The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

126 Edges
the so - called closed logics of state and commercial control operate
primarily using a social model of control. For example, Microsoft’s
commercial prowess is renewed via the social activity of market exchange.
Or digital rights management (DRM) licenses establish a
social relationship between producers and consumers, a social relationship
backed up by specific legal realities (such as the 1998 Digital
Millennium Copyright Act).
From this perspective, we find it self - evident that informatic (or
material) control is equally powerful as, if not more so than, social
control. If the topic at hand is one of control, then the monikers of
“open” and “closed” simply further confuse the issue. Instead we would
like to speak in terms of alternatives of control whereby the controlling
logic of both “open” and “closed” systems is brought out into the
light of day.
A Google Search for My Body
The expectation is that one is either online or not. There is little
room for kind of online or sort of online. Network status doesn’t allow
for technical ambiguity, only a selection box of discrete states. It is
frustrating, ambiguity is, especially from a technical point of view. It
works or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it should be debugged or
replaced. To be online in a chronically ambiguous state is maddening,
both for those communicating and for the service provider. The
advent of broadband connectivity only exacerbates the problem, as
expectations for uninterrupted uptime become more and more inflexible.
One way to fix the ambiguity is to be “always on,” even when
asleep, in the bathroom, or unconscious. All the official discourses of
the Web demand that one is either online and accounted for, or offline
and still accounted for. (This is the idealistic ubiquity of wireless connectivity—the
very air you breathe is a domain of access, harkening
back to radio’s domain of dead voices on air.) Search engines are the
best indicator of this demand. Bots run day and night, a swarm of surveillance
drones, calling roll in every hidden corner of the Web. All
are accounted for, even those who record few user hits. Even as the
Web disappears, the networks still multiply (text messaging, multi-