Protocol Book

Given this was written in 2004, this book was a huge contribution. It gets a lot of things right about how computer systems function in power dynamics, and accounts for a lot of misunderstandings about modern policies in a protocol-based world. At the current moment, many of us are still fighting policy-based battles in spaces that are entirely ignorant of the functions and possibilities of protocols, and this is a serious problem in an online world. Because of this, _Protocol_ is still one of the most relevant guides to thinking about information technology policy today.

This book clarifies that the world we know is undergoing a cultural change towards distributed and decentralized networks that are based upon digital documents that are fundamentally supported through protocol systems: bits of code that afford people the ability to interpret online documents in a common way. He goes on to describe how this process is, in no way, a technologically neutral one.

This book goes on to say that under these considerations of Deleuzian (and Foucauvian) notions of power, that we should reconsider how we think about Marxist material critical work. He suggests that in this world, all centralizing units of people are the enemy of those who find liberation in establishing and exploiting protocol: the enemy is corporations, institutions, the state, those groups which govern protocol (e.g. ICANN), and even unions. In fact, in the world of protocols, these groups ultimately become more of a pain than a threat as these groups must embrace the use of protocol to fight protocol. Ultimately, the revolutions are networks against networks in which the rhizomes that build them are networks of post-human cyborgs, incidental conceptual digital artists, hackers, and cyberfeminists.

This book is a wild ride about the (Deleuzian) virtual possibilities of protocol from start to finish. According to Galloway, we have entered into a space of digital potentials that must reconsider post-human, post-structural Continental philosophy, and must leave behind present formations of Marxist criticism (aside from perhaps Marxist Aesthetics) and current economic governing ideologies in order to establish a better materialist form of criticism, design, and pragmatic theory. In some ways, if memory recalls, this seems to be a similar, more technologically up-to-date argument made by Benjamin Bratton in _The Stack_ and is somewhat seconded from a more legal perspective in Benkler's _The Wealth of Networks_. It also echos from the work of _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_.