Random: Dr. Nadin recently gave a brief lecture on anticipation. On p33 he says “Graph theory is not enough for an understanding of networks, it is only a beginning.” – Then he goes on to talk about how simply graphing something renders several possible outputs based on the same data. Dr. Nadin stated that dropping a rock will always result in the same event, and this event can be depicted by an equation. Drop a cat however, and no equation can explain the way in which it falls. This creates an odd ‘alive’ aspect to networks that the authors mention (p51). This made me consider Gunkel’s statements to a scary degree.

The very last section of p37 (From ‘But individualization is not simply…’ to the end of the page) yelled out the semantic triangle that Nadin has also explained.
There are lots of different variants of the same thing so I’m just going to make my own based on Nadin’s telling, but a Google mage search comes up with many:
http://images.google.com/images?q=semiotic%20triangle&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi
My Own:
http://alexhays.com/school/ORI.gif
p84’s statement saying ‘don’t download attachments from unknown senders’ reminded me of a more basic thought. I remember when I was first started using the internet I would see ‘one new email’ banner-adds and click them with complete naivety, and try and log in with whatever information they asked. Recent studies show that this reaction isn’t a thing of the past, rather, many people react in this way (I found the article on reddit a while ago but their search is horrid so I couldn’t find it. I’ll try to later and link).
p41 made me want to reference Steven Johnson’s emergence a whole bunch, as did a lot of this section. I refrain however as I feel like I’ve already over-referenced it. The intro though, about slime mould, is particularly pertinent.
The final thing I want to mention begins on page 79 when he states ‘In this sense, life is the capacity to resist force.’ This could also be read as life is the want to escape from suffering. Force and suffering are, in my mind, coexistent – this is because force alters your natural state, which is a state of comfort.
(p80) There is a youtube video of an autistic lady explaining her worldview. It is an incredible video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc . She essentially states “yeah, you think different, but I don’t see you’re worldview as wrong, so why should you think my world view is wrong? It’s just different from mine.”
This section of the book (till The Exploit bit) made me consider life and death not only as dichotomies in reference to each other, but in reference to themselves. Life vs life and Death vs death.
I drew this diagram to explain:
http://alexhays.com/school/life-death.gif
One is ‘In the system’ (earthly) one is ‘Outside of the system’ (transcendental).
‘The Exploit’ bit of it was super built up to and thus obvious so I don’t want to waste words on it. This is such an amazing book. I really, really appreciated reading it.

Galloway and Thacker pave an interesting and enlightening path to understanding the topology of networks. Networks have nodes and edges. But the mere “existence of this multiplicity of nodes in no way implies an inherently democratic, ecumenical, or egalitarian order. Quite the opposite.” (13) We perceive (until now) networks as being all of these things, with a homogeneous order that flattens the earth. If they’re not egalitarian, there must be some sort of hierarchy.

A new look at topology is suggested. G&T present an interesting dialectic. A network focuses control on rigidly designed hierarchies while at the same time, radically distributes control into autonomous locales(19). We feel like there is control with the network because it distributes control to each autonomous node, but it also has a hierarchy within which control is focused. I found it fascinating, this dichotomy of control which suggests decentralization, but order nonetheless.

Networks consist of protocols, which are the apparatus of the network and “things being done within that apparatus”.(29) From here, we learn that the substance of protocol is information. Without information, there is no network.(57) Who creates protocol? Is it germane to the network structure, is it code (ip addresses), the produsage from individual nodes, or both?

A network can be seen as a new mode of sovereignty(20). America is only a figurehead. Which begs the question, WHO controls networks? “The quandary is this: no one controls networks, but networks are controlled” (39). And yet there is some discussion of military use of networks to attack other networks. If the political powers don’t control the network, then it must be something of the nature of networks that is exploited to gain control or disable other networks.

It gets really interesting where G&T lead the discussion to bio-political protocol. I think I understand what they’re trying to do here, but it hasn’t settled yet. Are networks giving us a new way of looking at our world?

Near the middle of the book, Galloway and Thacker question the phrase “life itself” as part of their argument about “biopolitics” (a concept imported from Foucault). “Broadly speaking,” they write, “biopolitics is a historical condition [when] ‘life itself’ plays a particular role in the ongoing management of the social and the political” (71). The authors describe the connection between biology and informatics in biopolitics, saying that biopolitics USES informatics to reconfigure biology “as an information resource” (74). The current result is that “the body is a database, and informatics is the search engine” (74). I think to myself, this would appall Heidegger—our own bodies made into standing-reserve. (!!!) Then the authors describe unrest over a belief in the natural “life itself” in opposition to informatics. Galloway and Thacker argue that the meaning of “life itself” is an ideological construct which breaks down when networks are considered “living things.” “Once life is information, and once information is a network,” the network becomes “management of ‘life itself’” (77).

In relation to this concept, I am most confused about the terms “life-resistance” and “resistance-to-life.” Essentially, these terms seek to highlight the unstable power structures and “the problem of control” (36) in networks. One prominent feature of power is “resistance,” or the ability of “human life to counter forces of exploitation” (78). The authors wonder how networks might overhaul the concept of resistance, and they ask, “Can the exploited become the exploiting?” (78).

Now we arrive at the life-resistance vs. resistance-to-life discussion. In a power structure, people resist force AND life. About life-resistance, the authors write (working from Deleuze and Foucault) that when power turns life into a commodity, resistance becomes “power of life” (79). “Life is the capacity to resist force.” But we also resist life. “Today ‘life itself’ is boxed in by competing biological and computational definitions. Resistance-to-life is thus a challenge posed to any situation in which a normative definition of ‘life itself’ dovetails with an instrumental use of the definition” (79). One purpose in the book is to expose the problem of naming and definitions—“nominalism” (11)—and confront “the brutal limitations of abstract logic” and binaries (81). A call for redefinition is at the heart of the life-resistance vs. resistance-to-life distinction. “Life” does not always mean human, if we consider networks a life form. “Networks contain an anonymity, an nonhuman component,” the authors remind us (81).

I can only barely summarize all this—I cannot think of how to apply it. I believe it has something to do with the fetishization of life… the exploitation of human lives as sources of information. “The source fetishists are the new exploitative classes” and “the biomass, not social relations, is today’s site of exploitation” (135).

An exploit, according to hacker-speak, is a form of resistance. It is some hole in the system which can be the genesis for change if the hole is exploited. Galloway and Thacker argue that “The new exploit will be antiweb” (22). I suppose this speaks to the idea of networks as controlling and non-egalitarian, so that resistance (when/if it comes) must be anti-network. I am just not sure what their specific claim is in the life-resistance vs. resistance-to-life discussion. There are so many claims in the first chapter, “Prolegomenon,” I feel lost in the other chapters. I am interested in the ideas, such as fetishization of life and information, but I can’t understand how these small arguments work toward a whole argument. If my copy of the book looks a little worn and ragged, it’s not because I bought it used. I was forced to abuse it as it abused me.

At this historic moment in time … of course I have to say the Network … we have put him there.

Who is we?

That seems harder to answer and the network is not just agency connected by movement (nodes and edges), nor is it only human i.e. only powered by individual or even group intentionality.

But the authors seem to suggest that political power comes from exploitation of the power of the net and our security (however we define ‘we” and ‘our’) depends on the weakening of other networks.

The shift from a discipline society to control society with the emphasis going from a source of domination to a protocol that ‘modulates’ rather than ‘manipulates’ .. I would like to talk about this with more concrete examples.

Haven’t protocols always been important even in vertical, hierrchichal structures? Hasn’t it always been the instrument of order? How is the new protocological nature of the net different from traditional protocols that maintain the status quo amongs all things?

I am afraid this is all that I have deciphered of this book … I love its double tiering of content in italics and regular font. But I think it requires a lot of reading around the book for all this to start making sense more intuitively.

It wasn’t until the second of half of the book in Nodes, that I felt I was in more comfortable territory. It was here that I started to understand a lot better of Galloway and Thacker’s discussion of networks towards the government. From what I gathered of it though was not a network that was created through calm and collected minds working together, but rather a network created by our government through the use of fear.

In the book the mention of diseases and terrorism is mentioned as things society has had to deal with especially after the “Attacks of 9/11” in which Galloway and Thacker mention on more than one occasion. We read in the book “One of the waya that sovereignty maintains its political power is continually identify a biological threat.” (110) Or even “For instance, the networks of AIDS, terrorist groups and the economy can be understood as having in common a particular pattern, a particular set of relations between dots and lines.” (112)

From what I can tell from the book, it is through media in which the government keeps control of everything within it’s network. Prior to 9/11 and even slightly after, nobody had a reason to question what was being told through the mass media. Plus no one was able to communicate with one another as we read “the audience is structurally unable to achieve a symmetrical relationship of communication with the apparatus (no matter how loudly one yells back at the screen.)”. (123)

It is thanks to the Internet that it seems the power that the government once might have had has started to diminish. Through the Internet, the individual now has a voice and can question what they are told with millions of others. “Many today say that the new media technologies are ushering in a new era of enhanced freedom and the technologies of control are waning”. (124)

We could see some of that through out this election. Over the last year, many politicians and religious leaders kept trying to tell the American people the Barack Obama, was evil because of his Muslim back-ground and did not have the political experience to run our country, but because we are now more connected as a society thanks to the internet and the new media technologies, we were able to make up our own minds and voice our many opinions to everyone else.

Last night’s election was a good example of the new ever-present online status. Three of us sat in a class (and we were not the only three, we were simply in a row so I saw what was going on) with our connections wide open. The student to my left had Twitterific open on his laptop, I had Twitterific open in addition to CNN.com, the Daily Kos and Google News, and the student to my right got breaking news alerts and Twitter updates on her iPhone. All three of us were also taking notes on the class (two of us on blogs, one in the low-tech pen and paper style) while following the election. At one point the instructor, who hasn’t developed a love for the online addiction several of us share, asked who was ahead. What seemed to be half the class told her. She easily could have asked what the speaker had just said and the same number of students could have answered her with equal confidence.

Galloway and Thacker only had it half right. Yes, we get upset when we can’t connect our machines to the Internet, but we go well beyond that observation. We have moved from allowing our machines to remain constantly connected to expecting to be able to get information the second it becomes available, no matter where we may be or what we may be doing.

In the Prologomenon, I felt comfortable in the direction they were taking during their discussions of the American-Centered political control, and how networks are all a part of that sovereignty; reflecting power, sovereignty, control, and the biological and political nature of networks.

I found Galloway and Thackers discussions on how the progress of the West promotes the threat of terrorism interesting as they explored the network connection to the military. If I understand them correctly, they suggest we must build a network that can “swarm” our enemies networks in order to have secure communications. A kind of “my network” can whip “your network” approach to communication defense. Later they make reference to The Matrix Revolution, I must see that movie.

It’s clear Galloway and Thacker agree that human networks form for a reason and with that reason comes a set of normal behaviors or “protocols”. Many networks come into existence because there is no noticeable control while some exist because there is control. If the network’s purpose or circumstances change, then the network morphs or evolves to accommodate those changes. In turn, the protocols shift automatically to accommodate those same network changes.

Now Galloway and Thacker shift emphasis to protocols as an instrument of control or sovereignty. They imply that while protocols are not the only identifying differences in both biological and computer networks the primary function of a protocol is to direct information for purposes of control. I understand their claims that protocols are essential for the proper functioning and general use of network systems in relation to information theory and computer networks and how forcing change to any protocol can inhibit access to files and even corrupt the proper functioning of a network.

Galloway and Thacker draw comparisons of computer networks to other forms of networks such as biotechnology and computers constructed from DNA. In addition they draw parallels between computer and biological viruses, infectious diseases and bioterrorism as non human aspects of networks.

They claim that in the future the knowledge of protocol practices and network theory will be the basis for the method of controlling viruses and terrorism. Do they mean that viruses are networks and are controlled as networks?

The final chapter of blogs or short essays doesn’t seem to match-up with the first two chapters. It seems to be more of a series of random thoughts for discussion. The first chapter reads more like a defense of the second chapter.