Evolved Politics

I've been kicking an idea around since Thanksgiving, so I decided it was time to actually attempt to write it down and see what it looks like when the words are there in front of me.

In The Exploit, a book exploring a theory of networks structuring everything today from politics to more simple interactions among groups and individuals. The authors, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, say that networks are not structured on the basis of power, but instead on the basis of protocol - which is to say that control (or modulation, distribution and flexibility, as Galloway and Thacker note) enables relationships in networks to exist.

Part of my worry is that this control is built into the networks themselves by those creating them, whoever that may be. Galloway and Thacker say that "control in networks must aim for an effectiveness that is immanent to the network, in the sense that the most perfectly controlled network is one that controls or regulates itself." If this is true, it would seem that one of the most perfect networks to be found in the real world is that of the universe itself, in that the rules of the sciences - be it physics, chemistry, biology and so forth - regulate how everything relates. More specifically (follow me on this, I promise it's going somewhere), evolution - natural selection - is one of the methods of modulation apparent in nature. The genius of natural selection is that every line of evolution is broken down into endless mutations and variations of the genetic code that result in creatures almost perfectly suited to their particular niche.

My main point, then: can this same logic be applied to us today as citizens or consumers or whatever title your niche merits? Perhaps the genius of networks is that it allows for the same method of modulation as evolution: individuation in extremely small steps leading to, as Gilles Deleuze said "dividuals." This is to say we become discrete points within networks, and even within the masses we are sectioned off into samples, data and markets. Galloway and Thacker say that "in the context of the control societies, individuation is assumed to be continually modulated, precisely because it is informatic, statistical, and probabilistic." The idea of probability raises an interesting idea, springing out of my worry earlier about who structures the networks in the first place: does this cutting up of the market or the masses or the citizenry into more and more discrete and specialized nodes mean that the probability of controlling each "sample" or node is higher? Are we more vulnerable than ever to manipulation (or the even more unseen modulation)?

-the ambassador