. . . it’s not that protocol is bad but that protocol is dangerous. – Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), p. 16.
A historical look at protocols suggests that their purpose has always been to simplify coordination and communication. With enough time, protocols converge upon conformity. They do not liberate us, but rather seek to control us completely. Protocols demand not just our compliance, but our loyalty in relinquishing our decision-making power to a formless entity. And because protocols are not owned or mediated by a central authority, if you don’t like the protocol you’re in, escape is not as “easy” as switching platforms (the latter already, as we’ve seen, is seemingly impossible). Protocols are not necessarily bad, however. Sometimes, relinquishing control enables us to spend precious brain power on other, more pressing decisions. We need protocols to help us manage complexity. Protocols are better understood as neither uniformly harmful nor liberating, but—as writer and computer programmer Alexander Galloway once put it—“dangerous.”2 Because they make our lives simpler, it is always tempting to outsource more decisions to protocol. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice in Disney’s Fantasia, though, when left unchecked, protocols threaten to subsume human agency.