May 17, 2005
The Ghost in the Network
Off the Grid: Adhocracy Rules
In discussing the difference between the living and the nonliving, Aristotle points to the phenomena of self-organized animation and motility as the key aspects of a living thing. For Aristotle the "form-giving Soul" enables inanimate matter to become a living organism. If life is animation, then animation is driven by a final cause. But the cause is internal to the organism, not imposed from without as with machines. Network science takes up this idea on the mathematical plane, so that geometry is the soul of the network. Network science proposes that heterogeneous network phenomena can be understood through the geometry of graph theory, the mathematics of dots and lines. An interesting outcome of this is that seemingly incongruous network phenomena can be grouped according to their similar geometries. For instance the networks of AIDS, terrorist groups, or the economy can be understood as having in common a particular pattern, a particular set of relations between dots (nodes) and lines (edges).
A given topological pattern is what cultivates and sculpts information within networks. To in-form is thus to give shape to matter (via organization or self-organization) through the instantiation of form--a network hylomorphism.
But further, the actualized being of the living network is also defined in political terms. "No central node sits in the middle of the spider web, controlling and monitoring every link and node. There is no single node whose removal could break the web. A scale-free network is a web without a spider" [1]. Having-no-spider is an observation about predatory hierarchy, or the supposed lack thereof, and is therefore a deeply political observation. In order to make this unnerving jump--from math (graph theory), to technology (the Internet), to politics ("a web without a spider")--politics needs to be seen as following the necessary and "natural" laws of mathematics; that is, networks need to be understood as "an unavoidable consequence of their evolution" [2]. In network science, the "unavoidable consequence" of networks often resembles something like neoliberal democracy, but a democracy which naturally emerges according to the "power law" of decentralized networks. Like so, their fates are twisted together.
Rhetorics of Freedom
While tactically valuable in the fight against proprietary software, open source is ultimately flawed as a political program. Open source focuses on code in isolation. It fetishizes all the wrong things: language, originality, source, the past, status. To focus on inert, isolated code is to ignore code in its context, in its social relation, in its real experience, or actual dynamic relations with other code and other machines. Debugging never happens through reading the source code, only through running the program. Better than open source would be open runtime which would prize all the opposites: open articulation, open iterability, open practice, open becoming.
But this is also misleading and based in a rhetoric around the relative openness and closedness of a technological system. The rhetoric goes something like this: technological systems can either be closed or open. Closed systems are generally created by either commercial or state interests-courts regulate technology, companies control their proprietary technologies in the market place, and so on. Open systems, on the other hand, are generally associated with the public and with freedom and political transparency. Geert Lovink contrasts "closed systems based on profit through control and scarcity" with "open, innovative standards situated in the public domain" [3]. Later, in his elucidation of Castells, he writes of the opposite, a "freedom hardwired into code" [4]. This gets to the heart of the freedom rhetoric. If it's hardwired is it still freedom? Instead of guaranteeing freedom, the act of "hardwiring" suggests a limitation on freedom. And in fact that is precisely the case on the Internet where strict universal standards of communication have been rolled out more widely and more quickly than in any other medium throughout history. Lessig and many others rely heavily on this rhetoric of freedom.
We suggest that this opposition between closed and open is flawed. It unwittingly perpetuates one of today's most insidious political myths, that the state and capital are the two sole instigators of control. Instead of the open/closed opposition we suggest the pairing physical/social. The so-called open logics of control, those associated with (non proprietary) computer code or with the Internet protocols, operate primarily using a physical model of control. For example, protocols interact with each other by physically altering and amending lower protocological objects (IP prefixes its header onto a TCP data object, which prefixes its header onto an HTTP object, and so on). But on the other hand, the so-called closed logics of state and commercial control operate primarily using a social model of control. For, example, Microsoft's commercial prowess is renewed via the social activity of market exchange. Or, using another example, Digital Rights Management licenses establish a social relationship between producers and consumers, a social relationship backed up by specific legal realities (DMCA). Viewed in this way, we find it self evident that physical control (i.e. protocol) is equally powerful if not more so than social control. Thus, we hope to show that if the topic at hand is one of control, then the monikers of "open" and "closed" simply further confuse the issue. Instead we would like to speak in terms of "alternatives of control" whereby the controlling logic of both "open" and "closed" systems is brought out into the light of day.
Political Animals
Aristotle's famous formulation of "man as a political animal" takes on new meanings in light of contemporary studies of biological self-organization. For Aristotle, the human being was first a living being, with the additional capacity for political being. In this sense, biology becomes the presupposition for politics, just as the human being's animal being serves as the basis for its political being. But not all animals are alike. Deleuze distinguishes three types of animals: domestic pets (Freudian, anthropomorphized Wolf-Man), animals in nature (the isolated species, the lone wolf), and packs (multiplicities). It is this last type of animal--the pack--which provides the most direct counter-point to Aristotle's formulation, and which leads us to pose a question: If the human being is a political animal, are there also animal politics? Ethnologists and entymologists would think so. The ant colony and insect swarm has long been used in science fiction and horror as the metaphor for the opposite of Western, liberal democracies. Even the language used in biology still retains the remnants of sovereignty: the queen bee, the drone. What, then, do we make of theories of biocomplexity and swarm intelligence, which suggest that there is no "queen" but only a set of localized interactions which self-organize into a whole swarm or colony? Is the "multitude" a type of animal multiplicity? Such probes seem to suggest that Aristotle based his formulation on the wrong kinds of animals. "You can't be one wolf," of course. "You're always eight or nine, six or seven" [5].
Ad Hoc
Unplug from the grid. Plug into your friends. Adhocracy will rule. Autonomy and security will only happen when telecommunications operate around ad hoc networking. Syndicate yourself to the locality.
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker
[1] Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked (Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2002), p. 221.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Geert Lovink, My First Recession (Rotterdam: V2, 2003), p. 14.
[4] Ibid., p. 47.
[5] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 29.
Posted by jo at May 17, 2005 01:37 PM
Comments
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 11:40:06 +0200
From: Keith Hart
Subject: Re: The Ghost in the Network
>>In discussing the difference between the living and the nonliving, Aristotle points to the phenomena of self-organized animation and motility as the key aspects of a living thing. For Aristotle the "form-giving Soul" enables inanimate matter to become a living organism. If life is animation, then animation is driven by a final cause. But the cause is internal to the organism, not imposed from without as with machines. Network science takes up this idea on the mathematical plane,so that geometry is the soul of the network.
>>Unplug from the grid. Plug into your friends. Adhocracy will rule. Autonomy and security will only happen when telecommunications operate around ad hoc networking. Syndicate yourself to the locality.
I wasn't sure until the end if these guys were on Aristotle's side or not. But their resounding call to "stop the world, I want to get off" makes it clear that they share his reactionary conservatism. It is worth recalling that the great philosopher was tutor to the leader of those Macedonian thugs who finally pulled the plug on the first millennium BC's drive towards urban commercial civilisation and was the godfather of catholic apologists for the military agrarian complex like Aquinas. European socialism has long been in thrall to their anti-market ideology and this repudiation of an open source approach to network society is no different.
Incidentally, graph theory has been pronounced out-of-date by the sources they cite -- for its assumptions of stasis, randomness and atomism which can't make sense of network growth with preferences.
Keith Hart
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Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 17:05:01 -0400
From: Felix Stalder
Subject: Re: The Ghost in the Network
On Monday, 16. May 2005 12:56, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker wrote:>
>> We suggest that this opposition between closed and open is flawed. It unwittingly perpetuates one of today's most insidious political myths, that the state and capital are the two sole instigators of control.Instead of the open/closed opposition we suggest the pairing physical/social. The so-called open logics of control, those associated with (non proprietary) computer code or with the Internet protocols, operate primarily using a physical model of control. For example,protocols interact with each other by physically altering and amending lower protocological objects (IP prefixes its header onto a TCP data object, which prefixes its header onto an HTTP object, and so on). But on the other hand, the so-called closed logics of state and commercial control operate primarily using a social model of control. For, example, Microsoft's commercial prowess is renewed via the social activity of market exchange. Or, using another example, Digital Rights Management licenses establish a social relationship between producers and consumers, a social relationship backed up by specific legal realities (DMCA). Viewed in this way, we find it self evident that physical control (i.e. protocol) is equally powerful if not more so than social control. Thus, we hope to show that if the topic at hand is one of control, then the monikers of "open" and "closed" simply further confuse the issue. Instead we would like to speak in terms of "alternatives of control" whereby the controlling logic of both "open" and "closed" systems is brought out into the light of day.
I think this equation of "protocol = control", which is also the core of Galloway's stimulating book [1], is fundamentally flawed, because it mixes terms in ways that is not helpful to a critical political analysis.
A protocol, technical or social, is a series of standards which regulate how different entities can interact without the establishment of a formal hierarchy. Remember, the term originated in the context of exchanges between the king and foreign diplomats. The key about this relationship was that the diplomats were not the king's subjects, yet the diplomats were the equal to the king. They were different. The purpose of a protocol was to allow them to interact without the establishment of a formal hierarchy.
To argue that the protocol now, somehow, controlled the king and the diplomats seems strange. The same problem occurs when arguing that the Internet Protocol is somehow the ultimate controlling mechanism of the Internet. The fact that communication takes place within certain constraints, which enable communication in the first place, does not equate control. Rather, constraints on one level (the protocol of communication) can provide the grounds for freedom on an other level (content of communication). This is social theory 101.
The whole argument of protocol = control seems to rest on a somewhat unimaginative reading of Foucault's micro physics of power, in which he
argued that language itself is a main source of power and that the establishment of categories (e.g. madness) was itself a supreme act of
power. To transfer this one-on-one to protocols of communication networks, yields yet another control phantasy (or nightmare, depending on
your agenda). The only choice it leaves you is to jump into a some sort of 'pre-social' state. And this is precisely what Galloway & Thacker offer
us:
>> Unplug from the grid. Plug into your friends. Adhocracy will rule. Autonomy and security will only happen when telecommunications operate around ad hoc networking. Syndicate yourself to the locality.
What we have here is the 'social' vs. the 'technical', and the 'unplanned' vs. the 'planned'. Why this should lead to more freedom is dubious. Unless we understand freedom as absence of rules and control as presence of rules. This, however, is a very misleading understanding of these concepts, as has been argued often, not the least by in the feminist critique of the anti-authoritarian social movements of the late 1960s. [2]
PS: I am not arguing that protocols cannot be used as mechanism of social control. Rather, this has to be established on a case-by-case basis, rather than pronouncing protocols as means of control per se.
[1] Galloway, Alexander R. (2004). Protocol: How Control Exists After
Decentralization. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press
[2] Freeman, Jo (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness. The Second Wave.
Vol. 2 No. 1 http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
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http://felix.openflows.org
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Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 13:57:33 +0200
From: "Dirk Vekemans"
Subject: RE: The Ghost in the Network
I am new to this list,please forgive my ignorance and my clumsy wordings, i read this stimulating text by Galloway & Thacker on Rhizome (thanks to Geert). I wanted to respond, tried first on Rhizome, made a mailing mistake there, but i suppose this is the place to do so...
On the Ghost in network part, on the rhetoric of freedom in particular (I quote the authors first): "Later, in his elucidation of Castells, he (=Lovink, dv) writes of the opposite, a "freedom hardwired into code" [4]. This gets to the heart of the freedom rhetoric. If it's hardwired is it still freedom? Instead of guaranteeing freedom, the act of "hardwiring" suggests a limitation on freedom. And in fact that is precisely the case on the Internet where strict universal standards of communication have been rolled out more widely and more quickly than in any other medium throughout history. Lessig and many others rely heavily on this rhetoric of freedom."
As with any rhetoric, this may be beside the point, and therefore pointing towards it: regardless of the how's why's of software development, regardless of its supposedly 'open-' or 'closedness', all software i know has too much artificiality 'hardwired' into it, not because it efficiently reflects a mechanic ontology and because therefore it is too much of a machine to deal with organic processes, but because it isn't machinic enough (cfr. Deleuze on Leibniz' critique of Descartes, Le Pli, p12) : we are now noticing matter-shape interactions on macro levels (supra human if you want,i hate these metaphores) such as the selforganisation of internet as well as on micro levels ('below' our field of perception, although that topology isn't sustainable either) that point towards a dissolution of that old dualism in favour of multiplicity and Deleuze's 'becoming'.
Matter unfolding into its shape and shape folding into its matter. Difference>absence>difference.
In the self-inflicted urgency that is very much the essence of software development ( we need better software faster to 'regain' control of a global process running wild, or at least to radically slow down some processes that lead to quasi immediate annihilation), we are perhaps too much focussed on the immediate results the object-oriented approach gives us. In doing so we have ***rightfully***, i do want to stress that, disregarded alternatives. Because we need results fast, ever faster. But in doing so, we are now in a stage where systems need to be developed to run systems to run systems to infinity: we are stuck in a hysteresis of developing cycles feeding itself with ever more need.
The 'solution' or escape route offered here ('Unplug from the grid." "Adhocracy will rule") is one that i have given considerable thought in the past but always rejected. I have seen beautiful artistical results come off it. I appreciate its inherent beauty, the arcadian attraction of it. But I do not like the defaitism that goes with it.
It is as much a solution as taking out your tent and go camping near the Rocky Mountains for the rest of your life. You cannot unplug from the grid, the grid is taking shape within you, within the micro-economics of your friendly circles, within the micro power balancing within the machine-you. It is not a malignant ghost. It has nothing to do with good or evil and certainly nothing to do with transcendance, although many religious organisations base their very worldly power on that interpretation. Mechanical machines will give us mechanical results, if left running by themselves, i don't see anything 'bad' or devilish there. Machinical machines, on the other hand,in the Deleuzian sense of 'machine', would give us machinical results, and take the 'natural' flow of matter-shape (in)formation along with them into the technology that enables them. I don't see anything 'good' or messianistic there either. It's just that everything i can observe points in that direction, i wouldn't presume to say anything like this with my limited knowledge if that weren't the case. Heck, I just noticed mr Sondheim's work deals with some of the questions i'm working on...
So somehow I believe alternatives can be developed into working information systems that could supplement and even unhinge our current critical condition. I'm making some very modest efforts towards that with what i know of programming and the semantical to ontological implications of poetry.
Before today,i didn't see where these things were being researched, but i am entertaining hunches that process thought as expressed in the work of the Leibniz-Deleuze-Whitehead trail in ontology could find its reflection in working models of such alternatives and that our current practice of object-oriented programming should be subjected to a critical analysis, not because it's bad or malfunctioning, but because we need to understand how the shape of it turns to matter there. And these programmatic approaches didn't come into being all of a sudden, they built upon a dominant ontology themselves (as Philip E. Agre points out in The Practical Logic of Computer Work at p://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/practical.html) and they are modelled after them. So we need to know how the transcoding process that Lev Manovich explains in his 'The Language of New Media', the way how our daily interaction with computer (networks) influences our strains of thoughts on every level, how that really works, how it affects us and more importantly, how we could affect it.
I think IT matters, if you want a slogan. Or computers need sex, if you want a provocative one. And i think a lot of people should be doing this kind of research, not just some halfwit poet from kessel-lo without any resources, although of course i know a thing or two about how poetry works and how semantical processes at work there could be correlated to basic concepts in programming like recursive definition and garbage collection to name a few directions my own wreckage is floating in. I'm happy to notice some people are doing it here and with much more of the expertise required to do so. One would need to take another go at AI from the point before it went pragmatical, disassemble that and start rebuilding on, why not, a better phenomenology of analogic/discrete (referring to mr Sondheim's last post) although my guess is you do _not_ need to actually 'solve' any deep ontological and epistemological issues to get anywhere: if you allow the process of machine-building sufficient 'air-space' the 'text' will write itself, much like a poem goes ding-dong when it has finished being written and starts writing itself into reality. It is a process that dissolves time and space alltogether, in a way, anyone who's had the experience will testify to a sense of timelessness while writing/being ridden by and waking up afterwards without any memory of the actual writing. There's nothing mystical/romantic/visionary involved there, i think, it's just nature having its way. Very deterministic in the end, i'm afraid, inasmuch as that freedom is, epitemologically, a rather irrelevant question, only of (ab)use in rhetorical games of power after the fact, post-mortem if you want and mostly going on in equal bad taste as asking how it was after having intimate sex. Anyway,i've noticed programming doing the very same chemistry in my cranky brain...
In a modest way i am steering my shaky Cathedral of erotic Misery, a net arty project at http://www.vilt.net/nkdee towards these goals. Just please don't ask me how i propose to realize such alternatives, i'm just in the middle of trying to formulate some notes that could lead towards a possibly workable hypothesis in the best of scientific tradition, eventually. Anyone is invited to join in the process of theory building, although at this stage for the actual authoring stuff, i hang on to a very male and as yet tyranical core authoring process, collaboration is nice but impossible when there's nothing to collaborate on...Very theoretically it could lead to results, following it's own recursively defined flow or growth. Notes towards a supreme fiction, if you want Wallace Stevens in the game, although his poetry unfolds far beyond his ontology.
greetings,
dv
www.vilt.net
Posted by: Jo at May 19, 2005 11:20 AM
