Performativity on the Net: "Protocological Management" and the "Societies of Control"

In contrast to Foucault’s concept of “the political technologies of individuals,” the Internet protocol (theorised, e.g., by Alexander Galloway) can be interpreted as an instance of a political technology of “dividuals” (Gilles Deleuze). The performance of protocols, or the execution of “distributed management”, is based – among others - on a problematic identification of life with a code and a medium. It assumes the existence of a new form of life, described as a “cybernetic system of man and machine” (Galloway) and a new type of individual who differs from the subject of the Enlightenment liberalism. On the one hand, these individuals are mere “body-objects,” on the other hand they are endowed by a power of resistance. This is paradoxical, if not absurd, since “by definition, there can be no resistance to protocol” (Galloway). The most problematic example of protocological management is the technique of “collaborative filtering,” which opens the network to homogenizing manipulation of political or economic forces. Individuals active on the net are processed into “dividuals” (or sets of statistical data comprised in their diverse profiles), whose “personal identity is formed only on certain hegemonic patterns” (Galloway). As a result, the “bio-political self-organization” of “the multitude” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), is supplanted by the operation of social media platforms. These function as the “planes of intensity,” which construct continuums of intensity (Deleuze and Félix Guattari) out of the affects, emotions and desires of their users, who have become “dividuals.” The social media platforms enable “the operation of markets,” both economic and political, to function as “the instrument of social control” (Deleuze).