Protocollary Power

Protocally Power is a concept developed by Alexander Galloway in his book Protocol, to denote the new way power and control are exercized in distributed networks.

Citations on Design as a function of Protocollary Power

Mitch Ratfliffe:

"Yes, networks are grown. But the medium they grow in, in this case the software that supports them, is not grown but designed & architected. The social network ecosystem of the blogosphere was grown, but the blog software that enabled it was designed. Wikis are a socially grown structure on top of software that was designed. It's fortuitous that the social network structures that grew on those software substrates turn out to have interesting & useful properties.

With a greater understanding of which software structures lead to which social network topologies & what the implications are for the robustness, innovativeness, error correctiveness, fairness, etc. of those various topologies, software can be designed that will intentionally & inevitably lead to the growth of political social networks that are more robust, innovative, fair & error correcting." (http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/archives/000471.html)

Mitch Kapor on 'Politics is Architecture'

"“politics is architecture": The architecture (structure and design) of political processes, not their content, is determinative of what can be accomplished. Just as you can’t build a skyscraper out of bamboo, you can’t have a participatory democracy if power is centralized, processes are opaque, and accountability is limited." (http://blog.kapor.com/?p=29)

Power in Networks: Virtual Location (V. Krebs)

"In social networks, location is determined by your connections and the connections of those around you – your virtual location.

Two social network measures, Betweenness and Closeness, are particularly revealing of a node’s advantageous or constrained location in a network. The values of both metrics are dependent upon the pattern of connections that a node is embedded in. Betweenness measures the control a node has over what flows in the network – how often is this node on the path between other nodes? Closeness measures how easily a node can access what is available via the network – how quickly can this node reach all others in the network? A combination where a node has easy access to others, while controlling the access of other nodes in the network, reveals high informal power." (http://www.orgnet.com/PowerInNetworks.pdf)

Fred Stutzman on Pseudo-Govermental Decisions in Social Software

"When one designs social software, they are forced to make pseudo-governmental decisions about how the contained ecosystem will behave. Examples of these decisions include limits on friending behavior, limits on how information in a profile can be displayed, and how access to information is restricted in the ecosystem. These rules create and inform the structural aspects of the ecosystem, causing participants in the ecosystem to behave a specific way.

As we use social software more, and social software more neatly integrates with our lives, a greater portion of our social rules will come to be enforced by the will of software designers. Of course, this isn't new - when we elected to use email, we agree to buy into the social consequences of email. Perhaps because we are so used to making tradeoffs when we adopt social technology, we don't notice them anymore. However, as social technology adopts a greater role in mediating our social experience, it will become very important to take a critical perspective in analyzing how the will of designers change us." (http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2006/10/colonialist-perspective-in-social.html)

Philippe Zafirian on the Two Faces of the Control Society

Philippe Zafirian's citation suggests that protocollary power is related to a shift with the 'Society of Control', from disciplinary control, to the control of engagement.

"Gilles Deleuze, commentant Foucault, a développé une formidable intuition : nous basculons, disait-il, de la société disciplinaire dans la société de contrôle. Ou, pour dire les choses de manière légèrement différente, de la société de contrôle disciplinaire à la société de contrôle d'engagement . Sous une première face, on pourra interpréter ce contrôle comme une forme d'exercice d'un pouvoir de domination, d'un pouvoir structurellement inégalitaire, agissant de manière instrumentale sur l'action des autres. Ce contrôle d'engagement se distingue, en profondeur, du contrôle disciplinaire en ce qu'il n'impose plus le moule des "tâches", de l'assignation à un poste de travail, de l'enfermement dans la discipline d'usine. Il n'enferme plus, ni dans l'espace, ni dans le temps. Il cesse de se présenter comme clôture dans la cellule d'une prison, elle-même placée sous constante surveillance. Selon l'intuition de Deleuze, on passe du moule à la modulation, de l'enfermement à la circulation à l'air libre, de l'usine à la mobilité inter-entreprises. Tout devient modulable : le temps de travail, l'espace professionnel, le lien à l'entreprise, les résultats à atteindre, la rémunération… La contractualisation entre le salarié et l'employeur cesse elle-même d'être rigide et stable. Elle devient perpétuellement renégociable. Tout est en permanence susceptible d'être remis en cause, modifié, altéré." (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/philippe.zarifian/page109.htm)

Example

Social Values in Technical Code:

"In a paper about the hacker community, Hannemyr compares and contrasts software produced in both open source and commercial realms in an effort to deconstruct and problematize design decisions and goals. His analysis provides us with further evidence regarding the links between social values and software code. He concludes:

"Software constructed by hackers seem to favor such properties as flexibility, tailorability, modularity and openendedness to facilitate on-going experimentation. Software originating in the mainstream is characterized by the promise of control, completeness and immutability" (Hannemyr, 1999).

To bolster his argument, Hannemyr outlines the striking differences between document mark-up languages (like HTML and Adobe PDF), as well as various word processing applications (such as TeX and Emacs verses Microsoft Word) that have originated in open and closed development environments. He concludes that "the difference between the hacker’s approach and those of the industrial programmer is one of outlook: between an agoric, integrated and holistic attitude towards the creation of artifacts and a proprietary, fragmented and reductionist one" (Hannemyr, 1999). As Hannemyr’s analysis reveals, the characteristics of a given piece of software frequently reflect the attitude and outlook of the programmers and organizations from which it emerges" (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_10/jesiek/)

Discussion

Protocally Power and P2P

Michel Bauwens on the P2P aspects of Protocollary Power:

The P2P era indeed adds a new twist, a new form of power, which we have called Protocollary Power, and has first been clearly identified and analyzed by Alexander Galloway in his book Protocol. We have already given some examples. One is the fact that the blogosphere has devised mechanisms to avoid the emergence of individual and collective monopolies, through rules that are incorporated in the software itself. Another was whether the entertainment industry would succeed in incorporating software or hardware-based restrictions to enforce their version of copyright. There are many other similarly important evolutions to monitor: Will the internet remain a point to point structure? Will the web evolve to a true P2P medium through Writeable Web developments? The common point is this: social values are incorporated, integrated in the very architecture of our technical systems, either in the software code or the hardwired machinery, and these then enable/allow or prohibit/discourage certain usages, thereby becoming a determinant factor in the type of social relations that are possible. Are the algorhythms that determine search results objective, or manipulated for commercial and ideological reasons? Is parental control software driven by censorship rules that serve a fundamentalist agenda? Many issues are dependent on hidden protocols, which the user community has to learn to see (as a new form of media literacy and democratic practice), so that it can become an object of conscious development, favoring peer to peer processes, rather than the restrictive and manipulative command and control systems. In P2P systems, the formal rules governing bureaucratic systems are replaced by the design criteria of our new means of production, and this is where we should focus our attention. Galloway suggests that we make a diagram of the networks we participate in, with dots and lines, nodes and edges. Important questions then become: Who decides who can participate?, or better, what are the implied rules governing participation? (since there is no specific 'who' or command in a distributed environment); what kind of linkages are possible? On the example of the internet, Galloway shows how the net has a peer to peer protocol in the form of TCP/IP, but that the Domain Name System is hierarchical, and that an authorative server could block a domain family from operating. This is how power should be analyzed. Such power is not per se negative, since protocol is needed to enable participation (no driving without highway code!), but protocol can also be centralized, proprietary, secret, in that case subverting peer to peer processes. However, the stress on protocol, which concerns what Yochai Benkler calls the 'logical layer' of the networks, should not make us forget the power distribution of the physical layer (who owns the networks), and the content layer (who owns and controls the content).

Key Book to Read

Protocol. Alexander Galloway.

More Information

"Democratizing software: Open source, the hacker ethic, and beyond by Brent K. Jesiek. First Monday, volume 8, number 10 (October 2003), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_10/jesiek/index.html