Looking for a Counter-Protocol
Interview with Alexander Galloway
Domenico Quaranta
Alexander GallowayGolan Levin ‘JJ (Network Surveillance Tool / Empathic Data Visualilzation)’ Carnivore Client, 2002 a software agent which uses facial expressions to visualize the emotional content of network traffic
He was the content director of Rhizome.org, new media art’s most important database online. As an artist he collaborated with the creation of Every Image and StarryNight, two interfaces that offer alternative (and Poetic) visualization of structure and contents for the online database . As a member of the collective RSG (Radical Software Group), he invented Carnivore, a software that monitors the flux of information on the web, based on a homonymous system developed by the FBI. Carnivore, was winner of Ars Electronica Golden Nica of 2002, it works as an artists community server, artists are invited to develop “clients” that interpret with creative expression the data flux.
Assitant professor at the Department of Culture and Communication of New York University, Alexander Galloway is currently working of his second book, entitled Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. His first book, Protocol, published by MIT Press in April 2004, was immediately the cause for an intense debate on the nature of networks, stating that – on the basis of a careful analysis of the code, its grammar and syntax, and of the web protocols – its founding principle is control.
Cluster asks him some questions on his work as an artist and theoretic. And his journey that lead from the utopia of the rhizome to the ghost of control.
Alexander Galloway
DQ. You worked for six years as director of content and technology at Rhizome.org, and took part in that experience from the beginning. What kind of vision of the internet does the rhizome embody? And how did you look at the net at that time?
AG. Rhizome.org started in 1997 as an email list and website for people interested in new media art. That was a very exciting time for a lot of people. The Web was new and it held the potential for new forms of cultural practice and interchange. Some of this potential was fulfilled, in however brief or limited forms, and some remains elusive, or indeed has been transformed into the opposite.
Interactivity is often considered to be a liberating quality of new technologies. Yet the bidirectionality of interactive software generally means that there exists a higher degree of control
In the last few years I’ve been occupied with the problem of trying to elaborate a political critique of information. This led me to write the book Protocol which starts to address some of these questions. The book offers the first critical analysis of the core protocols that make up the Internet. I try to put forward a general theory of “protocol” to help explain the new type of management style that exists in computerized networks. Protocol is a management style but it is also a type of control. Thus I write about how this control was established historically and also how it can be resisted in various ways.
Ironically, in the book I essentially try to undo the myth of the “rhizome” as it comes to us from Deleuze.
‘World Wall Painters’ a carnivore client that depicts the information the software obtains from the Net
DQ. As an artist, and a member of the software collective RSG (Radical Software Group) you created the data surveillance system Carnivore. What’s the main goal of that work? Whether to reveal the strength of control over the net or to reflect upon the possibility of creating different interfaces from the same source? In other words, is Carnivore a radical or a formal work?
AG. RSG was founded in 2000 to create the work Carnivore and release it into the public domain. The approach was to remove the shroud of secrecy surrounding the FBI surveillance software of the same name and to experiment with more creative or artistic uses of network traffic. Since Carnivore, we’ve been experimenting a lot with video game systems, and have a new long term project in the works (code name: TW3).
You might call RSG a hacker rip-off group. For example, Carnivore is nothing but a new spin on the packet sniffer, a tool that hackers and sys admins have been using for years. But the flip side is that most hackers are quite unschooled when it comes to politics and cultural theory. (Of course I’m referring to traditional hackers, not hacktivists like Critical Art Ensemble or The Yes Men.) So one of the goals of RSG is to bring a more political and theoretical awareness to hacker practice.
DQ. Many net critics are telling us that the net is not the wonderful Utopia we thought it was, but no one up to now described it as an ultimate Dystopia. Optimism is giving space to realism, not pessimism. What role has the fall of the new economy had in showing us that “the King is naked”? If protocol is evil (“the locus of power”, Eugene Thacker says), do you think, as Geert Lovink does, that “social software” could help the net to become a better place to live?
AG. Yes, there are a few voices today who are beginning to question the unqualified optimism toward networking seen in the late 1990s.
Interestingly, most of these voices are coming from outside the USA. Many of them use economic arguments to highlight problems such as unequal access to technology, or consolidation of media ownership, or questions around proprietary versus free software. These are all interesting and valuable arguments to make. But this is not my area. I find that these arguments inevitably boil down to arguments about economics or sociology or law or some other domain, whereas my work is specifically about the medium itself.
An example of this is what you might call the political tragedy of interactive software. Interactivity is often considered to be a liberating quality of new technologies. Yet the bidirectionality of interactive software generally means that there exists a higher degree of control. So the tragedy is that the new bidirectional (or “interactive”) media were swept in on a promise of liberation and freedom – Enzensberger’s assumption that an interactive media is an “emancipated” media is a perfect example of this. In their infancy interactive media were indeed liberating, particularly because they were deployed in opposition to centralized, unidirectional media. But in the meantime new techniques for reestablishing sovereignty and control inside interactive media have been discovered. This is the tragedy. So today the challenge is to discover a new space, one which has the same liberating relationship with today’s dominant media as Enzensberger’s “emancipated” media did decades ago. Eugene Thacker and I call this new space “counter-protocol”.
