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Electronic Mediations
The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
" The Exploit is that rare a book with a clear grasp of how networks operate that also understands the political implications of this emerging form of power. It cuts through the nonsense about how 'free' and 'democratic' networks supposedly are, and it offers a rich analysis of how network protocols create a new kind of control. Essential reading for all theorists, artists, activists, techheads, and hackers of the Net." --McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto
The network has become the core organizational structure for postmodern politics, culture, and life, replacing the modern era's hierarchical systems. From peer-to-peer file sharing and massive multiplayer online games to contagion vectors of digital or biological viruses and global affiliations of terrorist organizations, the network form has become so invasive that nearly every aspect of contemporary society can be located within it.
Borrowing their title from the hacker term for a program that takes advantage of a flaw in a network system, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker challenge the widespread assumption that networks are inherently egalitarian. Instead, they contend that there exist new modes of control entirely native to networks, modes that are at once highly centralized and dispersed, corporate and subversive.
In this provocative book-length essay, Galloway and Thacker argue that a whole new topology must be invented to resist and reshape the network form, one that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network is in relation to hierarchy.
Alexander R. Galloway is professor of culture and communications at New York University and the author of Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006) and How Control Exists after Decentralization .
Eugene Thacker is professor at The New School and the author of Biomedia (Minnesota, 2004) and In the Dust of This Planet .
The network has become the core organizational structure for postmodern politics, culture, and life, replacing the modern era's hierarchical systems. From peer-to-peer file sharing and massive multiplayer online games to contagion vectors of digital or biological viruses and global affiliations of terrorist organizations, the network form has become so invasive that nearly every aspect of contemporary society can be located within it.
Borrowing their title from the hacker term for a program that takes advantage of a flaw in a network system, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker challenge the widespread assumption that networks are inherently egalitarian. Instead, they contend that there exist new modes of control entirely native to networks, modes that are at once highly centralized and dispersed, corporate and subversive.
In this provocative book-length essay, Galloway and Thacker argue that a whole new topology must be invented to resist and reshape the network form, one that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network is in relation to hierarchy.
Alexander R. Galloway is professor of culture and communications at New York University and the author of Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006) and How Control Exists after Decentralization .
Eugene Thacker is professor at The New School and the author of Biomedia (Minnesota, 2004) and In the Dust of This Planet .
206 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 25, 2020
I think that as media theory / cyberphil / technoprogressive texts go this one is quite tame, straightforward, and fun. It reads very smoothly, and I enjoy Galloway & Thacker's careful but still exuberant prose, which indulges regularly but never to excess in many of the stylistic features of this avenue of theoretical writing: parataxis, insistent lists, metaphors, among other things. They also explicitly duplicate the content of their argument on the level of form: Galloway & Thacker are interested in the "metaphysics of networks," which consists of an expansion of the graph-theoretical concepts of the "node" and the "edge," and Part One of the book is called Nodes and Part Two is called Edges (118). Part one is also written in a deliberately self-recapitulating form: evenly distributed among the regular romanised paragraphs are pithy italicised paragraphs, central informatic points which the romanised paragraphs branch off from, "experimentally ... diversifiying" as they put it in their introductory note (vii). Whether or not this quite comes off is open to question: I just read straight through, so it was more like an alternating set of parallel tracks bound together by time, rather than a freely spatial emanation from a node. We might also be reminded of the italicised marginal notes that have been a fairly regular feature of certain types of publication for many centuries - for some reason I think mostly of the out-of-place marginal prose glosses to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" reproduced in some editions - but, more generously, perhaps the way Galloway & Thacker flag their formal experiment alerts us to the ways that historical texts that are less self-consciously fragmented could in fact be read in hindsight as networked. The romantic fragment of Coleridge or Schlegel becomes a kind of node, always reaching out edges without becoming self-complete.
I mentioned that this book partly has a metaphysical bent, and indeed one of the denser short passages of Part Two, titled "The Hypertrophy of Matter," is a playfully and explicitly Spinozist set of "Four Definitions and One Axiom," which slightly redefines, without fundamentally changing, the Spinozist concepts of immanence and substance, pairing them with "emptiness" (which denotes the edges of a graph, the space between things) and "indistinction" (which denotes a hypothetical third Spinozist attribute, "the ability to autogenerate distinctions," to form graph relations (142-143).
It is difficult to make out what is to be taken away from this metaphysical claim, which, as I mention, is not representative of the book as a whole - it actually moves very readably and informatively from computer programming to political philosophy to the way pandemics are handled by bioinformatic medical apparatuses (topical!) - which is why I flag this metaphysical passage here as something to reflect on should you choose to read it from the beginning.
The first noun of the metaphysical heading, "Hypertrophy," seems to denote a kind of acceleration(ism) for Galloway & Thacker, which perhaps represents the more controversial edge of their political project in this book. The less controversial edge would just be to insist to the reader that networks are not inherently egalitarian - instead, they make use of both human and nonhuman methods of organising and distributing power relationships through 'protocols.' This thesis is one that they concede can be found in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: "the network form is not tied to any necessary political position, either progressive or reactionary," but this realisation needs to be supplemented with a vision of a "new future of asymmetry," i.e. replacing the current symmetry, {networked sovereignty of the United States} / {networked straits of (bio)/(cyber)terroristic resistance} with something different, something which cannot be recuperated by the dominant political paradigm (152). They ask "From where will appear the anti-Web?" (153).
The flesh of this search for asymmetry seems to be provided by the claim that "hypertrophy" - which I assume is taken in its medical sense here, the swelling growth of matter, of flesh, as in 'hypertrophic cardiomyopathy' - "is the desire for pushing beyond. The goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go ... We must scale up, not unplug" (98). This reads somewhat like a standard statement of post-Deleuzian accelerationism, so I think the onus on us as readers is not to let the radical promise of the aforementioned transvaluation of the network fall away into a neoreactionary endorsement of technocapitalist rapture and implosion.
Although they do not say it anywhere, it is perhaps interesting that they share their neo-Spinozist metaphysics with Deleuze, who, along with Foucault, represent the key theoretical jumping-off point for this text: The Exploit is a kind of postscript to the Postscript to the Societies of Control, as well as a postscriptural critique of several key positions of A Thousand Plateaus. Perhaps the richest moment, though, if I may conclude by revealing my biases, is the moment when they engage at greatest length with Marx and Walter Benjamin, in the passage labelled "Codification, Not Reification." The thrust here is that where once it was the transformation of labour into commodity, the reification of a social relation into an object, now we have "the extraction of abstract code from objects" (134). Galloway & Thacker conclude with the dire suggestion that now, and more so in the future, it will not just be our bodies that we sell, but our genomic, immunological, and consumer data, in order to be "exploited informatically as well as corporally" (135). Dire to be sure! if not entirely surprising 13 years after publication. But the final line in this passage is "The biomass, not social relations, is today's site of exploitation" (135). Earlier they were careful to remind us that "we are referring only to protocological resistance and in no way whatsoever suggest that non-protocological practice should abandon successful techniques for effecting change such as organising, striking, speaking out, or demonstrating. What we demonstrate here is a supplement to existing practice, not a replacement for it" (82). This is one of the most important lines in the book, and I think we can recall it here in order to rethink this argument concerning reification: perhaps, instead, biomass is now another social relation, a relation that takes precisely the form of the exploitative network and engenders it at a more fundamental and inhuman, nonsocial level than we thought possible.
I mentioned that this book partly has a metaphysical bent, and indeed one of the denser short passages of Part Two, titled "The Hypertrophy of Matter," is a playfully and explicitly Spinozist set of "Four Definitions and One Axiom," which slightly redefines, without fundamentally changing, the Spinozist concepts of immanence and substance, pairing them with "emptiness" (which denotes the edges of a graph, the space between things) and "indistinction" (which denotes a hypothetical third Spinozist attribute, "the ability to autogenerate distinctions," to form graph relations (142-143).
It is difficult to make out what is to be taken away from this metaphysical claim, which, as I mention, is not representative of the book as a whole - it actually moves very readably and informatively from computer programming to political philosophy to the way pandemics are handled by bioinformatic medical apparatuses (topical!) - which is why I flag this metaphysical passage here as something to reflect on should you choose to read it from the beginning.
The first noun of the metaphysical heading, "Hypertrophy," seems to denote a kind of acceleration(ism) for Galloway & Thacker, which perhaps represents the more controversial edge of their political project in this book. The less controversial edge would just be to insist to the reader that networks are not inherently egalitarian - instead, they make use of both human and nonhuman methods of organising and distributing power relationships through 'protocols.' This thesis is one that they concede can be found in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: "the network form is not tied to any necessary political position, either progressive or reactionary," but this realisation needs to be supplemented with a vision of a "new future of asymmetry," i.e. replacing the current symmetry, {networked sovereignty of the United States} / {networked straits of (bio)/(cyber)terroristic resistance} with something different, something which cannot be recuperated by the dominant political paradigm (152). They ask "From where will appear the anti-Web?" (153).
The flesh of this search for asymmetry seems to be provided by the claim that "hypertrophy" - which I assume is taken in its medical sense here, the swelling growth of matter, of flesh, as in 'hypertrophic cardiomyopathy' - "is the desire for pushing beyond. The goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go ... We must scale up, not unplug" (98). This reads somewhat like a standard statement of post-Deleuzian accelerationism, so I think the onus on us as readers is not to let the radical promise of the aforementioned transvaluation of the network fall away into a neoreactionary endorsement of technocapitalist rapture and implosion.
Although they do not say it anywhere, it is perhaps interesting that they share their neo-Spinozist metaphysics with Deleuze, who, along with Foucault, represent the key theoretical jumping-off point for this text: The Exploit is a kind of postscript to the Postscript to the Societies of Control, as well as a postscriptural critique of several key positions of A Thousand Plateaus. Perhaps the richest moment, though, if I may conclude by revealing my biases, is the moment when they engage at greatest length with Marx and Walter Benjamin, in the passage labelled "Codification, Not Reification." The thrust here is that where once it was the transformation of labour into commodity, the reification of a social relation into an object, now we have "the extraction of abstract code from objects" (134). Galloway & Thacker conclude with the dire suggestion that now, and more so in the future, it will not just be our bodies that we sell, but our genomic, immunological, and consumer data, in order to be "exploited informatically as well as corporally" (135). Dire to be sure! if not entirely surprising 13 years after publication. But the final line in this passage is "The biomass, not social relations, is today's site of exploitation" (135). Earlier they were careful to remind us that "we are referring only to protocological resistance and in no way whatsoever suggest that non-protocological practice should abandon successful techniques for effecting change such as organising, striking, speaking out, or demonstrating. What we demonstrate here is a supplement to existing practice, not a replacement for it" (82). This is one of the most important lines in the book, and I think we can recall it here in order to rethink this argument concerning reification: perhaps, instead, biomass is now another social relation, a relation that takes precisely the form of the exploitative network and engenders it at a more fundamental and inhuman, nonsocial level than we thought possible.
June 25, 2012
Galloway and Thacker argue for a theory of networks that is at once broader and more nuanced than those commonly supported by scholars in the philosophy of technology area. More specifically, they see networks as the basic organizational form of our current age, structures that are not as egalitarian as they're often portrayed, but not dystopian either. Rather, there's a great deal of degrees and nuances in networks, and they seek to better articulate what networks have to offer. It's an exuberantly multidisciplinary book, borrowing from health sciences, microbiology, cybernetics, communication, political theory, and mathematical graph theory, among many others. This variety is occasionally to the book's discredit, as it sometimes seems to drift in terms of the connection of the argument at hand to the argument as a whole. But in general, it's pretty significant reading for anyone in the general area of digital media (and at least interesting reading for political theory, especially those following Negri and Hardt), and an articulate refusal to anyone who who would use the term "network" in theoretical discussion casually, without a consideration of what the term implies.
Read
March 6, 2017Read for my Advanced Theories of Communication course.
I felt very woke after I read this, and learnt so many things I didn't know that I didn't know (unknown unknown as Galloway and Thacker call it).
I felt very woke after I read this, and learnt so many things I didn't know that I didn't know (unknown unknown as Galloway and Thacker call it).
Want to read
April 11, 2009From Alan DeNiro: "Anyone with any interest in social networking should read this book (how they are just another form of control)"
October 25, 2025
I'm surprised to see so much emphasis on this book's clarity. It's thesis was clear, but often seemed so disorganized in it's explication. Ultimately I think the book failed as a media theory/theory of code text, because it spent so much time on Empire, and couldn't stop returning to American politics instead of developing their conceptual framework of Networks and power.
The most interesting ideas here were about the nonhuman in technology, and how informatic systems are self-governing and don't need a person at their helm to establish their sovereignty. Taken in conjunction with the idea that information networks as we have them now are largely voluntary and participatory, network power seems to require a kind of religiosity to reign, in that it is faith based. Curious to develop this idea more. I will be reading Galloway's Protocol, hoping that this thread doesn't get lost in a jumble of pointless (to me) political theory surrounding current events in American politics.
The most interesting ideas here were about the nonhuman in technology, and how informatic systems are self-governing and don't need a person at their helm to establish their sovereignty. Taken in conjunction with the idea that information networks as we have them now are largely voluntary and participatory, network power seems to require a kind of religiosity to reign, in that it is faith based. Curious to develop this idea more. I will be reading Galloway's Protocol, hoping that this thread doesn't get lost in a jumble of pointless (to me) political theory surrounding current events in American politics.
May 20, 2023
This book is interesting because it is telling of future directions of both of these authors. That said it is naive in structure and theoretical development. While there are bits and pieces here that I really enjoyed, it isn't a fully developed framework as are each of these authors' later works.
October 8, 2008
A great exploration of the connection between control and technology. This might be one of the clearest explanations of network theory and philosophy that I have read. It is helpful to have a minimal background in network technology and philosophy from the likes of Deleuze or Faucalt, but the concrete and illustrative examples given in the book should help the laymen understand the complex and intriguing questions posited by the authors. The writing style, which is more aphorism than exposition, was distracting at times and left one feeling that there was so much more to explore, but as a whole, the argument is clear and well maintained. A great book for anyone interesting in the connection of politics and technology. In particular, extended prologue should be mandatory reading for any aspiring politician.
Read
December 30, 2024Galloway and Thacker were ahead of the curve on many issues now of pressing interest (the nonhuman, anti-data-extraction tactics, epidemics and the digital) but the fragmentary structure sometimes risks turning the book into a media theory moodboard. Also, considering it’s called “the exploit,” they spend relatively little time outlining tactics for "counterprotocol,” and some of what they do present (especially the hypertrophy stuff) just doesn’t play. That said, their hyper-nuanced, expansive account of what networks are challenges us to be more “flexible and robust” in the way we describe our reigning techno-political forms.
June 12, 2008
This book is a struggle to read. The guys are clearly brilliant, but it's tough for a general reader to get handle on their argument.
October 11, 2008
This book is absolutely fascinating if you're at all interested in politics, the globalizing effects of technology and the net, and/or network theory. I definitely recommend it.
Read
July 11, 2012 A little postmodern for my tastes, but the look at graph theory was dead on and I appreciated the context of asymmetrical warfare. Quick read.
Want to read
November 17, 2007Enthused. The problem is, when?
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews