Alexander Galloway: Protocol

From the preface of Protocol by Eugene Thacker: "Understanding networks not as metaphors, but as materialized and materializing media, is an important step toward diversifying and complexifying our understanding of power relationships in control societies. With the network metaphor, one only has a tool that does something in accordance to the agency of the human-user (a computer that downloads at your command, an information network that makes everything freely accessible at the click of a mouse, etc.). Click-download, cause-effect. If we dispense with convenient metaphors and actually ask how a network functions (not “what is it?” but “what does it do?”), then several noteworthy realizations emerge. This is what Protocol does. It asks how a particular type of network functions—the information networks that undergird the Internet. It shows how a network is not simply a free-for-all of information “out there,” nor is it a dystopia of databanks owned by corporations. It is a set of technical procedures for defining, managing, modulating, and distributing information throughout a flexible yet robust delivery infrastructure. More than that, this infrastructure and set of procedures grows out of U.S. government and military interests in developing high-technology communications capabilities (from ARPA to DARPA to dot-coms). At an even finer level of detail, the Internet is not a simple “ask and you shall receive” tool. It is constituted by a bi-level logic that Protocol patiently explains. On the one hand, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) enables the Internet to create horizontal distributions of information from one computer to another. On the other, the DNS (Domain Name System) vertically stratifies that horizontal logic through a set of regulatory bodies that manage Internet addresses and names. Understanding these two dynamics in the Internet means understanding the essential ambivalence in the way that power functions in control societies. As Protocol states, “the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom— control has existed from the beginning.” To grasp “protocol” is to grasp the technical and the political dynamics of TCP/IP and DNS at the same time."

In the seminar we will read and discuss Alexander Galloways study "Protocol". The seminar will be held in English.

Bedingung für Scheinerwerb ist regelmäßige, aktive Teilnahme und Referat oder Präsentation, ggf. Ausarbeitung oder Hausarbeit