The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Coda 153
tributed network form, just as it was the undoing of a previous one?
From where will appear the anti - Web? And what will it look like?
Resistance is asymmetry—and this is where we part ways with Hardt
and Negri—formal sameness may bring about reform, but formal incommensurability
breeds revolution.
Because both empire and the multitude employ the distributed
network form, it is not sufficient to remain politically ambiguous on
the question of distributed networks. A decision has to be made: we’re
tired of rhizomes. One must not only analyze how distributed networks
afford certain advantages to certain movements; one must critique
the logics of distributed networks themselves. Many political thinkers
today seem to think that “networked power” means simply the aggregation
of powerful concerns into a networked shape, that networked
power is nothing more than a network of powerful individuals. Our
claim is entirely the opposite, that the materiality of networks—and
above all the “open” or “free” networks—exhibits power relations regardless
of powerful individuals.
At this point, we pause and pose a question: Is the multitude always
“human”? Can the multitude or netwars not be human and yet still be
“political”? That is, are individuated human subjects always the basic unit
of composition in the multitude? If not, then we must admit that forms such
as the multitude, netwars, and networks exhibit unhuman as well as human
characteristics.
We mean such questions less as an issue about agency (the issue of
how to instrumentalize networks, how to use them as tools), and more
as an issue about the nature of constituent power in the age of networks
(the issue of the kinds of challenges that networks pose to the
way we think about “politics”). If, as the saying goes, networks operate
at a global level from sets of local interactions, and if one of the
defining characteristics of networks is the way in which they redefine
“control” in the Deleuzian sense, then we are moved to ask what inhabits
the gap left open by the limitations of autonomous, causal,
human agency. Nothing about networks leads us to believe that they
are inherently egalitarian forms—a tendency displayed in the numerous
popular - science books on networks. Not all networks are equal,