Protocol: how control exists after decentralization

tags

Internet Protocol

Notes

Foreword: Protocol Is as Protocol Does

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makes a case for a material understanding of technology. “Material” can be taken in all senses of the term, as an ontological category as well as a political and economic one. This type of materialist media studies shows how the question “how does it work?” is also the question “whom does it work for?”

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this is clearly not literary criticism. Nor is it semiotics—textual, visual, or otherwise. This is because computer code is always enacted.

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Networks Are Real but Abstract

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Protocol, or Political Economy

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general talk about “networks,” dissociated from their context and technical instantiation, can be replaced by a discussion of “protocols.” Every network is a network be- cause it is constituted by a protocol.

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The central political question that Protocol asks is where the power has gone.

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Isomorphic Biopolitics

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the concept of “protocol” is related to a biopolitical production, a production of the possibility for experience in control societies.

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the mere decision about standards becomes a discourse on “ontol- ogy” in the philosophical sense.

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Preface

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I consider computers to be fundamentally a textual medium. The reason is obvious: computers are based on a technological language called code. This underlying code provides the textual link between computers and critical theory.

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I. How Control Exists After Decentralization

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Introduction

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after the disciplinary societies come the societies of control. Deleuze believed that there exist wholly new technologies concurrent with the societies of control.

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protocol is a technique for achieving vol- untary regulation within a contingent environment.

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common for contemporary critics to describe the Internet as an unpredictable mass of data—rhizomatic and lacking central organization. This position states that since new communication technologies are based on the elimination of centralized command and hierarchical control, it follows that the world is witnessing a general disappearance of control as such. This could not be further from the truth.

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What contributes to this misconception (that the Internet is chaotic rather than highly controlled), I suggest, is that protocol is based on a con- tradiction between two opposing machines: One machine radically distrib- utes control into autonomous locales, the other machine focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies.

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nearly all Web traffic must submit to a hierarchical structure (DNS) to gain access to the anarchic and radically horizontal struc- ture of the Internet. As I demonstrate later, this contradictory logic is ram- pant throughout the apparatus of protocol.

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Because the DNS system is structured like an inverted tree, each branch of the tree holds absolute control over everything below it.

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the content of every new protocol is always an- other protocol.

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Like the rhizome, each node in a dis- tributed network may establish direct communication with another node, without having to appeal to a hierarchical intermediary. Yet in order to ini- tiate communication, the two nodes must speak the same language. This is why protocol is important. Shared protocols are what defines the landscape of the network—who is connected to whom.

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“[d]istributed systems require for their operation a homogenous standard of interconnectivity.”

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Protocol is to control societies as the panopticon is to disciplinary societies.

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Marvin Minsky, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, and oth- ers have also wrestled with the topic of artificial intelligence. But they are not addressed here. I draw a critical distinction between this body of work, which is concerned largely with epistemology and cognitive science, and the critical media theory that inspires this book. Where they are concerned with minds and questions epistemological, I am largely concerned with bodies and the material stratum of computer technology.

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study computers as André Bazin studied film or Roland Barthes studied the striptease: to look at a material technology and analyze its specific formal functions and dysfunctions.

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Periodization

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thinkers have roughly agreed on three broad historical phases, these being the classical era, the modern era, and the postmodern era.

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In Deleuze, therefore, com- puters are historically concurrent with control societies.

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A distributed architecture is pre- cisely that which makes protocological/imperial control of the network so easy. In fact, the various Internet protocols mandate that control may only be derived from such a distributed architecture.

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Empire is the social theory and protocol the tech- nical.

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An analysis of computer protocols proves this, for it reassigns the former weapons of Leftists—celebration of difference, attack on essen- tialism, and so forth—as the new tools of Empire: “This new enemy not only is resistant to the old weapons but actually thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying them to the fullest. Long live differ- ence! Down with essentialist binaries.”49 A distributed network is precisely what gives IP its effectiveness as a dominant protocol. Or to take another ex- ample, the flimsy, cross-platform nature of HTML is precisely what gives it its power as a protocological standard. Like Empire, if protocol dared to cen- tralize, or dared to hierarchize, or dared to essentialize, it would fail.

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1 Physical Media

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During the Cold War, NORAD was the lynchpin of nuclear defense in North America. It is a “solution” to the nuclear threat. The Internet system could not be more different.

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The panopticon, described in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, is also a centralized network.

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de- centralized networks are the most common diagram of the modern era.

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Truly distributed networks cannot, in fact, support all-channel communication (a combinatorial utopia),

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“The shift is occurring across the spectrum of information technologies as we move from models of the global application of intelligence, with their universality and frictionless dispersal, to one of local applications, where intelligence is site-specific and fluid.”

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Distribution propagates through rhythm, not rebirth.

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The highway system is a distributed network because it lacks any centralized hubs and offers direct linkages from city to city through a va- riety of highway combinations.

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Both the Internet and the U.S. interstate highway system were developed in roughly the same time period (from the late 1950s to the late 1970s), for roughly the same reason (to facilitate mobility and communication in case of war). Later, they both matured into highly useful tools for civilians.

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What was once protocol’s primary liability in its former military con- text—the autonomous agent who does not listen to the chain of command— is now its primary constituent in the civil context.

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RFCs are a discursive treasure trove for the criti- cal theorist.

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the OSI model, my preferred heuristic, considers every- thing to be code and makes no allowances for special anthropomorphic uses of data. This makes it much easier to think about protocol. The other models privilege human-legible forms, whose reducibility to protocol is flimsy at best.

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The ultimate goal of the Internet protocols is totality. The virtues of the Internet are robustness, contingency, interoperability, flexibility, heterogeneity, pantheism. Accept everything, no matter what source, sender, or destination.

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As a system this robustness is achieved by following a general principle: “Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”

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The next-hop strategy means that no single node on the Internet knows definitively where a destination is, merely that it is “over there.”

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The tree structure allows Mockapetris to divide the total name space data- base into more manageable and decentralized zones through a process of hi- erarchization.

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In DNS, each name server can reply only with authoritative information about the zone immediately below it. This is why the system is hierarchical. But each name server can only know authoritative information about the zone immediately below it. The second, or third, or even fourth segment down the branch has been delegated to other name servers. This is why the system is decentralized.

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protocol is based on a con- tradiction between two opposing machinic technologies: One radically dis- tributes control into autonomous locales (exemplified here by TCP and IP), and the other focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies (exemplified here by DNS).

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DNS is the most heroic of human projects; it is the actual construction of a single, exhaustive index for all things. It is the encyclopedia of mankind, a map that has a one-to-one relationship with its territory.

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DNS is like many other protocols in that, in its mad dash toward universality, it produces sameness or consistency where originally there existed arbitrariness.

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DNS is not simply a translation language, it is language. It governs meaning by mandating that anything meaningful must register and appear somewhere in its system. This is the nature of protocol.

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protocol is against interpretation.

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protocological analysis must focus not on the sciences of meaning (representation/interpretation/ reading), but rather on the sciences of possibility (physics or logic),

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The limits of a protocological system and the limits of possibility within that system are synonymous.

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2 Form

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computer protocols are not just a set of technical specifications, as de- scribed in chapter 1. They are an entire formal apparatus. By formal appara- tus I mean the totality of techniques and conventions that affect protocol at a social level, not simply a technical one.

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protocol from the point of view of the webmaster.

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one may ask: Is protocol formally healthy?

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radio was in the wrong shape, that it had yet to fulfill its full potential for being a two-way com- munications network: Radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out.

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why wouldn’t the many-to-many radio net- work already exist, if it was possible for it to exist? Enzensberger’s answer is that it is prohibited for “political reasons,” and that this prohibition arises from the fundamental structure of capital: “The technical distinction be- tween receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers . . . It is based, in the last analysis, on the basic contradiction between the ruling class and the ruled class.”

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“Fear of handling shit is a luxury a sewerman cannot necessarily afford,”

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“fear of being swallowed up by the system is a sign of weakness; it presupposes that capitalism could overcome any contradic- tion—a conviction which can easily be refuted historically and is theoreti- cally untenable.”

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Enzensberger equates decentralization with Marxist liberation. He lauds the new electronic media for being “oriented towards action, not contemplation; towards the present, not [bourgeois] tradition.”9 The very immateriality of the media resists commodification and reification, suggests Enzensberger: “The media produce no objects that can be hoarded and auctioned,”10 and later: “The media also do away with the old category of works of art which can only be considered as separate objects . . . The media do not produce such objects. They create programs. Their production is in the nature of a process.”11 The discovery of processes where once there were ob- jects—this is perhaps the most fundamental moment in a Marxist method.

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Both Wiener and Bush have therefore unwittingly contributed greatly to the tradition of Marxist media theory inaugurated by Brecht.

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if critical theory teaches anything, it is to be wary of the obvious.

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the Web is structured around rigid protocols that govern the transfer and representation of texts and images—so the Web isn’t “an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system” as is Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome.

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The Web is described as a free, structureless network. Yet the rhizome is clearly not the absence of structure. It is the privileging of a certain kind of structure, the horizontal network, over another structure, the tree.

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protocol is in fact both poles of this machinic movement, territorializing structure and anarchical distribu- tion.

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Indeed, the Internet works too well. If the Internet were truly rhizomatic, it would resist identification. It would resist the deep, meaningful uses that people make of it everyday.

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Continuity, then, is defined as the set of techniques practiced by web- masters that, taken as a totality, create this pleasurable, fluid experience for the user.

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Conceal the source.

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Eliminate dead links.

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Eliminate no links.

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There can be no dead ends on the Inter- net. Each page must go somewhere else, even if that somewhere else is “back.” Each page must be rich with offerings,

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Green means go.

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“Good interfaces do away with text, the way good psychotherapists get rid of repressed memories and emotional blocks.”

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True identity.

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Remove barriers.

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Continuity between media types.

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Prohibition against low resolution.

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Pixels cannot be visible. Fonts must be smooth. Full color palettes are better than limited ones. High-resolution, representational images are better than cheap, simple ones. Low resolution shatters the illusion of continuity because it means that the source, the code, is not being properly concealed.

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Highest speed possible.

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Prohibition on crashes.

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During a crash, the computer changes from being passive to being active.

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Prohibition on dead media.

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All technology is new technology. Everything else must be eliminated.

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Eliminate mediation.

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make the network a natural-feeling extension of the user’s own body. Thus, any mediation between the user and the network must be eliminated. Interfaces must be as transparent as possible.

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All traces of the medium should be hidden,

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Feedback loops.

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downstream bandwidth (the size of the pipe entering your house) can be as much as ten times the size of the upstream bandwidth (the size of the pipe leaving your house). Thus, it becomes easier to re- ceive information than it does to send it, creating a scenario much more like television than the many-to-many structure promised by the Internet.

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The conflict between the total and the specific is palpable on the Internet. Each movement on the Net is recorded in myriad different locations (log files, server statistics, email boxes); however, the real identity of those movements is irrelevant.

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Anonymous but descriptive.

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The clustering of de- scriptive information around a specific user becomes sufficient to explain the identity of that user.

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biopower is the power to interpret material objects as information,

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the most interesting forms of cultural production appear when some of these principles are inverted,

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Record

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A record is any type of nonrandom information, not simply something that records language or data.

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Certain records can experience a conjunction of utility and information. Thus, a knife not only contains the information of cutting in its form, but is also used to cut. A photograph of a knife, on the other hand, contains the information of cutting, but cannot be used to cut.

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With the alphabet comes a perfect synergy of form and information.

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“the ability to record sense data technologically,” using such instruments as the phonograph and the typwriter, “shifted the entire discourse network circa 1900. For the first time in history, writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial storage of data. The technological recording of the real entered into competition with the symbolic registration of the Symbolic.”

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The record is, in the most abstract sense, any nonchaotic something.

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Object

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A record is one particular form-of-appearance of an object. The object is the digital economy’s basic unit. It is any unit of content.

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Digital objects are pure positivities. They are the heterogenous elements that exist in what Deleuze and Guattari have called “machinic” processes.

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Objects exist only upon use. They are assembled from scratch each time

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Protocol

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from a formal perspective, protocol is a type of object.

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Browser

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In digital space this “hiding machine,” this making-no- difference machine, is epitomized in the Internet browser.

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the goal of protocol is totality, to accept everything. This principle is also exhibited in the browser.

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Its virtue is not diversity but university.

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HTML

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Fonts

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3 Power

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consider protocol in its political sense, as a pseudo- ideological force that has influence over real human lives.

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Deleuze de- fines control societies as being primarily “digital.” They operate through “ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control.”

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Foucault has argued that the further the progression into the post- modern (or digital) age, the more politics ceases to interest itself in the soul or the body. Instead, politics desires “life itself.” Foucault calls this type of politics “bio-politics.”

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protocol is an affective, aesthetic force that has control over “life it- self.” This is the key to thinking of protocol as power.

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“Discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a think- ing, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be deter- mined.”6 In fact, Foucault writes that his interest lies in the “anonymous and general subject of history,”7 not the social subject of history.

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Biopolitics, then, connects to a certain statistical knowledge about populations. Foucault notes that it is dependent on the basic tenets of liberalism— namely, that people and their societies possess various statistical properties that can be measured. Biopolitics is a species-level knowledge. It is the type of knowledge that, say, UNICEF employs when it claims that the infant mor- tality rate in the United States is 7 per every 1,000 births.16 This is the mo- ment of biopolitics.

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biopolitics and biopower are Foucault’s terms for protocol as it relates to life forms. They are Foucault’s terms for the statistical coding, the making-statistical, of large living masses, such that any singular life-form within that mass may be compared in its organic nature to the totality. This is exactly how protocol functions, as a management style for distributed masses of autonomous agents.

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Second Nature

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For my purposes, “second nature” refers to the way in which material objects in the modern era have a tendency to become aesthetic objects.

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Does Capital have an aesthetic essence accessible to the medium of film? How would it be possible to make such a film, and who would watch it?

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the discourse of Capital itself was always already in aesthetic form, bol- stered by never-ending naturalistic and vitalistic imagery (natural objects, biological processes, monsters, transmutations, and mystifications). This vitalism in Marx heralds the dawning age of protocol, I argue, by transforming life itself into an aesthetic object.

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The contradiction at the heart of protocol is that it has to standardize in order to liberate. It has to be fascistic and unilateral in order to be utopian. It contains, as Jameson wrote of mass culture before it, both the ability to imagine an unalienated social life and a window into the dystopian realities of that life.

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Marx is obsessed with animals, plants and minerals of all kinds.

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Specters, monsters, and vampires riddle his text. As Derrida has shown in Specters of Marx, the concept of haunting appears several times in Capital

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the idea that inversion, or upside-downness, is linked directly to illusion, mystification, and misrecognition. Because Hegel (and idealists like him) was standing on his head, he couldn’t see the world as it was.

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The use of vitalistic imagery, no matter how margin- alized within the text, quite literally aestheticizes capitalism. It turns capital- ism into media.

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Emergence of Artificial Life Forms (Matter Becoming Life)

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The vital quality of pure matter has long haunted the modern era.

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the emergence of autonomous vital forms appears as a distinct trend in the last two hundred years of contem- plative thought.

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this book has very little to say about questions epistemological. Protocol is not a theory of mind.

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protocological life is considered here as “the forces—aesthetic, technical, po- litical, sexual—with which things combine in order to form novel aggre- gates of pattern and behavior.”

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The anti-entropic position states, simply, that life is precisely that force that resists entropy.

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Genes and memes (themselves also genes, but in the realm of culture) are two ways of moving against the entropic force,

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living beings are characterized as anti-entropic, vitality being the op- posite of entropy,

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machines also resist entropy.

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It’s not simply that machines are like people, or that people are like machines, but that both entities are like something else, what Wiener calls “communicative organisms,” or what today might be called “information organisms.” These are the same organisms that live inside protocol.

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upon formulating his theory of cybernetics, his first instinct was to warn organized labor,

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The self-determinism of material systems is therefore the essence of cybernetics, and it is a positive essence,

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Artificial Life

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this shift—from procedural to object-oriented—follows the shift from the modern to the postmodern eras. In what she calls “the modernist computational aesthetic” the computer was viewed as a “giant calculator,” and program- ming it “was a cut-and-dried technical activity whose rules were crystal clear.”90 However, in today’s multifaceted, distributed environments, “com- putational models of the mind often embrace a postmodern aesthetic of com- plexity and decentering. Mainstream computer researchers no longer aspire to program intelligence into computers but expect intelligence to emerge from the interactions of small subprograms.”

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The ecologically minded Ray has gone so far as to advocate the institution on the Net of a wildlife preserve for digital organisms.

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Life as Medium (Life Becoming Matter)

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life forms, both artificial and organic, exist in any space where material forces are actively aestheticized,

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The “information age”—a term irreverently tossed to and fro by many critics of contemporary life—is not simply that moment when computers come to dominate, but is instead that moment in history when matter itself is understood in terms of information or code. At this historical moment, protocol becomes a controlling force in social life.

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from a “kingdom of sense” in the year 1800 to a “kingdom of pat- tern” in 1900.

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the transformation of matter into code is not only a passage from the qualitative to the quantita- tive but also a passage from the non-aesthetic to the aesthetic—the passage from non-media to media.

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Life was no longer a “pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (Eliot), it was a code borne from pure mathematics, an object of aesthetic beauty, a double helix! This historical moment—when life is de- fined no longer as essence, but as code—is the moment when life becomes a medium.

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biometrics does some- thing much more important. It considers living human bodies not in their immaterial essences, or souls, or what have you, but in terms of quantifiable, recordable, enumerable, and encodable characteristics. It considers life as an aesthetic object.

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Biometrics is important, therefore, not because it infringes on privacy, but because it has redefined what counts as proof of the true identity of ma- terial life forms.

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Collaborative filtering, also called suggestive filtering and included in the growing field of “intelligent agents,” allows one to predict new characteristics (particularly one’s so-called desires) based on survey data.

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because collaborative filtering works through a process of interpellation (selecting data interior rather than exterior to a given set), no improvement in the overall data pool is possible. Thus, collaborative filtering ensures structural homogeneity rather than het- erogeneity. While any given user may experience a broadening of his or her personal tastes, the pool at large becomes less and less internally diverse.

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Personal identity is formed only on certain hegemonic patterns. In this massive algorithmic collaboration, the user is always suggested to be like someone else, who, in order for the system to work, is already like the user to begin with!

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II. Failures of Protocol

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4 Institutionalization

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Spam was born. The perpetrators, Arizona lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Seigel, had effectively transformed a democratic, protocological system for exchange of ideas into a unilateral, homogenous tool for commercial solicitation.

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protocol requires universal adoption. As a protocological product, Usenet is vulnerable because of this. Even a single party can exploit a weakness and, like a virus, propagate through the system with logical ferocity.

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think of bureaucratic interests as visiting protocol from without due to the im- position of a completely prior and foreign control diagram, while propri- etary interests arrive from within as a coopting of protocol’s own explosive architecture. Bureaucracy is protocol atrophied, while propriety is protocol reified.

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bureaucratic and institutional forces (as well as proprietary interests) are together the inverse of protocol’s control logic.

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Organizations like ICANN are the enemy of protocol because they limit the open, free development of technology.

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protocol is a type of controlling logic that operates outside institutional, governmental, and corporate power,

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Of the twenty-five or so orig- inal protocol pioneers, three of them—Vint Cerf, Jon Postel, and Steve Crocker—all came from a single high school in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley.

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the standards makers at the heart of this technology are a small entrenched group of techno-elite peers. The reasons for this are largely practical. “Most users are not interested in the details of Internet protocols,” Cerf observes. “They just want the system to work.”

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C++ has been tremendously successful as a language. “The spread was world-wide from the beginning,” recalled Stroustrup. “[I]t fit into more environments with less trouble than just about anything else.” Just like a protocol.

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JVC’s economic strategy that included aggressive licensing of the VHS format to competitors. JVC’s behavior is pseudo-protocological.

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Sony tried to fortify its market position by keeping Betamax to itself.

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protocological behavior (giving out your technology broadly even if it means giving it to your competitors) often wins out over proprietary behavior.

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Protocol does not interface with content, with se- mantic value. It is, as I have said, against interpretation. But with Bern- ers-Lee comes a new strain of protocol: protocol that cares about meaning. This is what he means by a Semantic Web.

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debate as to whether descriptive protocols actually add intelligence to information, or whether they are simply subjective descriptions (originally written by a human) that computers mimic but understand little about.

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local differences are elided in favor of uni- versal consistencies.

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Thus it is an oversight for theorists like Lawrence Lessig (despite his strengths) to suggest that the origin of Internet communication was one of total freedom and lack of control.46 Instead, it is clear to me that the exact opposite of freedom—that is, control—has been the outcome of the last forty years of developments in networked communications. The founding prin- ciple of the Net is control, not freedom. Control has existed from the beginning.

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control based on openness, inclusion, universalism, and flexibility. It is control borne from high degrees of technical organization (protocol), not this or that limitation on individual freedom or decision making (fascism).

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it is with complete sincerity that Berners-Lee writes: “I had (and still have) a dream that the web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. I imagine it immersing us as a warm, friendly environment made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured out.”47 The irony is, of course, that in or- der to achieve this social utopia computer scientists like Berners-Lee had to develop the most highly controlled and extensive mass media yet known.

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The generative contradiction that lies at the very heart of protocol is that in order to be politically progressive, protocol must be partially reactionary.

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in order for protocol to enable radically distributed communications between autonomous entities, it must employ a strategy of universalization, and of homogeneity. It must be anti-diversity.

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III Protocol Futures

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5 Hacking

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Not to enter into the protocological community carries such a high price that to reject protocol would be foolish.

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especially difficult to speak about protocol in a nega- tive sense, for its very success helps preclude outsider positions. Only the participants can connect, and therefore, by definition, there can be no resist- ance to protocol (at least not in any direct or connected sense).

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members of the left continue to act as if they still live in the age of early capital.”

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The police crackdown arrived full force in 1990 after the January 15, 1990, crash of AT&T’s long- distance system.

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Now when people say hacker, they mean terrorist.

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the current debate on hackers is help- lessly throttled by the discourse on contemporary liberalism: should one re- spect data as private property, or should one cultivate individual freedom and leave computer users well enough alone?

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hacking is an index of protocological transformations taking place in the broader world of techno-culture.

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Tiger Teams

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“A true hacker is not a group person,”31 wrote Stewart Brand in 1972. Or, as he would write fifteen years later: “Workers of the world, fan out”32—advice that inverts the message of resistance-through-unity found in Marx and En- gel’s Communist Manifesto.

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“[t]he use of power through number—from labor unions to activist organizations—is bankrupt, because such a strategy requires . . . the existence of a centralized present enemy.”

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The nomadic model “seeks to undermine the symbolic order with more ephemeral, process-oriented methods,”

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Code

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Code thus purports to be multidimensional. Code draws a line between what is material and what is active, in essence saying that writing (hardware) can- not do anything, but must be transformed into code (software) to be effective.

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not in the fact that code is sub- linguistic, but rather in the fact that it is hyperlinguistic. Code is a language, but a very special kind of language. Code is the only language that is executable.

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a machine for con- verting meaning into action.

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Code has a semantic meaning, but it also has an enactment of meaning.

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“There Is No Software”¹

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Uncompiled source code is logically equivalent to that same code compiled into assembly language and/or linked into machine code.

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it is wrong to make claims about the relative pu- rity of machine code over source code, for each is equally mediated by the environment of the digital computer.

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Possibility

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Protocol is synonymous with possibility. From the perspective of protocol, if you can do it, it can’t be bad,

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Hackers don’t care about rules, feelings, or opinions. They care about what is true and what is possible. And in the logical world of computers, if it is possible then it is real. Can you break into a computer, not should you or is it right to.

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Now, who is to blame? ME for getting it or YOU for being such an idiot?!”

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if technology is proprietary it ceases to be protocological.

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with protocol comes the exciting new ability to leverage possibility and action through code.

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6 Tactical Media

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computer viruses are incredibly effective at identifying anti- protocological technologies. They infect proprietary systems and propagate through the homogeneity contained within them. Show me a computer virus and I’ll show you proprietary software with a market monopoly.

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Computer Viruses

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Morris’s worm was characterized as a mistake, not an overt criminal act. Likewise his punishment was relatively lenient

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While Melissa was gen- erally admitted to have been more of a nuisance than a real threat, Smith was treated as a hard criminal rather than a blundering geek. He pleaded guilty to ten years and a $150,000 fine.

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self-replicating programs flipped 180 degrees. The virus is now indicative of criminal wrongdoing.

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Cyberfeminism

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women have traditionally comprised the laboring core of networks of all kinds, particularly the telecommunications networks.

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a lot of ‘orthodox’ feminist theory was still very technophobic.”

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Conflicting Diagrams

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Terrorism is a sign that we are in a transitional moment in history. (Could there ever be anything else?) It signals that historical actors are not in a re- lationship of equilibrium, but are instead grossly mismatched.

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“City by city, country by country, the bomb helped drive dispersion,”² Galison continues, highlighting the power of the A-bomb to drive the push toward distribution in urban planning.

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Baran’s advice to the American military was to become network-like. And once it did the nuclear threat was no longer a catastrophic threat to communications and mobility

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“Bureaucracy lies at the root of our military weakness,” wrote advocates of military reform in the mid-eighties. “The bureaucratic model is inher- ently contradictory to the nature of war, and no military that is a bureaucracy can produce military excellence.”

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The dilemma, then, is that while hierarchy and centralization are almost certainly politically tainted due to their historical association with fascism and other abuses, networks are both bad and good.

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mobility and disguise.

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7 Internet Art

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a ‘new art,’ as people say a little loosely, may be recognized by the fact that it is not recognized.”4 Thus, a truly subversive art form would, in fact, be invisible. The moment video is seen as art, it is divorced from its “newness.”

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Let me suggest that the “new art” that Derrida calls for is not in fact video, but the new media art that has appeared over the last few decades with the arrival of digital computers.

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the very limitations of new media technology, what she describes as the “delays in transmission-time, busy signals from service providers, crashing web browsers,” are what bring about its specificity as an artistic medium.

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Many on the Left have been disappointed with the political potential of hacking because of this libertarian, gee-whiz desire for freedom of information. Tactical media, on the other hand, is almost synonymous with the Left because it is driven almost exclusively by progressive politics.

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Floodnet is primarily a vi- sualization tool, but for abstract networks rather than real world situations. It makes the Internet and the people in it more visible—and their political cause with them—by creating what EDT founder Ricardo Dominguez calls “disturbances” within protocol.

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Freedom of all information was more important to the HEART hackers than the political disturbances.

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If the network itself is political from the start, then any artistic practice within that network must engage politics or feign ignorance.

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“the end of an era. The first formative period of net cul- ture seems to be over.”23 He is referring to a series of years from 1995 to 1999 when the genre of net.art was first developed. In this period, due to prominent technical constraints such as bandwidth and computer speed, many artists were forced to turn toward conceptual uses of the Internet that were not hindered by these technical constraints, or, in fact, made these constrains the subject of the work. All art media involve constraints, and through these constraints creativity is born. Net.art is low bandwidth through and through.

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As computers and network bandwidth improved during the late 1990s, the primary physical reality that governed the aesthetic space of net.art began to fall away.

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Internet Art as Art of the Network

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Internet Art as Art of Software

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Toywar was an online gaming platform playable simulta- neously by multiple users around the world. The goal of the game was to negatively affect specific capital valuations on the NASDAQ stock market.

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artist groups like Etoy and RTMark have begun to think and act like corporations, even going so far as to create mutual funds and issue stocks as art objects.

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People will have their own character and will have an in- come—if they work hard they get etoy.SHARE options.

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The goal of Toywar was to wage “art war” on eToys Inc., trying to drive its stock price to as low a value as possible—and in the first two weeks of Toywar, eToys’ stock price on the NASDAQ plummeted by over 50 percent and continued to nosedive.

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Auctionism

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Conclusion

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With bumps, the driver wants to drive more slowly. With bumps, it becomes a virtue to drive slowly. But with police presence, driving slowly can never be more than coerced behavior. Thus, the signage appeals to the mind, while protocol always appeals to the body.

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Protocol is not a superego (like the police); instead it always operates at the level of desire, at the level of “what we want.”

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the ruling elite is tired of trees too.

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How is a technology able to establish real-world control when it lacks certain fundamental tools such as hierarchy, centralization, and violence? Why does technology seem, as Kevin Kelly likes to put it, so “out of control” yet still function so flawlessly? There must be some machine that, at the end of the day, sorts it all out. Protocol is that machine, that massive control apparatus that guides dis- tributed networks, creates cultural objects, and engenders life forms.

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restating a few summarizing moments

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It is very likely if not inevitable that the core Internet protocols, to- day largely safe from commercial and state power, will be replaced by some type of proprietary system. (The fact that Microsoft has not yet replaced TCP/IP with a commercial product of its own is one of the miracles of computer history. Chances are this will happen very soon.)

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pro- tocol is like the trace of footprints left in snow, or a mountain trail whose route becomes fixed only after years of constant wear. One is always free to pick a different route. But protocol makes one instantly aware of the best route—and why wouldn’t one want to follow it?

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a better synonym for protocol might be “the practical,” or even “the sensible.”

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it is dangerous because it acts to make concrete our fun- damentally contingent and immaterial desires (a process called reification), and in this sense protocol takes on authoritarian undertones.

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protocol is also dangerous in the way that a weapon is dangerous. It is potentially an effective tool that can be used to roll over one’s political op- ponents.

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Perhaps an analogy from Berners-Lee would help clarify this. The Web, he writes, is like a market economy: In a market economy, anybody can trade with anybody, and they don’t have to go to a market square to do it. What they do need, however, are a few practices everyone has to agree to, such as the currency used for trade, and the rules of fair trading.

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Do we want the Web to function like a mar- ket economy?

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Index

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