Galloway’s Protocols
Galloway has a crucial contention: That protocol is how technological control exists after decentralisation. So far, we have considered the Internet’s network as an ecology. To me decentralisation has until now implied a certain level of anarchy. Last week’s Albert-Laszlo readings started to show that in fact a specific structure and certain rules of predictability emerge in the decentralised network. This reading did not imply that the system was entirely chaotic, but it also did not allude to the level of control through underlying protocols that Galloway suggests the DNS structure imposes. The idea of power laws in last week’s reading relates to Galloway’s idea of the distributed network in which each node is self-deterministic and can communicate how it chooses. However, Galloway goes further to define how this landscape is shaped – through shared protocols, such as language.
Galloway’s concept of the network is an institutional ecology. The “Achille’s heel” of the DNS structure is demonstrated in cases such as that of WikiLeaks. Separate countries and servers could stop providing the domain name server for the website and thus make it inaccessible. This case also demonstrates Galloway’s comparison between the powers of protocols in control societies and Foucault’s concept of the panopticon in regards to disciplinary societies. However, he also stresses that protological control is still an improvement on other forms of social control, because it eliminates hierarchy and thus is more democratic.
[…] Anna D has a fantastic post joining Galloway to the stuff about scale free networks, so that decentralisation doesn’t equal lack of strucure, and that what Galloway shows is how important protocol is (I’d suggest technical and social) to making this structure sensible to us. Protocol as an economy and ecology of control is ‘flat’, decentralised and possibly more democratic. I don’t know, but its structure is flat and there aren’t really centres, just processes of agreement that are in turn highly ordered (protocolesque) events. For instance anyone can write a RFC, and anyone can join the W3C and have a say in what protocols are defined for the internet. Anyone. Written by adrianmiles Posted in commentary Tagged with galloway, weavings […]