Before computers, "protocol" meant correct behavior within an agreed system: the rules of diplomacy, etiquette, treaty-signing.
His analogy is the highway system. Many routes can get you from point A to point B, but along the way you stop at red lights, stay in your lane, follow a reasonably direct path. Protocol is the set of rules that make travel possible at all, without anyone directing traffic in person. It's a form of control
The key idea: protocol governs without a central authority giving direct orders. It works because every participant follows the same standard, not because someone is watching and enforcing compliance.
The title how control exists after decentralization. Nobody runs the internet, and yet behavior on it is tightly regulated. Compare stop signs, traffic lights, white lines. Nobody forces you, but you cannot participate if you ignore them.
TCP/IP distributes control horizontally, anyone can join and talk to anyone. DNS pulls control back into a hierarchy, since names must be granted from the root down. Both are protocol.
Galloway borrows a periodization from Foucault (elaborated by Deleuze) to explain why protocol is a new kind of power
| Period | Diagram | Manager | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sovereign society | Centralization | Hierarchy | a king, a single command center |
| Disciplinary society | Decentralization | Bureaucracy | the prison, the panopticon |
| Control society | Distribution | Protocol | the internet, TCP/IP |
Sovereign power rules from a single center. Disciplinary power trains bodies through institutions (prisons, schools, hospitals) that internalize obedience.
Control societies, Galloway argues, are managed differently again: not by a visible authority, but by distributed technical standards that everyone has to follow to participate at all. That third kind of management is what he calls protocol.
If social media shapes behavior not by a visible authority telling you what to do, but through interfaces and algorithms you have to accept just to participate, that's protocological control.
The panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's design for a prison: a circular building with a guard tower at the center and cells arranged around the outer wall, each visible from the tower. Prisoners cannot tell whether the guard is watching them at any given moment, so they behave as if they always are. Foucault made the panopticon famous in Discipline and Punish as the diagram of disciplinary power: power that gets internalized as self-surveillance.
Notice the shape: one hub (the tower), many dependent nodes (the cells), nothing connects to anything except the center. That is what Galloway calls a centralized network. He uses the same diagram to describe the American court system and NORAD's nuclear command structure, both of which appear on the first pages of "Physical Media."
Galloway's central claim is that the internet is not organized like a panopticon. There is no central tower watching everyone. Control instead gets distributed into the technical standards themselves, into TCP/IP, DNS, HTML, the rules every device has to follow just to communicate at all.
Hold onto that sentence while you read. "Physical Media" opens by contrasting NORAD, a centralized military command system built to survive an attack through force, with the internet, a distributed system built to survive an attack by having no center worth destroying in the first place. The panopticon shows up on page 31 as Galloway's example of a centralized network: the very shape the internet was deliberately built not to have.