As I am trying to connect the dots between this week’s reading, I cam across Manovich’s review on de Certeau’s piece about tactics and strategies. In de Certeau’s article, tactics and strategies are independent and isolated to one and another. Strategies posses power, it has centralized place that is institutionalized (e.g.: corporates, government) and manageable. It can reproduce itself and act like a autonomous entity. In contrast, tactics are weak and unstable. It is adapt to change and response to opportunity. One of the examples that de Certeau gave (mentioned in Manovich’s review) is that city’s planning and layout are defined by government and business entities (aka. the centralized place), and individuals are using tactics to help them navigate from space to space. It is adaptive and “habitable”. It seems like that tactics are acted within the domains that strategies defined.

This makes me think of Galloway’s definition of protocol and network. He think that networks are “material technologies, sites of variable practices, actions, and movements.” It is “a diagram, a technology, and a management style.” Protocol is the infrastructure that host the networks. Protocol connects the dots — it is manageable and controllable. If you think of Protocol as the parent and networks as its child, networks are adaptive and response to change while protocol is the control panel. Codes, on the other hand, is “a set of procedures, actions, and practices, designed in particular ways to achieve particular ends in particular contexts.” To me, codes are like tactics, there’s is no fixed way to write codes, but there is this abstract foundation that guide their movement within the network with a sets of features (connectivity, collectivity and participatory). You can’t control how people use code to program what within the protocol (e.g: hackers, marketers, gamers).

In Manovich’s article, he suggested that tactics are a sets of actions for self-identification and discovery. One of the tactics is remix.

As de Certeau points out, in modern societies most of the objects that people use in their everyday lives are mass-produced goods; these goods are the expressions of strategies of designers, producers, and marketers. People build their worlds and identities out of these readily available objects by using different tactics: bricolage, assembly, customization, and — to use a term that was not a part of de Certeau’s vocabulary but that has become important today — remix.

He think that the difference between tactics and strategies are more ambiguous than what de Certeau though in 1980s. Companies are using strategies that create open-sourced software, user-generated content and platforms (e.g.: YouTube) that resemble the these tactics. The tactics that people use to navigate their life are now used as a strategies for the centralized institutes. Like we discussed earlier of the semester, our packaged data that collected through these tactics are being traded and used for other entities for different strategic purposes.

But these kind of tactic-liked strategies also bring in some benefits, people are able to collaborate virtually, create innovations and new culture. It also leads to others drawbacks and concerns — whether something is original or just a combination of remix and reproduction?