Though the term isn’t invoked by Deleuze or Galloway in this week’s readings, we are in Neoliberal Land for both authors’ discussions of power and control. I’m very much looking forward to taking in tomorrow’s seminar discussion as part of the Week-in-Review team—there are so many places to go from these texts. I’m really interested in Joe’s point about anonymity, for one.

In Galloway’s introduction to Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, he lays out the thought process that led to his determination that protocol is the answer to the question that makes up the section part of his book’s title (the question is asked on page 3, and on page 8, Galloway concisely states, “I argue in this book that protocol is how technological control exists after decentralization”). I found Galloway’s introduction extremely readable; for example, he helpfully provides this crucial definition early on: “a computer protocol is a set of recommendations and rules that outline specific technical standards” (6). I get the feeling from the introduction that Galloway is interested in reaching a broad, interdisciplinary audience in order to bring his message—“protocol is dangerous”—to a wide audience, since he clearly feels it is a political matter and as such affects everyone, not just computer scientists or new media theorists (16).

Galloway’s readable style makes his inclusion in the collection Critical Terms for Media Studies seem logical; indeed, his “Networks” chapter covers much of the same ground as the introduction to Protocol. For example, just as protocol enables technological control, “networks are often symbols for, or actual embodiments of, real world power and control” (283) and “distributed networks create new, robust structures for organization and control; they do not remove organization and control” (290). Networks must conform to protocol in order to function, and networks are “structures…for control.” So, we could set up a sort of mathematic sequence: protocol controls networks and networks control users, thus protocol controls users. This is true because, as Galloway says, “interactivity is one of the core instruments of control and organization” (291). If we have to (or want to) use a network, whether it is the Internet or the public school system or the global network that gets food from farms to grocers, we have to play by the rules of the system and are therefore beholden to its power.