Rhizome and things to catch up on

"It is common for contemporary critics to describe the Internet as an unpredictable
mass of data, rhizomatic and lacking central organization. This position goes roughly
like this: since new communication technologies are based on the elimination of
centralized command and hierarchical control, it follows that we are witnessing a
general disappearance of control as such. This could not be further from the truth.
Empire does much to dispel this myth in the social and political arenas. Whereas
Empire is how political control exists under decentralization, protocol is how technological control exists under decentralization."

Although Hardt and Negri flirt with this gee-whiz position on new technologies,
writing that, within the Internet, “[a]n indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of interconnected nodes communicate with no central point of control,” and that
this decentralized architecture is “what makes control of the network so difficult”
(299), the attentive reader will notice that here they actually mean modern control
and not imperial control. What they say elsewhere about Empire should also be true
of new media. A decentralized architecture is precisely that which makes protocological/imperial control of the network so easy. In fact, the various Internet protocols mandate that control may only be derived from such a distributed architecture.
Hardt and Negri confirm this position by writing elsewhere that “the passage to the
society of control does not in any way mean the end of discipline. In fact, the immanent exercise of discipline . . . is extended even more generally in the society of control” (330).


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 another86 Galloway
node without having to appeal to a hierarchical intermediary.






occupy wall street tactical committee
Utopia
The New Yorker's Origins of OWS
Timeline (wiki, for sources)