Reading comments

I found Galloway's writing very helpful and much easier to access than some of the other texts we have engaged with so far. Especially since it seemed like a critical instructional text that succeeded to illuminate me about the Internet (I've never heard of a “DNS critic” before) without getting lost.

Starting by contextualizing the Net's origin in a military history (and this reminded me of two things, a parallel in medical technology like radiography and then of the term avantgarde, at once referring to a leading and potentially subversive formal art movement and a leading elite in military missions) does help to understand the idea and function of decentralization and distribution in the ambivalent way that Galloway himself points to later in his text: namely, that the Net - or rather the protocol "as a unique governing principle within that network" (no page numbers given) - is both "territorializing structure and anarchical distribution" (Tim referred to this in his post too). Internet contains the (Utopian?) possibilities of total control/functioning and total openness/connection.

I would question Galloway's assumption though that the Internet is neither time- nor narrative-based, since we still perceive/move through (a feeling of) flow and continuity and that seems to be a crucial point for the “compelling, intuitive experience for the user”, not to speak of a kinesthetic self-perception (implying movement through space and time).

In this regard, the outlining of how the Internet works to enable such an experience is very helpful to think about the way a subject/subjectivity is created or performed in accordance to specific rules (protocols) - where does the machine/human start and where does it end (and we can use the Internet/subject relation not least as a metaphor of subject-constitution per se); where is inside/outside, beginning and end, matter and discourse...

And this newly innovated Self-Portrait Machine might be interesting to look at here.

However, what I wished to be elaborated more in Galloway's writing (and maybe it is throughout the book) is the malfunctioning of the Internet protocols (besides the dead and deceptive links). I am thinking here of the virus and how the organizing system creates its own erasures in destructive 'forces' and at the same time the means to incorporate them like an archive that can only exist with its neither external nor totally internalized “archive fever” (or how the virus does not equal this very fever). And moreover it would have been enriching to get to know about flows that are not exclusively inherent within, but do maybe influence the protocol system: How f.e. does an audiovisual advertisement clip of mouse poison come to be chosen and placed in the middle of a newspaper article reporting the strangling of a female student?

Maybe this is just another way to address the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman.