Thacker & Galloway on Protocol

Taken from their article, Networks, Control and Life-Forms:
PROTOCOLS
The principle of political control we suggest is most helpful
for thinking about biological and informatic networks is
"protocol," a word derived from computer science butwhich resonates in the life sciences as well. Protocol
abounds in techno-culture. It is a totalizing control
apparatus that guides both the technical and political
formation of computer networks, biological systems and
other media. Put simply, protocols are all the conventional
rules and standards that govern relationships within
networks. Quite often these relationships come in the form
of communication between two or more computers, but
"relationships within networks" can also refer to purely
biological processes as in the systemic phenomenon of gene
expression. Thus by "networks" we want to refer to any
system of interrelationality, whether biological or
informatic, organic or inorganic, technical or natural--with
the ultimate goal of undoing the polar restrictiveness of
these pairings.
In computer networks, science professionals have, over the
years, drafted hundreds of protocols to govern email, web
pages, and so on, plus many other standards for
technologies rarely seen by human eyes. The first protocols
for computer networks were written in 1969 by Steve
Crocker and others. If networks are the structures that
connect people, then protocols are the rules that make sure
the connections actually work. From the large technological
discourse of white papers, memos, and manuals, we can
derive some of the basic qualities of the apparatus of
organization which we here call protocol:
· protocol facilitates relationships between
interconnected, but autonomous, entities;
· protocol's virtues include robustness, contingency,
interoperability, flexibility, and heterogeneity;
· a goal of protocol is to accommodate everything, no
matter what source or destination, no matter what
originary definition or identity;
· while protocol is universal, it is always achieved
through negotiation (meaning that in the future
protocol can and will be different);
· protocol is a system for maintaining organization
and control in networks.
In many current political discussions, networks are seen as
the new paradigm of social and political organization. The
reason is that networks exhibit a set of properties that
distinguishes them from more centralized power structures.
These properties are often taken to be merely abstract,
formal aspects of the network--which is itself characterized
as a kind of meta-structure. We see this in "pop science"
books discussing complexity and network science, as well
as in the political discourse of "netwars" and so forth. What
we end up with is a metaphysics of networks. The network,
then, appears as a universal signifier of political resistance,
be it in Chiapas, Seattle, Geneva, or online. What we
question is not the network concept itself, for, as a number
of network examples show, they can indeed be effective
modes of political struggle. What we do question is the
undue and exclusive reliance on the metaphysics of the
network, as if this ahistorical concept legitimizes itself
merely by existing.