool of analysis)
from a graph theory perspective, networks display three basic characteristics: their organization into nodes and edges (dots and lines), their connectivity, and their topology.
Paul Baran, coinventor of packet switching, uses basic graph theory principles to show how, given the same set of nodes/ dots and a different set of edges/lines, one gets three very different network topologies. Same dots, different lines, different networks. The familiar distinction between centralized, decentralized, and distributed networks can be found everywhere today, not only within computer and information technologies but in social, political, economic, and, especially, biological networks as well
Networks always contain several coexistent, and sometimes incompatible, topologies. A “technical” topology of the Internet might describe it as distributed (for example, in the case of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks based on the Gnutella model). But this technical topology is indissociable from its motive, use, and regulation, which also makes it a social topology (file sharing communities), an economic topology (distribution of commodities), and even a legal topology (digital copyright)
Protocol as control (second tool of analysis)
Borrowed from computer science, protocol describes the rules that determine how data flows and connections are maintained. This technical structure itself is a form of political organization.
Protocological control challenges us to rethink critical and political action around a newer framework, that of multi-agent, individuated nodes in a metastable network. This means that protocol is less about power (confinement, discipline, normativity) and more about control (modulation, distribution, flexibility).
Same as the protocols of biological networks, which are the modes of biological regulation and control in the genome and in the cell.
What we can learn from understanding DNA computing is that protocological control can be biological as well as computational.
The relation between protocol and power is some what inverted: the greater the distributed nature of the network, the greater the number of controls that enable the network to function as a network. Protocol answers the complicated question of how control pervades distributed networks. In other words, protocol tells us that heterogeneous, asymmetrical power relations are the absolute essence of the Internet-network or the genome-network, not their fetter.
| [[Galloway, Alexander_Protocol, Control, and Networks.pdf#page=16&selection=16,32,28,16 | Galloway, Alexander_Protocol, Control, and Networks, page 16]] |
Information as both material and immaterial
On the one hand, information is seen as being abstract, quantitative, reducible to a calculus of management and regulation this is the disembodied, immaterial notion of “information” referred to above. On the other hand, cybernetics, information theory, and systems theory all show how information is immanently material, configured into military technology, communications media, and even biological systems. In the cybernetic feedback loop, in the communications channel, and in the organic whole of any system, we find this dual view of information. Both immaterial and materializing, abstract and concrete, an act and a thing.
Protocol always implies some way of acting through information. In a sense, information is the concept that enables a wide range of networks-computational, biological, economic, political-to be networks. Information is the key commodity in the organizational logic of protocological control. Information is the substance of protocol. Information makes protocol matter
| [[Galloway, Alexander_Protocol, Control, and Networks.pdf#page=16&selection=64,51,74,20 | Galloway, Alexander_Protocol, Control, and Networks, page 16]] |
Political Ontology (third tool)
Deleuze “individuals become ‘dividuals,’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’
Simondon “understand the individual from the perspective of the process of individuation rather than the process of individuation by means of the individual.”
In terms of protocological control, the question of individuation is a question of how discrete nodes (agencies) and their edges (actions) are identified and managed as nodes and edges. What counts as a node or an edge in a given network? Does this change depending on the granularity of the analysis? What resists individuations, or “dividuations”? What supports individuations, or diversifies them?
Multiplicity While networks can be individuated and identified quite easily, networks are also always “more than one.
What are the terms, the conditions, upon which “a” network may be constituted by multiple agencies? Protocols serve to provide that condition of possibility, and protocological control the means of facilitating that condition
Movement
networks are only networks when they are “live,” when they are enacted, embodied, or rendered operational.
Resistance and counter-protocol
Hardt and Negri, “being-against” the vast potential of human life to counter forces of exploitation.
the target is not simply protocol; rather, to be more precise, the target of resistance is the way in which protocol inflects and sculpts life itself.
![[Galloway, Alexander_Protocol, Control, and Networks.pdf]]