Blas, Galloway, and Escaping the Net

Alexander Galloway’s “Networks” has been kind of a touchstone for me in terms of how I tend to think about networks-as-objects, an architecture of the normally invisible. Sure, there are cables that transmit from the server to the modem and so forth, but the actual machinations of the network as a thing (as opposed to a pure means of transmission) occur beyond the limit of normal human understanding - there is some sort of inherent quality to the network that renders it always just out of our reach. This quality is, in my opinion, exactly what makes the network a site of struggle for Deleuze; in Galloway and Blas’ work, the network becomes a site of terror, in its current state perpetually ready to be weaponized by a government, the inescapable “web of ruin” that doomed Agamemnon (Galloway, “Networks”, 281). The network-as-net is thrown over the user and provides his downfall.

And while Galloway has some formal claims to make about the potential of escape, I don’t think that his strategies exactly crystallize until they are put into action via Zach Blas’ “Fag Face Mask”.

As Galloway states, to escape the all-seeing eye of the network, one requires “a new exploit…one that is asymmetrical in relationship to distributed networks as the distributed network was to the power centers of modernity…But this new exploit is never outside the network, it is always formally within it” (“Networks” 294). Blas’ “Fag Face Mask” is one such solution because of its origin within the network and its construction as being used exclusively as a tool against a global network, the panopticon of facial recognition and analysis. Despite his construction’s formal similarity to Anonymous’ use of the Guy Fawkes mask (as Joe points out), the origin of Blas’ mask as a face hybrid entirely designed to confuse cameras puts it in a different category; after all, the Guy Fawkes mask basically only became popular because of fucking V For Vendetta.

Somehow, we have found a method of, if not escape, resistance through anti-interpellation, refusing to be conjured into being by identifiers and judgement claims. My only qualm with this solution is the fact that it is a heavily politicized thing; there are dangers, sure, but I think that it should be a fundamental human right to disappear.