Protocol

Protocol. How Control Exists after Decentralization. Alexander Galloway. MIT Press, 2004

URL = http://mitpress.mit.edu/protocol

Description

Important book, which distinguishes decentralization from distribution, and explains how control is exerted in distributed networks.

Excerpt

Alexander Galloway:

"Excerpt from the "Introduction":

This book is about a diagram, a technology, and a management style. The diagram is the distributed network, a structural form without center that resembles a web or meshwork. The technology is the digital computer, an abstract machine able to perform the work of any other machine (provided it can be described logically). The management style is protocol, the principle of organization native to computers in distributed networks. All three come together to define a new apparatus of control that has achieved importance at the start of the new millennium.

Much work has been done recently on theorizing the present historical moment and on offering periodizations to explain its historical trajectory. I am particularly inspired by five pages from Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies," which begin to define a chronological period after the modern age that is founded neither on the central control of the sovereign nor on the decentralized control of the prison or the factory. My book aims to flesh out the specificity of this third historical wave by focusing on the controlling computer technologies native to it.

How would control exist after decentralization? In former times control was a little easier to explain. In what Michel Foucault called the sovereign societies of the classical era, characterized by centralized power and sovereign fiat, control existed as an extension of the word and deed of the master, assisted by violence and other coercive factors. Later, the disciplinary societies of the modern era took hold, replacing violence with more bureaucratic forms of command and control.

Deleuze has extended this periodization into the present day by suggesting that after the disciplinary societies come the societies of control. Deleuze believed that there exist wholly new technologies concurrent with the societies of control. "The old sovereign societies worked with simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks," he writes, "but recent disciplinary societies were equipped with thermodynamic machines... control societies operate with a third generation of machines, with information technology and computers." Just as Marx rooted his economic theory in a strict analysis of the factory's productive machinery, Deleuze heralds the coming productive power of computers to explain the sociopolitical logics of our own age.

According to Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), the shift from disciplinary societies to control societies goes something like this:

"Before computerized information management, the heart of institutional command and control was easy to locate. In fact, the conspicuous appearance of the halls of power was used by regimes to maintain their hegemony.... Even though the monuments of power still stand, visibly present in stable locations, the agency that maintains power is neither visible nor stable. Power no longer permanently resides in these monuments, and command and control now move about as desired."

The most extensive "computerized information management" system existing today is the Internet. The Internet is a global distributed computer network. It has its roots in the American academic and military culture of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1950s, in response to the Soviet Sputnik launch and other fears connected to the Cold War, Paul Baran at the Rand Corporation decided to create a computer network that was independent of centralized command and control, and would thus be able to withstand a nuclear attack that targets such centralized hubs. In August 1964, he published an eleven-volume memorandum for the Rand Corporation outlining his research.

Baran's network was based on a technology called packet-switching that allows messages to break themselves apart into small fragments. Each fragment, or packet, is able to find its own way to its destination. Once there, the packets reassemble to create the original message. In 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) at the U.S. Department of Defense started the ARPAnet, the first network to use Baran's packet-switching technology. The ARPAnet allowed academics to share resources and transfer files. In its early years, the ARPAnet (later renamed DARPAnet) existed unnoticed by the outside world, with only a few hundred participating computers, or "hosts."

All addressing for this network was maintained by a single machine located at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. By 1984 the network had grown larger. Paul Mockapetris invented a new addressing scheme, this one decentralized, called the Domain Name System (DNS).

The computers had changed also. By the late 1970s and early 1980s personal computers were coming to market and appearing in homes and offices. In 1977, researchers at Berkeley released the highly influential "BSD" flavor of the UNIX operating system, which was available to other institutions at virtually no cost. With the help of BSD, UNIX would become the most important computer operating system of the 1980s.

In the early 1980s, the suite of protocols known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) was also developed and included with most UNIX servers. TCP/IP allowed for cheap, ubiquitous connectivity. In 1988, the Defense department transferred control of the central "backbone" of the Internet over to the National Science Foundation, who in turn transferred control to commercial telecommunications interests in 1995. In that year, there were 24 million Internet users. Today, the Internet is a global distributed network connecting billions of people around the world.

At the core of networked computing is the concept of protocol. A computer protocol is a set of recommendations and rules that outline specific technical standards. The protocols that govern much of the Internet are contained in what are called RFC (Request For Comments) documents. Called "the primary documentation of the Internet," these technical memoranda detail the vast majority of standards and protocols in use on the Internet today.

The RFCs are published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They are freely available and used predominantly by engineers who wish to build hardware or software that meets common specifications. The IETF is affiliated with the Internet Society, an altruistic, technocratic organization that wishes "[t]o assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world." Other protocols are developed and maintained by other organizations. For example, many of the protocols used on the World Wide Web (a network within the Internet) are governed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This international consortium was created in October 1994 to develop common protocols such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets. Scores of other protocols have been created for a variety of other purposes by many different professional societies and organizations. They are covered in more detail in chapter 4 [on "Institutionalization"].

Protocol is not a new word. Prior to its usage in computing, protocol referred to any type of correct or proper behavior within a specific system of conventions. It is an important concept in the area of social etiquette as well as in the fields of diplomacy and international relations. Etymologically it refers to a fly-leaf glued to the beginning of a document, but in familiar usage the word came to mean any introductory paper summarizing the key points of a diplomatic agreement or treaty.

However, with the advent of digital computing, the term has taken on a slightly different meaning. Now, protocols refer specifically to standards governing the implementation of specific technologies. Like their diplomatic predecessors, computer protocols establish the essential points necessary to enact an agreed-upon standard of action. Like their diplomatic predecessors, computer protocols are vetted out between negotiating parties and then materialized in the real world by large populations of participants (in one case citizens, and in the other computer users). Yet instead of governing social or political practices as did their diplomatic predecessors, computer protocols govern how specific technologies are agreed to, adopted, implemented, and ultimately used by people around the world. What was once a question of consideration and sense is now a question of logic and physics.

To help understand the concept of computer protocols, consider the analogy of the highway system. Many different combinations of roads are available to a person driving from point A to point B. However, en route one is compelled to stop at red lights, stay between the white lines, follow a reasonably direct path, and so on. These conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system are what computer scientists call protocol. Thus, protocol is a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment.

These regulations always operate at the level of coding--they encode packets of information so they may be transported; they code documents so they may be effectively parsed; they code communication so local devices may effectively communicate with foreign devices. Protocols are highly formal; that is, they encapsulate information inside a technically defined wrapper, while remaining relatively indifferent to the content of information contained within. Viewed as a whole, protocol is a distributed management system that allows control to exist within a heterogeneous material milieu.

It is 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. I argue in this book that protocol is how technological control exists after decentralization. The "after" in my title refers to both the historical moment after decentralization has come into existence, but also--and more important--the historical phase after decentralization, that is, after it is dead and gone, replaced as the supreme social management style by the diagram of distribution." (http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/12004)

Discussion

Nicolas Mendoza:

"In Protocol, Galloway argues that Internet protocols are an apparatus of control; that “The founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom.” This essay wants to show how this is the incorrect dichotomy. Through critical analysis of the dominant narratives at the net’s genesis I will show that, on the contrary, the founding principle of the Net is not control but command and control and, further, distributed command and control. The significance of this precision lays in that the distribution of command and control, as long as it remains real, leads necessarily to the collapse of traditional power and to the emergence of an unprecedented social order of distributed power. Such an order, precisely because of power distribution, is close to what anarchist scholars like David Graeber and web activist groups like Anonymous advocate for. In their theoretical and pure form, the founding protocols of a true distributed network as was initially conceived, even while endangered and partially implemented, break the dam towards collective emancipation. They are the protocols of freedom." (February 2012)

More Information

1. Concept: Protocollary Power
2. Interview: Alexander Galloway on Protocollary Power
3. table of contents: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ag111/Protocol-contents.doc
4. amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262072475