/Assignment30/10/2013/

ALEXANDER GALLOWAY PROTOCOL: HOW CONTROL EXISTS AFTER DECENTRALISATION

Notes from introduction

Every society has its diagrams.(Deleuze)

Diagram= distributed network, technology= digital computer and management style (protocol)

3d historical wave , controlling computing technologies, control after decentralization

In this shift, computational information systems play a crucial role. The internet.

At the core of networked computing is the protocol, a set of reccomendations and rules that outline specific technical standards

Prior computer use, the protocol means the correct or proper behaviour within a specifik system of conventions, now protocol standards governing the implementation of specific technologies, analogy with the highway system

Misconception of internet as a mass of data lacking organisation, but the internet is highly controled

DNS system and the inverted tree of servers with hierarcically controled information, so each branch controls everything below it. The root servers at the top.

Delete key and whole countries can be clocked

By design protocols can't be centralised

Distributed network as a diagramm of our current social formation. Distributed network is different than centralized and decentralized network. It contains neither a central hub nor a satelite node, it contains inteligent end point systems that are self deterministic allowing each endpoint to communicate with any host choosen and without hierarcical intermediary.

But the two nodes must speak the same language. That is why protocol is important. Shared protocols define the landscape of the network.

Deleuze: protocological control affects the bodies within the social space and the creation of these bodies into forms of artificial life (what is for Foucault the work of the self on the self), what are divituated , sampled and coded.

While protocol is more democratic than panopticon, it it sill very much structured around command and control.

Is life resistance a way of engaging with distributed forms of protocological management?Protocol may be not bad but its dangerous.

To refuse protocol in a sense of directing this protocological technologies toward "emancipated media", created by active actors than pasive users.

Protocol is a type of species-knowledge for coded lifeforms.

Each new diagramm, technology or management style is an improvement on the previous one and contains the germ that must frow to a higher form .