This text is the foreward to Alex Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (2004).
[xii] {technology, material, theory, practice, protocol, technologist, Galloway} Protocol consistently makes a case for a material understanding of technology.
[xii] {technology, material, theory, practice, protocol, technologist, specifications, ontology, politics} ...the technical specs matter, ontologically and politically.
[xii] {technology, material, theory, practice, protocol, technologist, specifications, praxis, code, programming} ...Code = praxis.
[xiii] {technology, material, theory, practice, protocol, technologist, specifications, praxis, code, Galloway, programming} Protocol puts forth an invitation, a challenge to us: You have not sufficiently understood power relationships in the control society unless you have understood "how it works" and "who it works for." Protocol suggests that it is not only worthwhile, but also necessary to have a technical as well as theoretical understanding of any given technology.
[xviii] {protocol, network, networks, technical, technology, context, actor network theory} To begin with, general talk about "networks," dissociated from their context and technical instantiation, can be replaced by a discussion of "protocols." Every network is a network because it is constituted by a protocol.
[xviii] {Foucault, political technologies, TCP/IP, DNS}
[xviii] {Deleuze, diagram, graph, chart, drawing} Protocol considers networks through a "diagram," a term borrowed from Gilles Deleuze.