This Is Freedom?

photo: Leslie Van Stelten

Protocol author Alexander Galloway

Related Content

• More No-Confidence Votes Against NYU's Administration
  May 10, 2013
• NYU Silver School of Social Work Advances No Confidence Vote on NYU Prez John Sexton
  May 1, 2013
• NYU Student Busted For Selling Airsoft Rifles Out Of Dorm
  April 24, 2013
• Here are Photos of the FBI's Suspects in the Boston Marathon Bombings
  April 18, 2013
• NYU Clerical Workers Plan Their Own Vote of No Confidence in Administration
  March 25, 2013

More About

• Alexander Galloway
• Gilles Deleuze
• Felix Guattari
• Science and Technology
• Internet Protocols

More importantly, Galloway brings the uncool question of morality back into critical thinking. In a last-chapter rundown of his theses on protocol, Galloway writes that "protocol is a universalism achieved through negotiation, meaning that in the future protocol can and will be different." As an evolving system, protocol "ultimately becomes the blueprint for humanity's innermost desires about the world and how it ought to be lived." When asked why one would assume that such desires would necessarily be socially progressive, Galloway laughs. "Well, I'm a Marxist, so I think they are!" he replies. "At the end of the day, one has to have an ethical grounding." In Protocol's final paragraph, he poses this sentiment as an unanswered question: "Do we want the Web to function like a market economy? Can we imagine future technological solutions that fulfill our social desires more fully than protocol can?"