The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

22 Prolegomenon
suicide bomber (versus the police), peer - to - peer protocols (versus the
music conglomerates), guerrillas (versus the army), netwar (versus
cyberwar), subcultures (versus the family), and so on.
2. The present day is symmetrical again, but this time in the symmetrical
form of networks fighting networks.
A new sovereignty, native to global networks, has recently been
established, resulting in a new alliance between “control” and “emergence.”
Networks exist in a new kind of global universalism, but one
coextensive with a permanent state of internal inconsistency and exceptionalism.
In this network exception, what is at stake is a newly
defined sense of nodes and edges, dots and lines, things and events—
networked phenomena that are at once biological and informatic.
3. To be effective, future political movements must discover a new
exploit.
A wholly new topology of resistance must be invented that is as
asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network was in relationship
to power centers. Resistance is asymmetry. The new exploit
will be an “antiweb.” It will be what we call later an “exceptional
topology.” It will have to consider the radically unhuman elements of
all networks. It will have to consider the nonhuman within the human,
the level of “bits and atoms” that are even today leveraged as
value - laden biomedia for proprietary interests. It has yet to be invented,
but the newly ascendant network sovereigns will likely breed the
anti web into existence, just as the old twentieth - century powers bred
their own demise, their own desertion.