Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization

Technology as an Emblem of the World System

• Definition of Technology: Fredric Jameson in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (2004) posits that technology is little more than an "outer emblem or symptom" of systemic concrete situations expressing themselves in specific forms.

• Physical vs. Formal Realms: Alexander R. Galloway distinguishes between the physical material layer (circuits, wires, routers, terminals) and the formal apparatus.     * The Physical Realm: Involves technical software and machinic technologies like distributed networks (e.g., the U.S. interstate highway system and the global Internet).     * Machinic Tension: The interaction between "deterritorializing" and "reterritorializing" technologies creates the power of the protocological system.     * The Formal Apparatus: The totality of techniques and conventions affecting protocol at the social level. It shifts the perspective from the systems administrator to the webmaster.

• Protocol Evaluation: An attention to form allows critics to establish a "yardstick" to evaluate the political condition of objects, specifically asking: "Is protocol formally healthy?"

Marxist Theories of Media and Communication

• Bertolt Brecht’s Radio Theory: Brecht argued that radio was in the "wrong shape," functioning as a one-sided apparatus for distribution rather than a two-way network for communication.     * Brecht’s Vision: Radio should be a "vast network of pipes" allowing listeners to speak as well as hear, bringing them into a relationship instead of isolating them.

• Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Marxist-Materialist Framework: Directly influenced by Brecht, Enzensberger identifies a "political prohibition" against many-to-many networks root in the social division of labor between producers and consumers.     * The Struggle with "Truth": Enzensberger critiques the Frankfurt School's "manipulation thesis," arguing that "unmanipulated truth" is folly because all media use presupposes manipulation. Therefore, everyone interested in emancipation should be a "manipulator."     * The "Sewerman" Metaphor: Taking a cue from Marx, Enzensberger warns that the "fear of handling shit [media] is a luxury a sewerman [the oppressed] cannot necessarily afford."

• Repressive vs. Emancipatory Media Use: Enzensberger provides a comparison chart:     * Repressive: Central control, one transmitter/many receivers, immobilization, passive consumption, depoliticization, production by specialists, control by property owners.     * Emancipatory: Decentralized program, each receiver a transmitter, mobilization of masses, interaction/feedback, political learning, collective production, social control by self-organization.

• Postmodern Shift: The emancipatory mode is historically associated with the Internet, focusing on "process" rather than "objects."

• Jean Baudrillard’s "Requiem for the Media": Baudrillard expands Marxist analysis into the "murky field of signification and communication," moving beyond classical definitions of productive forces.

The Theoretical Roots of Networks: Cybernetics and the Memex

• Norbert Wiener and Cybernetics: Cybernetics is a theory of dynamic systems based on feedback—the ability of a process to receive new input and adjust itself.     * Virtues of Cybernetic Systems: Balance, self-regulation, circularity, and control.     * Man-Machine Hybrids: Wiener recognized an isomorphism between the computer and the human brain, allowing for "artificial sense organs."

• Vannevar Bush and the Memex: In "As We May Think" (1945), Bush proposed the Memex, an intimate supplement to memory.     * Memex Architecture: A nonhierarchical, associative machine for information storage and retrieval. It utilized associative indexing (meshwork) rather than library-style linear/hierarchical indexing.     * Connection to Modern Web: Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web inventor) echoed Bush’s vision of potentially connecting everything to everything to allow society to work like the human mind.

The Logic of Continuity in Digital Networks

• Protocol as Control and Distribution: Galloway argues that protocol is both a territorializing structure and part of anarchical distribution. The Internet works "too well" to be purely rhizomatic; it uses "continuity" to create an intuitive experience.

• Substitute Movements: The browser's movement is experienced as the user's movement; mouse movement is a phenomenological substitution for the user's physical displacement.

• Core Principles of Net Continuity:     * Conceal the Source: Media formats (HTML, IP addresses, image code) hide their internal workings to provide a transparent, intuitive interface. Domain names (www.amazon.com) hide numerical IP addresses.     * Eliminate Dead Links (404 Errors): Dead links are viewed as lies or corruptions of the smooth space. If something is pointed to, it must exist.     * Eliminate No Links: There must be no dead ends. Each page must offer infinite movement within an abundant network of flow.     * "Green Means Go": Iconography and form should convey meaning (e.g., links should look like links). Steven Johnson notes that "good interfaces do away with text."     * True Identity: A link’s name and its destination must correspond to avoid disinformation.     * Remove Barriers: Elimination of splash pages and tables of contents; all content should be near the "front door."     * Continuity Between Media Types: Information is digitized, allowing for smooth, deterritorialized transitions between text and image.     * Prohibition Against Low Resolution: Use of techniques like anti-aliasing to hide pixels. Low resolution (e.g., ASCII) shatters the illusion because the code becomes visible.     * Highest Speed Possible: Speed perpetuates the illusion that the computer is a natural extension of the body.     * Prohibition on Crashes: A crash makes the computer "active" and disruptive rather than a "passive" tool.     * Prohibition on Dead Media: Elimination of obsolete hardware (Commodore 64) and languages (Fortran) that cannot function in contemporary flows.     * Many-to-Many Feedback Loops: Proliferation of email, chat, and bulletin boards to produce active subjectivity.     * Anonymous but Descriptive: Real identity is irrelevant compared to demographics and user statistics cluster around a user.

Digital Object Relations and Second-Order Processes

• The Record: Any nonchaotic, nonrandom information stored in physical objects (e.g., sharpening a stone, the alphabet).

• The Object: The basic unit of digital content. Lev Manovich lists digital stills, 3D environments, and the Web as media objects. Objects are "pure positivities" that exist only upon use and are assembled from scratch each time.

• Definition of Protocol: A universal description language for objects. It is "etiquette for autonomous agents" and "the chivalry of the object."

• HTML (Hypertext Markup Language): A graphic design protocol introduced in 1990. It consists of tags (e.g., <b>, <i>) that describe layout rather than including the layout itself.

• Fonts: These are protocological sub-elements that regulate representation and protect the reader from the "shock of virtual transfer."

Power, Biopolitics, and the Control Matrix

• Gilles Deleuze’s Control Societies: Societies of control are "digital" and operate through "ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control." Disciplinary societies (sovereign rule, enclosure) give way to control societies (modulation, codes, passwords).

• Dividuals: In control societies, people are no longer individuals but "dividuals" and masses are reduced to "data banks" or "samples."

• Michel Foucault’s Biopower and Biopolitics:     * Biopower: Power that fosters life or disallows it to the point of death; the administration of bodies and management of life.     * Biopolitics: The rationalization of problems presented by a group of living beings (health, birthrate, longevity). It treats the population as a mass of biological traits.     * Example Statistics: UNICEF reports the infant mortality rate in the U.S. as $7 \text{ per every } 1,000 \text{ births}$.

• Marx’s Second Nature: Capital represents a force of "naturalization." Marx used vitalistic metaphors to describe capitalism:     * Metabolic: Harmonious, systemic self-regulation.     * Organic: Ratio of variable capital (labor) to constant capital (machines).     * Monsters and Vampires: Capital is "dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour." Money "haunts" circulation.     * Social Hieroglyphic: Objects do not announce their internal value on their surface; they must be denaturalized.

Artificial Life and Life as Medium

• Entropy Resistance: Life is the force that resists entropy (the tendency toward disorder). Living beings propagate genes and memes to negate the second law of thermodynamics.

• Object-Oriented Programming (OOP): A shift from procedural (linear) code to distributed entities (objects) that interact. Intelligence "emerges" from small subprograms.

• Tom Ray’s Tierra: A virtual world populated by "digital organisms" that self-replicate and evolve via bit-flipping (mutation) and code-swapping (recombination).

• DNA Computing: Leonard Adleman created the TT-100, which uses strands of DNA to solve computational problems in parallel. Life becomes a medium for number-crunching.

• The Max Planck Institute: Successful establishment of a two-way signal channel between a living neuron and a silicon chip (1995).

• Biometrics: Measuring human bodies to derive digital signatures. Identity checks through eye scans or blood tests translate life into quantifiable data.

• Collaborative Filtering: Statistical algorithms (e.g., Firefly) that build user profiles by comparing taste ratings. It encourages structural homogeneity by suggesting the user is "like someone else."

The Control Matrix (Table 3.1)