Given my goal of brevity, I didn't attempt to explore Galloway's book in my paper about media and cyborg hybrids, but certainly it has relevance to such a project. So I'd like to frame my discussion of Protocol here as a sort of postscript to my work. Most literally, I refer to the BitTorrent architecture as a protocol, and I use this word rigorously: BitTorrent is protocol in Galloway's sense, and his theory of protocol can help to explain why BitTorrent is being heralded by some as a transformative technology of distribution, rather than simply another peer-to-peer program that floats on the application layer. Galloway defines protocol as "conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system... a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment" (7), which "facilitates peer-to-peer relationships between autonomous entities... engenders localized decision making, not centralized... [and] is robust, flexible, and universal" (82). These are precisely BitTorrent's strengths as a technical specification: it is designed to simultaneously and horizontally connect multiplicitous members of a "swarm" in a distributed meshwork (to use Galloway's word); while tracking is typically (though not necessarily) centralized, each peer is locally responsible for negotiating for pieces of the target file and maximizing its own download rates, under encoded etiquette that maximizes the swarm's collective speed and performance; it can accommodate any type of file and (theoretically) any number of peers, and will continue to run as individual clients enter and drop out of the swarm in whatever configuration.
[4:42:45] [Distributed DB] Control:dht=93462, Database:keys=3,vals=1,loc=4,dir=0,ind=0,div_f=0,div_s=0
[4:42:46] Peer connection [{disconnected} []] closed: failed to establish outgoing connection: Connection attempt aborted: timed out after 30sec
[4:42:48] Received message [BT_PIECE data for #1138: 98304->114687] from L: 68.148.239.210: 6881 [Azureus 2.3.0.0]
[4:42:48] Sent BT_REQUEST piece #1138: 131072->147455 message to L: 68.148.239.210: 6881 [Azureus 2.3.0.0]
[4:42:53] Received message [BT_KEEP_ALIVE] from L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]
[4:43:02] Tracker Announcer is sending an update Request
[4:43:02] Tracker Announcer is Requesting : http:[]tracker.prq.to/announce?info_hash=%F6G%9CTs%C0JP%0AP%8At%00%22C%FEl%C3%0F%85&peer_id=-AZ2302-Eem4bhX7uawn&port=6882&uploaded=606689&downloaded=590498[...]
[4:43:02] Received message [BT_REQUEST piece #1053: 212992->229375] from L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]
[4:43:02] Sent BT_PIECE data for #1053: 212992->212991 message to L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]
[4:43:04] Received message [BT_REQUEST piece #1053: 229376->245759] from L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]
[4:43:05] Sent BT_PIECE data for #1053: 229376->229375 message to L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]
[4:43:06] Exception while processing the Tracker Request : ConnectException:Connection refused
[4:43:06] Tracker Announcer is Requesting : http:[]f6479c5473c04a500a508a74002243fe6cc30f85.bthub.com:80/announce?info_hash=%F6G%9CTs%C0JP%0AP%8At%00%22C%FEl%C3%0F%85&peer_id=-AZ2302-Eem4bhX7uawn&port=6882&uploaded=639483&downloaded=598368[...]
[4:43:07] Received message [BT_PIECE data for #143: 180224->196607] from L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]
[Azureus (BitTorrent client) log, excerpt]
Galloway situates the importance of these characteristics in a sweeping historical shift (from the modern to the postmodern, discipline to control, decentralized to distributed). Given that "protocol is a type of controlling logic that operates largely outside institutional, governmental, and corporate power" (244), it is unsurprising that BitTorrent finds itself in a position of acute tension with (formerly?) hegemonic hierarchical economic and juridical systems.
In a deeper sense, Galloway's account aligns with my own in that he theorizes protocol as hybrid. This is to say that, as he writes, "protocol is based on a contradiction between two opposing machines: One machine [exemplified by TCP/IP] radically distributes control into autonomous locales, the other machine [exemplified by DNS] focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies. The tension between these two machines -- a dialectical tension -- creates a hospitable climate for protocological control" (8). Protocol, then, is radically effective in a postmodern environment not because it fully supplants vertical models of discipline with horizontal and flexible management, but because it marries them in a composite system in which their contradiction is precisely what is most productive -- my definition of hybridity. While his broad intervention may be similar to mine, though, Galloway's interpretation of the periodization at work here is slightly different. He evinces equal skepticism about utopian narratives of postmodernism's technological advances: "Critics love to exclaim that 'everything has changed!'... The Web is described as a free, structureless network. Yet the rhizome is clearly not the absence of structure... So to equate the Web with the rhizome, one must argue against those who describe the Web as a free, structureless network, and argue for a certain kind of rhizomatic protocol on the Web" (60-64). Nevertheless, as is evident here, where I've understood this as a moment suspended on the cusp of two eras, Galloway more penetratingly refigures postmodernism proper as more complex than its vulgar apologists would have us believe. (He also gives Deleuze and Guattari more credit than I do for describing and inhabiting this hybrid complexity.) To give an example of how Galloway's perspective can be more convincing, take my rather clumsy reading of BitTorrent as a media hybrid: "BitTorrent negotiates this tension by combining centralized (torrent sites and trackers) and decentralized (collective uploading of fragmented files) elements, representing a hybrid system within what is often (prematurely) thought of as the fully self-organizing, emergent topology of peer-to-peer" (6). For Galloway, the idea that peer-to-peer (the distributed network) represents a clean break with previous modes (such as broadcasting) is a naive misinterpretation, and it is precisely the unification of divergent control strategies in technologies like BitTorrent (and the internet more generally) that makes them quintessentially postmodern protocols.
Galloway also orchestrates the convergence of my two hybrids, the sci-fi cyborg and peer-to-peer TV distribution, more seamlessly than I. He claims provocatively that, given "that for many years now matter has become life, this coinciding with the emergence of autonomous life forms both nonhuman and hybrid such as robots [and] cyborgs... [and that] because protocol is agent-specific, it must always be connected to the particular milieu inhabited by those agents -- their spaces and their own material bodies," "life, hitherto considered as an effuse, immaterial essence, has become matter, due to its increased imbrication with protocol forces" (82). More concisely, "This historical moment -- when life is defined no longer as essence, but as code -- is the moment when life becomes a medium" (111). Methodologically, this is a profound statement, because it engineers in one fell swoop the interface of two major bodies of work: theories of media and theories of bioinformatics and biopolitics -- I might venture to call it a sort of cybernetics of critical theory, in the sense that it posits the fundamental interchangeability of these objects. In this vein, however, this move is perhaps not immune to cybernetics-style pitfalls. Even as Galloway continually asserts the "special existence of protocol in the 'privileged' physical media of bodies" (12), the status of this materiality in his text remains, in my opinion, ambiguous. One of protocol's primary virtues is "pantheism[:] Accept everything, no matter what source, sender, or destination" (42). Because protocols "encapsulate information inside a technically defined wrapper, while remaining relatively indifferent to the content of information" (7), they veer perilously toward information theory's symptomatic indifference to medium in favor of aspects that can be modeled as universal: "in order to initiate communication, the nodes must speak the same language. This is why protocol is important" (12). Galloway seems far more interested, for example, in protocol's cross-platform facility in operating across heterogeneous components than in the vagaries of this hardware, whether technological or organic -- it's hard to grasp how, when he asserts that "the key to protocol's formal relations is in the realm of the immaterial software" (72), he isn't contradicting his insistence on materiality elsewhere. These are perhaps a manifestation of the same tendency to efface bodily contingencies that Hayles critiques. Ultimately, Galloway tries to steer a hybrid course here too, concluding that "protocol is not a theory of mind. Nor... is protocol a theory of the body... Indeed, protocol is a theory of confluence of life and matter" (103). Engaging in the humanities in a social context where the material realm is still "privileged," these questions about how to position physical existence (again, whether of organisms or technologies) within post-structuralist theory remain unresolved.
