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The Exploit
Thursday, for the second to last class, we will be discussing Thacker and Galloway’s The Exploit. This is a somewhat different take on “network theory.” Although this book is short, it is a tough read, so leave yourself time. Leave your comments/thoughts below.
8 Users Commented In " The Exploit "
There is a section at the beginning of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks entitled On Reading This Book. Working as sort of a preface to the preface, this section is intended to right the wrong way of reading the book: “we hope you will experience the book not as the step-by-step propositional evolution of a complete theory but as a series of marginal claims, disconnected in a living environment of many thoughts, distributed across as many pages.” While books normally are formed hierarchically, with a main point subdivided into sections, there authors here intend to avoid that. The question is, do they intend to avoid this format only, or the format and the philosophy behind it?
The philosophy behind a librocentric work comes from the enlightenment and modernism. This is the hierarchy mentioned earlier. The Exploit seeks to explore alternate forms of how power is distributed. In seeking to avoid the hierarchical distribution of power (with power being the central message of the text in this case), the authors have created a format of “marginal claims.” But this does little to distance the message from the format it is written on. It is still a book, and books are linear. For this kind of message, perhaps a website would have been a better medium to carry this message?
After reading Barabasi’s book last week, _The Exploit_ actually was a treat, with all of its nuanced richness and painstaking efforts to move beyond “the brutal limitations of abstract logic” (81). Thacker and Galloway raise the point which was discussed in last week’s class: “The idea of connectivity is so highly privileged today that it is becoming more and more difficult to locate places or objects that don’t, in some way, fit into a networking rubric” (26). Last week, it was difficult to answer the question: if everything’s linked, then what is outside the network? Yet, Thacker and Galloway aim to do precisely that—to escape “network fever” (27) and think outside “the so-called black box of technology” (27). The form of control within networks is essential to understand because network logic is consuming our society, moving it from one of disciplining discrete people to one of controlling large groups. They write, “perhaps there is no greater lesson about networks than the lesson about control: networks are not liberating… they exercise novel forms of control that are anonymous and non-human, which is to say material” (5). Much more than the discipline society, the control society is predicated on the existence of a network (35).
The control society is maintained in part by the fact that one can never really go off-line: “we are nostalgic for a time when organisms didn’t need to produce quantitative data about themselves, for a time when one didn’t need to report back” (124). In the discipline society, paper documentation can be evaded; it is harder to evade digital documentation. We talked about this in class with Foucault, that the internet is a type of always-on panopticon. Yet, it is not so simple because unlike the panopticon, the network of the internet only works when it is forgotten. As Thacker and Galloway summarize this mindset, “Express yourself! Output some data! It is how distributed control functions best” (41). This passage foreshadows one major thrust in their book: “Double the communication leads to double the control” (124). The more we use the internet and add to the internet, the more data we compile and the stronger the network grows… and the stronger it grows, the more opportunities there are for an exploit.
U.S. proposed $1.6 Billion dollars to combat and prepare for the chemical/biological warfare that might attack our country. Unfortunately, since viruses can adapt and mutate very quickly to its environment that no matter how much money and time we spend on countermeasures, it will probably be in vein. Humans may have control over the modifications of viruses, but afterwards, the virus takes a “life” of its own. Technically it is categorized as a non-living thing. As the book mentions, it does have a reproductive system(replicative rather), but it lacks few essential organelles to function as a fully living organism. Network that is created by digital codes and signals also sometimes gets mis-represented as being “alive”. We say that the network is infected by viruses, and worms just as how human beings can be infected with viruses and worms. Network’s existence is purely depended upon the user input. If we cease to exist, the network will also cease to exist. If the existence of certain being cannot prevail without the existence of certain other “live being”, it should be considered a non-living thing. Perhaps network is part of a digital virus in itself, because it only exist because we exist. As time passes, its capacity gets larger and larger just as viruses can only replicate itself. This might be something that could differentiate between “being” and “being alive”.
The concept of the control society particularly grabbed my while reading The Exploit. Galloway and Thatcher speak about the various political structures that exist simultaneously, while contradicting one another (peer to peer sharing communities and digital copyright, for example). The most telling statement for me was that these parameters are “assumed fundamental” (34). It seems as though they believe that networks can only be understood (or that the network theory that has been established up to this point) by referencing the previous patterns. The social control extends the network to the point of reference of network theory itself.
(I feel like I’m copying Rachael here, but…) The discussion we had last week regarding both the concept and the actuality of the network, and access to the network being so widespread that it has become easier to find what is not connected than to find what is, comes into play. This is an extremely controlling image. The livelihoods of everyone in the class, for instance, are dependent on the network that is the epitome of society control. They also expound on the discussion from last week regarding the network being limiting as opposed to freeing. The network is finite. There is an end to the internet. As Foucault spoke to us regarding the panopticon, the concept of the control society is born out of the creation of the network.
I started reading the book as the preface suggested: read Part I‘s italicized sections only first, then go into Part II. But that did not really work for me. Part I just became a bunch of sentences that do not make a full paragraph/ sense. And Part II became examples of networks but I didn’t get the connection among them except that they are all some type of networks. So I had to go back to read Part I in detail, which made it impossible for me to finish the entire book before this post is due.
Although I’m still in the process of finishing the book, I did find it interesting that the authors compared the networks to sovereignty. I particularly liked it when they said “the mere existence of networks does not imply democracy or equality….the existence of networks invites us to think in a manner that is appropriate to networks (p.13).” I never linked America to sovereignty. But if networks are a form of sovereignty, then who else should be the better example of sovereignty than the very well developed, capitalism-brainwashed America? Up until today, capitalism has been built on the concept of hierarchy in organizations, which is not something far from a sovereignty system. We are being told to expand our networks all the time. It is something I think sometimes is over privileged here in the US. Like the second italicized section in Part I said: Often the discourse surrounding networks tend to pose it…against what it sees as retrograde structures … (p.25). The problem is that most of us see them as a good thing because we get jobs, things we need to be done, more power, or whatever it is for being well connected. The other part I liked was where the authors talked about the American unilateralism. I found it kind of funny. But that could be sarcasm built in me for being from a country that is not as powerful.
Despite the fact that we have been talking about the non-egalitarian and non-democratic nature of the World Wide Web throughout the semester, I found “The Exploit” exceptionally enlightening. In fact, after reading the book the World Wide Web seems to be nothing but a voluntary digital workplace, a global village of collective consciousness that exploits users along with their information. According to Galloway and Thatcher, the web has changed the traditional power dynamics of selling one’s human labor, due to the fact that in the technological postmodern age, in order to survive, both body’s labor power and body’s information have to be given up. Today, the mass “is being exploited and controlled informatically as well as corporally.” (135) In addition, the interactive and multidirectional nature of Internet has enabled the World Wide Web to exploit and control people by using different means of surveillance, monitoring, biometrics, etc.
Unlike modern sovereignty-based networks, postmodern distributed networks are less concerned with power and more concerned with control. Although the book suggests that distributed and control-versus-power networks are the primary forms of networks in the postmodern age, it seems to me that our network structure is still very centralized and hub based, (or perhaps it is a mix of two). Still, power brings control.
In general, reading the book was no easy task. The fragmented and non-linear narrative form (its postmodern nature) was a little hard to follow.
One of the main ideas of The Exploit is that networks are not inherently egalitarian despite widespread belief. According to Galloway and Thatcher, protocol is the method of control in a network. Networks are not in fact democratic because they are governed by protocol; without protocol, you have no network. Galloway and Thatcher refer to protocol as the “target of resistance” – “The target of resistance is clear enough. It is the vast apparatus of technopolitical organization that we call protocol” (78). In a protological network, networks are “exploited” by viruses which find holes in the network and project change through these holes. In the context of both computer viruses and biological viruses (which are discussed in parallel with one another), viruses take advantage of their host systems by producing more copies of themselves.
In Galloway and Thatcher’s discussion of networks and government, I noticed that fear is an important element of networks due to our government. Government keeps control of its network through generating fear. Galloway and Thatcher demonstrate this point by noting that “one of the ways that sovereignty maintains its political power is continually to identify a biological threat” (110). For example, threats of disease and terrorism are exaggeratingly report by government-controlled media to maintain stability of its network.
The Exploit was definitely not an easy read for me but I found a few things that stood out as interesting to me. It appears the author is making the point that government and networks go hand in hand. The author states “technology is assumed to, in effect, preexist politics. I believe this has come up in class before and I agree with this statement. The author also talks about the idea that some people believe distributed networks are liberating and centralized networks are oppressive. I’d like to touch upon this idea in class to better understand how this works. I really liked the first few pages of part II called “The Edge”. I thought the first paragraph discussing an exhibit of computer viruses was compelling even though it really made no sense in real life. However, the author goes on to talk about real museum shows that are centered on diseases. Curing and Curating – Brilliant. I have been to numerous art shows, photography shows and some science museums but never heard of a show quite like that.