Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization - Study Notes

Definition and Apparatus of Protocol

Alexander R. Galloway defines protocol as the principle of organization native to computers in distributed networks. It is a management style and a technology that establishes a structural form without a centralized hub, often resembling a web or meshwork.
Protocol is an apparatus of control that functions through a distributed network (a diagram), digital computers (the technology), and the rules governing their interaction (protocol itself).
Etymological Origin: The term originally referred to a fly-leaf glued to the beginning of a document, eventually meaning an introductory paper summarizing diplomatic treaties. In computing, it refers to technical standards governing the adoption and implementation of technologies.
The Highway Analogy: Protocol functions like a highway system. While there are many paths from point $A$ to point $B$ , drivers are compelled to follow specific rules (staying between lines, stopping at red lights). Protocol acts as a technique for voluntary regulation within a contingent environment.
The Foundational Contradiction: Protocol is based on a dialectical tension between two opposing systems: * Horizontal Distribution: Exemplified by TCP/IP, which allows any computer to talk to any other computer in a peer-to-peer relationship. * Vertical Stratification: Exemplified by the Domain Name System (DNS), which manages addresses in a rigid, hierarchical, inverted-tree structure.

Historical Periodization and the Shift to Control Societies

Sovereign Societies (Classical Era): Characterized by centralized power, sovereign fiat, and the use of violence or master-servant relationships. These societies utilized simple mechanical machines such as levers, pulleys, and clocks.
Disciplinary Societies (Modern Era): Michel Foucault identified this shift occurring between $1750$ and $1830$ . Control became diffuse and immanent through bureaucratic enclosures (prisons, hospitals, factories). These societies utilized thermodynamic machines (steam and internal combustion engines, nuclear power).
Control Societies (Postmodern/Digital Era): Gilles Deleuze identified a third wave where control is "free-floating" and modulated. This phase is characterized by the password, the computer, and cybernetic machines. Power no longer resides in monuments but moves about as desired.
Core Historical Shifts: * Kingdom of Sense ( $1800$ ): Focused on depth, meaning, and the voice of Man (Kittler). * Kingdom of Pattern ( $1900$ ): Focused on images, algorithms, and random generators (Kittler). * Economic Transition: Shift from market/monopoly capitalism to late capitalism or "Empire" (Mandel, Jameson, Hardt/Negri), characterized by flexible accumulation and interactive networks.

Material Origins of the Internet

The Nuclear Threat Prompt: In the late $1950$ s, in response to the Soviet Sputnik launch, Paul Baran at the Rand Corporation sought to design a communications system that could survive a nuclear attack. Centrally controlled hubs were vulnerable; thus, a non-centralized network was necessary.
Packet-Switching: Coined by British scientist Donald Davies (independently discovered by Baran), this technology breaks messages into small fragments or "packets." Each packet finds its own path and reassembles at the destination.
ARPAnet Development: In $1969$ , the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) launched the ARPAnet, the first to use packet-switching. Significant dates include: * $1977$ : Release of the "BSD" flavor of UNIX at Berkeley. * $1981$ : Development of RFC $791$ (IP) and RFC $793$ (TCP). * January $1$ , $1983$ : Mandatory rollover to TCP/IP. * $1984$ : Paul Mockapetris invents the Domain Name System (DNS). * $1988$ : Control of the backbone transferred to the National Science Foundation. * $1995$ : Control transferred to commercial interests; there were $24 imes 10^{6}$ Internet users at this time.

Network Topologies and the Distributed Diagram

Centralized Network: Consists of a single central power point (host) with radial nodes. All activity travels from the center to the periphery (e.g., the U.S. Supreme Court, or a panopticon guard).
Decentralized Network: A multiplication of the centralized network with multiple hubs. No single zenith point exercises control over all others (e.g., the airline hub system).
Distributed Network: Native to control societies. Each point is an intelligent system that is self-deterministic. Direct communication exists between any two nodes without a hierarchical intermediary (e.g., the Internet, the interstate highway system, or Deleuze and Guattari's botanical "rhizome"). * Rhizome Characteristics: Acritically acentered, nonhierarchical, and nonsignifying. It has neither beginning nor end, always a milieu from which it grows.

The Logic of TCP/IP and the Transmission of Data

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP): A connection-oriented, end-to-end reliable protocol. It creates a "virtual circuit" and uses a three-step handshake: 1. SYN: Sender sends a synchronize message ("Hello!"). 2. ACK/SYN: Recipient acknowledges and initiates its own SYN request ("Hi, how are you?"). 3. ACK: Original sender acknowledges the recipient's SYN ("I'm fine, thanks").
Internet Protocol (IP): Responsible for routing and fragmentation. It is "connectionless" and blind to data integrity. * Routing: Paths are selected through a "hopping" process. Each machine knows only the general direction of the destination. * Time-to-Live (TTL): A number designating the maximum hops a datagram can take before it is deleted to prevent network congestion. * Fragmentation: Large messages are disintegrated into small packets and reassembled using a header containing destination addresses and a "checksum" mathematical algorithm for corruption detection.

The Domain Name System (DNS) and Hierarchical Control

Definition: A decentralized database mapping "humanized" names (e.g., www.rhizome.org) to "machinic" numbers (IP addresses like $206.252.131.211$ ).
Resolution: The process of converting domain names to IP addresses. It follows an inverted tree starting from "root" servers (the single dot ".").
Centralized Vulnerability: Root servers hold ultimate control. Tim Berners-Lee calls DNS the "Achilles' heel" of the Web. Paul Garrin notes that with a stroke of a delete key, whole countries can be blacked out (e.g., hypothetical removal of DNS support for China or the case of the Swiss art group Etoy).

Layering and the OSI Reference Model

The Protocol Suite: Protocols are nested. The content of every protocol is another protocol. A typical Web transaction involves HTML (graphic markup) inside HTTP (transfer), inside TCP (transport), inside IP (network), inside a link layer (physical media).
The 7-Layer OSI Model: * Layer $7$ : Application (Web, email). * Layer $6$ : Presentation. * Layer $5$ : Session. * Layer $4$ : Transport (TCP). * Layer $3$ : Network (IP). * Layer $2$ : Data Link (Ethernet). * Layer $1$ : Physical.
Functional Goal: Protocological management allows control to exist within a heterogeneous milieu, where the ultimate privileged protocol is the physical medium itself (cables, air waves, fiber-optics).

The Formal Apparatus: Continuity and the Medium of the Web

Web Continuity: Techniques practiced by webmasters to create a fluid, pleasurable user experience. * Conceal the Source: The apparatus removes itself from view (e.g., HTML is rendered as a page, not seen as text; IP addresses are hidden behind domain names). * Eliminate Dead Links: 404 errors must be avoided to prevent corruption of smooth space. * Green Means Go: Icons should intuitively convey destination meaning. * Eliminate Mediation: Keyboard evolution to touch screens and voice recognition aiming for unfettered ease. * High Speed: Facilitates the illusion that the network is a natural extension of the body.
The Browser: An assembler and filter. It interprets HTML to include, exclude, and organize content. It is a "making-no-difference" machine that hides the underlying code.

Abstract Formal Relations: From Record to Protocol

Record: Any non-random information stored in a physical object (e.g., a sharpened stone tool, an alphabet engraved in bone).
Object: The digital economy's basic unit (pure positivity). Objects disappear upon use and are assembled from scratch. They are inheritable and extendable children of code.
Protocol as Object: A universal description language that regulates flow and codes relationships. It is the "chivalry of the object" and "etiquette for autonomous agents."
Fonts: Sub-elements of the signifier that regulate representation. They buffer the act of reading and protect the reader from the shock of virtual transfer.

Protocological Power: Biopolitics and the Management of Life

Biopolitics (Foucault): The attempt to rationalize problems presented to governmental practice by populations (health, sanitation, birthrate, race). It treats the population as a mass of living beings subject to specific knowledge and technology.
Biopower (Foucault): A power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. Protocol is to control societies what the panopticon was to disciplinary societies.
Dividuals (Deleuze): In control societies, masses become samples, data, or "banks." Individuals dissolve into distributed networks of information.
Anti-Entropic Theory of Life: Life is the force that resists entropy (the physical principle that systems tend toward disorder). Norbert Wiener noted that machines, like living organisms, are enclaves of organization in a decaying world.

Vitalism in Marx and the Concept of Second Nature

Second Nature: Material objects in the modern era become aesthetic objects or autonomous entities through capitalism.
Marx's Aesthetic Materialism: Galloway argues that Capital is an aesthetic object, filled with vitalistic imagery: * Sinister Monsters: Capital as a "vampire" sucking living labor; the commodity as a "grotesque" creature with a "wooden brain." * Natural Processes: Imagery of "fermentation," "crystallization," and "congealing" of human labor into social substances. * Mystification: The "rational kernel" inside the "mystical shell." The "social hieroglyphic" where value does not have its description branded on its forehead.

Matter and Life: Artificial Life and DNA Computing

Artificial Life (ALife): The active production of vital forms by other vital forms. Evolution occurs in media like digital computation.
Tierra (Tom Ray): A virtual computer where digital organisms self-replicate and evolve by flipping bits (mutation) or swapping code segments (recombination). Resources are CPU time and memory.
Life as Medium: The discovery of DNA in $1953$ (Watson and Crick) redefined life as a code.
DNA Computing: Leonard Adleman created the TT-100 computer in $1995$ . It uses chemical reactions between DNA molecules to do parallel number-crunching. Life here becomes a literal medium for computation.
Biometrics: The measurement of the body to derive digital signatures (eye scans, fingerprints). It treats life as an aesthetic, quantifiable object.
Collaborative Filtering: Techniques (like those used by Firefly) that use algorithms to interpellate data from user profiles to suggest desires, ensuring structural homogeneity.

Institutionalization and the Regulation of Standards

Tactical Standardization: Protocol must be partially reactionary/standardized to enable radical openness.
The VHS vs. Betamax Example: VHS won because JVC aggressively licensed the technical specs to competitors to establish a market standard, while Sony kept Betamax proprietary.
Professional Bodies: * IEEE: The world's largest professional society; sets standards for Ethernet (802.3), Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. * ISO: Responsible for the OSI Reference Model. * ANSI: The coordinates standards creation in the U.S. and advocates for American interests internationally.

The RFC Process and the Technocratic Elite

Self-Selected Oligarchy: Standards are made by a technocratic elite of electrical engineers (e.g., the "ad-hocracy" of Vint Cerf, Jon Postel, and Steve Crocker who shared the same high school).
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF): A loosely self-organized group. Membership is based on participation. It operates via Working Groups.
Standards Track Stages: 1. Proposed Standard: The entry point via the RFC editor. 2. Draft Standard: Requires two independent, interoperable real-world implementations. 3. Standard: Robust, wide implementation (assigned an STD subseries number).
Humorous RFCs: Examples include RFC $1149$ (Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) and RFC $2324$ (Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol).

The Architecture of the Web and the Semantic Web

Tim Berners-Lee's Goal: Define a few basic rules (URI, HTTP, HTML) that allow computers to talk without a central controller.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): Establish in $1994$ to run quicker and more efficiently than the IETF route.
The Semantic Web: Turning the Web into machine-understandable information. It involves wrapping info in descriptive protocols (e.g., Galloway). It is "well-defined" data, not AI.

Hacking and the Hyperlinguistic Nature of Code

Hacker Ethic (Steven Levy): Access should be unlimited, info should be free, mistrust authority, judge by hacking quality.
Tiger Teams: Spontaneous electronic ad-hocracies that leap up to solve problems (analogous to Japanese Toyotism).
Code as Executable: Code is the only language that actually does what it says. Unlike natural languages (legible state only), code has both a legible and an executable state.
Possibility and Access: Protocol outlines the playing field for what can happen. Hackers focus on the "envelope of possibility," making them the harbingers of protocol's assume.

Tactical Media: Computer Viruses and Threat Paradigms

Tactical Media (Garcia/Lovink): Cheap "do it yourself" media produced by groups feeling aggrieved or excluded. It is a media of crisis and opposition.
Computer Viruses: Self-replicating code attached to a host executable. Variants include worms (no host needed) and Trojan horses (hidden undesirable code). * Core War ( $1960$ s): A game where engineers released programs to battle over resources. * The Morris Worm ( $1988$ ): Robert Morris released a worm into the ARPAnet infecting between $2500$ and $6000$ computers. He was convicted under the $1986$ Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The Evolution of Threat: * $1980$ s (Contagion Paradigm): Paired with social anxieties about AIDS (e.g., the Jerusalem virus, "AIDS Info Disk"). * $1990$ s (Terrorism Paradigm): Weaponization of code; searching for "evil-doers" (e.g., the Melissa virus, the "I Love You" virus).

Cyberfeminism and the Matrix

Cyberfeminism: A tactical media movement reflecting on the totality of protocol command. It views technology not as male-dominated, but as fundamentally feminine (Sadie Plant).
The First Computer Bug: Grace Hopper discovered a physical moth in a machine, birthing the term "bug."
Theoretical Pillars: * Sadie Plant: Argues "Cybernetics is feminisation." Women have worked as simulators and operators since the loom; binary code undermines patriarchal material bases. * Sandy Stone: Observes how virtual communities produce bodies and identities. Digital networks are bodyless until tactical protocols make them Cartesian and desiring. * VNS Matrix: Australian group (Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, Virginia Barratt) that authored the "Cyberfeminist Manifesto." Slogan: "The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix."

Netwar and Conflicting Diagrams

Netwar (Arquilla and Ronfeldt): Emerging mode of conflict using network forms of organization (e.g., Zapatistas vs. Mexican Gov, Al Qaeda cellular structures).
Asymmetrical Conflict: Hierarchies have difficulty fighting networks. Future conflict will be Bilateral Organizational Conflict (networks fighting networks).
The $9/11$ Analogy: The World Trade Center was a central hub/pillar (Vulnerable diagram), whereas terrorists are cellular and modular (Resilient diagram).

Internet Art: From Net Specificity to Corporate Software

Specificity: Internet art finds specificity in the limitations of the medium (transmission delays, crashing browsers).
Phase $1$ : Net.art ( $1995$ - $1999$ ): Low-tech aesthetic, bandwidth-limited. * Jodi: Focused on the computer crash and raw code (e.g., day66, OSS). * Alexei Shulgin: Refresh (auto-refreshing nodal link chain). * Heath Bunting: _readme (hyperlinking every word of an article).
Phase $2$ : Art of Software/Corporate Phase (Post- $2000$ ): Focused on commercial contexts. * Toywar (Etoy): A $60$ -day global art event/game against eToys Inc. using a game platform. Caused $4.5 imes 10^{9}$ dollars in NASDAQ stock damage. * RTMark: A corporation funding anticorporate sabotage (e.g., Barbie Liberation Organization).
Auctionism: Art using online auctions like eBay to sell demographics (Jeff Gates) or the artist’s own body (Michael Daines).

Conclusion: Ethics and the Logic of Protocol

The Speed Bump Analogy: Speed limit signs appeal to the mind (Coerced; non-protocological). Speed bumps appeal to the body (Material force; protocological). Protocol is a physical logic that makes the driver want to drive slowly.
Summary of Protocol's Nature: * It is a system of distributed management for autonomous entities. * It is materially immanent and resists interpretation. * It operates outside institutional power but standardizes to enable openness.
Ethics: Protocol is not inherently "good" or "bad." Like a market economy, it facilitates freedom over feudalism but creates vast social inequalities. The task is to evaluate and critique specific protocological technologies in their historical contexts.