reading response: protocol, software, code

All three essays this week, which seem to be in an explicit dialogue with each other, seek to uncover underlying ideologies harbored or built within code; unlike previous media objects, however, code resists traditional models of critique. Galloway, for example, dispels with the notion that the Internet represents a fully distributed or rhizomatic structure, and examines the structure of the Internet, particularly in the protocological regimes of TICP/IP and DNS flows and processes, as the primary site of control. While the Internet may appear to be a democratized space connecting the many to the many, Galloway demonstrates that, as with the suturing function of continuity editing in cinema, the Internet browser functions as an apparatus that masks another apparatus, the protocols that structure communication without most users’ awareness. He attempts to redirect our attention away from the particular manifestations encounters with the Internet might take and toward its (invisible) underlying structure. He writes: “The discovery of processes where once there were objects –this is perhaps the most fundamental moment in a Marxist method.”

Golumbia is more interested in the interaction between political and social control and technology, arguing that that computational culture reinforces and even exacerbates existing neoliberal oligarchic structures of power. This is accomplished through striation —the elimination of smooth, undifferentiated space in the name of efficiency—and surveillance. Computational culture, he contends, is deeply integrated with ideology, whose forces long predate the computational turn and have since shaped its many uses. Golumbia debunks the notion of the “empowered individual” and other utopian claims that attend emergence of new medium; he sees Friedman’s World Is Flat, for example, as reifying arcane capitalist values. What may be new, in Golumbia’s view, is the emergence of “a different kind of power” that seizes on computational methods, the placeless, largely opaque multinational corporation.

Drucker insists on the enmeshed character of code’s “ideality” and its material form, which is manifest is graphesis, or “information embodied in material, and thus ambiguous, formats.” (Drucker, 136) Responding to an ideological assumption that code exists outside of material form, or presents a self-identity, in Adorno’s term, she asserts that while a gap always exists between code and its expression, the two are coterminous with each other. Yet she also argues that the graphesis of code presents a different kind of materiality: “Materiality cannot be fully absorbed into ideality, nor can it be understood as a mechanical, self-evident literal identity.” (Drucker, 141)

What strikes me most across these three texts is the degree to which each is invested in a (Marxist?) process of unveiling the ideological underpinnings of code; Galloway identifies structure, Golumbia looks at usage, and Drucker reasserts expression as the places from which code can begin to be critiqued. Of the three I’m most drawn to Golumbia’s analysis, particularly his scathing critique of Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games and the ways in which they rewrite history from a computationalist viewpoint. As with work like Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer, I’m most interested in the ways in which the introduction of new technologies inform culture and the perceptual horizons of individuals, and to me his approach most convincingly inscribes the Internet within a longer view of industrial history.

Drucker’s positing of a different form of materiality is intriguing, but I’d be interested to see more about what presumptions about ideality exist specifically about code, and why those notions are resistant to critique. Galloway’s emphasis on hidden protocols is compelling, and perhaps this is spelled out in other chapters, but the link between protocol and actual usage is somewhat thinly drawn. I would problematize, for example, his reference to “intuitive” usage of browsers; even though he identifies what makes an Internet session most “smooth,” such supposed intuition seems to me more a learned and imitated practice among a group of users than something that “feels” correct or natural. Case in point: the spread of Internet memes as a wholly distinct practice, less about individual objects than a shared language developed specifically as something that reflexively plays off the rapid flows of information on the Internet, kind of like a giant inside joke. My new favorite meme is the “interrupting Kayne” meme, photoshopped onto other images with his infamous VMA speech reduced to a Mad Libs script. (The best iterations of this meme is when it infects other famous and well-worn memes, like lolcats and keyboard cat.) But here I’m interested in looking at the meme, or the glut of YouTube commentary on the incident (which has all but replaced the actual video on YouTube), as a semiotic process, an example of how the Internet protocols work as a language, as Galloway stresses, an example of graphic variability in Drucker, or perhaps, following Golumbia, it’s an instance of supposedly empowered individual expression that actually reasserts political will from an unseen above by diverting attention away from more urgent social issues.