Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway, MIT Press, $32.95, 拢21.95, ISBN 0262072475 Reviewed by Wendy M. Grossman
IF COMPUTER languages are so similar to natural languages, Alexander Galloway asks, why are they virtually ignored by linguists and literary critics? Perhaps, he suggests, because they see them as closed and determinate.
Setting out to fill the gap, Galloway distinguishes 鈥減rotocol鈥�, the rules and standards which are open and delineate the possible, from 鈥渢he proprietary鈥�, which is closed 鈥� for example the mysterious and unpublished inner workings of a program. Yet, he argues, the power of protocol makes the internet the most tightly controlled mass medium ever known.
Advertisement
Galloway is assistant professor of media ecology at New York University, and he makes a good stab at explaining the creation and general workings of the main protocols that define the internet and its most common application, the World Wide Web. En route he delves into discussions of hacking, cyberfeminism and internet art.
He notes with surprise that Microsoft has not yet replaced TCP/IP, the set of protocols that define how everything from email to video traverses the internet, with a proprietary product. In fact, Microsoft did have its own product. It failed to catch on because everyone chose TCP/IP, recognising the advantages of shared, universally available protocols.
Other such temporary failures of practical understanding dot this predominantly theoretical book. Yet some of Galloway鈥檚 ideas are intriguing at least. He suggests, for example, that we might have labelled computer viruses differently if they hadn鈥檛 shown up at about the same time as AIDS, in the mid-1980s. If they had arrived in the 1990s, he argues, they would simply have been nuisances, like spam. It鈥檚 an interesting point, but how many computer-system administrators would regard software that replicates itself and has unpredictable effects on the machines they鈥檙e in charge of as a mere nuisance?
Where Galloway is correct is in pointing out that network architecture is political. But if it鈥檚 a practical understanding you are after, you will do better with Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig鈥檚 book, Code is Law.