8: No Brakes, No Erasers

Alex Galloway “Protocol, or, How Control Exists after Decentralization” page 86

***

My classmates have put it well:

"People imagine new technology, either before it exists or right at its advent,
when they’re still trying to figure out what it is and how to relate it to what’s come before” (Team 1).

This cyclical process will not stop 
as long there are BPMs and MBPS.

Technology is as natural as a pinky or a bellybutton,

and hands down more useful.

We create technology as extensions of ourselves – 

First for our bodies, and then for our minds.

Babbage had everyone pretty much beat there.

Even after we think we've practiced enough,

Get comfortable with the way things are,

Feel content with a conclusion, 

We are forced to adapt.

Communication, production, and sharing 

They do change. Constantly.

But we manage to stick together,
Having figured things out a bit since Babel. 

Protocol keeps up with us, somehow. 

Or rather? We keep up with it.

“We can’t progress into the future without being influenced by our past, by what we’ve created and learned from before” (Team 3).

There is no alternative to moving into the future with the past in mind.

We cannot be emptied of experiences,

Of the lessons that have stuck to our brains.

***

“A point in a distributed network is neither a central hub nor a satellite node. The network contains nothing but 'intelligent end-point systems that are self-deterministic, allowing each end-point system to communicate with any host it chooses' (Hall 2000, 6). Like the rhizome, each node in a distributed network may establish direct communication with another node without having to appeal to a hierarchical intermediary. In order to initiate communication, the two nodes must speak the same language. Thus, distributed networks are defined by these same languages—these shared protocols. (Galloway 85-86)”