The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

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Prolegomenon 5 centralized armies fighting decentralized guerrillas? Hierarchies fighting networks? Or is a new global dynamic on the horizon? Second query: Networks are important. But does the policy of American unilateralism provide a significant counterexample to the claim that power today is network based? Has a singular sovereignty won out in global affairs? We cannot begin to answer these questions definitively. Instead we want to suggest that the juncture between sovereignty and networks is the place where the apparent contradictions in which we live can best be understood. It is the friction between the two that is interesting. Our choice should not simply be “everything is different” or “nothing has changed”; instead, one should use this dilemma as a problematic through which to explore many of the shifts in society and control over the last several decades. Perhaps there is no greater lesson about networks than the lesson about control: networks, by their mere existence, are not liberating; they exercise novel forms of control that operate at a level that is anonymous and nonhuman, which is to say material. The nonhuman quality of networks is precisely what makes them so difficult to grasp. They are, we suggest, a medium of contemporary power, and yet no single subject or group absolutely controls a network. Human subjects constitute and construct networks, but always in a highly distributed and unequal fashion. Human subjects thrive on network interaction (kin groups, clans, the social), yet the moments when the network logic takes over—in the mob or the swarm, in contagion or infection—are the moments that are the most disorienting, the most threatening to the integrity of the human ego. Hence a contradiction: the self - regulating and self - organizing qualities of emergent networked phenomena appear to engender and supplement the very thing that makes us human, yet one’s ability to superimpose top - down control on that emergent structure evaporates in the blossoming of the network form, itself bent on eradicating the importance of any distinct or isolated node. This dissonance is most evident in network accidents or networks that appear to spiral out of control— Internet worms and disease epidemics, for instance. But calling such
6 Prolegomenon instances “accidents” or networks “out of control” is a misnomer. They are not networks that are somehow broken but networks that work too well. They are networks beyond one’s capacity to control them, or even to comprehend them. At one moment the network appears far too large, as in the global dynamic of climate changes, but at another moment it appears too small, as with binary code or DNA. This is why we suggest that even while networks are entirely coincident with social life, networks also carry with them the most nonhuman and mis - anthropic tendencies. Indeed, sourcing the nonhuman within the human will be a major theme of this book. So let us first outline a few provisional responses to the foregoing queries. While each is a useful cognitive exercise, we hope to show how each response is ultimately unsatisfying, and how a new approach is required for understanding the exceptional quality of sovereignty in the age of networks. Provisional Response 1: Political Atomism (the Nietzschean Argument) Action and reaction, force and counterforce—the argument can be made that the United States’ decisions to declare war on terrorism or to intervene in the Middle East do not take place in a political vacuum. Perhaps the global machinations of “Empire” have elicited an American ressentiment in the form of unilateralism, a nostalgia for the good old days of the Cold War, when war meant the continued preparation for a standoff (never to arrive) between technologically advanced power blocs. Thus each advancement toward a decentralized global Empire consisting of France, Japan, Russia, and other leading industrialized nations is met by an American counterclaim to regain a singular world sovereignty. However, this implies that, in contradistinction to the United States, the international community represented by the United Nations is the vanguard in the global political scene. The problem is that the very concept of a “united nations” is fraught with complication. On the one hand, there exists a romantic desire for a political tabula rasa, in which the many inequities between nations can be effaced by the “general will” of an international community. Yet on
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Page 6 and 7: Contents On Reading This Book vii P
Page 8 and 9: On Reading This Book It is our inte
Page 10 and 11: Prolegomenon “We’re Tired of Tr
Page 12 and 13: Prolegomenon 3 opportunities that t
Page 16 and 17: Prolegomenon 7 the other hand, the
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Page 20 and 21: Prolegomenon 11 Provisional Respons
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Page 24 and 25: Prolegomenon 15 grams, where ultima
Page 26 and 27: Prolegomenon 17 rorism in the same
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Page 30 and 31: Prolegomenon 21 sovereignty. In the
Page 32 and 33: PART I Nodes The quest for “unive
Page 34 and 35: Nodes Discourse surrounding network
Page 36 and 37: Nodes 27 Benkler, and others, posit
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Page 40 and 41: Nodes 31 tify the political fissure
Page 42 and 43: Nodes 33 From the perspective of gr
Page 44 and 45: Nodes 35 Indeed, one of the argumen
Page 46 and 47: Nodes 37 works. Would it be enough
Page 48 and 49: Nodes 39 and “rule” lies. The n
Page 50 and 51: Nodes 41 modulating, in flux, alive
Page 52 and 53: Nodes 43 ning of the data object. F
Page 54 and 55: Nodes 45 number of top - level name
Page 56 and 57: Nodes 47 This process may be partia
Page 58 and 59: Nodes 49 Biotechnologies today have
Page 60 and 61: Nodes 51 be it in the living cell,
Page 62 and 63: Nodes 53 DNA computing demonstrates
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Nodes 55 greater the number of insi
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Nodes 57 more accurate or successfu
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Nodes 59 takes on new forms in the
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Nodes 61 and at all scales. Perhaps
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Nodes 63 many current network - bas
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Nodes 65 face because enmity is alw
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Nodes 67 As a concept, swarming der
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Nodes 69 Places where faces shouldn
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Nodes 71 at which “life itself
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Nodes 73 A crucial challenge is to
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Nodes 75 concern is not safety anym
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Nodes 77 is central in the developm
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itself on the side of life, and tur
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Nodes 81 Perhaps what is most instr
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Nodes 83 ever, the language of biol
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Nodes 85 computer’s normal MBR. E
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Nodes 87 amples of computer and bio
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Nodes 89 identify Lyme disease, the
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Nodes 91 Web sites, databases, and
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Nodes 93 to our bodies, which has t
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Nodes 95 True, in extreme cases suc
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fects are almost impossible to pred
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Nodes 99 guarded condition, it will
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Nodes 101 Societies of Control . .
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PART II Edges —Well there it is.
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Edges The Datum of Cura I Imagine a
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Edges 107 In these visions of healt
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Edges 109 control it seeks to estab
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Edges 111 treatise: Machiavelli’s
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Edges 113 Joseph - Marie Jacquard h
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Edges 115 but that, in the guise of
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Edges 117 tension, duration, and in
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Edges 119 abstract, mathematical pr
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Edges 121 Consider current developm
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Edges 123 simply mean symmetrical c
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Edges 125 focuses on code in isolat
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Edges 127 player online games, and
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Edges 129 role of medicine is to re
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Edges 131 of the supernatural, a di
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Edges 133 proteins, processes that
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Edges 135 muted into quality,” wr
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Edges 137 which cannot be cast into
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Edges 139 the thing, a particular f
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Edges 141 If Latour gives us a para
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Edges 143 tion. Nondistinction effa
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Edges 145 from the technological ve
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Edges 147 spellings, grammatical er
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Coda: Bits and Atoms Networks are a
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Coda 151 robustness that centralize
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Coda 153 tributed network form, jus
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Coda 155 The point here is not that
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Coda 157 ignored, and the network i
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Appendix Notes for a Liberated Comp
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Appendix 161 infinity palimpsest po
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Appendix 163 singular unordered vit
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lose DEVICE mutate SEQUENCE narcole
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Notes Prolegomenon 1. For more on t
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Notes 169 7. Gilles Deleuze, Negoti
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Notes 171 clude GM foods, chemical
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Notes 173 bodies, the new nondiscip
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Notes 175 61. For a popular overvie
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Notes 177 22. On December 1, 2003
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Notes 179 6. Ibid., 2. 7. Ibid., 20
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Electronic Mediations Katherine Hay
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Index abandonment, 110- 11, 136 Abu
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Index 185 body politic, 109- 11 Boe
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Index 187 distributed network. See
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Index 189 Health and Human Services
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Index 191 Metzger, Gustav, 108 Mich
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Index 193 poltergeist, 161 populati
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Index 195 TCP/ IP. See Internet pro
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Alexander R. Galloway is assistant
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