Galloway defines protocols as “referring to standards governing the implementation of specific technologies” (7). He then goes on to specify, “instead of governing social or political practices as did their diplomatic predecessors, computer protocols govern how specific technologies are agreed to, adopted, implemented, and ultimately used by people around the world” (7). Yet even Galloway acknowledges this distinction between social/political protocol and computer protocol is a difficult one to navigate. He invokes Bertalanffy, who reminds us, “cybernetics, information theory, and systems theory all show how information is immanently material, configured into military technology, communications media, and even biological systems” (286).

We see this blurring of political and technological boundaries is being acted out in Apple’s refusal to unlock the iPhone of the San Bernadino shooter. This is perhaps an example of a situation where protocol does not yet exist. There is no “agreement” on how this technology – that is, the ability to unlock – should be “implemented.” The controversy also plays into what Galloway calls the “dialectical tension” between a hierarchical versus an autonomous system of control. Galloway discusses this tension in technological terms. Our iPhones are “autonomous” because they are “intelligent end-point systems that are self-deterministic, allowing each end-point system to communicate with any host it chooses” (Hall 6); they are “hierarchical” in that they “must submit to a hierarchical structure (DNS) to gain access to the anarchic and radically horizontal structure of the internet” (9). Yet this tension also gets played out on the political arena, especially when considering the politics/ethics/morality of access. If my iPhone is locked, I would like to think I have “autonomous” control over the information within it. The FBI however, contends that the law is at the top of the “hierarchy” here. We are asked to (at least if we commit homicide) “submit” our autonomy so the police can “gain access” to personal data.

There are matters of choice here that complicate Galloway’s argument. Apple has the technology to unlock iPhones, it is choosing not to use that technology. There are material/real world factors that thwart the binary of possible/impossible that Galloway claims protological analysis should focus on. Just because it’s possible to access information, does that necessarily mean one should always be able to do so? Technology here is not just technology; it is inextricably wrapped up in Bertalanffy’s idea of the “military” (in regards to terrorism) and “biological systems” (the FBI argues that unlocking the phone could prevent other shootings, as in, more death from happening). Also, what choice/autonomy/agency do I have as an individual when I am forced to choose between either Apple or the FBI at the top of the hierarchy of my “society of control”?

Deleuze and Guattari might respond that it does not matter, that both work to support, and Joe says this nicely, a society that continuously exerts its control across social institutions. Both Apple and the FBI are one in the same, no longer separate “enclosures,” but “undulatory, in orbit, a continuous network” (6)