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The Seventh Sense
Power, Fortune and Survival in the Age of Networks
Joshua Cooper Ramo
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Part One: The Nature of Our Age
In which the revolutionary character of our era is explained. The need for a new
instinct is introduced. The historical stakes are weighed.
Chapter 1: The Master
Chapter 2: The Age of Network Power
Chapter 3: The Unbuckling
Part Two: The Seventh Sense
In which we regard the world with a new sensibility. Connection, we discover, changes
the nature of an object.
Chapter 4: The Jaws of Connection
Chapter 5: Fishnet
Chapter 6: Warez Dudes
Chapter 7: The New Caste
Chapter 8: “A mechanism and a myth”: The Compression of Space and Time
Part Three: Gateland
A guide to power in the world that becomes newly apparent with the Seventh Sense.
Chapter 9: Inside and Out
Chapter 10: Defense in Depth
Chapter 11: Citizens!
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Preface
Three hundred years ago the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution began
their pounding work on the foundations of an ancient order. Like twin hammers,
these forces demolished most of what once seemed permanent: Kings, alchemists,
popes, feudal lords – they were all undone.
Today, a fresh hammer is cracking away at our world. The demands of constant,
instant connection are tearing at old power arrangements. The formation of
networks of all kinds, for trade and biology and finance and warfare and any of a
thousand varied needs, is producing new and still dimly understood sources of
power. They are eroding the roots of an older order even as a new one is beginning
to appear. In fact, this process is only beginning. The networks ahead of us will be
even faster than those we have today. They will also be informed by artificial
intelligence. The combination of these two forces – instantness and thinking
machines – will further deepen an already profound change.
That last great shift of the Enlightenment was a violent and wonderful
transformation. It produced winners and losers, triggered tragedy and lit fresh
triumphs. What lies ahead of us is the same. A new landscape of power is emerging
now. This book is its story, and the tale of the instinct that will divide those who
master it from those who will be mastered by it.
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Part One: The Nature of Our Age
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Chapter One:
The Masters
In which the immortal problems of power are discussed, and the possibility of a new
instinct is introduced.
1.
One morning in of 1943, a Chinese writer named Nan Huai-Chin packed his bags in
Shanghai and began walking out of the city. He was headed west, and traced a route
along the Huang Pu river, as he headed out towards E’Mei Shan several thousand
miles away in Western China. E’Mei Shan – Eyebrow Mountain – was and is one of
the holiest Buddhist sites in China.
Nan was an unusual young man. At fifteen, he had won a national sword fighting
competition against men twice his age. At sixteen he had been admitted to the best
university in Shanghai, where he excelled in the study of natural sciences and
philosophy. If you look at photos of Nan in those years, more or less at the moment
he left Shanghai for the mountains, you see a clean-shaven, and soft-skinned man.
He is handsome, with electric eyes. You can see, if you know to look, the rough
intensity of the man he’d become during the anti-Japanese war: A toughness in his
stance; some hint too in his grimace of a sword-fighter’s mercilessness. This was
long before Nan was regarded as one of the finest living exemplars of the Chinese
Buddhist tradition, before he became known as Master Nan. This was before his
flight from China with the Kuomintang in 1949 once the communists came to power,
before his decades of wandering, and his eventual return to the mainland. All that
lies ahead of the man you see in the photo. The man in the photo is young, energetic.
He is certain.
In Nan’s youth, in his early sword fighting days, he had come to understand that
mastering the blade of his sword involved really training his internal spirit to the
highest possible level of sharpness. The spirit moved first, then – instants later – the
sword. It was his desire to sharpen that inner blade that led him to E’mei Shan and
the study of Ch’an Buddhism. Ch’an – you may know it by its Japanese name, Zen – is
the steeliest of the Buddhist traditions, bred through the combination of the
Buddha’s ancient Indian teachings with the mystical philosophical habits of Chinese
Daoism. Its adherents explain that enlightenment in Ch’an demands concentration
strong enough to make and then smash diamonds. It produces, as a result, an
unmatchable form of enlightenment. So, with the anti-Japanese war still smoldering,
Nan traveled for a month through his convulsing country and up E’mei Mountain,
where he found a Ch’an lamasery near the peak. Once there, during three years of
constant effort and meditation and deprivation, he achieved a breakthrough to
samadhi, that state of spiritual alignment in which the world and your own soul
become as transparent as water. Fear vanishes, as does lust or any real confusion
about the deeper currents of life. You become, the priests like to say, as resilient as a
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natural mountain spring: No matter what mud is thrown in, it is simply and
naturally bubbled away into clarity.
From E’Mei temple, with this fresh, clear-running mind, Nan began a quest to
sharpen his spirit even further. The journey took him, for nearly a decade, from
master to master in China, from monastery to university to rural huts. These were
the places where the last bits of some of China’s most ancient traditions had been
carried, places where classical wisdom had survived a hundred years of national
chaos. Nan’s wandering education resembled the way in which, in millennia past,
monks would make spiritual marathons around China, seeking an ever-sharper edge
to their insights. Solitary monks would stride into packed monasteries and engage
in tests of insight, contests to see who could feel the underlying nature of the world
with greater fidelity. The aim was, always, to touch the energy flows moving, just
unseen, below our lives. “Ten thousand kinds of clever talk—how can they be as
good as reality?” So the famous Ch’an master Yun Men, who himself trained four
great masters, faced down a King with pure silence in one such a battle. 1
Nan was trying to cultivate in himself deep ways of feeling and sensing the world.
During his wandering study, he followed a path that would lead him to
enlightenment in more than a dozen different schools of Buddhism. He mastered
everything from medicine to calligraphy. His youthful success and energy at sword
fighting, it emerged, was a sign of a prodigal genius. He became, in the 20 th century,
recognized as one of those crucial human vessels by which really ancient tradition is
preserved and carried forward for new generations.
After a few years of study, Nan saw the descending madness of Mao’s China and
slipped out of the mainland for Taiwan. He lived for decades between Taipei and
Hong Kong and America. During this time his fame as a teacher grew. In the mid-
1990s as China opened, Nan returned to the mainland. He had been invited by some
of China’s most powerful families, the children of communist revolutionaries who
were groping for a sense of history and identity. They wanted to absorb the lessons
of Chinese culture that Nan had internalized, they hoped to bend them into tools
they could use to shape a Chinese future. Might the old habits of the country, with
their ancient roots, have something to offer a nation nearly splitting with the
energies of modernity? Nan agreed to set up a private school. He selected a site on
the shores of Lake Tai in Zhejiang Province, not far from Shanghai. He chose the
location carefully: The still lake water near his campus was like a giant bath of
calming yin energy that balanced the urgent, uncertainly aggressive yang energy of
1990s China into a kind of harmony. Ash trees shaded the study rooms in the
summer. Wild peonies erupted in pink and white each spring.
1 So the famous Ch’an master: “Yun Men’s Every Day is a Good Day” in Thomas
Cleary, Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record: Zen Comments by Hakuin and Tenkei. (Boston,
Mass.: Shambhala, 2002) 39. Fir an excellent introduction to the thinking of Master
Nan, see Diamond Sutra Explained (Primodia Media 2007) and To Realize
Enlightenment: Practice of the Cultivation Path (York Beach, ME: S. Weiser, 1994)
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It was here, when he was 92 years old, that I first came to know him.
2.
Before I moved to Beijing in 2002 a friend took me aside and offered this thought:
“Your life in China will change the way you see the world. But if you want to get the
most out of it, you have to understand that as important as being bilingual is, it is as
important to be bicultural.” I had not honestly thought of this as part of my plan, but
it seemed like good advice. I have hewed to it as a personal law ever since. From my
first days in China, I lived almost entirely among the Chinese. I can, for instance,
nearly number on one hand the meals I shared with Westerners over my years
there. This advice to learn to be bicultural really did change my experience of living
in China. It changed how I saw the world. It presented moments of really honest and
searching confusion. I had conversations where I understood every word and yet
had no idea what my interlocutor meant. I had periods where I did not know which
culture was pulling on my mind. But the decision produced, at least, a fortunate
encounter that led me to Master Nan’s school.
Several years after I arrived in Beijing, I was out for dinner one evening with a close
Chinese friend. My friend is a remarkable woman. If you ask how China has gone
from poverty to prosperity in record time, it is partly because of people like her. She
had studied in the Chinese educational system, had moved overseas and mastered
the technical arts of economics and finance, and had returned eagerly to help in the
construction of modern post-reform China. Nearly any time the government had
some new and difficult financial problem to manage, she would be shuffled into the
nervous hands of some baffled Minister or Vice Premier. She had, in her various
activities, helped put the Chinese stock exchange on its feet, rebuilt bankrupt banks,
and had overseen the construction of China’s first sovereign wealth fund. Though
only a few years older than me, her unique skills and absolute loyalty meant she had
seen much of the development of China’s speed-train economy – part miracle, part
near accident – from zero-distance range.
As she and I were finishing dinner that evening, a door opened to a private dining
room near us in the restaurant. Chinese often eat out in private rooms, and the best
restaurants are usually warrens of well-appointed secret spaces, a reminder that in
China door after door after door leads to ever more secure sanctums—think of the
nested power architecture of the Forbidden City. When the door near us opened, a
stream of senior Chinese party figures paraded past, hovering around an intense,
square-jawed and smiling man who was soon to become one of the most powerful
figures in China. As this man walked past, he nodded hello to both of us. I asked my
friend once he had left: “How do you know him?” I expected her contact with senior
leaders on financial matters would explain the connection. Her answer surprised
me.
“We both,” she said, “have the same Master.”
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I had only been living in China then for about four or five years, so I was still a bit
surprised to learn in this unusual way about what I would later come to know – and
see and even experience myself – as the spiritual life of China’s communist officials,
particularly those at the absolute top of the system. The Master my friend was
referring to was Master Nan. Though he was largely unknown outside of China – I
am sure you had not heard of him until a few pages ago – in China he was an icon.
After his return to the mainland in the 1990s, his books about Buddhism and
philosophy sold millions of copies. His lectures are watched on DVDs and the
Internet, and he owns a fond fame that reaches across generations and transcends
politics or art or philosophy. You are as likely to find a copy of his book on the desk
of a university President as stuffed into the back pocket of a tea-server in Chengdu.
As you can imagine, when my friend first introduced me to the idea of someone like
Master Nan serving as a spiritual mentor to the figures struggling to master this
huge country, figures I had met and worked with in the brutally rational business of
everyday life in a modernizing China, it raised all sorts of questions. We both have
the same master? But in China, one thing you discover pretty quickly is that honest
understanding of anything isn’t achieved by asking lots of questions, particularly not
the direct sort. Yun Men had it right: Ten thousand kinds of clever talk get you
nowhere meaningful. But with her one sentence, the dinner conversation, which had
been moving pleasantly enough through the eddies of China’s politics and
economics, passed into deeper water, where it has stayed in the years since.
Master Nan’s particular passion, I learned that night, was a branch of Chinese Ch’an
Buddhism that had, about 1000 years ago, provided the seeds for the Japanese
school of “instant illumination,” known as Rinzai Zen. Rinzai is famed in the west for
asking students to grapple with koans, the sorts of puzzles – “What was your face
before your were born?” or “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or just “Mu!”
– that can never be approached or answered by reason alone. They require nothing
but pure, trained instinct. Koans are not like math problems or word puzzles, so
much as questions that have to be answered with your whole soul. We don’t really
have an educational concept like this in the west, but the aim of Rinzai meditation
and learning is to arrive at kensho (jianxing in Chinese), a sudden and complete
understanding of the true nature of the world. Such “instant illumination” marks a
very eastern sensibility: Real truth resists the grasp of mere logic. It can’t be simply
explained, or taught with words alone. It calls on more immediate feelings, in the
way we might fall in love or get angry. In Rinzai study, the aim is to tighten and
compress your mind with meditation and focus and exercise – and the occasional
slapping sharpness of a hardwood “enlightenment stick” – as a way to open it, with
the goal of instant, blazing enlightenment. In such a moment, all sorts of invisible
relations become unforgettably obvious.
I had been a student of Rinzai since I was 16. So it was that, in the springtime of the
year after that dinner in Beijing, I was surprisingly, luckily invited to Master Nan’s
campus.
3.
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It is often said that during the days when Master Nan’s Lake Tai campus is open for
training, when hundreds of rich and connected elites from all over the Chinesespeaking
world converge there, it is the best networking spot in the country. But on
the weekend of my first visit, the Tai Hu center was closed to outsiders. Only about
ten of us were present. We were all, together, students. On our first morning we
walked to a large hall overlooking the lake and sat down quietly on benches and
meditated for three hours. And on our first evening, Master Nan sat with us during
dinner, looking young and vital and 20 years short of his 92, barely eating. Above the
bridge of his nose, I noticed, was a small marble-sized bump. This is the mark that
emerges, according to Buddhist tradition, when your self-cultivation and meditation
has led you to deep breakthrough, when energy begins to slip out of your head at
that “third eye” spot and into the world, leaving a little bump as evidence.
As we finished dinner, Master Nan turned the conversation to me and asked me to
speak about what was on my mind. In later years I would learn this was his habit, to
hand the floor over to his guests for a bit – whether they were politicians or
industrial titans or innocent visitors – before entering into his own reflections. He
pursued me with careful questions, his voice purring with a thick coastal accent. The
questions seemed removed sometimes from my main points, but I quickly came to
see them as needles. (“When he uttered a phrase,” it was said of Yun Men, “it was
like an iron spike.”) Many of those present were jotting notes: Whatever Master Nan
thought important, his students felt, must be worth putting down.
I knew that the records of Nan’s lectures and discussions were often circulated by
email. With subject lines like “Understanding This Chinese Generation” or “Master
Nan Answers Questions About Chinese and Western Knowledge,” they were realtime
maps of the usually invisible dance our daily lives do with history and
philosophy. We live now, of course, but Nan was always aware that we lived within
an historical flow too, in a particular moment amidst constant change. Remember
that the foundational text of Chinese civilization is the 2500-year old Yi Jing, The
Book of Changes. If Westerners are accustomed to consistent historical, Chinese
begin with the idea of a flux of forces as the only constant. A world of ceaseless
change means that valuable, useful education is less about facts than about the
training of a vigilant instinct for reaction. 2 It was a version of this same aim that was
at the heart of Nan’s teaching, and that made his ideas so magnetically appealing.
The circulation lists on his lecture notes were the Chinese equivalent of a roster that
included Ben Bernanke, Colin Powell, and Warren Buffett. They reflected the
breadth of curiosity about his ideas, and the hunger to understand and digest
changes in China and the world. “I just had a very senior leader here,” Nan told me
during a visit several years later. I had seen the high security at the compound and
2 A world of ceaslesee change: See Francois Jullien, The Silent Tranformations
(London: Seagull Books, 2011) 70, and David Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from
the Han Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany, N.Y.:
State University of New York Press, 1998) 150
9
the military cars whipping in and out all day. “He asked me what books I could
recommend to understand this period we are living in. I said, ‘I could give you some
books, but you wouldn’t understand them.’” Nan laughed. The iron spike. “This can’t
be understood by reading!” Nan was trying to educate his students in the original
principles of Ch’an: a set of psychological and physical tools to reveal deeper
patterns in the world.
After wearing his guests down with relentless dinner-time questioning that first
night I was at Lake Tai, Master Nan began to offer his views of our age. What he saw,
he explained, was a world pressing too hard on a fault line. We faced, he said,
choosing his word carefully, an “ephocal” quake. We were at a moment when the
river of change he had spent a lifetime feeling out was about to shift its course over
the landscape, drowning many of the reliable, old routes. The origins of this change
were buried in the very things we hoped might, in fact, save us from shock: money,
information, speed. “People are now constantly connected to computers and
machines, and this is changing the way they think. People just cannot make sense of
what is happening,” he said. “There is no respite. The world is going to go faster and
faster in this regard.”
“In the 19 th century the biggest threat to humanity was pneumonia,” he continued.
“In the 20 th century it was cancer. The illness that will mark our era, and particularly
the start of the 21 st century, is insanity. Or we can say, spiritual disease.” He paused.
“This next century is going to be especially turbulent. It has already begun. And
when I say insanity and spiritual disease, I don’t only mean inside the minds of
individuals. Politics, military, economics, education, culture and medicine – all these
will be affected.”
I could sense the logic behind Master Nan’s argument. The industrialization and
urbanization of the 19 th century had packed much of the world into Dickensian
urban pits. These became petri dishes for pneumonia. Too much industry and
urbanization, too fast. The 20 th century of plastics and artificial, untested, unsafe
materials had torn away at our genetic base and worsened cancers. Too much
science, too fast. In our age, in the 21 st century he felt a wasting disease would be
carried by information, by cell phones, by packets of data, by every bitstream we
jacked into our lives – and it would go right for our brains. Our institutions and our
ideas about power and stability would fall apart. The remapping of force that the
information revolution represented was a profound, destructive shift – what Nan
called a jieshu, the Chinese word for a rupture in the fabric of human history. In such
an era, the once reliable old habits would become useless, even dangerous. All that
would matter were your instincts. Frankly, all you would have would be your
instincts because no existing map could guide you through a completely new
landscape. In fact, the existing maps, should you stubbornly continue to use them,
would lead you along dangerous paths towards catastrophes you could not even
imagine.
�
4.
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The dining hall around us was dark as Nan finished his discussion that night. At our
table we sat in a pool of dim light and waited on the Master as he considered his
next thoughts. I knew that some of what drew China’s great minds here to dinners
with him was a sense that those old ideas of Chinese philosophy – born in an age of
chaos and dating back to a time before rational calculation and scientific progress –
offered hope. I asked Master Nan where he would begin on a quest to understand
this age and how best to prepare. How to cultivate oneself?
“You know you can’t just understand this easily,” Master Nan said sharply. He was a
little angry with me, I could see, for asking such a direct question – and he was also
using the Chinese teaching technique of taking students through a range of emotions
to accelerate their learning. Chinese philosophers believe we learn differently
depending on how we feel, so a teacher making a student scared or insulted or
proud is often just an educational tactic. Nan was working on my humiliation bone
now: “This isn’t like some idea I can sell you and then you can just go and use,” he
continued, his voice rising. “This is going to be hard.”
Master Nan inhaled on his cigarette and waited a moment. “If you work, though,
maybe you can be like Su Qin,” he said, “the man who wrestled 20 years of peace out
of 300 years of war.” Su Qin was the hero of the Warring States period during which
China collapsed into total chaos. He is remembered today, two thousand years later,
for the way he had penetrated the madness of his age and how he found there
deeper fibers of truth that he lashed into a stable peace. “Su Qin started as an
idealist. He failed.
“You know, Su Qin was humiliated in trying to advise kings. Even his kin were
embarrassed. His sister and mother refused to let him return to the family home. He
was in so much pain over this embarrassment that he sat in front of a desk and read
every book of history he could find for seven years. He tied his long hair to a beam
above his desk so that if he fell asleep it would hold his head up. Sometimes he
would stab a knife into his thigh to keep awake.” Nan’s voice was rising, his speech
picking up pace. “But in the end, he learned. Su Qin learned. You should study him. If
you do this, if you are sincere, if you work hard, if you learn these ideas, you can
understand. Can you be that disciplined?” The room was dead quiet now. No one
looked at me. In the silence, one of the guests passed around a plate of cut fresh fruit
and cherries and sweet dried dates.
Nan’s relentless, intense Ch’an Buddhism sort of enlightenment, delivered only after
painful years of carbon-crushing intellectual intensity, expressed a clear ambition:
To learn to feel through invisible relations and balances and to construct something
promising and hopeful on the other side. Nan’s long sessions of mediation or sword
play, his furious pursuing philosophical dialogues that reduced students to an
embarrassed sweating state, these were all aimed at sharpening a blade so as to
instantly carve at the energy flows of our age. Did “spiritual illness” really linger
ahead of us? What sort of tragedy did that suggest? What was it that, hair tied to the
5.
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ceiling, penknife jabbed into his leg, Su Qin had learned in those long, effortful years
of study? What secret had he penetrated? What sort of education had he finally
received at the end of his humiliations and breakthroughs? He had mastered the
energy of his age – and the exact right sensibility to use it. Might we, Nan seemed to
be asking, do the same?
7.
Faced with the mad unsettling of his world during the Industrial Revolution of the
mid 19 th century, the German philosopher Friederich Nietzsche once mused that
survival and greatness would depend on having what he called a “Sixth Sense”, by
which he meant a feeling for history. Surely, he felt, an instinct for ancient balances
and truths would provide a guide rail of sorts as the world lurched into a new age,
along an uncharted road. 3 If you could say “This has happened before” or “This is
how we got to where we are,” Nietzsche believed, it was the first step towards
knowing where to go next. Nan and Kissinger knew the need for something else for
our age as well, for a different instinct. It wasn’t just about knowing your history or
feeling the real possibility of human progress or tragedy. Rather it was about feeling
out the roots of the present in a certain way. All of our ideas – from how we love to
what we think of politics – are taken from the feedback and experience of our lives,
from what we’ve seen and done and felt and learned. We are the sum total of our
experiences, in this sense. But what to do if changes happen at some deeper,
insensible level where the old ideas and instincts, where the tools of sight and smell,
of feel and taste and hearing don’t fully answer? What to do when we are confronted
with what we’ve never experienced before? Never even dreamed of, perhaps?
This book is the story of a completely fresh way of feeling our world. By this I mean
a sensation that is as newborn as the lively sense of connection, of freedom, of
electric uncertainty and hope that come with the knowledge that we are unboxing a
new age. If Nietzsche’s era demanded a feeling for history, our own age insists on a
3 Surely, he felt: Nietzche describes the “Sixth Sense” in Beyond Good and Evil in the
following way: “The historical sense (or the capacity for divining quickly the order
of rank of the evaluations according to which a people, a society, a human being has
lived, the ‘divinatory instinct’ for the relationships of these evaluations, for the
relation of the authority of values to the authority of effective forces): this historical
sense, to which we Europeans lay claim as our specialty, has come to us in the wake
of the mad and fascinating semi-barbarism into which Europe has been plunged
through the democratic mingling of classes and races—only the nineteenth century
knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form and mode of life, of
cultures that formerly lay close beside or on top of one another, streams into us
“modern souls” thanks to this mingling, our instincts now run back in all directions,
we ourselves are a kind of chaos. In the end, as I said before, ‘the spirit’ perceives its
advantage in all this.” See Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Rolf Horstmann. Beyond
Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 224.
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sensation alive to the pull of constant, instant connection. This Seventh Sense reacts
to what none of our other senses can notice, to the subtle undercurrents of a
networked age. That moment of first connection you once had – to a computer, a
friend, a fast-moving financial product, a miracle medical cure, an idea, a smashed
up sound – is like the first time you looked at a Matisse painting or heard Beethoven
(or Orbital). It switched on a new sensibility. But you have probably had – or will
shortly – another moment. This is the instant a cold and creeping chill hits you,
started by the uneasy sensation that something you’ve done has been recorded or
predicted or watched and manipulated in some way you’d not quite imagined. That
some strange force from a great distance has slammed into your life. This feeling is
the sudden shudder of a bill come surprisingly due: You wanted to be connected?
Okay, here’s the cost. And the addition on both sides of the ledger, the massive
benefits of our links and the rather terrible potential of those same threads, is still
being settled. We can say at least that the sum of all the revolutions wrought by the
instant mingling of the world’s soon-to-be connected billions with each other and
with machine intelligence, biological innovation and the tremors of a globalizing
world will be, to use Master Nan’s word, “epochal.”
Most of us find ourselves torn now. Not just between future and past; not merely
between the habits and loves of a slower age and the ceaslesss promise of
something fast and new. We are trapped, as well, between two groups. An older
generation now in power, blind to the laws of networks and connection, uses old
ideas to battle problems of a connected age and makes them worse, ever faster.
Terrorism. Financial chasms. Environmental imbalance. At the same time, an
emergent class of powerful technologists fingers more influence than perhaps any
group in history. Machines watch, learn, think and increasingly control nearly every
element of our lives. This digital-age group understands networks; but if they have
ideas about virtue, philosophy and justice, (mostly they don’t) these feel susbsumed
by their confidence in networks and control. Each group pulls at the legacy of the
Enlightenment – our liberty. And, so far, we’ve no way of defending ourselves. No
new instinct for life in this still unfathomable age of connection. The Seventh Sense
is a feeling for just what constant connection means – and the start of (finally) a
confident knowledge of how to construct our future and protect ourselves against
what is even now descending upon us. A consciouness exists in the world, Master
Nan would say. It extends over borders, across differences, between people. And it
becomes, on networks now, visible in new, powerful and hopeful ways.
What I mean by a sensibility is really a kind of instinctive notion, a way to sense and
then use the energy flows of our age that hovers perhaps just below what the
rational mind alone can tell. Master Nan used to recall a famous story from the 2500
year old Daoist masterpiece Zhuangzi, about the butcher who worked for a famous
and powerful Duke. One day the Duke saw the butcher cutting meat, his blade
singing and moving with almost no effort. “Ah, this is marvelous. Imagine such
mastery,” the Duke said. “How have you achived this?” he asked. “What I follow is
The Way,” the butcher said, referring to the idea of a spiritual force, a natural energy
which Daoisim tells us infuses everthing, from trees to the human heart. “When I
started butchering, all I could see was parts of the ox itself. After three years, I could
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see the the whole ox. Nowadays, I meet the ox with my mind and spirit rather than
see it.” 4 The butcher was not looking at his work; he was feeling the energy of the
task. “A good cook goes through a knife in a year, because he cuts,” the butcher
concluded. “An average cook goes through a knife in a month, because he hacks. I
have used this knife for nineteen years. It has butchered thousands of oxen, But the
blade is still like it's newly sharpened.” He was cutting not with his knife, but with an
instinct – and the result was the highest form of mastery: accomplishment with
nearly no effort. This our our aim: To see the world with our mind, not our eyes. So
much of what will affect us in the future is invisibly stashed on a connected
landscape we’re only now learning to feel. It will emerge from the complex, adaptive
sea of links expanding around us. We must tune our own instincts for this power,
which will make our moves almost effortless. The ever-sharp mental knife laid upon
the thick challenges of a new age.
There will be moments ahead for all of us – the most dangerous or terrifying or
wonderful ones – in which things will happen that none of our old ideas or senses
can help us understand. The truly new. We’ve had previews of such moments often
enough in recent years: innovative devices, surprise attacks, unexpected and
permanent economic quakes. A cracking of the old physics of wealth and power is
underway around us, largely invisible to most of us, except perhaps in its strange
and unnatural effects: everywhere terror, instant billionaries, the failure of ideas
and institutions, millions of migrants loosed and drifting across old borders, but
tethered to deeper fields of connection, data, and ideology. The Seventh Sense is the
ability to see why this is happening. And to use what you see. This is not merely
about brain power or sharpened intellect; it’s about a gut reaction. Just as the
demand for liberty or industry was once invisible and insensible to an age
accustomed hundreds of years ago to feudal, agricultural habits, so we’re likely blind
to urgent pressures of our own. Surely you’ve felt this creeping anxiety yourself, the
exciting nausea of movement coming from you know not where? The ability to sense
and feel the deeper chord changes of history has, always, been the decisive mark of
leadership and success in revolutionary periods.
Consider, for instance, Charles, the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel who faced
down Napoleon on the fields of Jena in what is now central Germany in October
1806. Brusnwick-Wolfenbuttel was then 71 years old. He was considered one of the
most courageous soldiers of his age, with a record of astonishing victories. He
looked over the sun-dappled fields along the Saar river on that fall day and saw
nearly certain victory in the coming battle. He had Napoleon outmatched two
soldiers to one. His men were masters of the subtle techniques of Frederick the
Great, tactics that had delivered victory in far more perilous moments. But
Napoleon, less than half the Duke’s age at 37, stared across the same undulating
land, the same poised armies and saw in the landscape something completely
4 When I started butchering: I’ve finessed the always-unstranslatable Zhuangzi.
See for reference Burton Watson, Burton, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1968)
14
different and totally, lethally correct: An interlocking set of murderous gears that
could be set loose by his artillery 5 .
In the course of the French victory the next day Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel was first
blinded by French musket shot and then bled to death. It was a poetic end. He had
been, like so many of the Generals who would tumble before Napoleon in coming
years, absolutely blind to forces perfectly clear and visible and usable to the
revolutionary upstart. Napoloen’s European opponents would come to fear and
admire nothing so much as the Emperor’s specific, almosty mystical sort of
battlefield vision. He could look at a battlefield and see possibilities – certanties, in
fact – that eluded older, famous men. They named his masterful insight the “Coup
d’Oeil”: an instant, apprehending glimpse of power waves 6 . He saw forces and facts
in war that were obscured from his enemies by their own habits of mind and the
limits of their creativity. The great Prussian military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz,
who was made prisoner by Napoleon during the massacre at Jena, used his time
locked up to begin compiling notes for his classic work of Western strategy, On War.
“Genius,” he later wrote, “rises above the rules.” Mastery of strategy, Von Clausewitz
explained, was not merely the result of steely courage, geometric calculation or even
luck, as earlier writers had figured it. Rather, it was derived from the ownership of a
sensibility that could discern the secretly running lines of power that made the old
ways instantly irrelevant and appallingly dangerous.
Historians who mark out and consider the really long, century by century movement
of humanity, often divide time into “historic” eras where fundamental, tsunami-like
changes wipe clean old orders and other, more sedate periods where time dawdles
like a quiet lake. This is the difference between living in Warsaw in, say, 1339 or
1939. The first period was sober and silent; the second was awfully awake. Historic
moments like 1939 are marked by the fact that change comes to find you. It is often
unavoidable. Your children are pulled into a World War. Your village is torn down.
Your health is remade by science. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called the
march of these snapping changes “punctuated equilibrium,” as the world is jumped
from one state to another – and never turns back. He was largely considering the
extinction of the dinosaurs, but we find the idea useful in thinking about history too.
The Revolution of 1789 in France, for instance, which enabled the massive,
volunteer armies Napoleon later brought to his wars, which were of unprecedented
size. “Looking at the situation in this conventional manner, people at first expected
to have to deal only with a seriously weakened French army,” Von Clausewitz
explained later. “But in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination.” 7 The
5 An interlocking set of gears: David Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New
York: Macmillan Publishing, 1974), 464; For a discussion of this generational
mismatch, see the essay “������������������”or Dai Xu,
“Reconsidering the military aspect of great power rise and fall from a cultural
perspective” PLA Daily, June 8, 2015
6 They named his masterful insight: Carl von Clausewitz, Howard, Michael, trans.
Clausewitz On War, (Washington: Library of Congress, 1998) 102
7 But in 1793: On War, p 591 (1984)
15
European riots of 1848 were another such example. Or the ideological and military
surging of 1939. Our very own age. There is a feeling of this sort of inevitable
punctuation in what is underway around us now, the insertion of a single period at
the end of one era and the first, italicized letters of a new one. Impulses and
connections we don’t fully understand and can’t yet control are at play. Our
imagination is beggared too now. Often. These forces are, we have to confess, wiping
away one system. But they are also producing another.
What I mean by the Seventh Sense is the ability to see both these old and the new
worlds around us, to feel too the real and the virtual – and to know power as it flows
through and between each. Rattling one apart. Enlivening another. I don’t mean here
blinding technological optimism; nor do I mean absurd conservative historicism.
The Seventh Sense is the ability to contemplate politics, economics, warfare,
innovation, genomics now – really every hot-connected discipline and sense in one
glance the new and the old power, and of course the fault lines running between
them. Connected and yet-to-be-linked. Colliding. Melding. Repelling. Our future will
be less an isolated technological paradise than an intermingling of real and virtual. It
will not be an age of blacked-out virtual reality goggles like Oculus Rift or the
blinding and submersive feeling of novels like Ready Player One but, I think, a bit
more like a semi-transparent screen, on which real and virtual worlds mash
together. Hololens or Magic Leap glasses that project virtual images on the real
world, for instance. Or the feeling of Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece
novel whose charaters move effortlessly between net and city. Maybe even
(probably most accurately) the game Ingress, in which the reality of streets and
buildings and homes was augmented into a giant chessboard and populated by
hundreds of thousands of us in the last few years. These cultural landmarks matter,
they are worth learning about and exploring. They stand out as trailguides to a fresh
sensibility in the same way Nijinsky’s 20 th century dances or Goethe’s 19 th century
poetry once did.
We flip back and forth between real and virtual in our every day lives now, popping
our head from screen to street. Our art, our music, our finances – they make the
same passage. To see both fields at once, to see the way they blend and pull on each
other, does demand a new sensibility, of course. And though, eventually, this new
instinct will be commonplace, for now at least it must be defined, refined, and
learned by each of us. Like Napoleon looking at a battlfield and discovering how to
spot the violent potential of industrial war. Or, Einstein reaching the deeper,
invisible truths of physics as he left Newton behind: “There is no logical path to
these laws,” he wrote later of the leaps that had carried him to relativity, “only
intuition.” 8 This is what Nan was trying to point to; the need to train an instinct for
the epochal changes ahead. Whether the future that emerges from our simultaneous
confrontation with real and network phenomenae will produce a speed-blasted
information paradise or a terrifying dystopia is hard to say now. That will be
decided largely by choices made in the next couple of decades. It will be decided by
8 Or, Einstein: Einstein, Albert, Essays in Science (New York: Philosophical Library,
1934), 4
16
people who do have the Seventh Sense. Even, I think, by people who are reading this
book.
Why start this journey into the churning, still-confusing and affronting world
around us now by the shores of Lake Taihu? Why begin with the sentiments of a
slower culture that Master Nan embodied, passed like delicate and still-warm tea,
with so much calm in the face of all this urgency? It’s not only because of Master
Nan’s insight that this world is tearing at our minds, that the faster we move the
sicker we’ll get. It’s something else. The training of an instinct, of a really fresh way
of looking at the world, demands a kind of calm. Understanding of anything, after all,
is most durably assembled in slow conversations, in patient probing. It is developed
as much from brushes with music and literature as it is from any direct, slamming
confrontation with the truth. The birth of an instinct requires a rewiring of our
minds, a reframing of our hopes, and this can only be done at the pace of
contemplation. (It’s the best way to keep the fear at bay.) We seek those stilled,
freeze-framed moments where we’ll pause amid lightspeed fast networks to think
about why they work and just what they are doing to us. Tranquility, for a moment
at least, in the face of the alternately horrible and wonderful way the world is being
remade. That’s what you’ll get here, in the following pages. Nan’s model statesman
Su Qin, knife stabbed into his own thigh and slouched with exhaustion is a sort of
totem for us. Knife in thigh. Stop. Think. Even, hard as it may be, wait for the right
path to present itself. No matter how uncomfortable it may be at times, it is better to
be unconventional than conventional in our revolutionary age. This is the only way
to cultivate a Seventh Sense. The old methods will not teach you a new way.
Let me tell you what is going to happen: In coming years there will be a struggle
between those who have the Seventh Sense – who are born with it or trained to it –
and those who don't. New, network forces all around us will take on old, established
ones – they already are – in business, politics, warfare, science. Then – because
those who don’t have the Seventh Sense for network power will lose, as anyone who
tries to stop the future always loses – a new age will begin. This age will involve
violent, historic wrestling between different groups with different versions of the
Seventh Sense.Competing interests and ideals and aims will fire these contending
forces. Networks will fight networks. Some of the plans of these connected age
groups will be good, others evil, and anyhow the winners will be ruthless. Then, and
this is where it will get particularly strange and incredible, there will be a battle
between those with the Seventh Sense and the very systems of connection,
machines and intelligence they have built. Human instincts laid in competition
against the machine instincts. That struggle? I’m not quite sure how it will turn out.
But for now, at least, we can say this: The future sits almost like a cold-eyed dare in
front of us. Just try to avoid this!
17
Chapter Two: The Age of Network Power
In which the Seventh Sense reveals a fundamental insight: Connection changes the
nature of an object.
Several hundred years ago the forces of the Enlightenment and the Industrial
Revolution, like twin hammers, began working away at the roots of an ancient order.
The powerful ideas of liberty, freedom of thought, science, democracy and
capitalism – these all layered one upon the other. They washed, like irresistible
tides, across the institutions and kingdoms and beliefs of Europe and in a process of
revolution, of invention, of destruction and creation, they put a period at the end of
one era, and began the very first lines of a new human story. These forces produced
what we know today as the modern world: Trains knit new markets, science tripled
life spans, democracy liberated politics. Confronted with this really irresistible
pressure, a gulf opened. The world started to cleave. On one side were the nations
and peoples that our modern economists would come to know and label as a
“Convergence Club.” 9 This group mastered and refined and then used the tools of
their era to become industrial, democratic, scientific and rich. 10 They left the age of
kings and feudal lords, of alchemists and all-knowing priests behind. At the same
time, a “Divergence Club” appeared. These nations missed the essential turn. They
were trapped. Old ideas, useless habits of power, inescapable history – varied
shackles held them back from the punctuated shift to a new, more advanced
equilibrium. Russia, China, much of Latin America and Africa – for them, the leap to
being honestly modern was fatally elusive. Even today, they struggle to catch up.
We are now in the earliest stages of a shift that promises to be still more
consequential than the one that enlightened and industrialized our world over
several centuries after the Dark Ages. The essence of this shift is best captured by
the prodigious explosion of different types of connection emerging around us now –
financial, trade, information, transport, biological – and the innovative combinations
that follow these and other fast, fresh links. Modern, highly-connected systems are
different than those with less connection. And, as we’ll come to see, they are
particularly different from those with slower connection. We experience power
through networks now, as once we experienced it through brick-bound institutions
like universities or military headquarters or telephone company switches. You can
no more understand the operations of Hizb’allah or China’s central bank or the most
valuable Internet companies today without at least this frank admission: Their
1.
9 On one side: William J. Baumol, Convergence of Productivity Cross-national Studies
and Historical Evidence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
10 This group mastered: See Joel Mokyr, “The European Enlightenment, the
Industrial Revolution, and Modern Economic Growth”, Max Weber Lecture,
European University, March 27, 2007
18
power operates as much through light pulses running through fiber optic webs as it
does in any physical sense. Think of the most influential geopolitical forces. The
most lethal militaries. The greatest new commercial or financial efforts. All now
depend on and are nearly defined by their fluency with different sorts of connection.
Networks emerge when nodes – which can be composed of people, financial
markets, computers, mobile devices, drones or any lively and connectable object –
link to other nodes. Networks can be defined by geography, or by language or
currency or data protocols or any of a thousand particular features. 11 People who
live in Bangalore, is a network. As is, Switches running DNSSEC protocol on the
Internet or Businesses transacting in Rupiah. An engineer might say: Network power
is simply the ceaseless summing, at any instant, of all these bundles of connection.
Real, physical networks hum magnetically now in cities that now pulse and grow
with accelerating, connected speed. New York City is network, in this sense, as is
Beijing or – in a less evolved way – the Alaskan steppe. So while it’s tempting to call
the 21 st Century the “Urban Century”, in fact the billion-people a decade rush into
cities is a symptom. A larger hunger for the constant knitting of lives together, for
fresh and efficient connection drives us. 12 Of course completely, powerfully virtual
instances of networks exist too: knit webs of computers teaching themselves how to
read, or the fast, paranoid and careful buzzing of constantly alert cybersecurity
firewalls. All of these systems are defined by relations. Their power comes from the
number, the type and the speed of the connections they hungrily establish and then
use. Networks don’t merely speed up our markets, our news, or our innovation –
they revolutionize the nature of their power. Broad-based interconnection can cause
and even determine events.
These expanding, ever-thicker webs of data and linkage can be mapped, and taken
together they reflect something we are coming to know as “Network Power”. 13 By
this phrase we mean not merely the Internet or twitter or crypto currencies like
11 Networks can be defined: For an excellent overview of networks the following
texts are of use: Albert Barabasi, Linked The New Science Of Networks Science Of
Networks. (S.l.: Basic Books, 2014), Mark Newman Networks: An Introduction,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010); Remco van der Hofstad, Random Graphs
and Complex Networks. Vol. I, (Eindhoven University of Technology, 2015);
Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit a Theory of Networks
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and S. Boccaletti, V. Latora, Y.
Moreno, M. Chavez, D.-U. Hwang, “Complex networks: Structure and dynamics,”
Physics Reports, Volume 424, Issues 4–5, February 2006, Pages 175-308
12 A larger hunger: Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer “Urbanization as Opportunity,”
Marron Institute Working Paper No. 1, 2014
13 These expanding, ever-thicker webs: See Castells, Manuel. Communication
Power. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009; and Castells, Manuel. "Network
Theory| A Network Theory of Power" International Journal of Communication,
Volume 5(8 April 2011)
19
BitCoin – these are, of course, expressions of a kind of network power. But “Network
Power” is something larger. It represents a potentially comprehensive grasp, new in
human history and enmeshing billions of connected lives and tens of billions of
linked sensors and machines. It is becoming, with every passing moment, more
comprehensive: more sensors, more links, more points and more speed. Cascades,
epidemics and interactions are ubiquitous on all these networks, producing
unexpected innovation in their collisions: the weaving of genetics and databases, for
instance, or of terrorism and mobile messaging 14 . Scientists who study networks call
this sort of change “Explosive Percolation,” by which they mean an instant shift in
the very nature of a system as it passes a threshold level of connectivity. 15 This
melding of nodes into a single fabric is not unlike the linking of water molecules one
to another as the temperature drops. One moment you have something you can
drink; the next you have ice. So: One moment you have a world of simply connected
users, the next a billion-person platform like Facebook or YouTube solidifies. One
day you have tumbling, angry fundamentalists; the next a linked terror movement.
And because the impact of terrorism – which might be best defined as violence with
an aim of causing psychological impact – depends on connection, exploding the
landscape of links instantly expands its effects. 16 The network enables a new kind of
terror. It changes its nature. Expands its impact. Such elemental phase transitions,
where more means different, appear everywhere in linked natural systems– the
formation of crystals, for example, of the collapse of an ecosystem when the last of a
keystone species is hunted down. They appear on networks too. So you might say: A
phase transtion lingers ahead of us in our security, our finances, our politics. The
age we’re entering now will be as different from the age we’re leaving behind as the
Enlightenment was from the dark feudal era that preceded it.
The Enlightenment’s revolution of free ideas and men and trade and capital
demanded a new sensibility. Our age is similar. It insists already on a fresh feeling
for the power that emerges as a result of connection. There’s an irony here: At the
very moment when we might expect ourselves to be most free – liberated by
wireless connections, by easy jet travel, by never-off communications – we find
ourselves, inescapably, enmeshed and dependent. Mastery of connection turns out
to be the modern version of Napoleon’s Coup D’Oeil. Connection increasingly defines
the most elemental pieces of our lives. The old individualistic, me-first instincts
don’t answer as well as they might once have when “me-first” now demands
connection of some sort in order to get what you might want: Am education, better
medical care, a pizza. What is true for the machines all around us now is true for us
too: We are what we are connected to.
14 Cascades, epidemics and interactions: Dirk Helbing, “Globally Networked Risks
and How to Respond,” Nature, 2013, 51-59.
15 Scientists who study networks: D. Achlioptas, R. M. D'souza, and J. Spencer.
"Explosive Percolation in Random Networks." Science, 2009, 1453-455.
16 And because the nature of terrorism: See Anthony Richards, Conceptualizing
Terrorism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
20
Centuries from now, our great-great grandchildren will look back at our age and
name it as we have named “The Enlightenment.” Perhaps they will call this era “The
Great Connection” or the “The Enmeshmnet” or somesuch. They will spot the
winners and losers of our age as we do in our own review of history. That distant
generation will identify a new “convergence club” emerging among us now, even if
we can’t quite name its members yet. Already we can see lavish rewards
accumulating to the people and nations and companies who have established an
early grip on this new sensibility. They understand and manipulate connective
power. What they all share is a feeling, as instant and certain as an instinct, for what
it means to be enclosed, constantly, by ever growing masses of connection. A set of
forces, invisible to many, is now applying a merciless and grinding pressure to the
familiar structures of an older age.
The struggles of our cherished institutions – the US congress, the military, the news
media, our educational system, our once-inclusive capitalism – to achieve the very
aims that they once elegantly and efficiently met is only the visible evidence of this
shift. Buried underneath their lurching collapse is the real source of this change, a
new connective energy. Power is now passing with a rippling, ripping energy from
old, once-useful people and institutions and ideas and into these new platforms and
protocols, built for an age of connection. If this passage has so far only wiped out
encyclopedias, telephone companies or taxi medallions, it is merely because it is just
beginning.
The Seventh Sense, in short, is the ability to look at any object and see the way in
which it is changed by connection. This is the essential skill. Whether you are
commanding an army, running a Fortune 50 company, planning a great work of art
or thinking about your children’s education. You need to be able to look at a car, a
hotel room, a share of stock, a language, a translation machine and say to yourself:
Connection changes the nature of an object. It changes the nature of every object
around it. This book is the story of just how and why that happens and of the way in
which an instinct for this power now rests behind the fattest fortunes and the
greatest successes of our age. Connection changes the nature of an object means
connection changes the nature of your life, of mine, of our government, of the wars
we fight and the peace we secure. The heart of the problem ahead of us is not small.
It is nothing less than the most significant shift of power balances since the
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. How high are the stakes? If the
Enlightenment is our reference, then I think we can say they are nothing less than
total.
Of all the Seventh Sense ideas, this single concept is the most fundamental:
Connection changes the nature of an object. A medical diagnostic machine is
impressive; one that is connected to a database of information that can accelerate
and improve or perfect a diagnosis is revolutionary. The act of linking our bodies,
our cities, our ideas – everything really – together, introduces a genuinely new
dynamic to our world. It creates hyper-dense concentrations of power. It breeds
2.
21
fresh chances for complex and instant chaos. The emergence of surprise, tragedy, of
wealth and hope will be more common now than in less revolutionary times. To
follow the logic of the French philosopher Paul Virilio, for a moment: The train
produced the train accident. The plane produced the plane accident 17 .�Surely we can
count on the network to produce the network accident – and many of them. In such
a world the question of what you “have” – by which I mean what you are connected
to – determines what you “are.” You have friends on a social network. The US has a
currency platform. Some new startup has an artificially intelligent machine. We all
have possibilities and vulnerabilities we only dimly understand.
The great insight of the Enlightenment was that the nature of an object – a person, a
piece of land, a vote, a share – changed when it was liberated from old fetters of
tradition, ignorance, habit or fear. That single shift triggered centuries of disruption,
of wars, of creativity and great human advance. The world realigned itself. The
Seventh Sense era will be similar. When we are connected, power shifts. It changes
who we are, what we might expect, how we might be manipulated, attacked,
enriched. It is too early to map with any real fidelity the landscape that will emerge
as a result, but we can say at least this: The nature of an object, any object, changes
when it is connected. We need to say too: We are relatively early in our age of
connection. It’s not just that so much of the world remains to be linked; it’s also that
the nature of connection itself is changing. It is becoming instant. It is increasingly
sharpened and enhanced, we will see, by the use of artificial intelligence. Basic
connection is a powerful force; instant, AI-enabled links? You can imagine it must be
something else entirely.
Let’s take as an example a tool you’re using right now, the English language. Any
language is an “object” of sorts, a tool whose power depends on how and where it is
used. Just as widespread use of the dollar or the British Pound or gold – for trade,
for finance or for stashing under mattresses – marks a network of economic
exchange, so English is a mesh for information sharing. When Spanish and Lebanese
and Russian researchers gather to design a drug molecule, when astronauts talk in
the International Space Station, when bankers settle finance policy in the midst of
yet another unexpected crisis, they are using a powerful, standardized, shared tool
that makes their work possible and efficient. English in this role, like French before
it, has an appealing leverage: The more people who use it, the greater the incentive
to learn it.
But when we think of English in a network sense, we see it is more than simply an
object. It’s a means of connection, something that information scientists call a
“protocol”. You may know the word from the realm of diplomacy, where protocols
ritualize and decide everything from where the President sits at a dinner to how a
letter must be addressed. In technical terms a “protocol” is also a rulebook too.
Some network protocols you may have heard of – HTTP, DNS, SWIFT all serve as
links in this sense. They translate digital bits into organized web pages, secure
17 To follow the logic: Paul Virilio and Philippe Petit. Politics of the Very Worst: An
Interview by Philippe Petit. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999
22
packets or financial vouchers. Protocols embody shared rules. Their subtle, decisive
power is to place each bit of data in a reliable, predictable order, just as diplomatic
protocol might seat ambassadors at a negotiation. “Protocol,” the theorists
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker have written, “is a system for maintaining
organization and control in networks.” 18
In a world of older, more traditional power distributions Americans might worry
about a day when another language, another “protocol” in a sense – Chinese or
Spanish, say – would pry the central connective role away from English. Protocols
are hard to change, of course. So many people have learned English; whole systems
depend on its use. To suddenly switch the world’s airline pilots, bond traders and
computer programmers to Chinese or Spanish would hardly be worth the immense
cost and the colliding confusion such a transfer would demand. But it’s here where
the Seventh Sense axiom, that connection changes the nature of an object, gives us a
new view. For the first time, as a result of connectivity, a once unimagined
possibility exists: rapid, real-time machine translation. Fast, ubiquitous network
links mean that the central role of English is boiled away by another language than
by a connected, intelligent network skin. “Good morning,” is less likely to be
overtaken by a greeting from some other language as it is to be effortlessly, invisibly
transmuted into “� �” or “Buenos Dias.” Fast access to a great translation
algorithm will be more important than the ability to speak English (or Spanish or
Chinese). Even as an advocate of learning other languages, it’s hard not to feel that
the American parents now plowing their children urgently into Chinese classes are
missing the point. Fluency in any second language in the future will be an arcane
specialty. Better to teach the kids how to build an AI, or to debate the moral
reasoning of Confucius and Socrates than how to order dinner. The machines will
take care of that. Power in a connected age will pool, then, not in the mouths and
minds of English speakers, but rather into the hands of anyone who controls the
best translation server.
Connection has changed the nature of several objects here: The language itself, the
people who use it – pilots, commodity traders, machines, you and I. You can see how
the ability to design, build and turn on (or off) the fastest, smartest, most connected
language machines becomes a nexus of fresh power. What will replace English isn’t
Spanish or Chinese, but a protocol. This sort of specialized data-pipe will permit
instant, always-improving translation. It will become as crucial to the operation of
the global economy or research laboratories or entertainment companies as English
now is. More crucial, in fact, because these machines will enable vast new
communication links with a fidelity far better than pidgin-level speech. They will
consider not only what we say, but what they suspect we mean to say in the quest of
ever clearer discussion. The pre-network instinct of Fear Chinese! Fear Spanish! is
the wrong one. As is the idea to teach the world Chinese or Spanish as a source of
power. Rather, Can we control this turbo-smart connected language platform? is the
right question. So many of the threats we worry about today have been similarly
18 “Protocol”: Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, “Protocol, Control, and
Networks” in Grey Room 17, Fall 2004, pp. 9
23
simplified and misplaced. Fear deflation? Fear ISIS? Fear the RMB? What we should
be contemplating with great care is the connected skein that enmeshes us and all
these connected knots of worry. We will see, over and over again, the way in which
connection shifts, alters and even destroys the way an object moves and lives. The
main point here is straightforward: New links, exploding into operation around us
everywhere now, alter everything from how terrorists operate to how investments
perform. And the failure to spot, use and understand that fact will be a source of our
biggest future tragedies. Do you feel the global economy is more stable now than in
2008? Are we less susceptible to terror now? Is your data more secure than in the
past? What do all these problems have in common?
Perhaps we’re targeting the wrong things.
If the idea of a Seventh Sense for our changing world is quickly apprehensible
enough – It’s that gut feeling that seems to animate wild new businesses or attacks or
risks – the deeper logic will be harder to name and master. We will have to consider
the most ancient instincts for power and safety in light of the very newest
technological experiences: speed, machine intelligence, really constant connection.
“Instead of thinking in terms of surfaces – two dimensions – or spheres – three
dimensions – on is asked to think of nodes that have as many dimensions as they
have connection,” the French philosopher Bruno Latour has written of a network
age. “Modern societies cannot be described without recognizing them as having a
fibrous, thread-like, wiry, string, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by
the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structures, systems.” 19
Familiar borders, like the ones dividing science and politics or military power and
civilian safety begin to erode when everything is linked. Computing machines and
networks were once locked into usefully narrow silos, unconnected: banking,
medical monitoring, power grids. In the past you could mark them as having
“levels”. But now they overlap and inform each other, meshed into that stringy
surface Latour describes. 20 The Seventh Sense is a feeling for just how this world
might be navigated; how those fibers might be pulled and yoked to new purposes.
This multitude of interwoven links is why networks and their pieces spill now even
into the non-digital elements of our life, from how we grow our food (with GPSguided,
self-driven tractors) to how we fight our wars (from a distance, using
constantly connected drones.) As a result, many of the technical choices we’re about
to make will be strikingly political. Who has access to what data? Where is the line
3.
19 “Instead of thinking”: Bruno Latour, “On actor-network theory: A few
clarifications,” In: Soziale Welt47 369-381
20 Now the overlap and inform: Richard Mortier, Hamed Haddadi, Tristan
Henderson, Derek McAuley, and Jon Crowcroft, “Human-Data Interaction: The
Human Face of the Data-Driven Society”, Social Science Research Network (October
1, 2014)
24
between human choice and machine intelligence? Why is one computer system
better than another? These decisions – and the people who make them – will
determine power distributions. They will reverberate through our future with the
same constant noise as the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, the Analects or the Koran
still do. The real contests ahead will be over networks, and we will come to
understand in this book how these struggles will unfold and how to fight them – but
keep in mind that this means, in fact, a deeper conflict. A fight about values.
Networks are like any organized system; they reflect the aims and ethics and habits
of the people who build them. The price of meshing so many different aims and
sensibilities, hopes and hatreds, will be costly. When Nan said that really, fully
grasping our world would be expensive this is what he meant. Particularly if he’s
right that we’ll all be going half mad under the pressures of constant connection as
we try to make the shift. We will pay with our old ideas, our current fortunes and – if
we’re not careful – our safety.
Engineers know this idea that network design shapes the real world as “Conway’s
Law.” 21 Melvin Conway was an early AT&T systems designer who noticed that the
organization of any connected telephone system had an impact on the communities
or offices it touched. Who could call who was a kind of power map. The physical
world, Conway realized, could be shaped and influenced by something other than a
physical force; it could be reshaped by information flows, by connection. The
expansion of airline routes to Indonesia, for instance, was a network design change
that tilted real-life economic patterns. New flights enabled tourism, manufacturing,
investment. In our connected age, the design of research studies, voter databases,
genetic information sharing networks, financial webs – all of these will create
bumps in the surface of our every day lives. 23 The way in which phones or data links
or mobile devices are tied together changes the way we act when we use them or
when we handle them to touch each other, even if the design of these systems is
insensible to us most of the time – the way a marble under a carpet might create a
surprising bump. Networks can organize themselves in many different ways. And in
the choice of layout, or the evolution of that layout in response to pressures of profit
or technology, a great deal can be decided. “When you decide what infrastructure to
use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision,” the programmer and
investor Paul Graham has written. “You're also making a social decision, and this
may be the more important of the two.” 24
You might ask: What drew tens of millions of people to watch live as Steve Jobs
unveiled some new Apple device in the last years of his life? Of course, partly it was
the cool technology, the warmly charming charisma of the man. But something else
was at work, I think. What Jobs was unveiling atop those black-backed stages over
21 Engineers know this idea: Melvin E. Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?”
Datamation, April, 1968.
23 In our connected age: Barbara Schewick, Internet Architecture and Innovation,
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010) Chapter 1
24 “When you decide what infrastructure to use”: Paul Graham, “Great Hackers”,
on paulgraham.com July 2004
25
the years as we waited for him was nothing less than whole new worlds, connected
landscapes that emerged entirely from systems Apple was secretly breeding. He
wasn’t merely introducing a phone; he was changing how we were going to
experience life. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that
changes everything,” Jobs began his famous rolling introduction for the first iPhone
in 2007. “In 1984 we introduced the Macintosh. It didn't just change Apple. It
changed the whole computer industry. In 2001 we introduced the first iPod. It didn't
just change the way we all listen to music. It changed the entire music industry.”
Apple devices were cracking open paths to whole new worlds in this sense. The
company develops an app for podcasts; a new media form is born. It builds an
architecture for video calling; our relations to each other deepen a bit. What Jobs
was presenting was new and – until that very instant – unimagined universes of
possibility that we’d all explore. No wonder the world tuned in.
When we speak of “architecture” in a digital sense we mean the design of the inside
of a computer – how the chips link to each other – or the layout of a phone system,
the mechanics of a block-chain or encryption tool, or the ethereal construction of a
datascape so it can be better used to train artificially intelligent programs. These are
design choices that, just like the ones about where to put a door or a freeway,
conclusively decide and shape movement. They affect speed. Politics, social norms,
technological needs – these and other forces all shape the architecture of digital
systems. But –and this is where a new sensibility comes into play – the
architectures, in turn, touch and twist politics, social norms and technology. Instant
communication, social webs, fast-spreading news – all of these forces redound
powerfully on the real world. They affect how we think and act. And, as a result,
controlling these connections is a profound source of power. It’s also true that
architectures and designs dropped into different places have different results: Think
of how an open computer system plopped into the Middle East might be used
differently than one placed in the American Midwest.
It was these sorts of vibrations, the ones made by power pulsing through certain
forms or networks in history, that led the Orientalist scholar Karl Wittfogel to his
famous “Hydrological Hypothesis” in the last centrury. Ancient agrarian societies –
Egypt or China, for instance – developed political orders that were decided by their
need for large scale irrigation, Wittfogel explained. Without water, these societies
were dead. Without control of that water? Exposed to constant chaos. Chinese
dynasties tumbled and Egyptian prosperity collapsed as unexpected, unpredicted
droughts and flooding tore them apart. Taming water became the aim of all politics.
An unusual centralized effort emerged. It screwed these scattered, nomadic
societies into a tight, enduring and largely effective authoritarianism. Wittfogel
argued that the “irrigation societies” of Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, and South
America all reflected this link between survival and water control. Power pooled in
the hands of what he called a “Hydraulic Bureaucracy”. China’s ”Yu the Great”, for
instance, rose to power around 2800 B.C. because of his skills in throttling the
unpredictable and deadly Yangtze flows. “Contrary to popular belief that nature
always remains the same,” Wittfogel wrote, “nature changes profoundly whenever
26
man, in response to simple or complex historical causes, profoundly changes his
technical equipment.” 25
Control of water in those ancient ages and control of information in our own are not
so different. We are in the midst, after all, of a change in our own “technical
equipment.” We should read Wittfogel with one eye on our own age, particularly his
warnings. “Like the tiger, the engineer of power must have the physical means with
which to crush his victims,” he wrote of those older orders. “The agromanagerial
despot,” he said of the masters of those connected water systems, “does indeed
posses such means.” We should ask: Are we watching the emergence of an
infomanagerial despotism? Who controls the dataflows we rely on now? The
protocols?
If we want to earn an honest understanding of how power works now, we need to
begin by looking under the carpet in for the marbles, in a sense. We need to touch
and follow the networks themselves, observing their construction and flow as
Wittfogel once traced the transmutation of ancient water systems into the politics of
an earlier age. We too need to go down, inside the connected systems of our era
before we can come back up and begin, confidently, to act. That journey won’t
always be easy because it will require us, as we’ll see, to consider some ideas that
make no sense using our current way of thinking. But, remember: The idea of a
democracy sounded like a laughable joke to hereditary heads of state until the 18 th
century – Let the peasants vote for what they want? The implications of our new
networks will set uncomfortably against many of our own habits and biases – or at
least what we’ve been told our habits and biases should be by an older generation.
But once we have mastered this new instinct, there will finally be a day after which
we will look at the world and really feel the new logic at work. We’ll be Napoleon,
not Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. And from that day on, everything will honestly be
different.
4.
We are still early in this age of network revolution. It was less than 50 years ago,
after all, that the first digital communication switches emerged. Today, devices,
places, people – are all losing what we might think of as their innocence of isolation.
The “Internet of Things” will expand the range of connected devices – phones,
refrigerators, heart-lung machines – from 10 billion today to 50 billion in less than a
decade. And even with 50 billion connected points only 2 percent of the world’s
people and devices and locations will be linked 27 . The analysis of this linked space is
a young discipline, younger even than the nearly newborn technologies at play. It
was only in the mid-1990s that the first sophisticated studies of “network science”
25 “Contrary to popular belief”: Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism; a
Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957)
27 “The Internet of Things”: See “The Zettabyte Era – Trends and Analysis” from
Cisco Systems (San Jose) 2015
27
became technically possible. They have since become essential, as crucial to our
network world as the first maps were to explorers centuries ago. Fundamental
papers, by now-legendary researchers like the mathematicians Steven Storgratz and
Albert-Lazlo Barabasi or the biologist Simon Levin, identified simple laws running in
single networks. The Internet, financial markets, jungle ecosystems and even our
own brain connections were found to exhibit similar, often surprisingly common
habits.
Unfortunately, most of our leading figures still think in terms of disconnected
dangers, of risks that can be reduced to nouns: Atomic bombs, fundamentalists,
hacks. To be sure plenty of these sorts of dangerous nouns confront us now. But the
sharpest edges of our problems come from the fact that these nouns are part of
networks, which spring them into connected, surprising action. Computers,
airplanes, derivatives – they snap and break systems when connected into
cascading, fast threats. When Master Nan spoke of spiritual illness, I think this is
particularly what he meant. Total confusion about our world, followed by all the
emotions of the lost: anger, denial, irrationality. “A commander in chief,” von
Clausewitz wrote of an older age of land warfare, “must aim at acquiring an overall
knowledge of the configuration of a province, of an entire country. He must hold in
his mind a vivid picture of the road-network, the river-lines, and the mountain
ranges without ever losing a sense of his immediate surroundings.” 28 This sort of
command mastery is still relevant in an age of networks. It is as important for the
design and operation of our economy, our politics, our data and our security as it is
in considering problems of war and peace. But who of our current leaders holds in
his or her mind such a vivid map of the ethereal and essential networks running
around us now? Who owns that subtle overall knowledge and then acts with the
confident sensibility such wisdom would produce?
At this early moment in a new revolution, our leaders are blind. It’s not simple
technical fluency that eludes them – though this is among the most embarrassing of
their deficits. It’s that avoiding cyber accidents, controlling the spread of nuclear
weapons, handling global warming, stemming fast financial crises, restoring
equitable economic growth – all of these puzzles yearn to be tackled with a new
sensibility. Not least because often they are produced by a fresh set of links and
instincts. These problems linger not as independent fractures on a solid base, but
rather as markers of spiderwebbing, connected cracks pressing out on knotted up
networks. It is only by tackling them with network ideas that we can hope to make
progress. That the rise of ISIS and the forces of global income inequality are driven
by the same laws can only be understood with a knowledge, or better an experience,
of connected power. Our leaders are preparing us to fight expensive new wars we
need not fight, to confront enemies who might best be regarded as partners – even
as they flail at the to corrosive problems of a new, emerging order simply because
they can’t see or feel the essential links of power that are, even now, making the
familiar dangerous and the dangerous familiar. “We got to know the nature of
calculating by learning to calculate,” the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
28 “A commander in chief”: Von Clausewitz, p 110
28
observed in his “On Certainty” at the end of his life. 29 So with networks. We will get
to know their nature by learning to use them. By watching what they do, observing
them in their surprising movements. We know at least already that puzzles like the
future of US-China relations or income inequality or artificial intelligence are simply
not addressable with traditional thinking because they occur on a network surface
now. Old-style ideas about each of these will likely lead us down dangerous paths.
Our leaders today are, as a result, imperiling us in ways they can’t even understand.
Honestly, these figures are not mentally prepared to fight any sort of battle on this
landscape. They probably never will be.
I’m not saying effective leadership now demands you know what “the instantiation
of a class” in object oriented programming means – or that you master the technical
roots of some other crucial, philosophical idea of connective design. But a feeling for
the laws of networks, for the normalness of connection and the pressures that it
produces is essential at least. That the terrorists of ISIS or the founders of gaming
app companies are better at growth hacking – the subtle art of using data,
connection and instinct to breed massive virtual communities – than our own
institutions or our leaders should unnerve us for a couple of reasons. First, because
it demonstrates a mastery of new power tools that move with astonishing speed,
assembling nation-sized movements and forces in incomprehensively brief periods
of time. But we should also worry – and this is as crucial – because that fast pace is
colliding with a set of slower-moving instincts, institutions and people who still
control substantial levers of power.
At the same moment in time that many of us are alive with the joy of being around
something that is beginning, most of our leaders are locked sadly or with terror into
the ending of something else. Same exact moment. Different instincts. It reminds me
of Virginia Woolf’s novel of transitions, The Years, when the once-commanding
Colonel Pargiter finally passes away, liberating his daughter Eleanor into a world of
adventure even as the change dooms Crosby, the family’s long-serving maid. “For
Crosby, it was the end of everything,” Woolf wrote. “She had known every cupboard,
flagstone, chair and table in the large rambling house, not from five or six feet
distance as they had known it; but from her knees as she had scrubbed and
polished; she had known every groove, stain, fork, knife, napkin and cupboard. They
and their doings had made her entire world. And now she was going off, alone, to a
single room at Richmond.” 30 The people now lamenting the decline of television, of
newspapers, of a disconnected age, who are baffled by constant connection or apps
of the moment or machines that learn should be given their quiet moments with the
old structures. They knew that world from their knees, built and maintained it as
much for us as for them. Elements of that slower unconnected era must be
29 “We got to know the nature of calculating”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty
ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.von Wright Translated by Denis Paul and
G.E.M.Anscombe, (Oxford: Blackwell 1969)
30 “For Crosby”: Virginia Woolf, The Years, (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Jovanovich, 1937) p. 216
29
preserved. But, also, we must move on. These people will never grasp the
opportunity that lingers in front of us now.
This book is not, in any event, written for them. It is written for those of us who are
inheriting the possibility of their inventions, the price of their errors. And it is aimed
too at the people and the generation who are coming to power and who are – in
some senses—already in power, even if they don’t appear to be just yet. By this I
mean the cohort bred into the age of connected acceleration; the first generation of
leaders and students and warfighters and entrepreneurs to not find the digital
strange, but to find it natural and curious and wonderful in its power. It is written
for those who will have to manage machines that are smarter than humans,
networks that move faster than we can calculate, and cascades of chaos and conflict
and creation as this new era settles in. It is for anyone too who has ever begun to
speak about the strange tensions of our age, who has begun maybe with the lines,
“Maybe I’m sensitive or something, but…” as they feel the tickle of their own lives,
minds and cells increasingly intertwined, electrified. It is written for those afflicted
with an aching feeling that we’re being torn apart. Pulled into foolish conflicts and
dangerous failures by old figures who don’t understand this age. Pulled into
sacrifices of liberty and freedom by young technological wizards who can’t balance
the miracle of their cold inventions with our hot, human needs for freedom and
control.
But I should say too that this book is not, either, a full-throated endorsement of the
technological elite. Yes, it’s wonderful that we are at the beginning of a new period.
But it’s not quite right to say that where the network age begins, the old one ends. In
fact, that's a dangerous conclusion. To begin with we’re at an extremely primitive
point in our understanding of networks, comparable to where economics was in the
1800s or medicine centuries ago. We have a small, modest collection of tools to
analyze and think about and consider the complex physics of a networked world.
We barely understand the operation and evolution of many single networks today –
and really only sort of grasp one or two types of design with any real depth. But
networks of networks? Instant networks? Artificially intelligent ones? We have
basically no laws or experience with these yet.
The headlong rush ahead into a world of constant connection will, of course, be
balanced, resisted, braced against, undermined, fought and manipulated. Networks
touch everything, remember? The idea that such elemental control – of you, of me,
of our finances or our nations – would move with anything less than a few
explosions is naïve. Revolutions don’t occur quietly. Consequently, the very thing
that makes many of the greatest tech minds of our age magnificent – a sense of
unstoppable determinism, a disregard for history, a slavish and instinctive urge to
follow what we’ll come to know as a Seventh Sense – is a bit of a disadvantage at
times. I know many of these men and women; their iron certainty is only a bit more
dazzling than the success they have had in building something from nothing in a
human instant. But that confidence in the new leads already to crushing collisions
with the sorts of older ideas – privacy, localism, slowness – that echo throughout
30
mankind’s history precisely because they touch in subtle ways on the human heart,
on what it means really to live.
A friend of mine who runs one of the leading technology firms told me of the
unnerving realization that the most important figures at the firm were under 25 –
and no senior person had much of an idea about what they were doing. This is an
inversion: Usually in a society the most power accrues to those with the most
experience, and judgment and perspective. Today, tremendous even decisive
influence clusters in the hands and machines of a young caste whose very fluency
with the norms of a revolutionary age blots out a whole set of important
connections, a group that instinctively feels networks but is deaf to the music of
philosophy, history and even tragedy that should inform the operation of so much
power. To love risk, to love creating and building – this is fine. Wonderful even. But
it’s also not enough.
“It happens that programming is a relatively easy craft to learn,” the MIT scientist
Joseph Weizenbaum observed in the 1970s, as computers emerged into academic
life. “Almost anyone with a reasonably ordered mind can become a good
programmer with just a little instruction and practice. And because programming is
almost immediately rewarding, that is because a computer very quickly begins to
behave somewhat in the way a programmer intends it to, programming is very
seductive.” The mistake, Weizenbaum warned, was to think that easy programming
of a machine was really a predictor of anything other than getting a machine to
follow commands. It didn’t mean easy programming of a complete operation. Or of
science. Or, godforbid, to think you could easily program the world. Programming,
he warned, “appeals most to those who do not yet have sufficient maturity to
tolerate long delays between an effort to achieve something and the concrete
appearance of success. Immature students are therefore easily misled into believing
that they have mastered a craft of immense power and of great importance when, in
fact, they have learned only the rudiments.” 31 Tempting as it may be to call for our
world to be turned over to entrepreneurs or technocrats, to let their tools of wired
efficiency tear with a fast disruptive enthusiasm into our politics and economics, the
reality is that the world (thankfully) does not respond like a cold machine. That
delay between an effort to achieve something and its realization that Weizenbaum
mentioned, it’s the essence of being human. The delay is filled with worry, hope,
debate, exploration, error, success. In short, it’s a hitch that should never be ground
out of our system, no more by technology than by authoritarian or totalitarian or
fundamentalist doctrines that have ever promised instant solution to any probem.
“Just let the entrepreneuers do it” or “Just let the machinces do it,” is no more a
solution than “Just let the Nazis handle this,” could have been.
So this is our dilemma: Old, white-haired, network-blinded leaders (and young
figures who think like them despite their age) pull us from Washington and other
31 “It happens that programming”: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and
Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman 1976),
276
31
capitals and traditional power centers into a world where their ideas and policies
constantly fail. They don’t understand networks; never will. At the same time a new,
rising generation lashes us into connected and amazing meshes. We welcome this
connection. Centered in Menlo Park or Seattle or Zhonguancun or Shenzhen, these
figures understand networks perfectly, but not yet much else. Old and new, each
group works anyhow on our freedom. We are pulled dangerously between these
forces. Problems seem to get worse. What we need to find is a way out of this trap. A
fusion. A blended sensibility of both the edgiest ideas of connection and the most
unshakeable and brutal and inarguable requirements of power. This is the Seventh
Sense. It is our only possible protection.
5.
In the last century, as the economist Fredrich Hayek watched Europe both struggle
against and flirt with the then-appealing ideas of Nazi and Soviet socialism, he
marked the fundamental conflict of his age as the one between individual liberty
and central planning. Recall that at that moment in history, the 1930s, America and
much of Europe were in deep depression, their political systems struggling. The
rapid growth in the USSR and Germany looked awfully appealing to many. The
political stability of totalitarian ideologis had a certain placid charm in some
quarters. But, Europe was, Hayek argued, walking nothing less than a road back to
serfdom. Was man happier, better off, more justly fulfilled by the chaos of a market
and democracy or in the orderly machine of authority, of clicking heels and
machines? Hayek voted with his feet. He fled the Nazis in 1938, and he worried for
the rest of his life that in the attempt to manage the risks of free markets and minds,
the Europe he loved was running into socialism. “Is there a greater tragedy
imaginable,” Hayek wrote, “than that we should unwittingly produce the very
opposite of what we have been striving for?” 32
Hayek thought two safety catches of might protect mankind from the totalizing
control habits of Soviet-style thinking: First, an unkillable human instinct for
individual freedom, the squirm humans have always shown under the boot of too
much authority. And, a second protection he thought, would be the really terrible,
absurd inefficiency of centrally planned systems. No bureaucrat, no economist,
could possibly out-perform the productive chaos of a market or an election in the
long run Hayek felt. Finding the right price, matching supply and demand – it was
impossible to think this could be done by some technocrat in a room somwhwere.
This was what markets were for. This is how they encouraged profit, free-thinking,
invention. Chuchill’s famous line, that “Democracy is the worst form of government
except for all the others,” contained a certain truth: civilizations, yoked by
democratic and market rules, reached more durable outcomes than despots or
oligarchs. Hayek, as we look at his judgment now, was correct. People wanted to be
free; the dream of central planning collapsed under its own weight with the USSR in
1989.
32 “Is there a greater tragedy”: F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994),
32
In our own age, a fundamental conflict lingers as well. This is the struggle between
individual liberty and connection. We have to ask a version of Hayek’s question: Are
we happier, better off, more justly fulfilled through ceaseless linkage to the fast
systems all around us? The appeal of constant connection is not a mere economic
fact. It’s become a feature our personalities and psychologies and even the
biochemistry of our brains. To be disconnected, in so many senses, hurts. And while
the human twitch for freedom remains as alive as a protection for us all, Hayek’s
second safety catch is eroding. Networks of deep connection, speed and intelligence
will be powerfully more efficient than central planning; they know more than any
central bureacrat might have. And they may yet be even more productive at times in
their connection and intelligence than our existing structures or markets or
electoral systems. Think of the way centralized, linked dispatch systems make a
“sharing” economy of on-demand cars and rooms available in ways the market itself
could not. Similar alluring evolutions lie ahead in medicine, in finance, in politics.
The temptation to throw all in for some sort of technological political fusion, one
that promises better returns on our time and money in exchange for our liberty, will
grow. When we depend so much on connection for our identity, our work, and our
safety how far from John Stuart Mill’s line from On Liberty might we tread: “Over
himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” 34 Are we
sovereign over our own bodies and minds? Over the machines? This is not a puzzle
today’s power class can or should touch. They may accidentally lead us to disaster.
Hayek’s fear, that in pursuing one end (freedom) leaders would secure its opposite
(tyranny), is what we should share. The tools of the network age are ripe for misuse.
In some senses, they are built for misuse: They are opaque. They are blindingly fast.
They seduce and enmesh us with their new power. They demand, as a result, new
sensibility for their final control.
There are many ways we will explore the Seventh Sense. The rise and fall of startup
technology companies or terror groups or epidemics will lead us. We will examine,
carefully, the tensions of a network age to understand where the cracks are coming
from, and where new ideas are emerging. But I’m trying at least to write a bit with
that challenge of Master Nan in mind. If we are, really, facing an ephochal change
then we should handle the problems of our era with particular care; we should
study the opportunities with real urgency. Two hundred years from now when the
great companies and billionaires and revolutionaries of our age are crushed down
below the horizon of history, it is the massive movements of states and populations
that will remain, with their awful or wondrous traces. Will we live in an age of war
or peace?
Is that something we can actually decide?
34 When we depend so much: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and the Subjugation of
Women, (New York: Penguin Classics 2007) 19.
33
34
Chapter Three:
War, Peace, Networks
In which The Seventh Sense reaches towards the questions of war and peace and
power that will flavor our lives, like it or not.
1.
One afternoon in the fall of 2009 I received an unexpected call from the Pentagon.
The US was, then, nearly a decade into the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq. Each, in its
own way, possessed a strange and shifting character, the sort of dim premonition of
a greater violence that has always most unnerved warriors and politicians. The old
soldier’s saying – Fear chaos as much as the enemy – seemed to animate, constantly,
the progress of these two fights. Once, before I gave a speech to an audience of
newly promoted one-star generals in 2010, a four-star general pulled me aside for a
moment. He explained that I’d be speaking to a crowd of officers who had come of
age pacing the murderous streets of these wars, watching soldiers under their
command killed by an often invisible enemy. “You have to remember that these men
have been seared, seared, by a decade of combat,” he said. The best American
military minds had tried, with characteristically direct and relentless energy, to box
the wildness of these wars. In books and papers and thousands of patrols, through
millions of hours of language training, and endless risky nights, they had tried. It
never quite seemed to work. There would never be a durable sense of mastery. The
wars, which appeared a certain and unfairly tilted fight to American victory at the
beginning, had run longer than any in the nation’s history. They were engines of
chaos and fear.
The American Marine Corps General Victor Krulak once observed, “The war you
prepare for is rarely the war you get,” and you could find this phrase whistling
through the years of American combat after 9/11 35 . One of the lessons of both Iraq
and Afghanistan – and of the post-World Trade Center wars generally – was that the
Pentagon and the fighting services had been unready for what they faced. Soldiers
had arrived in Baghdad with forest-colored uniforms, thin-skinned transport, tankled
battle plans – all wrong and mostly dangerous. The most feared weapons system
of the era told you something of the tone of the new millennium’s wars: $50 to $100
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Hidden smashups of dynamite, duct tape,
cellphone detonators and as much stubbly, impaling iron as could be found. They
were impossible to deter. Rapidly deadly. The IED threat, one officer later reflected,
“is a contemporary example of conventional militaries being confronted with a
tactical surprise with operational—if not strategic—implications.” 36 Like so much in
35 The American Marine Corps General: Victor Krulak, “A New Kind of War”, in
First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps (Bluejacket Press, 1984) 179
36 The IED threat: Andrew Smith, “Improvised Explosive Devices in Iraq, 2003-09:
A Case of Operational Surprise and Institutional Response” Letort Papers (Carlisle,
PA: Army War College April, 2011) 9
35
our age, small-sized problems were spilling rapidly into crises of strategy. One hot
battlefield instant – an explosion under an armorless truck, say – could freeze the
operations of a billion-dollar division. Nearly everyone begins to ask, sometimes out
loud: Why did that happen? Followed pretty quickly by: What the hell are we doing
here? The little bombs were shaking more than the Humvees.
Walking into the Pentagon, one is struck by cascading sensations of immensity and
volume and, frankly, gravity. Surely, you reflect, there must be someone here with a
plan for everything? But there was not; there is not now. Yet the massiveness, the
ineffable historical density and weight of American power, is so breathtaking that its
frequent impotence in the face of a changing world represents a particular and
unforgettable and, well, searing shock. The soldiers who had experienced those cold,
failing nights at the edge of superpower rippled with unease. This was the slim
comfort of life inside big, old and lamed structures confronting the fast, blithe and
unstoppable future.
By 2009, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq settling into a low boil, America’s
generals again began wondering what other cracks were spreading around the
world. The Unknown and the Future seemed to have an uneasy parallel meaning.
The diplomats worried about this too, of course, but with soldiers dying every day,
the questions had a particular urgency for the military. The top of the command
chain asked incessantly about what they might be missing. What fissures were
running even through their own building, masked by its scale but waiting quietly to
make their best plans look foolish and dangerous? And: How they could possibly
confront this world with 30% less of what they had a decade ago? They made a few
phone calls. I received one of them.
2.
It was hard not to notice, if you picked up one of those incoming queries from
Washington and were asked to draft your views on how this uncertain world might
be approached, that one of the main aims of the American military in recent years –
reducing the number of terrorists – appeared to be backfiring. This was an irritating
feature of many global problems. In spreading market capitalism ever wider, the
world was also digging an ever wider moat between rich and poor, for instance. In
trying to make the world modern with more connection we were, we found, lashing
ourselves to some very unmodern risks. And in waging the most expensive war on
terrorism in human history, the US was uneasily discovering that it was creating
more terrorists. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had sketched the nature of
this puzzle in an October, 2003 memo with acid clarity. He asked: “Are we capturing,
killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas
and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” 37 Though
37 He asked: Donald Rumsfeld, memo, 16 October 2003, available at
globalsecurity.org.
36
this was a simple question, nearly fifteen years into the wars it was still hard to
answer. There were a lot of dead terrorists. There were also a lot of new ones.
As the war against terrorism had progressed in the years since 2001, it had
produced at least this: a huge amount of data. Inside the Pentagon, analysis teams
poured over records of phone calls and text messages. They examined maps of
personal relations, and studied granular statistics about who had been killed and
why and when. All of this information went into targeting computers and databases,
and what became more and more apparent with each passing year was that the
spread of terrorism after 9/11 looked like nothing so much as the spread of a
disease. This was, at first, no great insight. After all, revolutionary ideas, dangerous
ideologies or just plain panic often look like epidemics. But what was shocking as
you studied the Pentagon numbers was the speed of this infection. Disease
epidemics, even the most virulently aggressive ones like Ebola or drug-resistant
tuberculosis, move at the pace of human contact; they can be watched and blocked
and even quarantined. But the contagions associated with terrorism were warpdriven
to a pace well beyond what the soldiers and analysts could match or even
fully monitor. “Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder
we get?’” Rumsfeld asked in 2003. 38
To be constantly behind. This was a commander’s nightmare. Among other things it
was that sense of never quite catching up that had so seared the new generals in the
audience of my speeches. But it seemed to be an inescapable reality. One day a guy
in Baghdad would figure out how to make an Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) –
a sort of pipe bomb that becomes a flying chunk of red-hot steel and can smash
through a tank from 100 yards away – and ten days later the same design of
projectile would take out an official thousands of miles away in rural Afghanistan,
before US troops had had a chance to update their defenses. 39 Behinder. An
American commander would arrive in a new town in Iraq, receive a briefing about
who he could really trust, and discover a week later half of them were showing up
on terrorist call logs. Behinder.
The Americans knew why this was happening. The data made that clear enough. The
proliferation of roadside IEDs, for instance: Obviously there was Al-Qaeda Institute
of Technology, no central IED academy where bomb makers could gather to safely
study trigger design or leisurely swap placement ideas. 40 Such a place would have
been flattened by a Tomahawk or a drone within hours of its discovery. And though
tomes like Tarek Mahmoud el-Sawah’s famous 400-page guide to bomb making
were often picked up on raids, they were out of date. (El-Sawah’s tips included
38 “Is our current situation”: Rumsfeld 2003 memorandum as above
39 One day a guy: Anne Stenersen, “’Bomb-making for Beginners’:Inside an Al-
Qaeda E-Learning Course”, Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol 7. No. 1 (2013)
40 Obviously there was no Al-Qaeda Institute of Technology: Matthew Bolton,
“From minefields to minespace: An archeology of the changing architecture of
autonomous killing in US Army field manuals on landmines, booby traps and IEDs”
Political Geography 46 (2015) p. 47
37
things like using Casio watches as timers.) No, the force at work was buried inside a
network of personal and technological ties, sometimes explicit, other times almost
ethereal in their nature until they were made real in a blast. By 2011 you could peel
back some corner of the web and find sites like Al-Shumukh’s Special Explosives
Course for Beginners, where dark diagrams were uploaded, debated, refined and redrawn,
like some sort of hobbyist site for car bomb geeks 41 . Deeper still, encrypted
chatrooms and messaging services pulsed invisibly, firing off real-time tips (use
aluminum not copper for detonation packs) and suggestions (Marines are easier to
target in the morning). When soldiers said they were fighting a “terrorist network”
they really meant it: the force arrayed against them was a self-repairing, growing,
constantly-learning web.
The Pentagon had, after a few years of confronting this problem, organized a
taskforce to deal at least with the IEDs, the “Joint IED Device Defeat Organization”
(JIEDDO). 42 The group specialized in miraculous engineering. They absolutely lived
up to the can-do, American spirit sound of their name: Gee! Do! Scientists and
warfighters in JIEDDO devised ways to secretly surveil streets so they could fire on
bomb-planting terrorists. They developed slick, blast-deflecting new designs for
cars and pioneered armor that could absorb the hit of repeated surprise blasts. Gee!
Do! was, its motto ran, trying to, “defeat the IED as a weapon of strategic influence.”
That made good sense, of course. It was a bit weird that $100 pipe-bombs were
disrupting America’s ten trillion dollar national interest. But: Defeating the device?
You could sense a limit in the way that mission statement was drawn out. It wasn’t
enough. Beating the devices wasn’t the same as chewing apart the network that
produced them. That was the real target. The devices kept coming with their own
innovative, murderous rush, with the gotta-have-it new pressure we know as the
desire for the latest phone or video game or flat-screen TV. This raised an important
question: Just what did it mean, really, to beat a network? Could you win? Could you
ever get aheader? In fact this is a question that resonates in many parts of life now.
That feeling of constantly slipping behind, one that is tied to the heart of a connected
order, a world where each additional link brings both a rich pipe of new data and a
sense of what you might be missing or not quite understanding. To be aheader
marks, we will see, the nature of a real Seventh Sense. When you can fully feel the
network, understand its logic, then you can touch and use new sources of influence
to reshape your business or your career or solve the problems in the world that
41 By 2011: Stenersen as above
42 The Pentagon had: On the establishement and background of JIEDDO: “The Joint
Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization: DOD’s Fight Against IEDs Today
and Tomorrow,” U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services,
Subcomittee on Oversight & Investigations report November, 2008; “IEDs: the
home-made bombs that changed modern war,”, IISS Strategic Comments Volume 18,
Issue 5, 2012. Also LTC Richard F. Ellis, USA, Maj Richard D. Rogers, USAF. LCDR
Bryan M. Cochran, USN, “Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization
(JIEDDO): Tactical Successes Mired in Organizational Chaos; Roadblock in the
Counter-IED Fight” Submitted Joint Forces Staff College, March 2007
38
bother you most. The war-or-peace dilemmas of foreign policy are an essential case
– when they go wrong, they hammer all of us. And we can see in the ripples of global
power ideas that are of use in nearly any sphere. How, for instance, to fight a
network. The struggle of JIEDDO is, in a sense, similar to something all of us face
now: Old vs. new. In any event, in the case of the IEDs, here was the most powerful
nation in human history, backed by hypersonic missiles, always-on radars, and
endless jet fuel that found itself unable to stop a group of half-educated and
promiscuously backwards terrorists. You had to ask: What was wrong? And did the
failure suggest something even deeper about the position of the dominant national
power of the era? About the nature of our age?
3.
A few days before Christmas of December of 1787, Thomas Jefferson sat down in
Paris to write a letter to James Madison. 43 Madison was on the other side of the
Atlantic, in Philadelphia, and struggling with refinements to the new American
constitution, which had been drafted in the spring and summer just passed. The two
men were frequent correspondents. They wrote to each other with an easy
familiarity, revolutionary to revolutionary. Jefferson was then 44, and had settled
hungrily into his role as the American minister in France, “violently smitten,” as he
wrote, by the charms of The Continent 44 . Madison was 36, twenty years removed
from the election of 1808 that would elevate him to the Presidency as Jefferson’s
successor. Madison would become, in a sense, America’s first “Foreign Policy”
President, prosecuting the war of 1812 and negotiating with France for the
Louisiana Purchase. He was known already, in 1787, as “The Father of the
Constitution.”
Jefferson begins his letter with a few of the charming literary asides we expect from
him: He asks Madison about some nuns he wants to help teach his children, inquires
after about a packet of carefully chosen South Carolina rice that has gone missing in
the oceanic post, delaying his plans to impress French palates with an American
crop. But then Jefferson turns to what he knows must be on Madison’s mind, the
new constitution. “I like much the general idea of framing a government which
should go on of itself peaceably,” he says, admiring the elegant balance that emerges
so carefully from the pages of the document. The American constitution, Jefferson
felt, reflected political arrangements new in the history of human governance,
between people and power, between states and the center, between agriculture and
commerce. He is, he says, “capitaved” by the details of what he has seen.
43 A few days before Christmas: Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, The
Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison, 1776-1826, (New York: Norton, 1995) Vol 1. pp, 457-459
44 Jefferson was then 44: Thomas Jefferson and Douglas L. Wilson. Jefferson Abroad.
Modern Library ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1999) letter to Madame de Tesse,
20 March 1787
39
Such a system, Jefferson wrote, was particularly appealing to him because it
contrasted so sharply with the violent shearing of daily life then underway all
around him in Europe. “France, with all its despotism, and two or three hundred
thousand men always in arms, has had three insurrections in the three years I have
been here,” he marvels. In fact, France’s revolutionary age was only just beginning.
The fall of the Bastille was 18 months away; the flight and death of the King five
years off. Paris would soon see a time when one riot a year felt like peace. You can’t
miss in Jefferson’s letter, and in the others he exchanged with Madison that winter
and the following spring, his instinct that the world was changing, that it was being
riven by urgent new forces, and that America must be positioned for the fresh order
both internally and in her foreign policy. Jefferson knows what this new age
demands – liberty – and in that spirit he fires off suggestions for Madison. It is in this
December, 1787 letter that he remarks that he “does not like” the absence of a “bill
of rights”, a hint that led to an adjustment of historic import.
It is possible to regard the transformations of politics, economics and military affairs
over the past centuries, the sorts of bold remakings that tore apart places like the
Bastille or built up instruments like the American Constitution, as emerging from a
few crucial periods, the sorts of historic turns that mark moments when power
makes an epochal shift. It is striking how, in passing through these periods of
unthinkable change, America has benefited so much, so fully. The country was, to
begin with, born out of the social and political revolutions of the 18 th century. The
national liberation that pulled Jefferson from his Virginia farm and into politics was
the first of the great, revolutionary movements that convulsed and fractured a
dozen European powers. France followed America, as did Germany and Italy and
soon most of the continent. “The boisterious sea of liberty,” Jefferson called the new
political order 45 . It required a strong stomach. Tempests of accumulated social
pressures – the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution – had
passed over one ancien regieme after another like powerful waves. America, begun
on fresh land and with new ideas inked onto clean paper, had a natural advantage in
the situation of her birth. “I think our government,” Jefferson concluded in his letter
to Madison, “will remain virtuous for many centuries.”
A second transformation of global order began in the middle of the 19 th Century, as
Jefferson and Madison’s age ended. Their period had largely been one of internal
revolutions, as the nations of Europe realigned their domestic orders. What came
next were furious contests between these countries. We might think of this new
period as starting with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and as running, with
increasing violence, through to the summer of 1945 and the end of World War Two.
In this era, Europe’s statesmen struggled from one tragically collapsed balance to
another. The demands of industry and nationalism and ideology and economy could
only be reconciled, it seemed, by war, as if it was absolutely necessary to devour the
old buildings and the young men before a new order could settle in. The scale of this
45 “The bousterious sea of liberty”: Thomas Jefferson to Philip Mazzei, The Papers
of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 29: 1 March 1796 to 31 December 1797 (Princeton
University Press, 2002), 81-3
40
violence, like the scale of the industry that produced it, defied anything even the
wisest minds could foresee. Eventually the entire world was pulled into the fire. “In
the autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes,” the
economist John Maynard Keynes wrote after the Paris Peace Conference settled The
Great War, dimly aware that an even deader season lay somewhere in the future in
the form of another war 46 . During this murderous 75 year run, in the reviving of
European and then global fortunes, America played a decisive if reluctant role. As in
that first period, she emerged richer, more central, and more modern.
A third struggle, the Cold War, immediately followed the end of this second period.
This contest was intensely material and as ideological as any conflict in hundreds of
years. It represented a struggle at the level of the most fundamental question of
politics: How should life be lived? Two totalizing, uncompromising worldviews were
placed in opposition. This 45-year struggle occurred under the threat of nuclear
disaster, which gave it an aspect new in human history, the potential for complete
destruction. It was possible to find sober-minded theorists pondering problems like
this one: “Let us assume that for 10 billion dollars one could build a device whose
function is to destroy the earth,” Herman Kahn wrote in the 1960s, with a spirit
typical of his age in his slick, sickly worrisome masterpiece On Thermonuclear
War 47 . Yet in this period too, over time, America found herself in an axial role, first
carrying one end of the risky fight and then, at the conflict’s surprising and jubilant
conclusion in 1989, discovering the country was in a position of unprecedented,
unchallenged power. As with the two earlier shifts, this one had brought with it an
arrangement nearly ideally tuned, yet again, to America’s advantages.
I mention all this here because while it may be fashionable to speak of the period
just passed as the “American Century” – and to wonder whose century comes next,
the reality is that for two and a half centuries, through some of the most violent and
wonderful changes in human history, America has had a remarkable run 48 . A senior
American military official once asked me, a week or so before he sat with the
Chinese President, how best to begin his remarks. “You might say,” I suggested, “that
America respects what China has done in the last thirty years. To have brought 400
million people out of poverty as Beijing has done is an historic accomplishment. But
he must understand that America, particularly in the last intense century, has paid
in nearly countless dollars and in the cost of hundreds of thousands of American
lives, to establish an order that has benefited billions. The scale of this
accomplishment is, by a great measure, historic.” America has been an emblematic,
profound force. It has been a country tuned exactly to the needs of her age. Three
times over. Inevitably, the world now asks: Can this continue?
46 Eventually the entire world: John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences
of the Peace in The Essential Keynes (Boston: Penguin Classics, 2015)
47 It was possible: Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1960)
48 I mention all this: Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1995. See chapter one, and Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (TK
London, 1988)
41
4.
Today the world is entering a new era of revolution. The fourth wave of fresh,
turbulent dynamics to confront America since Jefferson gamely predicted those
centuries of virtuous prosperity back in that 1787 letter to Madison. Driven by
incredible technological shifts and their economic, military and social implications,
new forces are beginning to tear into the established global order. Among the most
fundamental puzzles now is the problem of an American national mission. What
does America seek to achieve in the world? And how? On what basis will the United
States secure the chance to continue “peaceably”, as Jefferson would have it?
Because the country plays such a central role, these questions’ answers will affect
the calculations of every nation, of every new force yearning for influence. They
represent the crucial background against which we will all live, build businesses,
travel and learn. You might feel, sitting in Silicon Valley or Iowa, that such shifts
don’t matter to you now, but the cold truth is that the international system is
unlikely to be arranged, in two or three decades’ time, along the lines that bind it
now. Too many violent forces are at work. But must this be a disaster? The
technological demands of our age are forcing a new sensibility everywhere.
Research labs, medicine, science, finance and the arts are all hunting now for a new
outlook. The need for a fresh perspective is also reflected in the biggest of all
historical questions, the one that will decide if we live in an era of peace or one of
fear, uncertainty and tragedy: How is the international system to be ordered?
The idea that the stability of the world system might honestly be at stake right now
feels incredible to the generations of Americans born after World War II. A struggle
for global order? Real, sharp, bloody nation-imperiling violence? Though we know
such traps are a recurring feature of human history, we have been mostly numbed
and reassured by the passing of optimistic, fast and prosperous decades. We know
mostly a blur of IPOs, of rising real estate prices, and confident growth out of every
crisis in our memory. Survival and stability have been, fortunately, the least of the
national concerns. The sly aside of Jules Jusserand, the French Ambassador to
Washington for 20 years in the last century, about America’s position in the world
pretty much summed up our views: “On the north she had a weak neighbor; on the
south, another weak neighbor; on the east, fish, and on the west, fish.” 49 Most
Americans now alive grew up relying on the durable institutions and ideas and
structures built by the World War Two generation. We ride on their roads, fly into
their airports, and use the schools and media they built. We absorbed their habits of
consumption, home ownership, optimism and energy. This inheritance produced an
historic level of prosperity. It inspired other nations. And – along with those fathoms
of fish and friendly neighbors – it assured a position of real world leadership. Since
the end of the World Wars, America has fought six expensive smaller wars and lost
49 The sly aside: Jules Jusserand quoted in George C. Herring, From Colony to
Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008), 6
42
five. This record appeared to have had little impact on the nation’s dominant global
position; it did little to unnerve a comfortable sense of national destiny.
Much of our current confidence can be measured by the astonishing degree to which
we embrace the scrambling of even the most elemental parts of our lives, from how
we bank to how we drive. Most societies in the past were largely terrified of
disruption. If you had arrived in prosperous 17 th century Holland and proposed to
“disrupt agriculture,” or radically change people’s banking habits, you would have
been lynched. Our age is different. Many of the most unsettling forces in our world
are ones we encourage, feed and push along. If I had said to you a decade ago – “I’m
going to record all of your movements so you can spend less time in traffic.” – is that
really a deal you would have accepted? But if you use a GPS mapping system on your
phone, you have. That Orwell’s sick prognostication of technocratic life would be
one you’d embrace? That it would describe a desireable feature of network life?
“You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that
every sound you made was overheard, and … every movement scrutinized.” 50 If I
had told you we were going to build a world wide high-speed data system that
would, as a side effect, make it simple for children in London to connect with, learn
from and then join terrorists in Syria – would you have thought that wise?
The optimistic bumper sticker of our age – that any disruption is good disruption –
marks a wonderful feature of the American character. It is, perhaps, to be expected
of a nation built by immigrants who overturned their own lives in the hopes of
something better. To pull up and leave home for a land where you did not speak the
language, knew little of the culture, and faced a blank sheet of the future, demanded
faith. You had to believe too: Any disruption is good disruption. But no nation, even
the most heroically hopeful, is immune from the forces of history. Edmund Burke’s
old line, that “every revolution contains within it the seeds of evil,” runs like a
counterpoint through the hopeful music of the age now. America’s remarkable spirit
does not make the demand for a national outlook, for an American grand strategy,
any less real. We’re starting to be aware of just how dangerous this age can really
be. In many ways, our very confidence and sometimes blindly certain feeling of
destiny probably makes it even more essential that we have a sense, as we rest in
Silicon Valley or Iowa or wherever, of where we are going, and why.
The phrase “grand strategy” is one that carries a particular meaning when we think
about problems of global balance. It means the way in which all of a nation’s
powerful tools of economics, finance, ideology, politics, and other resources can be
used, together, in the service of security and prosperity. 51 To get the terms right, we
50 “You had to live”: George Orwell, 1984, Signet Classic Edition (New York: Signet
Press, 1961), 3
51 The phrase: For a good general introduction to the problems of grand strategy
B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, (New York: Faber & Faber, 1967); Paul Kennedy, ed.,
Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991);
Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987); Peter Paret with Gordon A. Craig
43
usually talk about “tactical”, “operational” and “strategic” levels as we watch the
gears of history churning away in war and peace. The “tactical” level is the most
practical. It’s the choice to use machine guns instead of tanks to secure a street in
Kabul, for instance, or to buy up gold for a central bank or permit high-frequency
stock trading. Tactics are where policy decisions crunch into reality. The most brutal
shocks are first felt tactically: roadside bombs or mis-designed, crashing computer
code.
A level above the problem of tactics sits the question of operations. It’s here where
decisions are made about just how various levers of power might best be moved.
Should we send bombers to slow Iranian proliferation or rely on cyber attacks? Will
tax dollars fix our infrastructure faster than tolls? Macarthur’s landing by surprise in
Incheon on the morning of September 15, 1950, Operation Chromite, was an
operational decision. “Within five hours, 40,000 men would act boldly, in the hope
that 100,000 others manning the defense lines of South Korea would not die," he
thought before the battle. “I alone was responsible for tomorrow, and if I failed, the
dreadful results would rest on judgment day against my soul.” 52
Policy gets implemented through operations. It is the level where clever bureaucrats
and parasitic office politicians prey, where they can most easily undermine the
ambitions of visionaries. But it is also the place where inspiration works on the will
and passion of companies or armies or research labs. Server farms, data mining
algorithms, trade treaties—these are the operational chessboards of our era.
Operations is where the bolt tightening for revolutionary change occurs. It is
intense, relentless operations that ensure stability in the face of shock or growth or
collapse. “The exploding popularity of Internet services has created a new class of
computing systems that we have named warehouse-scale computers,” the Google
data engineers Luiz Andre Barosso and Urs Holzle wrote in famous, revolutionary
paper several years ago as they described the operational revolution that lets
Google serve terabytes of data, instantly, every day. 53 The massive data centers they
had built, they realized, are so large that they are nothing less than computers that
are the size of massive buildings. Solar fields are their power supply; entire rivers
are their cooling tubes. And they enable nothing less than magic: instant knowledge,
connection to distant lands, a constant picture of what humanity knows. This is the
growing, heroic scale of operations now.�
Above the operational and tactical levels is what we call the strategic dimension. It is
here where overall design is considered and moved. Without it, operations and
tactics are incoherent. Strategy imagines how whole structures like nations or
and Felix Gilbert, eds., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear
Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986) and Sun Tzu, “The Art of
War”, Filiquarian (1986)
52 “Within five hours”: Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscenes (Naval Institute Press,
1964), 354
53 “The exploding popularity”: Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle, The Data-Center
as a Computer (San Rafael: Morgan & Claypool, 2009)
44
corporations might be directed in the service of really ambitious goals: European
peace or the fiber-speed transformation of telecommunications or billion-user
financial grids. It’s thin air up at this level, honestly, by which I mean that at these
elevated heights you see the most ambitious athletes of human power at work: The
maniacal CEO, the egotistical statesman, the mad dictator. Hundreds of millions of
lives are in play; even more in some cases. By a “grand strategy” we mean the very
peak of this sort of consideration. It represents, in the world of global affairs, the
construction of a strategic idea that suggests how military, diplomacy, markets, and
politics might be harnessed, firmly, in service of a singular aim. Grand strategy is a
basic stance towards the world. If it works, it liberates creativity and national
energy. It sets a clear direction 54 . It protects against the steep price of surprise.
Grand strategy holds, in a single concept, the nature of their age and our plans to use
that nature for the aims – security, prosperity – that gird a nation’s life and decide
its future. Like it or not, we all live under the umbrella raised by grand strategic
choices.
“Containment” of the Cold War period, “Balance of Power” from Europe’s 19 th
Century Age of Revolutions, or the “Tributary Alliances” that shaped a thousand
years of Chinese power – these were all big, essential organizing grand strategic
concepts. They shaped security decisions for durable empires. Each balanced ideal
aims like freedom or the preservation of dynastic continuity against technological
revolution, economic crisis, ideologies and the numberless other forces that can
crack empires. Each idea reflected the demands of the age, and as a result each tells
us something about power in those eras.
The Chinese strategist General Liu Yazhou observed a few years ago in a widely
circulated essay, perhaps a bit too eagerly, “A major state can lose many battles, but
the only loss that is always fatal is to be defeated in strategy.” 55 There’s something a
bit cold in that line, but it expresses a hard truth. Massiveness and deep
commitment to a particular, flawed view of the world can turn strength to weakness
in a heartbeat. In our connected age this sort of reversal can happen with a
particularly devastating speed. In the past, traditional measures of power – tanks,
airplanes, national wealth – declined or rose as a gradual process. It took years for
Genoa to fund and build an expeditionary force to gut Venice’s Adriatic designs.
Decades passed as Germany built her naval fleet. But in our age, such slower-moving
measures are of limited use. Network systems rise and fall with astonishing speed.
Once-successful firms in technology, companies like Wang or Fairchild
Semiconductor or MySpace, found themselves unseated in months, after years of
growth. New firms can emerge as if from nowhere and erase once cherished
balances, demolish once strong names. Google unseats Britannica. Ride-sharing
firms vaporize taxi medallion economics. “Change or die,” the old computer
54 If it works: Hal Brands, The Promise and Pitfalls of Grand Strategy, (U.S. Army War
College Strategic Studies Institute, August 2012); Jennifer Mitzen, “Illusion or
Intention? Talking Grand Strategy into Existence”, Security Studies, 24:1(2015), 61-
94
55 The Chinese strategist: Liu Yazhou, “Da guoce” on aisixiang.com (2004)��
45
programmer’s line, runs on a very fast clock in a world of constant innovation, and it
applies to nations and ideologies, your habits and mine. Think of General Liu again
for a moment: “A major state can lose many battles.” Those five lost American wars
over the last 50 years weren’t fatal. They wore only a bit on our national pride and
our position because they weren’t strategic losses. But our next errors, which may
come without the firing of a single shot, could be far more costly because of the slick,
strategic slope on which we are now moving. “It is one thing to struggle heroically to
get out of danger,” Liu wrote in another manifesto. “But it’s better to see the danger
before it even begins to sprout.” 56
Six paradoxes trace the immensity of the gaps we now face.
5.
First: We find ourselves confronted, almost daily, with an unnerving mismatch
between our interests and our means. The most powerful nation in human history
finds itself unable to achieve even simple military and diplomatic goals.
Second: A global crisis of faith in our institutions is now under way. No significant
institution, from the US congress to the Euro to your local newspaper, is more
trusted than it was a decade ago. Many of our most essential institutions seem
destined to be victims to the logic of “forced obsolescence” that makes our phones,
our cars and our televisions of ten years ago feel like antiques.
Third: The connected age lets us see and measure, with historic precision, the
problems we face – yet we can do almost nothing about them. Global warming,
wealth inequality, species destruction, nuclear accidents, terror killings – we can see
all of these in rattlingly sharp detail, instantly, miraculously. Watch the Fukishima
reactor meltdown! See BP oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico in HD! The rise and fall of
markets, the moves of distant wars, rivers of refugees appear almost as if we were
tuning into a football game. But we can only watch. “Hey, do something!” we want to
shout as we see financial or ideological or religious chaos spill towards us. But
nothing seems to move; and what does move makes the problems worse. This
impotence of being “just spectators”, works like a nutcracker on the credibility of
the people and institutions we expect to fix these problems.
Fourth: Many new challenges exhibit a worrying non-linearity. Small forces produce
massive effects. One radical teenager, a single mis-placed commodity order, or a few
bad lines of computer code can paralyze an entire system. The scale of this
whiplashing grows every day, because the network itself grows, it turns pindrop
noises into global avalanches. Dangers, accidents, crises were once local. A drought
in California was, largely, a drought in California. A slowdown in China hit Shenzhen
or Shanghai, not South America. Now, as networks overlap and influence each other,
crises cascade at a new, stunning and comprehensive scale. And while we know
56 “It is one thing to struggle”: Liu Yazhou, “Tan junshi gaige yu quojia anquan
wenti”
46
effective foreign policy or politics or economics can’t be improvised, the speed of the
networks now outstrips the velocity of our decisions – even as citizens expect
reactions at the ever-faster pace of their own connection. Think about the speed
with which answers are expected in almost any job; all those pressures are yet more
extreme at the highest levels of government.
Fifth: Though the changes working through the global order depend generally on
innovation rooted in American institutions, corporations and ideas, there is now an
uneasy sense: This order is slipping from American control. Look back just two
decades. Then America stood as the sole superpower, the global leader in finance
and economics and technology – and embracing other nations into rules we’d
written. Today, allies and enemies alike wonder: Is global order is collapsing? At
what speed? And: What comes next?
And, sixth, perhaps obviously to you by now: We don’t know where we’re going –
and our leaders don’t seem to have much of a clue either. Though nations are
capable of adjusting activities at the tactical and operational levels – devising better
drones, sharper monetary policy – we’ve still set no clear strategy. American
negotiations are aimed now at small problems, not the heart of the issues we face. In
what area of our national security today do we appear more confident than a decade
ago? What nation does conduct the confident, creative, energetic an global
negotiations of the sort that mark a power with a clear sense of direction?
Taken as a whole, these six paradoxes represent nothing less than the potential
unbuckling of the greatest power the world has ever seen. And because the whole
world is connected to that power, still more of the system may yet be rattled apart.
We are surrounded today not only by fish, but enmeshed in a world of connective
links that are the tissue of our real power – and a source of danger. A sense of
direction. You have to feel as you look at this rotten, dangerous landscape we’ve
made for ourselves in recent years. We need a sense of direction.
6.
In response to these challenges, America’s leading figures are now proposing a
range of ideas that don’t honestly resonate with much confidence. Really they are
having a debate about if they should use more of the old style of power or less. What
they aren’t doing is grasping the nature of the age. So no clear, imaginative and
coherent picture of where we might head yet exists. In fact, as you’re probably
starting to suspect, the very best ideas of our incumbent figures may yet make the
world more dangerous, may firmly and enthusiastically pull us into connective webs
of danger and waste and mis-calculation they don't see. With our Seventh Sense
we’ll be able to spot and think about many of these dangers in a new, better and
more rational way, free from the blinders of habit, but we should know what the
world looks like to the blind.
Two approaches are predominant among the most respected American elites, who –
as leaders of the leaders of the establishment represent an important group for us as
47
we consider what not to do. The first approach proposes something known
appealingly enough as “Smart Power.” 57 The concept was summarized most sharply
by President Obama in 2014, when he said American policy ought best be guided by
this tight precept: “Don’t do stupid stuff. 58 ” And while it is hard to disagree with this
sort of charming, solipsistic formulation – there’s not a long list of politicians
supporting a strategy of “Do stupid things”? – “Smart Power” is no more a foreign
policy vision than “Good Weather” is a strategy for farming. It suggests in some way
there is no need for a strategy at all. Faced with a problem, just make a smart
decision. “I don't really even need George Kennan right now,” Obama remarked at
one point during his presidency, dismissing the need for a strategist of real stature –
and, by implication, the need for any strategy at all. 59
Such a stance reflects an instinct that the great strategic question of our day – the
future – has pretty well been worked out. In such a view of history, all we need to do
is not screw this up too much. The root of this idea is an absence of a long view of
history and a discomfort I think about the application of cold power. There’s a
misplaced confidence at work here, an assurance that American-style power, our
model of politics and economics, is the best, final and only answer to the question of
how the nations of the world might be best organized. Americans need, in this
telling of history, only patience. The world will catch on. And I suppose that if you
grew up in the United States after World War Two, such a vision of the world
certainly would be consistent with your own experience. The problem is that such a
comfortable posture is at odds with nearly any book of history you might pick up,
from The Peloponnesian Wars to Churchill’s The Hinge of Fate, all of which will
remind you in the most violent terms that liberty and freedom demand struggle and
defense; that epochal changes come whether we want them or not. Also that nations
that look invincible can find themselves nearly unwound in an historical instant.
Great Britain mastered the globe in 1937; three years later she was gasping for air;
three decades later she was an afterthought. “Freedom is the sure possession of
those alone who have the courage to defend it,” Pericles told his Athenian audience
nearly 2500 years ago in as they mourned a full year of war-dead sons and fathers –
and no peace yet in sight. 60 Or, Churchill, famously: “Never, never, never, never give
up.” 61 We should be embarrassed to hold “Don’t do stupid things” against these
mottos.
Admiral Hyman Rickover’s famous advice as he surveyed the nuclear navy he’d built
in the last century has it about right at every level: “To find meaning in life one must
57 The first approach: Joseph S. Nye, Jr, “Get Smart”, Foreign Affairs, July/August
2009
58 The concept was summarized: Jeffrey Goldberg, “Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to
Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS” Atlantic Monthly, Aug 2014
59 “I don’t really even need”: David Remnick, “Going the Distance: On and off the
Road with Barack Obama”, The New Yorker, January 27, 2014
60 “Freedom is the sure possession:”
61 Or Chuchill:
48
be willing to act.” 62 This is as true for nations as it is for each of us. We must be
willing to act. It’s easy to be sympathetic to the desire for less action. Nothing we’ve
done in recent years seems to be working. But, as we’ll see, that’s because we’ve
been using the wrong tools. Our enemies? They are developing the right ones. They
are willing, and eager, to act. To travel the world now is to encounter in nearly every
capital figures who have a different reading of history or the future of the global
order. They see the world not as some ready-to-eat American political order but
rather as a churning, uncertain, urgently worrying vortex. They wonder: What might
we build? They look at America’s global leadership with the hungry eyes of an
Internet startup eyeing an old, unconnected market. “Don’t do stupid things,” is an
invitation for these forces to poke at the world, to take risks, and to remind us that
so much of what later seems brilliant appears stupid or insane when it begins.
In the years since “smart power” became fashionable, another proposition has
emerged from a different group of elite thinkers. It is, in a sense, the flipside of that
strategy-free posture of passivity. It was distilled by a well-regarded cluster of
academic foreign policy specialists in 2012 as America began withdrawing from
Iraq: “Don’t Come Home America!” they called their essay. As they explained, “The
United States’ globe-girding grand strategy is the devil we know. A world with a
disengaged United States is the devil we don’t know.” 63 According to this logic, the
country’s globe-striding posture, while expensive and exhausting and admittedly
inefficient, is a crucial element of our rich national power. Yes, we spend 15% of our
GDP on security activities, but we reap far more in return: Access to the best minds
in the world, a secure life, a culture of open debate and personal liberty.
The problem here is that “Don’t Go Home!” feels, for the most part, like a costly
groping after something to hold onto. Articles and speeches and policy ideas that
flow from this hopeful camp have a shimmering and expensive unreality, one that
American domestic sentiment would be unlikely to support for long and that jostles
against our experience of recent years. Are more aircraft carriers, overseas bases
and jet fighters really the cure for the dangers we face? The ideas of this group have
an appealing simplicity, or maybe I should say an appealing familiarity, because they
echo instincts about power that were once true. The energetic engagement with the
world they suggest is attractive, but America has work to do at home and – we can
all see – the ambitious overseas tasks of recent decades have not, in any event, been
really finished. Instead of a confident, conclusive, “Job well done!” comfort we still
sweat with nervousness. What is coming next? After all the blood and treasure, after
850,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and $3 trillion dollars – we were left with expanded
swamps. Like “Don't do stupid things”, “Don’t Go Home!” tells us little about the
picture of world order that might emerge in the future. (It also tips us to this:
Probably as a general rule no credible grand strategy starts with the word “Don’t”.)
62 Admiral Hyman Rickover: Rickover speech date TK
63 As they explained: Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, William C. Wohlforth,
“Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment” International Security,
Volume 37, Number 3, Winter 2012, pp. 7-51
49
So we should say it coldly: We have, as of yet, no strategy. We have no shared
picture of the world as it might be. You. Me. Our leaders. None of us. And the
experience of other, fast-collapsed empires should way on us. “The struggle to
survive,” the historian John Darwin has written of the British Empire, “was waged in
an age of revolution: a Eurasian revolution that cumulatively (but very quickly)
destroyed almost all the global preconditions on which the British system had
depended since the 1830s.” 64 So in our age. Many of the essential determinants of
American power are being revolutionized by new, connected forces. The world syste
will change in coming years. Our only question is will the changes reduce us as they
once shrunk Britain, or will we draw on them to establish a longer, more durable
system. At the moment, in a time of fascinating explosions of ideas and insights and
connection, the American foreign policy approach is deeply and strangely unplugged
from these risks and possibilities. The world has changed – is changing profoundly –
from the one in which most students and practitioners of international affairs were
educated. And here’s the reality: Nothing can stop this change. The last two decades
have brought massive and persuasive change in so many disciplines. And in foreign
policy? In the consideration of problems of war and peace which, if not handled
properly will rain tragedy on every other effort we might have in mind? Not much
has changed. Except this: A growing sentiment of pessimism that suggests maybe
America can’t hold on. Great powers get one century to rule, the logic goes, and
America’s is now up.
It’s not merely that we lack a “China Strategy” or a “Middle East Strategy”, it’s that
we’ve failed to discern an overall grand strategy that would produce a coherent
answer to the question of what to do about China or the Middle East – to say nothing
of how those forces might be played off another with clever diplomatic harmony like
instruments in a symphony. It is hard to know if this puzzlement represents a failure
of imagination or of nerve. Does it mark arrogance or confusion? Or just an
ignorance of the profound, revolutionary nature of the forces now at work?
Today when leading officials remark that their main concern is a rising China or
revanchist Russia or that we live in a world where, as Secretary of State John Kerry
said, “terrorism is the principal challenge,” they are missing the point. The
fundamental threat to American interests isn’t China or Al Qaeda or Iran. It is the
evolution of the network itself. Constructed of switches, chips, data, code, exploits,
sensors, AI bots, financial instruments, trade, currency and more, the network is
itself a weapons system. Its architecture, a wonderfully humming maze of change
and contagion and instability, determines its terrifying dangers and marks its vast
opportunities 65 . It touches – decisively – each and any particular problem we would
care to name.
64 “The struggle to survive”: John Darwin, The Empire Project, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009) 477
65 Its architecture: For an excellent overview on the politics of contagion, see Tony
D. Sampson, Virality, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)
50
Terrorism, we have to understand, is merely one example of network danger and
power. So is China. And Russia. And these may not even be the most dangerous or
devastating network battles that will take place in our lives. It’s a commonplace to
say now that the international system is in the greatest period of upheval in more
than half a century. But often this sort of remark is accompanied by a list of moving
pieces that seem to be unconnected: China’s rise, the return of Russia, changes in the
Middle East, globalization and then reverse globalization. “Who would have thought
the post Cold War era, which was supposed to be characterized by ‘softpower’ and
economic interdependence would be so violent?” 66 one team of scholars recently
wrote, reflecting the genuine wonderment of many “experts” who failed to predic
the end of the Cold War and then, largely, the nature of what has come after. Who
would have thought? Well, as we’ll see, anyone who understands networks.
Thomas Hobbes – the 16 th century British philosopher long considered an early
master of the analysis of cold, brutal power – once put it simply enough: Nations, he
said, need to be mastered. “During the time men live without a common power to
keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war,” he wrote. “Such
a war as is of every man against every man.” 67 A precondition of peace, for Hobbes,
was that some country or force or tribe decisively grips a region, an empire, even
the globe. “A common power to keep them all in awe,” fulfilled a need for order. In
our connected age, the common, awesome power is already here. It is networks. The
battle now is for and on of this genuinely historic, still curious force. They will be
attacked, throttled, trashed, accelerated, used, upgraded, won and lost and inflicted
on each of us and our security by those with a new sensibility. To feel the world with
a Seventh Sense will reveal a whole new landscape of power; it will permit us to see
the fibers of a new age and then weave them into how we see and think and, finally,
act. That essential, decisive terrain of our new age is, to the “Smart Power” and
“Don’t Come Home” crowd, still largely invisible and, anyhow, incomprehensible.
7.
Just as rivers or mountains or air currents drove commerce and combat in past eras,
networks will strongly, probably decisively, influence the dynamics ahead. Today
you can’t, after all, operate on the rivers or mountains or in the skies or space
without lively, near-instant connection. The space these interlocking networks
occupy represents a new geography. It is growing every day, as if it were a giant new
continent fusing together under the surface of the sea. We are, as the team at Gee!
Do! discovered, moving from a world in which nations battled nations to one in
which nations battle networks. And a world where networks battle networks. In
coming years, networks will surely break nations, as once nations broke each other.
It is linked the systems of trade and economics and biology and data that will create
66 “Who would have thought”: Robert Hutchings and Jeremi Suri, Foreign Policy
Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015) p. 2
67 “During the time”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (Cambridge University Press,
2002) 88,
51
the conditions for the practice of diplomacy in our future and, when that fails, the
landscape for decisive military or economic moves. Mastery of these systems will
provide a rich set of creative ways to increase our security, far more effective than
the unilateral and inconclusive military force we largely turn to now. A sensibility
for networks will unmask developments that look friendly as in fact deeply
dangerous. It will reveal that some of what may appears a threat is in fact an key to
security. But this instinct for seeing differenlty has largely not settled upon our
leaders.
Already the emergence of network power is producing strange collisions. Iran
versus Twitter. The hacking collective Anonymous striking against Mexican drug
lords, terrorists and Russian television. Tor versus the NSA. The use of financial
networks to crack human trafficking webs. Biological surveillance sensors in cites
used to fight disease contagion spreads – a network of machines laid against a
network of bugs. 68 I mean this at nearly every scale. Waves of networked
autonomous armed drones, for instance, may be among the greatest tactical military
threats of the next few decades; the only hope of defense against them will be still
better-enabled, self-thinking and learning defensive meshes, themselves capable of
response at a pace dictated by links of machine learning and communications.
Writing in 1890, the great American historian and admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan,
produced “The Influence of Sea Power upon History” in which he attempted to
convince an age obsessed with land forces of the enduring, decisive power of armed
ocean fleets. Hannibal’s smashing attacks against Rome, Mahan wrote, or Napoleon’s
failure against England – in each case “mastery of the sea rested with the victor.” 69
Our future will bring, almost certainly, a study of the “Influence of Network Power
upon History”. Here is a a line as true in diplomacy as it is in business or politics:
Mastery of networks – the links of data and trade and security information and
finance and others – will rest with the victor.
For the most part, the order the American and European world has been
accustomed to since the Treaties of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War in the
17 th century bottled the power to make large-scale change inside states. Nations
held a monopoly on the use of force, in a sense. They used it. Violent, state on state
struggles were the defining events of global affairs. In such a world, the country with
the most power, the greatest material reserves, the strongest sense of national
destiny, also enjoyed the most security – and the most options. A few hundred
thousand British imperial troops overmastered India in this fashion. And a handful
of really powerful nations struggled over centuries for dominance of the whole
system. Statesmen sought, and even occasionally achieved, temporary balances
between the lurching and violent resets of wars that erupted like a sort of pressure-
68 Biological surveliance: The foundational text of network battle thinking is John
Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime,
and Militancy (Santa Monica: RAND, 2001). For a discussion of the biological issues,
see Eugene Thacker, “Living Dead Networks”, in Fiberculture Journal No. 4 (2005)
69 Hanibal’s smashing attacks: Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History
1660-1783 (Boston: Little, Broan & Co. 1890), iv
52
release valve for the over-inflated ambitions, nationalism, and hatreds that steamed
up between nations.
On our modern networked systems, however, power is different. On fast connected
webs of nearly any sort, tiny forces applied can have immense impacts that leap
from one domain to another. One erroneous commodity trade can snap-scramble a
marketplace – and then tip a bucket of chaos into nations, companies and trading
firms, One hacker, sneaking into the back-door of a computer network, can – to us a
term of art – “brick” a nation’s expensive security systems into devices as lively as a
doorstop: STUXNET spinning Iran’s centrifuges into planned madness, for
instance. 70 Here’s the essential, dangerous insight about safety in a connected world:
It once required a big industrial force to defeat another big industrial force. Such
grinding victories required time. They could be prepared for. They could be avoided,
even. No more. Even the most formidable physical structures of our world –
militaries, markets, governments – can be rendered swiftly immobile by virtual
attacks on their connected nerve systems. 71 These strikes – or, in some cases, these
accidents – baffle and then paralyze at network speed, by which I mean less time
than it took you to read this sentence. When the American national security strategy
speaks of a “long struggle” against terrorism or a rising China, it doesn’t
acknowledge how fast some of the turns ahead may be. 72 Yes, a decades-long battle
for control of essential networks and platforms and protocols lingers ahead. But I
fear some of the changes ahead will whiplash us with their speed. Generals in World
War One lamented that the whole war might have been prevented if diplomatic
communication had been conducted at the stately speed of the horse-carried
message. It was the damn velocity of the telegraph that baffled the judgment of
statesmen, they claimed. Figures whose every instinct runs at a pace far slower than
what the age demands were then – and are now – a menace.
The great 20 th Century theorist of political realism, Hans Morgenthau, once referred
to nation states as “blind and potent monsters.” 73 He felt a sort of nervous evil as he
studied the moves countries made on the stage of world history. Some of this unease
was surely a result of his own life, marked by a lucky escape from Germany in 1937,
as Hitler was finally perfecting a national machine of lurid and murderous potency. I
suspect Morgenthau would have been terrified now by the always-on, all-seeing
connected mesh that encloses us. Connected forces move at times like a potent and
capricious monster too, smashing businesses or national economies or ecosystems
70 One hacker: David Raymond, Tom Cross, Gregory Conti, Robert Fanelli, “A
Control Measure Framework to Limit Collateral Damage and Propagation of Cyber
Weapons”, Proceedings 5th International Conference on Cyber Conflict (NATO CCD
COE Publications, Tallinn 2013).
71 Even the most formidable: Daniel Geer, “Heartbleed as Metaphor”, Lawfare Blog
April 21, 2014
72 When the American: See 2014 US National Security Strategy
73 The great 20 th Century theorist: Hans Morgenthau, “The State of Political
Science,” Politics in the Twentieth Century Vol. 1, (Chicago:University of Chicago
Press, YEAR HERE)
53
with little useful warning, and anyhow with a merciless and unstoppable efficiency.
Connected, surprising terrorism has cost trillions to fight; linked-up network
businesses have demolished, surely and even gladly, trillions of dollars of old profit
sources with their cold, clicking efficiency. Skype blitzes hundreds of billions of
dollars of long distance telephone profits, for instance. And replaces it with free.
Amazon, in the space of a few years, cripples marketplace ideas built at the cost of
trillions of dollars.
The world we’re entering into now, one of constant, sensor-filled data streams that
give us a real-time feeling for everything from the temperature of your car before
you get in to the pace of your heart as you sleep, means the potent, network forces
of our day are not “blind” as Morgenthau’s states were, but gifted with an exactness
of vision. They see everything, always, more than we or our leaders do. They see it
constantly. They never forget. Networks seem to have an irresistible and amazing
energy that impels them to find and then exploit pin-holes. Think of Al-Qaeda coolly
regarding the American airline network in 2000, for instance. Or rising powers now
poking at weaknesses in the international order that we’ve not yet begun to
consider, let alone patch up. Whether confronting mobs of network-organized
terrorists or cascades of computer error, we often discover the unnerving truth that
on these connected systems there is no plug to pull.
Networks of one sort or another are hardly new in international affairs, even if the
sheer scale and speed of our modern systems is totally, revolutionarily fresh. The
spiderwebbed tendrils of the Ganges River, for instance were a network that fed the
Mughal Empire in the 16 th and 17 th centuries. 74 The Yangtze and the Yellow and the
Mekong river systems each marked out vital webs that carried wealth and
knowledge into a half-dozen, spectacularly rich Chinese dynasties. Egypt and
Mesopotamia developed great powers that endured for centuries along the Nile and
the Euphrates. Later, networks of trade overlaid the Mediterranean, which became
the heart of the wealthy Carthaginian, Roman and Byzantine empires. And the
greatest geographical empire in history, Great Britain, was nothing if not a network
power, run on sea lines. Waterways, for centuries, pulsed with power. They were
vital for trade, essential in war and crucial for national freedom.
Network empires emerged on land too, assembled from connected webs of politics,
of silk and tobacco and gold, or from shared religious passions. These sorts of
networks, sometimes as thin as the trail of a single adventurer like Marco Polo,
carried promises of prosperity (and intimations of violence) as they spread. Baron
Antoin-Henry Jomini, Napoleon’s inspired tactical accomplice, was onto something
when he remarked that it was the interior, networked lines of communication and
logistics that had decided and delivered victory for history’s great empires.
“Methods change,” Jomini observed, “but principles are unchanging.” The skeins of
links running inside national war machines were as essential for security as any
74 The spiderwebbed tendrils: Peter Turchin, “A theory for the formation of large
agrarian empires”; Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois, and Brian Slack, The
Geography of Transport Systems Routledge 2006 p. 10-15
54
ability to strike out – a lesson Jomini and Napeoleon expensively re-learned at the
end of their gasping supply lines in Russia in the winter of 1807. 75 In our own day,
jet-meshed networks, commercial webs, satellite links and finance platforms span
the omnipresent routes of America’s global reach. So as we consider the information
networks evolving now: the growing connected world that is the largest, fastest,
most comprehensive network in history, we should ask ourselves the question
Jomini might have raised: Will an even greater empire be based on control of
information-powered networks?
This new world of connectivity won’t immediately devour the old. In fact, the classic
and the revolutionary will contend for some time, side by side. Cyberweapons and
nuclear ones in a strange dance, for instance: Imagine that you’re ruling a country
with no hope of building your own platforms for medicine, finance, information or
security. 76 You will be, as a result, uneasily and permanently dependent on the
nations or groups that do control these elemental, algorithmic and efficient tools. If
you’re running a medium-sized country there’s no chance your own IT industry can
develop a search engine with the reach and fluency of Google; or a cybersecurity
system with the omnipresence of some Chinese database. Might this make you more
eager for nuclear weapons? For an atomic hedge against the day you find yourself
threatened with national unplugging? Networks, we’ll discover, don’t lift us above
the old conflicts so much as they complicate them. They fill the old hatreds with new
fidelity; sharpen the old grudges and make it easier than ever to slap at the world
when you’re angry. While it is tempting to say that we’ve moved from a world of
“cold weapons” like planes and tanks to a world of “hot weapons” where digital light
pulses and biological infections will prevail, really it is the strange blending of these
cold and hot systems that is so interesting, so dangerous. Ever more precise
exploding iron bombs, made from a fusion of GPS data and TNT, will be a part of our
future, as will pathogens tuned by computer and delivered according to network
intelligence about where a contagion might best be started.
Orwell’s well-worn line – “The history of civilization is largely the history of
weapons” – settles uneasily onto a networked world. 77 The networks are, so clearly
already, becoming weaponized. And a great strategist should know and use the
materials of his day. Napoleon had a gunpowder-burn familiarity with his artillery;
Mao possessed a wizened guerilla sensibility. The electric, shifting and shocking
materials of our global networks are going to be used in pursuit of power anyhow,
so we had best consider how to become fluent with their real nature, how turn them
to our advantage – and ideally find a way to use them to so profoundly change the
rules of conflict that hurried, unconsidered and useless reaction will be all our
enemies can manage. Over the centuries shifts in power and wealth were achieved
75 The skeins: John Arquilla and Ryan Nomura “Three Wars of Ideas about the Idea
of War,” Comparative Strategy, 34:2 (2015), 186
76 Cyberweapons: Mary Kaldor, “In Defence of New Wars,” Stability, 2(1) 2013: 4,
pp. 1-16,
77 Orwell’s well-worn line: George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb” in George
Orwell: In Front of Your Nose, 1946-1950. (Nonpareil Books 2000) 7
55
by armies, by naval and air attacks. Now it is the ownership and use of connection,
of networks and machine intelligence that will deliver real, perhaps even final,
leverage.
If the strategic aim of Europe’s leaders after Napoleon’s violent emergence and
defeat was to restore a balance of power, if America’s grand strategic purpose after
World War Two was the containment of the USSR and her totalizing ideologies,
nations now must try for positions of security and for command during the uneasy
transition ahead. The wellbeing of the whole system becomes a concern; entities,
protocols and ideas that threaten the system’s health are the most urgent dangers,
even as they represent seats of potentially historic power. We should ask: How is it
that international cooperation occurs in an age of connection? Will it happen
through slow, incremental movement? In sudden bursts? In fact, the routes to
cooperation are rarely easy in any age. They involve overcoming old bureaucratic
ideas, deeply held instincts of national interest, broken and humid and sometimes
murderous psychological needs – all while accepting a new picture of power – and
fresh risks and responsibilities. Our problem now, even in the face of these snapping
traps, is to define a clear vision of our future security – and then to make a path to
get there. No route exists today. “Originally, there were no roads in the world,” the
Chinese writer Lu Xun observed in a famous story at the start of the last century. “It
is only by walking on them that paths are made.” 78 Ours is an age of first steps.
The social scientists John Padgett and Walter Powell, after considering examples of
epochal, collapsing change in political and biological systems of all sorts –
Renaissance finance markets, coral reefs, innovation clusters, and others – summed
up their conclusions in a little koan-like package of logic: “In the short run, actors
create relations. In the long run, relations create actors.” 79 The nouns we worry
about now, and the ones we hope for, take their meaning and their risk and energy
from relations. Your genome connected is different and more hopeful than it is
alone, unplugged, slipping into cancer. This idea that relations create actors is a
powerful basis for a new, enduring – even decent – grand strategy for an age of
revolutionary connection. It should also offer a check against some of our horrible
miscalculations: America invaded Iraq, for instance, intending to replace one state
with another. Instead we replaced a state with a network – and not one that we
controlled. That web still resists our old habits of control. Relations of family and
faith and clan link and activate murderous, relentless actors. The super power had
all the nouns: Tanks, planes, soldiers, money. But we did not have the networks. We
could not create relations. No move of ours held for long. We were like the team
JIEEDO – trying to defeat the wrong thing entirely.
78 “Originally, there were no roads”: Lu Xun, “My Old Home” in Diary of a Madman
and Other Stories Trans. William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1990.) 89–100, though the translation of the line here is my own.
79 “In the short run”: John F. Padgett and Walter W. Powell, ”The Problem of
Emergence” in The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, Princeton University
Press, 2012
56
As a start let’s at least fix the weird language of our current foreign policy world: We
don’t live in what they like to call a “Post Cold War” era anymore. (Who, after all,
called the Enlightenment the “post-Feudal era”?) We live in what is probably best
called “The Age of Network Power.” A world of connection is responding to a
powerful logic of its own. It builds new platforms, sometimes defined by users or by
technology or by the way in which currency or weapons move. Melvin Conway’s
deep engineering insight was right, the design of networks does affect our real
world. Even now it is shuffling us into “convergence” and “divergence” clubs. What
is next is the struggle to decide who is in which club. What businesses will win?
What technologies? Which ideas? Our only chance will be to learn a new instinct for
just how power moves on networks. And it’s to this that we will turn now.
57
Part Two: The Seventh Sense
58
Chapter Four: The Jaws of Connection
In which the Seventh Sense explains the strange, new way power behaves on networks .
1.
The Envoy, Frank Wisner Jr., had gotten the phone call on a Thursday, late in the
afternoon, and within a few hours he was on a plane. It was an unusual request from
the White House and from the State Department – and though he was a man who
had lived a life of many unusual requests, he knew that this one had a certain
significance, a weight you might say, if you were the sort of man who measured such
things in human lives.
The Envoy was such a man. His father, Frank Wisner Sr., had been one too. Senior
was one of the most famous and effective of America’s Cold War spies. He’d run the
Office of Special Services in Southern Europe during World War Two and then built
operations for the Central Intelligence Agency in the years after. He was a tough
man, from a generation of Americans that had fought and won wars and who,
unquestioningly, weighed their actions in human lives. As a spy in Romania in 1940,
Wisner Sr. had watched the Red Army, like some sort of sick machine, round up and
then execute scores of his friends. The course of his life was set. “Wisner landed like
a dynamo,” William Colby – a future CIA director who worked for Senior – observed.
“He started operating in the atmosphere of an order of the Knights of Templar, to
save Western freedom from Communist darkness—and war.” 80
Frank Wisner Jr., was known too as a dynamo. He was 72 in the winter of 2011
when the White House called. He’d had already a storied career as a diplomat,
following a rough trace of his father’s man-on-a-mission trajectory, also with a bit of
that secretive Knights of Templar feeling: Princeton, Vietnam, the Philippines, the
halls of the State Department in Foggy Bottom. Wisner had become the first phone
call for some of America’s leading corporate figures when they found themselves
billions of dollars backwards in some strange land, even as he’d remained closely in
touch with the most explosive policy puzzles. Iran. North Korea. He was a voluble
and opinionated man, but somehow also discreet, exact and patient. The
combination made him at once totally reliable and a great deal of fun. He had been,
over the years, a warm and personable figure in my own life, the sort of man who
took the long view of any problem, who lay his hand comfortably on your knee with
reassurance when some promise came undone and threatened a bit of chaos. He
was like an ideogram of reliability: Bukly, bald, coiled, loyal. He’d seen it all, you felt.
Frank Wisner Jr. had served as Ambassador to Egypt for half-a-decade in the 1980s.
Almost inevitably, his careful manner and easy charm led him into a close
relationship with Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president. Mubarak was an urbane
former fighter pilot who had come to sudden and surprising power after the
80 “Wisner landed”: William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York
1978), 73
59
assassination of Anwar Sadat on a calm afternoon in October 1981. Wisner arrived a
few years later. Though not quite a friend, Wisner had cultivated a directness at
least, with Mubarak. He’d become a mirror in which the Egyptian president might
see how different stances towards America or Israel would appear to the rest of the
world. So when, in the winter of 2011, the White House saw Mubarak facing waves
of unimagined protest, at a moment when it looked like the Egyptian president
would become the latest head of state to topple amidst the accelerating discontent
that would be known as the Arab Spring, they sent Wisner with a message for
Mubarak: No killing – and it is time for you to retire.
Wisner later recalled the tension of Cairo when he arrived. The city felt nervous in a
way he’d not seen before. He landed in the early morning and went almost
immediately to see the President. The situation would be brought back to normal,
Mubarak assured Wisner. Soon. He’d fired most of his cabinet a few days earlier. He
had promised reform, and had begun studying what might be done first, and how
soon it might be carefully attempted. He hinted to Wisner that the rumored
transition of power to his son Gamal was not, after all, inevitable. But, Mubarak said,
he wasn’t going anywhere just now.
Wisner tried another tack: He asked if the President would like to leave the country.
Maybe a trip for medical treatment? Mubarak dismissed the idea. He’d seen worse,
he reminded Wisner. Mubarak had been sitting inches away from Sadat on that
fateful October day in 1981. He himself had survived six assassination attempts. In
fact, he said he intended to go on television again that very evening. He would speak
directly to the protestors. He would tell them and the Egyptian people of his plans
for reform and for a gradual transition of power. He would remind them of the
greatness of their national spirit. He would evoke the immensity of their ancient
history. And he would be sure they understood that he would stay, he would die on
Egyptian soil. You can tell that to the White House too, Mubarak told Wisner. He
vouchsafed, at the end of their talk, at least some of the assurances the envoy had
come to collect: No violence. A graceful departure at some point. Elections, even. But
all on his timetable.
Around Mubarak in those days, Wisner recalled, he saw bafflement. Resolution
admixed with surprise. These men in that Egyptian power structure, all wealthy and
comfortable and perfectly secure, had thought their places impregnable. They were,
after all, the thin human line between the modern world and the boiling mad Islamic
fundamentalists who hungered to rule the country. They’d arrested the usual
dissidents, closed down the normal channels, checked with their informants.
Nothing. The old, reliable vents for unrest hadn’t worked. The pressures grew. It
was perhaps easy to understand why they thought they’d survive. They’d never
failed. Mubarak had been president for 30 years. For now, at least, the syllogistic
logic fluttering through the President’s own arguments reassured them: Egypt
wants stability. Only I can deliver stability. Therefore, Egypt wants me.
Wisner left the Presidential Palace. He reported what he’d learned back to
Washington and, work done, headed to the airport. That evening he found himself
60
waiting for his flight in front of a TV in the crapped-out lobby of an old hotel on the
road out of town, watching Mubarak’s promised speech. The President projected
total confidence on screen. This was the Mubarak Wisner had known in the 1980s.
There had always been a barreling self-assurance about the man; it was alive in him
now, facing the unthinkable. Ruggedly handsome and perfectly controlled. You could
almost believe, as Wisner did for a moment, “This was a great man who had led a
country through difficult times. He will endure.” Six assassination attempts. Mubarak
had always been a survivor.
Yet as he watched, Wisner knew the challenge the great man faced. Did Mubarak, he
wondered? Did he even understand what was happening around him? That he was
giving the speech on television, in the face of this strange revolutionary movement
that was unfolding on the smart phones of Cairo as much as on its streets, was a
subtle admission: Old power struggles to handle new rules. Wisner had seen tapes
of the earlier speeches, the ones intended to calm the crowds which had in fact
inflamed them further. He knew just how fine the edge Mubarak now paced.
Mubarak needed to address the protestors on their own level. He needed to show he
understood. There was only one thing he must not do, Wisner thought as he
watched. He must not address the protesters paternalistically, as a father might
speak to a child. On the screen in front of him, Mubarak continued in his steady,
slightly strident voice. “I am speaking to you all from the heart,” he said. “A speech
from a father to his sons and daughters.”
Two weeks later, Mubarak was gone.
Imagine, for a moment, you are Mubarak – or really any successful early 21 st century
autocrat. You’ve managed several decades of control in your Middle Eastern, North
African or Asian country. Perhaps you’ve inherited your position from your father or
an uncle. They’ve taught you about power. Keep it tightly controlled. Replace key
officials regularly. Execute your enemies from time to time. You’ve learned the
virtues of the hard crackdown. You’ve sent your security officers to the best military
schools in the US and Europe, and taught them to temper their firm grip with (a bit
of) humanity. In short, you’ve mastered the use of a strong hand and the
establishment of a certain national logic that suggested your name – Qadafi or
Mubarak or el-Abidine ben Ali – as a synonym for stability, for prosperity and even
pride. This seems to you like the most stable possible order. You know that someday
it might have to change, but that day seems a long way off. You delay reform. You
prepare your son to take over. Meanwhile, your citizens begin to acquire the
Internet and cell phones. And one day in 2008, following a financial crisis far away
from your own shores, you begin to notice an unnerving trend.
On the streets of Iceland and then Spain and then Chile and then Israel and Ukraine
and Turkey and Mexico and then New York City, thousands or hundreds of
thousands of citizens gather. There is no one leader of any of these protests. Instead
these movements breathe and grow like an organic whole. The discontent is diffuse
2.
61
even if the result is similar: Mass gatherings, control of some essential public space –
a square, a stock exchange, a park. All organized, it appears, using completely
ethereal techniques: Text messages, video postings, chat rooms. Similar movements
appear around in the world. In Iran, in Italy, in Russia. “Occupy Wall Street”,
blossoms in New York City, a protest against wealth inequality and finance. It
becomes a self-franchising social movement, appearing in hundreds of cities:
Occupy Hollywood. Occupy Central in Hong Kong. Occupy – strangely – Vegas.
Then in Sidi Bouzid, a Tunisian town you’ve never heard of, far away from all these
unstable looking mobs, a spark lands. A local man has set himself on fire. Police
(worse, a police woman) had confiscated his scales and his fruit and then tossed him
around for no reason other than that he was poor and could do nothing about it. It is
November 2010. Within hours protests begin in Sidi Bouzid. They spread to Tunis.
81 Then Tripoli. Then Damascus. You watch as the anger, moving on once-invisible
technological lines of video and text, demolishes the stability of all of North Africa.
Over the next two years leaders are pushed from power in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and
Yemen: their names, instead of being symbols of stability, instantly cast as sources
of injustice. Other countries – Syria, Algeria, Sudan, and Bahrain tumble for periods
into the black hole of civil violence. Some people mistake all this for a democratic
revolution. Over time, however, it’s clear this is hardly that. Something more
complex is emerging from the violent mist. New, nearly virtual terror groups
organized themselves in the vacuum, hyper-lethal versions of connected protest. A
new kind of political energy, a method of linking people and ideas and an easy
destructive power, is alive. It seems to be as active in cynical, murderous
fundamentalists as in the optimistic peace-hoping youth. Democratic revolution? No.
Revolution? Yes, clearly, that.
A few years later, after you’ve been replaced or are on the run, after your own
country has had upheaval and you’ve had your visit from a well-meaning American
diplomat urging you towards a quiet retirement house in Saudi Arabi, the Spanish
social philosopher Manuel Castells will name the disease that undid you. Castells is
perhaps an unlikely figure to diagnose the political illness that infected so much of
the world after 2008. An elfin, kinetic figure with a disorganized mop of grey hair, he
sports the wardrobe of an accountant and a rolling Spanish accent that flavors his
speech with a surprising taste of romance. It’s a mixture that seems somehow ideal
for a world often on his lips: “Reevolootion.” With the meticulous care an
anthropologist might bring to documenting a distant, undiscovered tribe, Castells
has spent decades finger-poking, classifying and explaining networks. In the late
1990s his books, lectures and research set the frame for the world we inhabit: fastchanging,
ripped through by communications and technology, linked in unusual
ways. “The network society,” he explained, “represents a qualitative change in the
human experience,” he explained. 82
81 They spread to Tunis: Mohamed Zayani, Networked Publics and Digital
Contention: The Politcs of Everyday Life in Tunisia, Oxford University Press (2015)
82 “The network society”: Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden,
Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 508
62
Inevitably, Castells became curious about how such a change was affecting politics.
Speaking to an audience at Harvard in the spring of 2014, he reviewed what he had
learned in the past decade – and particularly in the years since 2008, much of which
he had spent dropping into the ground-zero sites where network protest and
dissatisfaction were exploding. “We are witnessing,” he told the audience, “the birth
of a new form of social movement.” 83 Information technology was breeding massive,
rapidly moving social waves. These movements went from invisible to irresistible in
instants. They pressed for political change or for economic justice or even for – and
this was odd for such wired up efforts, but anyhow – a return to a pre-technological
age. In most of these countries, the older organizations had little appeal to a new
generation of protesters. The political parties smelled of rot. The media was stateowned
or controlled by billionaires. For a generation used to instant empowerment,
the time to work inside these broken structures seemed impossibly long. And,
anyhow, another option existed. Twitter or Facebook or YouTube had taught them.
So riots in those dozens of cities, unplanned and uncontrolled, emerged. 84 The
“Collective Action,” of popular movements for hundreds of years from Bastilleraiders
to labor actions, was replaced – upgraded? – into “Connective Action.”
People who’d never met and who shared very different histories and desires, were
connected, fused together by lightspeed bits in hope or fury or vengeful rage. 85 This
was, perhaps, predictable. It mirrored the linked, fast-spreading dynamism of the
2008 crisis itself. As the British central banker and economist Andy Haldane
observed, the world had never before suffered a genuinely global financial crisis,
with every county on the planet, tied together as they were by finance and
technology (and fear), tumbling off a cliff at the same, nano-second instant. 86 In one
three month period, the entire global economy shrunk by five percent.
As fast as shocks like that economic one spread, these linked network social
reactions seemed to move faster still, echoing each other, with ever louder and more
complex results. The technology itself became as important to the emergence of new
groups as their ideas. The terror phenomenon of ISIS, for instance, emerged almost
entirely along skeins of digital connection, and was itself a reaction to the networkled
disruption of the Arab Spring – and the earlier fracturing of older order in Iraq.
When President Obama dismissively called ISIS the junior-varsity squad of terror
and said there was nothing much for the West to worry about, he was reflecting the
83 “We are witnessing”: Manuel Castells "The Space of Autonomy: Cyberspace and
Urban Space in Networked Social Movements", Speech at Harvard GSD, February
2014, available online
84 And, anyhow: Raquel Alvarez, David Garcia, Yamir Moreno, and Frank
Schweitzer. "Sentiment Cascades in the 15M Movement." EPJ Data Sci. EPJ Data
Science, 4:6 2015
85 People who’d never met: W. Lance Bennett & Alexandra Segerberg “The Logic of
Connective Action”, Information, Communication & Society, 15:5 (2012)
86 As the British central banker: Andrew Haldane “On Microscopes and
Telescopes”, Speech at Lorenz Center Workshop on Socio-Economic Complexity,
March 2015, p.20
63
same dim, comfortably dangerous instincts that undid Mubarak. These kids can’t
possibly amount to much. The youth of these groups, the very fact that they were not
the varsity team, their intimate fingertip familiarity with virtual spaces – all this
gave this new generation of movements energy, appeal, attraction. Even in countries
that looked technologically “backwards” by American standards, linked systems
speed-bred revolution, they gleefully filled in for a failed traditional media, and they
accelerated and enabled the creation of groups as different as the Syrian Electronic
Army and Occupy Hong Kong. 87
Traditionally, such a long list of hopeless exclusions (no money, no friends, no
access, no power) added up to an easy judgment of irrelevance. But ISIS was like the
the Iranian bloggers and American social justice campaigners and Swedish digital
pirates and vengeful Houthi fighters who were all staring back, confidently, at the
people who had the money, the friends and the power – and the drones. Obama and
Mubarak and – fill in the blank with a powerful name or institution – were too slow.
Out of touch. Their connections were all wrong. So while the individual parts of the
new networks – young students, poorly trained armed fighters – were soft and
human and easy to destroy, they still tore unstoppably at old power. Tied together,
the connected systems themselves were capable of more than their individual
strength might suggest. What they shared wasn’t simply a single issue or identity. It
was cheap, constant connection. And they were, frankly, furious.
The old guys were crafty, of course. They tried to shut down the technology itself. Or
they aimed at crucial points on the network. “Arrest or kill the leaders you can find!”
was the sort of order that bolted stability back onto Iran, for example. Other
governments found they could crack the will of the protesters by going after their
relatives. “Relational repression,” as it became known, was the closest a big power
could get, quickly, to using one network to fight another. And there were other
strategies: The Egyptian military, for instance, played a deadly serious long game.
They gave in on a few points. They let the massed opposition and Islamic networks
come to power. But this was merely a pretext, a way to map the ties of these groups,
to coldly study how they functioned and record the secret sources of their power
and influence and money. Then, when the Egyptian population tired of these failing,
amateurish new leaders – as the military knew they someday would – the generals
moved.
Skeptics would demand of Castells: What the hell did any of these protests really
accomplish? What sort of reevolootion was it that left nothing but chaotic sink holes
in Tripoli and Damascus? What they accomplished, Castells conceded, was mostly
destructive. But that was the point. This smashing at old laws, the cracking apart of
ideas of power and control had changed the landscape. And it had revealed a hidden
logic of connection. Irrelevant? That was like saying earthquakes or epidemics
should be overlooked. In their vibrating apart of once-solid structures, networked
social movements told a great deal. They revelaled interconnected fault lines. They
87 Even in countries: Edwin Grohe “The Cyber Dimensions of the Syrian Civil War:
Implications for Future Conflict,” Comparative Strategy, (2015) 34:2, 133-148
64
showed how groups could suck power into themselves from networks, along
invisible lines, and animate themselves as if by connection to electricity. The
protesters and terrorists understood power that existed simply because of
connectivity. They understood how easy it was to connect. And so they had an
instinct that eluded the comfortable men in the palaces. The usual reaction of
authorities – Round up the usual suspects – didn’t work because, as Castells noted,
“The usual suspects were networks.” You couldn’t arrest a network.
3.
Before we can go much further in figuring out how network power might be used –
to close up those six worrisome paradoxes, to create massive new companies (or
invest in them), to rebuild our politics – I think we need a picture of sorts in our
heads of this new landscape. What does a network look like? How does it’s design
affect its operation? Yes, it’s true you can’t arrest a network. But can you say
something about how it’s different? Can you spot the parts that are dangerous?
When someone like Castells says to us, “Power is moving,” what does that mean
exactly? Where is it going? What I want to do now is begin to assemble an image of a
network, and to show what that sort of linked design tells us about where we are
now and where we’re going. Then, with such a picture, firmly in our minds, we can
ask just what these networks are for, after all, and how they might be used.
It is an old chestnut of historians and anthropologists that power – the ability to
make or cause things to happen – is often determined by structure. When I say,
“Superpower” I am painting a picture of the international system with a single word.
“Highway,” does the same – and tells you something about logistics, trucks,
economic power. Or “City.” This is why “org charts” have such a decisive power.
Think of the map of power in your family or your office or a nation. Who makes the
decisions? Why? The way we bottle up our lives in firms or congresses or
universities flavors just about every other decision we make 88 . An imperial CEO,
prone to visions and control creates a different sort of firm than a boss who moves
among his employees nearly as an equal. An army that moves from the top down is
different than one that lives, as Mao said of the Chinese guerilla forces that mastered
the country against steep odds in 1949, “as if they were fish and the people were
water.” Power is always packed into structures of some sort. Emperors, kings,
presidents and congresses all reflect certain arrangements. But those arrangements
change; power moves. You can see leaders struggle with this constant shifting:
Think of the “Englightened Despotism” of the 18 th Century as Frederick II of Prussia,
Joseph II of the Hapsburgs and Catherine II in St. Petersburg each struggled to marry
the then-new ideas of liberty with older instincts of control. History is, in one sense,
nothing but the tale of the movement of power. Once the idea of an Assyrian king
emperor was new, as was the notion of a President or a Pope. History is paced by
the arrival of new species of all sorts; and by the death of others. This is as true for
institutions as is it for bugs. With this caveat: No one gives up power easily.
88 The way we: See Venkatesh Rao, “The Amazing, Shrinking Org Chart”, on
Ribbonfarm.com, May 28, 2015
65
Here’s what’s unnerving about this for us now: There are whole approaches to
power that look extremely reasonable until one day they look insane. For thousands
of years the idea that one feudal lord should control thousands of serfs seemed
perfectly reasonable to the lords and serfs alike. John Maynard Keynes’ famous line
about Egypt – Just because you built the pyramids doesn’t mean you get to use them –
marked a whole approach that seemed inarguable for centuries, even if the
experience of it was inarguably awful 89 . Features of the world – moats, massive
cathedrals, pyramids, sweatshops – exist only because distributions of power
permitted or enabled or encouraged them. The quotidian interactions of our lives –
how we shop, where we hang out with friends, the kinds of performance or politics
we follow – these all produce long-lasting structures. Malls, democracies, war
zones. 90 Pushing power into networks, we can see already, creates whole new
arrangements. Some are as unimaginable to us now as a voting booth would have
been to an Egyptian slave. When we say that ours is a revolutionary age, it’s not
because you can watch videos on your phone. It’s because of why you can watch
video on your phone – and what that implies for the old, nervous structures around
us.
4.
Before the age of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution began most political
and economic power was extremely concentrated. A few kings and feudal lords
controlled most economic production. Priests decided who could speak to God, and
how and when. Finance was dominated by a few families, largely working in the
secretive counting rooms of early banking capitals such as Amsterdam or Genoa or
Lyon. Knowledge about the world, a sense of science and of history and even
geography, was closely held, fiercely opaque. Inside monastery walls or university
halls the aim of protecting (and editing) what the world knew far outstripped any
hunger for new ideas, for innovation or dissemination. In those times a lucky or
brutal few decided the economic, political and intellectual lives of many. You can
picture power as balled up almost, in the hands of a tiny and fortunate elite.
Over time, cracks appeared in this system. One of the earliest was also one of the
most fundamental: The schism that split the Catholic Church. This was, at first, the
work of a young German theologian named Martin Luther in the 16 th Century.
Luther was a man whose view of life, he would say often in later years, was shaped
by a single sentence: Romans 1:17. “The righteousness of God is revealed from faith
to faith, as it is written: The just shall live by faith.” The Epistle to the Romans, as
Romans is formally titled, was a letter from Saint Paul to a collection of recalcitrant,
89 John Maynard Keynes’ famous line: Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the
Peace, p. 16
90 David Murakami Wood and Stephen Graham “Permeable Boundaries in the
Software-Sorted Society: Survelliance and the Differentiations of Mobillity” in Mobile
Technologies of the City eds. Mimi Sheller and John Urry. (London: Routledge. 2006)
Chapter 10
66
spiritually mordant Jews in Rome. His message was among the simplest and most
compact and personal possible: The transmission of faith requires nothing more and
nothing less than faith itself. Romans teaches us that believing in God, which is faith,
is enough for access to all the riches of heaven: God’s righteousness, an afterlife,
forgiveness.
By Luther’s age, however, access to those riches was not so simple. Among other
things, spiritual control had become a source of lucre for the church. The glory of the
Catholic Church, her magnificent cathedrals and clothes, and her insidious habits of
selling passes to heaven in the form of indulgences – this was a deployment of faith
and power marked by a venality that grated against Luther’s from-faith-to-faith
sensibility. When he saw his own congregation increasingly slipping away to
churches with priests who would do what he would not, which was to market and
sell indulgences, he saw a rank, strange hypocrisy: The Church as an economic
instrument. His rage boiled over in the summer of 1517, and he summarized his
case against the Church in the 95 Theses that he nailed to the door of his local
church on October 31 st . Papa non vult nec potest ullas penas remittere preter eas,
quas arbitrio vel suo vel canonum imposuit, he wrote in Thesis Five: No matter what
you might pay him, the Pope can’t influence what happens to you after you die. Or,
Thesis 78, Euangelici rhetia sunt, quibus olim piscabantur viros divitiarum.
Indulgences are nets with which one fishes for the riches of men.
As much as Luther was crying for a restoration of Saint Paul’s sense of a personal
faith, he was also starting a difficult and – for the Church – unpleasant argument
about power. Our relation to God, Luther meant, is our relation. It’s not something to
be brokered or sold or negotiated. It does not require fancy clothes or cathedrals or
hierarchies. For Luther, this new logic had engendered a profound spiritual crisis.
He recalled, later in life, the very first time he’d encountered the possibility of direct
access to God, in the pages of Saint Augustine, probably around 1508. “When I came
to the words ‘thee, most merciful father,’” he wrote, “the thought that I had to speak
to God without a mediator almost made me flee.” 91 Who was he, Martin Luther, to
speak directly to God? But from then on, Luther’s experience of God, his own sense
of power honestly passing from faith to faith – and not from faith to church to faith –
embodied an extremely heretical idea about power: faith without a middleman.
Such a concept undid much of what had been taken as inarguable doctrine. The
Church immediately understood the danger. They rushed to label Luther as heretical
and, later, crazy. In arguing that the Catholic Church, with all of its magnificent
trappings of faith, was really a useless toll gate, Luther was picking at a still larger,
more significant question: How should power be split? If Luther was right, and God
should be accessible directly to each of us, then some other questions tumbled after
that one. Should we have direct access to political power? To ideas? To money and
land and control of our own economic destiny? Could “from faith to faith,” be recast
as “from idea to idea” or “truth to truth” or – and this turned out to be the really
91 “When I came to the words”: Preserved Smith, The Life and Letters of Martin
Luther, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911) Introduction
67
violent shift – “from citizen to citizen as equals”? The Church was merely one of
many institutions that had sat massively, reliably, comfortably (and greedily)
between people and power.
Luther, it later emerged, was not alone. An era of awkward answers had begun. The
Prussian astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, for instance, had preceded Luther by a
couple of decades with his own questioning of the unquestionable. “Those who
know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the idea that the earth
remains at rest while the heavens move around it would regard it as an insane
pronouncement if I said the opposite,” he wrote. Machiavelli, Galileo, Erasmus, a
growing list of great, transformative names – they were all working away in this
same questioning spirit. Their insane pronouncements, when proven true, opened
the way to still further insights. The Enlightenment had begun. The old power
centers acted almost as if nothing had changed; maybe they believed nothing would
ever need to. “What was, still is,” the Catholic Church pronounced confidently (and
absurdly) at the Council of Trent in response to Luther’s Reformation. But there was
no turning back. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, the motto of the
era could best be summarized as: Dare to know! “The Enlightenment,” he explained,
“requires nothing but freedom.” 92
This, it emerged, was a hell of an expensive requirement.
4.
In the years after Luther’s 95 Theses, Europe was torn apart. The continent’s
longstanding image of power – balled up, concentrated, unquestioned – was ripped
away. Another picture emerged. The idea of personal access to God, a kind of “one
man, one prayer” approach to religion, which opened in turn other fundamental
struggles. The credibility of nearly every sacred body that had once depended on
controlling people and limiting their choices – the Church, those kings, feudalism,
myths – faced a creeping erosion. “Human knowledge and human power come to the
same thing,” the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon observed in the
midst of this shift in his artillery shell of a book The New Organum. Human
knowledge, he means, is human power. You can imagine the energy, the promise of
the book as it was passed in Latin copy to Kepler in his study in Linz (then Lintz), to
Gallileo in Venice a decade before his imprisonment. It was this same human power
to question even the most sacred ideas that the masses of Enlightenment Europe
would use, gleefully at times, to claw apart most of the old structures. 93 Luther’s
heresy led initially to the Wars of the Reformation, battles that pulled every
European royal family into a struggle between church and state, and then between
each other. The bloodletting of The Thirty Years War, the first truly pan-European
92 “The Enlightenment”: Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is
Enlightenment?” Kant: Political Writings, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991) p. 54
93 “Human knowledge”: Francis Bacon, The New Organon. Cambridge Texts in the
History of Philosophy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 32
68
conflict, established in its aftermath a new balance that let each King select the
religion of his subjects. Cuius regio, eius religio as the agreements of Westphalia
decided in 1648 – or Whose realm, whose religion. This produced some stability, but
not for long. You could read that line, after all, very personally and see what it
demanded next: My realm, my religion.
In a sense, this revolutionary tumult was necessary to pull power from a
comfortable, established asymmetric arrangement, in which a few people controlled
so much, and into something more symmetric. Luther’s Reformation thinking made
God directly, instantly accessible to anyone. (Just as Copernicus’ scientific way of
thinking gave us, eventually, the ability to question if God existed at all.) Individuals
– and the very birth of the idea of individualism was another heretical slap at the old
institutions – could balance and contend and argue as equals. The notion that men
were “created equal” became increasingly evident in this generation, even as
establishing that equality triggered the French Revolution, the American Civil War
and countless similar conflicts. Democratic systems aspired to enshrine this new
balance, shifting countries from rule-by-birth to rule-by-majorities. In economics,
markets reflected the new picture of power too. How good is that product? What is
the price? Is there demand? became the essential questions, not Which Lord controls
that field. Releasing power into the busy arms of businessmen, politicians, scientists
and artists meant ideas, politics and innovations contended one against the other.
They got better. They evolved. And the sum of all these interacting pieces made
sustained economic growth into a reality for the first time in history. In a
“commercial society,” Adam Smith explained in The Wealth of Nations, “Every man
lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant.” 94 Smith didn’t mean
everyone was really a merchant, rather that in a world of markets each of us – our
labor, our ideas, our capital – is a commodity. We are liberated, but only to compete.
For votes, for jobs, for resources.
If the old faiths and institutions couldn’t stand the pressures of these powerful,
equalizing forces, then new ones had to be built. “The scaffolds humans erect,” the
Nobel prize-winning economist Douglass North called these foundations. 95 The idea
of equality of influence or power – not merely opportunity – demanded new
containers: voting booths, congresses, unions. Rule of law was one of the most
urgently essential: a single code that could be laid down evenly across a society,
demanding that principles of order outweighed the habitual advantages of
prominence or power or birth. Law aspired to make men equal in front of courts.
This, in turn, suggested a new degree of fairness up and down the social order.
Broader literacy, the standardization of measurements or the birth of universal
credit and currencies were all tools for spreading access. Museums, scientific
congresses and industrial fairs helped turn sparks of theoretical knowledge into the
94 In a commercial society: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008) 32
95 “The scaffolds humans erect”: Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of
Economic Change, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010) 48
69
practical heat of industry. 96 Ever-more efficient use of iron, of steam, of electricity all
reflected a virtuous loop of theory and practice, between the lab and the market, the
scientist and the businessman.
This fusion of the instinct for competition, for constant new innovation, delivered
the modern world you and I live in today. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations,” Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1849 about the speed of this change, “are swept away.
All new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid,
melts into air.” 97 As more people “dared to know”, the big ideas and big thinkers
attracted an audience. Arguments started. New ways to record and share the
answers appeared too. Locke or Newton or Darwin were as notable for the crowd of
debating, curious citizens they attracted as for their ideas. Such contentious
discussions were designed to elicit truth, to give individuals that same shocking
sense Luther had felt on discovering a powerful idea by himself; but as important
was that these debates were recorded – written and then distributed in journals,
books and letters. For most of history, after all, knowledge suffered from its own
fragility and asymmetry: There was always a chance, maybe even a likelihood, that
some important insight would be lost in a plague, strangled as heretical, burnt up in
a library fire, or dissolved by some military misfortune. This is why, for instance, we
have almost all of Shakespeare and why we are missing so much of Sappho.
Widespread knowledge changed this. A solid, inarguable base endured. “If I have
seen further,” Newton famously wrote, “it is because I have stood on the shoulders
of giants.” Those shoulders for Netwon were enshrined in libraries, scientific
journals and the massive sense of what had come before swaddled in the Cambridge
walls that surrounded him. In this sense, the preservation and advance of
knowledge, the new symmetry, was not only the largest shift of power in history. It
was also the best thing that ever happened to the human race.
In other ways, of course, it was very nearly the worst. Symmetry had a darker edge.
It meant that nations decided the strategic questions of the day by throwing
massive, deadly power at one another in unprecedented volume. With each passing
year, Europe’s engines of science and industry were grinding out tools of
unprecedented destruction. Napoleon’s greatest victories were enabled as much by
the industrial strength of French artillery factories as by the liberated masses of the
French revolution. When France was unseated by the British Empire, it was
manufacturing scale and naval depth that tipped the balance. London’s clubby
mastery was, in turn, challenged by Germany’s efficient, iron-and-blood commercial
engines. Size and scale and safety became linked. This sense of the undeniable
power of industrial mass was Winston Churchill’s only comfort for two nervous,
lonely years after 1939 as he paced the hours until what he hoped was America’s
entry into The Second World War. “I knew that the United States was in the war, up
96 Museums, scientific congresses: Joel Mokyr, “The Intellectual Origins of Modern
Economic Growth”, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, No. 2 (June 2005) p 290
97 “All fixed, fast-frozen relations” Karl Marx and Freiderich Engels, “The
Communist Manifesto,” in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the
Communist Manifesto (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1988) 212
70
to the neck and in to the death,” he wrote the day after Pearl Harbor. “Hitler's fate
was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground
to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming
force.” 98 Or, the reverse of that coin: Admiral Yamamoto grimly to Emperor
Hirohito: “If you tell me that it is necessary that we fight, then in the first six months
to a year of war against the U.S. and England I will run wild, and I will show you an
uninterrupted succession of victories. I must tell you also that, should the war be
prolonged for two or three years, I have no confidence in our ultimate victory.” 99
Ground to a powder. This was symmetry at its most pounding and decisive. Mass
against mass. This was a picture of power that seemed undeniable in its pure logic.
Until now.
So how should we think about power in our own age? What picture best captures its
vibrant, unceasing demands?
It might be tempting now, as a first pass, to say we’ve left that world of purely
symmetric, mass-against-mass power behind. After all, a few figures, anywhere in
the system, can exert massive and even fatal, collapsing pressure. One clever hacker,
one terrorist, one hedge fund manager with a bad idea, even one purely accidental
mis-connection – never before has so much power accumulated in systems so
vulnerable to single slips. And our massive power – the US Army or our economy –
is hardly decisive despite its weight. It seems now that something can grow bigger
and weaker. A nation may have an ever-larger GDP, but if it is miswired somehow, if
its social or legal or youthful connections misfire a bit, then it may be still more
vulnerable. But this “power of a pinprick” asymmetry is not the whole story. Just
when the network looks like a way to tie together all sorts of small, even isolated
forces and bless them with decisive power, we notice something else. Tremendous,
even historic and undeniably massive concentrations of power. Platforms like
Facebook, software systems like Microsoft or search centers like Google are sort of
dense, impossible-to-replace gold mines. Google answers questions for more than
50% of the world every day. Is it the most powerful company in human history? Is
Facebook? And is their power widely distributed? Or is it concentrated in the
algorithms and cloud data of these firms? Anyhow, they are among the first of a
totally new species of firm.
The leap we have to make in understanding our networked age – and by this I don’t
just mean the Internet, but really any connected system you’d care to consider –
begins with this idea: On connected systems, power is defined by both profound
concentration and by massive distribution. It can’t be understood in simple either/or
terms. Power and influence may yet become even more concentrated than it was in
5.
98 “Hitler’s fate was sealed”: Winston Churchill, The Second World War: The Grand
Alliance, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986) 540
99 Or the reverse of that coin: Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and
Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 349–353.
71
feudal times and more distributed than it was in the most vibrant democracies.
Network power, we might say, exists as a sort of skin or surface that ties together
billions of points to each other and to vital, centralized cores. We know our world is
filling with more and better and faster connected devices distributing themselves at
an unmeasureably quick pace; but we are also breeding powerful centralized
knowledge and computing basins. Biological research labs now engage in complex
DNA analysis with powerful desktop tools (distribution), but to work efficiently,
they demand fast reference to the patterns revealed only in immense genetic
datasets (concentration). You can snap high quality videos with your phone
(distribution); you share them with millions on a connected central stage like
Facebook or YouTube (concentration). A financial engineer can architect a new and
profitable trading instrument on his tablet (distribution), but his hopes for profit
depend on instant connection to busy, price-setting markets were prices are set
(concentration.)
This sort of pulling, taffy-like web of ties between small (your watch) and big
(connected data systems) stretches constantly. It’s what you need to picture when
you think of an image of network power. The wired masses in Tahrir square, for
instance, emerge like magic on some once-invisible surface that forms between their
phones and powerful platforms like YouTube. Or: Hyper-linked terrorist groups
appear from nearly nowhere, jerking recruits from suburban London bedrooms via
massively connected messaging platforms. Recall Adam Smith’s line about the
Enlightenment, how a commercial society was one in which every man had to
become a merchant? Well, in our age of connection, every one of us is a node. We sit
on that tense, stretched surface between center and periphery. When we say
“connection changes the nature of an object,” this is the exact balance we have to
comtemplate. “Social structures,” John Padgett and Walter Powell wrote in their
masterful study of complex connected systems, The Emergence of Organizations and
Markets, “should be viewed more as vortexes in the flow of social life than as
buildings of stone.” 100 This idea has some eerie implications: Every structure –
congresses, universities, the company where you work, our minds even – is merely a
temporary collection of relations. And of course those relations can change at any
moment. The tension between concentration and distribution acts, in a sense, like
an hydraulic jaw. It pries power out of older, once-legitimate hands.
Consider the case of my father, a cardiologist. As a doctor he stands at the head of a
medical tradition run for thousands of years on the idea that the doctor is the center
of your care. If you show up at a hospital on a stretcher with a flat-line on some
heart monitor, my father’s decades of training and practice have always been your
best hope. But today, nearly every patient he sees – even the ones he brings back
from their black flat-line future – second-guesses him as soon as he’s out the door:
Googling their disease, tapping into websites of mixed reliability, joining some
online community of people with the same sickness while they still have tubes in
their nose. Meanwhile, his ideas about your case are under quickening pressure: An
100 Padgett and Powell, p. 8
72
emerging “Internet of DNA”, massive collections of treatment histories, or linked
databases of medical histories will be overseen by machine intelligences able to outdiagnose
him. 101 Constant, automatic links between body-borne sensors we’ll wear
(or swallow) and data centers will sharpen the edge these systems have on my dad
further still in coming years. They will notice things he could never hope to see –
small but portentous changes in your heartbeat, chemical chimeras from new
medications, how you’re feeling in each moment until your last.
It is the nature of networks that they create both massive concentration and
distribution. And in the process they simply rip apart many of our existing
structures. Look at our worrisome global economics at the moment. Extreme
concentration of wealth on one end and massive distribution of work tools to evercheaper
sources of labor runs on this exact same logic: it is a sort of jawing network
effect that is tearing up the middle class, producing an ever-richer elite. Those who
have information in financial markets, for instance, possess a secret and vital and
ever sharper edge over those who don’t. Which makes them richer still. Which
sharpens their cutting edge still finer. If we ask ourselves why the world now feels
on the edge of a deflationary shock – a moment where there is more supply than
there is demand, where the world waits to buy because “tomorrow it will be
cheaper” and sends economies spiraling as a result – one reason is this way in which
networks are pulling on our economics. On the one hand, wealth is concentrated in
fewer and fewer hands by the leverage of knowledge and a head start and
connection – a phenomenon known, in fact, as a “rich club” distribution by network
theorists. The middle class is locked out of this group. Their wealth and power and
influence declines, as a result. This slashes overall demand, since a billionaire
consumes less of each additional dollar than, say, a school teacher. At the same time,
massive distribution of technology and connection is reducing demand for labor
while flooding the world with commodities, workers, newly linked-supply of items
like bedrooms and car seats.
The network effect works its usual jawing destruction here: Connection decreases
demand and increases supply. It concentrates capital in a few hands, even as it
distributes tools of work to cheaper and more distributed people and machines. The
middle is class torn inexorably apart from both ends. It’s not wrong to wonder, as
some economists have, if capitalism is a system best yoked to older, slower
puritanical values that encouraged saving, not consumption – and to ask if wiring
markets to instant networks is not, in the end like trying to warp speed a carriage.
Anyhow placing an economy on a network surface produces new, ripping pressures
as apparent in middle-income nations as they are in middle class households. “We
are being destroyed,” a South Korean friend said to me about the hollowing out of
his national economy. Korean computer and television and compute manufacturers
had hoped they could develop their own essential software, that their hardware
manufacturing technology would be unmatchable. In fact, software triumph was
101 Meanwhile, his ideas about your case: I. Akyildiz, Pierobon, M.
Balasubramaniam, S. Koucheryavy, Y., "The internet of Bio-Nano things,"
Communications Magazine, IEEE , vol.53, no.3, pp.32-40, March 2015
73
drifting to cores in Silicon Valley and Redmond – a contest between Microsoft and
Apple and Google. And the prized Korean manufacturing excellence was no match
for cheap Chinese and then Vietnamese labor welded to assembly-line technology.
We see this pattern of network-led shredding nearly everywhere now, the result of
powerful cores of knowledge and wide distribution of connection. Newspapers –
removed from relevancy by crowd-sourced newsfeeds and constantly-connected
smart databases. Once indomintable television networks, devoured by cheap homemade
videos and large-scale platforms that use the Internet for distribution. Bitcoin
and other first-generation block-chained currencies eating at the once
unquestionable authority of central banks. Drones hovering along on a skein of GPS
and data links are also among the new citizens of this connected skein. They are
products of a data web: They depend on centralized connection and the distribution
of technology, data, and design. They may do to old ideas of security and power
what the fusion of GPS and smart phones and databases have done to hotel chains or
medicine. Massed, self-organized drone fleets can turn aircraft carriers and exposed
battle groups from sources of strength into vulnerable and even dangerously selfdefeating
antiques. They will remake urban landscapes. Think of the way that Baron
Hausman redesigned Paris in the 18 th Century to manage with the Enlightement-age
danger of liberated, angry citizens. The creation of the city’s wide boulevards,
central axes for easy movement of the police, and intersections engineered to
quarantine riots was a reaction against the demands of mass liberty. Our cities are
now vulnerable not simply to mass protest risk, but to the pinch of asymmetric
levitating drones. The sensations of safety behind walls, up a staircase, inside a
windowed room all begin to slip away. Drone risk – and all the potentially
wonderful elements of constant, instant drone assistance – will command a
retooling of cities, much as automobiles did a century ago.�
So this is power: Cores and distribution. They way that tension pulls particularly on
certain, once-essential structures and objects and people explains a lot about our
age – including the failure of so many institutions. Connectivity changes the nature
of an object. That’s true for your doctor, your bank account, your army – and for
billions of people whose lives alter irreversibly once they connect to markets, to
knowledge, to the world. To connect now is to be exposed to this fresh young skin of
linked power, a lively surface that transports anything at near instant speed. We
have to ask just how many of the “scaffolds humans erect” that were essential for
Enlightenment-era advances will be pulled down. And of course we face the exciting,
uneasy task of thinking up the new scaffolds we now must build.
If you have the tools or the skill to see the world this way, as a vibrating and pulling
mesh of connections, then you can look at a tanks or soldiers or years of stability
and see possibility. A friend who controls the largest secure Bitcoin vault in the
world, put it to me once this way: “Platforms mattered once; now it is protocols.” His
point was that the pipes and rules connecting the varied systems of our world affect,
fundamentally, the distribution of power. The rules of the Bitcoin blockchain or the
implications of a protocol like IPv6 or DNSSSEC reveals something about how we’ll
all connect in the future. Once these new rules become visible to you, then even the
74
most inarguable current sources of influence and control – the US Dollar, say – look
weak. The Seventh Sense is defined first by an intuitive feeling for just how power is
being re-geared now. If you look at a kid with a phone and think “Strong”, you have
the Seventh Sense. If you look at an angry, barely educated terrorist wannabe and
think, “Junior Varsity”, you don't. And as a result you may be about to have a very
unpleasant surprise.
Try this: Ball up your right hand and hold it in front of you; now take your left hand
and open the fingers and hold it a few inches away with your fingers pointing back
towards the right. You can think of your left hand as the vibrating, living network of
connection – reaching towards the concentrated power that your right hand
represents. This is the heart of understanding our age. Networks live in that tension
between distribution and concentration. To connect any object – my dad, a
newspaper, a radio-controlled plastic drone – to this skein is to change, irrevocably,
its essence. The reason the legitimacy of old leaders is failing, the reason our
strategy is incoherent, the reason our age really is revolutionary, is that they are all
sitting in the midst of these pulling, powerful forces. We should steel ourselves for
the shredding imminence of this violence . But also – and you know this already, I
think – we must prepare ourselves for the possibility of immense construction.
Network power does not only pull apart. It also creates.
This paradox confused me, to be honest, for a long time. Power is, manifestly,
concentrated with astonishing efficiency now. And it is more widely dispersed than
ever too. We can stare at this difference, this strange polar tension and baffle
ourselves as we try to figure out just how and why it moves. The best way of
understanding this, I finally concluded, requires a cognitive leap, perhaps, over our
usual Western way of understanding the world as either “a” or “b”, as either
“distributed” or “concentrated”, and into a view of how opposites might ceaselessly
balance into a whole. Not “a” or “b” but “a” and “b” at the same time.
Let me tell you what I mean: In 1132 the Song Dynasty that had ruled China for
nearly 200 years collapsed in the face of an invasion by wild Manchurian soldiers
from the northern plains. The Song leadership – along with its best minds and
cultural figures – fled south from Beijing for a thousand miles, until they were safely
on the opposite bank of the Yangtze River. They settled in a lakeside city we know
today as Hangzhou. In those days Hangzhou was known as Lin’An, which might best
be translated as “Gazing at Peace.” The little town must have seemed to the Song
leaders a perfect respite from the horror and war they had left behind. The city lay
then, as it still does, along side XiHu or West Lake, a tranquil and horizon-filling
stretch of water framed by rolling hills and tea plantations. The famous poet and
statesman Su Dongpo later compared gazing at the lake to looking at a beautiful
woman – that same fused sense of calm, peace and astonishment you might feel
while considering the object of your own love. Stilled water is regarded in Chinese
culture – you may recall from Lake Tai Hu where Master Nan set his campus –as a
reservoir of yin energy. Song leaders had fled the angry yang energy of invasion for
the yin peace of the south. Yin energy is associated with calm, femininity, fertility.
Yang expresses action, violence, creation. Yang is the thunderstorm; Yin is the peace
75
that comes afterwards, as the crops absorb water and grow. The idea of a balance of
yin and yang is among the oldest in Chinese philosophy. “When heaven and earth
were formed, they divided into yin and yang,” the Huainanzi, one of China’s greatest
political texts explains. “Yang is generated from yin and yin is generated from yang.”
Hangzhou became a capital of yin. It produced perhaps some of the greatest Chinese
philosophy and poetry and art. Greatness emerged from that stillness – and, even
today, to sit by West Lake and drink a cup of the Dragon Well tea produced on the
nearby hillsides is to have every one of your senses flooded by tranquility.
That yin-yang balance gives us, in a sense, a way to understand that split power on a
network by seeing it is not, really, split. Network power is energetic and wild at the
ends, with all the creative energy of a world filled with devices, empowered human
dreams, and the violent slips of old balances. Yang. But at the center it is dense, still,
even quiet with the silently cranking algorithms of massively concentrated power.
The computer science pioneer Claude Shannon saw information in 1949 as wild,
uncertain, and pulsing with the instability of an entropic system. Yang. The machine
architect Norbert Weiner, writing at nearly the same moment in 1948, saw the
digital age differently – as an expression of stability and structure. Yin. 102 His vision
for a digital order, what he called “cybernetics,” emerged from the Greek concept of
kibernetes – the orderly steering of a ship through sometimes chaotic waters.
We now know: the humming webs around us are both. They are ordered and
structured. 103 Good and evil. Power in this connected age is concentrated and
distributed. Each feeds the other. The crops need the thunderstorm; the
thunderstorm feeds from the heat radiated off the land. Or: The yang violence of the
Manchurian wars bred the conditions for the yin renaissance in Hangzhou. The
massive distribution of connected points creates revolutions, economic disruption,
crackling innovation. But it also creates a need for more centralization, more
agreement on protocols or platforms. This idea of opposites balancing into a whole
is not unique to Chinese civilization. You can find it too in ancient Greek or Roman
tradition. Heraclitis, for instance, insisting, “All things are one.” Or in the view that
there can be no love without hate, no stillness without chaos, no beauty without the
unbeautiful and fortunately – as we’re about to see – no destruction without
creation.
102 The computer science pioneer: See D. Bawden and L. Robinson, “Waiting for
Carnot”: Information and Complexity. Journal of the Association for Information
Science and Technology, 66: 2177–2186; Norbert Wiener Cybernetics, or control and
communication in the animal and the machine (New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons,
1948); Warren Weaver, “Science and complexity”, American Scientist, 36(4), 536
103 They are ordered: Carlos Gershenson, Péter Csermely, Peter Erdi, Helena
Knyazeva, and Alexander Laszlo,“The Past, Present and Future of Cybernetics and
Systems Research”, arXiv:1308.6317v3, 23 Sept 2013
76
Chapter Five:
Fishnet
In which we learn why networks spread so quickly.
1.
In 1959 a young aeronautical engineer named Paul Baran, who had been working at
Howard Hughes’ aircraft design factory in Los Angeles, arrived for his first day at
work at a low-slung, modern building along the Santa Monica beach in California.
RAND – a stylish 1950’s acronym for Research & Development – had been
established by the US Air Force with an ambitious aim: How might the best minds of
math and science be bent to the purpose of winning the Cold War? RAND was a
dream destination for many researchers, offering a fusion of patriotism, technology
and California sun. The place became known for a relaxed, intellectual atmosphere –
an energy of open creativity that belied the dangerous, nuclear-tipped problems
sitting inside its locked safes and eager minds. Shortly after settling in, Baran was
given one of the most troubling, deeply secret of these puzzles.
The Cold War was then in its early days. The debate over how to manage an age
when it was, for the first time, possible for humans to destroy the planet was
colored still by fresh memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was charged too with
the fear of communist expansion, not an unreasonable worry for Americans who
had just fought a world war against two other, dangerously totalitarian forces. A
cold fear lingered in the minds of many citizens and military planners: Given a
window of vulnerability, might the USSR loose a fast nuclear attack? Avoiding such a
risk became a primary concern of American diplomacy and defense thinking,
particularly in the establishment of some sort of deterrent to a Soviet attack.
Moscow had to know, and trust, that any attempt to strike-first would be met with a
devastating reply. “The chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win
wars,” the nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie wrote in a 1946 memo. “From now on
its chief purpose must be to avert them.” 104 Deterrence rested on this hope that the
USSR would be persuaded not to launch a snap-strike because of the certainty of a
nation-levelling reply. This logic, this “balance of threat” depended in turn on
America’s ability to launch such a strike. If the Soviets could wipe out America’s
ability to respond, then Moscow’s leaders might move first, snap of America’s claws,
and then pick the world apart at their leisure. If Krushchev’s famous, mocking
dangerous ”We will bury you!” line from 1956 really meant what it said, then such a
move would provide an awfully convenient first shovel.
In the late 1950s, when Baran arrived at RAND, the Cold War was at its chilliest and
one of the most carefully guarded American secrets was this: If the USSR attacked,
104 “The chief purpose of our military”: Bernard Brodie, “The Weapon: War in the
Atomic Age and Implications for Military Policy,” in Brodie Ed, The Absolute Weapon:
Atomic Power and World Order, (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1946) 76
77
there might be no response. The US, with its priceless collection of bombers and
missiles and million-man army, could not strike back for the simple reason that the
nation’s field officers would have no way to talk to each other, or to commanders in
Washington. The military radio and telephone systems America depended on for her
safety would not likely endure an initial Soviet strike. This was the problem Baran
had been told to solve.“At the time we didn’t know how to build a communication
system that could survive even collateral damage by enemy weapons,” he recalled
later. RAND determined through computer simulations that the AT&T Long Lines
telephone system, a copper web that carried essentially all the nation’s military
communications, would be cut apart by relatively minor physical damage. 105
The military had spent, already, a fortune on the problem. (They had spent half a
fortune, it turned out, trying to hide it.) The result was an expensively designed,
gorgeously featured telephone network linking military bases to strategic command
posts. But because the lines and their switching centers were laced out in a pattern
with just a few big central nodes, like a bicycle wheel with spokes, it had almost no
chance of surviving the very thing it was designed to help prevent, a Soviet strike. If
you gazed at an inked-out map of this network, with its central hub staffed by senior
commanders and then radiating lines out to bases and missile silos, it even looked,
well, like a target. If the USSR could bullseye those hubs with a bomb or two, the rest
of the network would fold. The Soviets could do whatever they wanted: Invade
Berlin, roll into France, obliterate Los Angeles. America’s military would be deaf.
And as Soviet missiles became more accurate, this seemed an inevitability. “We will
soon be living in an era,” Baran wrote, “in which we cannot guarantee survivability
of any single point.”
The situation, as a carefully screened handful of scientists at RAND knew, was in fact
even more perilous. Shortly before Baran arrived at RAND, scientists testing
hydrogen bomb designs in the Pacific discovered that radiation from their
explosions fuzzed communications for hundreds of miles. A Soviet attack, even if it
105 “At the time”: There is a fair amount of debate about this question of if the
Internet design was intended for survivability or if some other systemic need – such
as linking research institutions – accounted for the distributed architecture that
emerged. See, for instance, Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, et al, “A Brief History of
the Internet”, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 39 Issue 5,
October 2009, 22-31. However, an examination of primary source documents shows
the evolution of Baran’s thinking clearly and produces documentary evidence for
the origins of the problem he and various figures at RAND were aiming to solve.
Others arrived at the packet switching model, but it is clear Baran’s path to the
design emerged from the security problems he was considering. For much of the
information here see “Oral History: Paul Baran” Interview #378 for the IEEE History
Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (Available online);
Paul Baran, “On Distributed Communications I: Introduction to Distributed
Communications Networks,” United States Air Force Project RAND (August, 1964);
Baran “On Distributed Communications XI: Summary Overview,” United States Air
Force Project RAND (August, 1964)
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missed those crucial, central AT&T nodes, would still reduce American military
communications to a bunch of hissing, empty phones. “Our communications were so
vulnerable,” Baran said, “that each missile base commander would face the dilemma
of either doing nothing in the event of a physical attack, or taking action that would
mean an all out irrevocable war.” You could, uneasily, picture the moment of
decision: Some Colonel alone in his bomb-laden plane over Europe or deep in some
cornfield missile silo wondering “Launch or not?”. This was a horrifying possibility.
Baran began to ask: Was there some other way to send a counter-strike signal?
There was a sense of life-saving preciousness in such a setting about connectivity
itself. To hold it, manage it, protect and control it – in the face of the extreme
pressures of a nuclear balance, such connection marked the difference between
safety and catastrophe.
2.
You can, at the heart of many revolutions, find the warm hints of human psychology
pressing out. This is the roiling, unscratchable instinct for change that marks a really
revolutionary temperament – and that often is the only sort of personality that can
imagine and then deliver a solution to impossible problems. Conservatives like
things as they are, even if “as they are” is sometimes broken or dysfunctional or
dangerous. Revolutionaries are different. They don’t seem to choose their role. They
have a vision for how the world ought to be, a vibrating and instinctive picture of
power, and driven by passion or anger or faith or some wild genius, they chase that
vision relentlessly, even into madness. If they are lucky, however, they live in an age
where their crazy hopes catch onto some larger human hunger. Khomeini worried
that the Shah would never fall. Lenin was preparing to abandon revolutionary
politics in 1916. Jobs was told the iPhone could never be built as he wished. Then, in
an instant, revolution.
We might ask: What set Martin Luther on his revolutionary course to demand
instant access to God? Luther would tell you that his first inspiration had come to
him one night in the summer of 1505, while he was walking home in a
thunderstorm, when a lightning bolt landed a foot or two away. 106 Luther had been
struggling for years with an inner battle, with a tension between his faith and what
it demanded of him. Then, when that lightning cracked free from the storm, a
sensation of total terror was replaced by a new feeling. The nearness and power of
God snapped past him in that moment. It clarified everything. He dropped his law
studies the next day and within a year he was an Augustinian monk, preaching –
often hundreds of sermons a year, ever angrier, ever clearer – about the closeness of
God, the real, tangible, bolt-from-the-blue passage of faith to faith. He was totally,
completely converted.
106 Luther would tell you: Albert Beutel “Luther’s Life” in Ed. Donald K. McKim, The
Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003) 4
79
Long before Paul Baran dreamed up the networks that were required to solve the
“deaf, dumb and blind bomber pilot” challenge, he lived through the sort of moment
that left an indelible psychological mark – one that remains visible in the revolution
he made, as Luther’s lightning-bolt of faith is in the unadorned churches and simple
liturgy of Lutheranism. Baran was born in Grodno, Poland in 1928. His father had an
uneasy sense about what was coming to Europe and he moved the family to America
when Paul was six. Pesach Baran became Paul Bran in America, a model student, a
prize-winning mathematician and eventually at Hughes and Rand he established
himself as one of the great American engineers of his generation. And like so many
refugees of that era, the sharp, irreversible exodus left him with a question. How,
exactly, to stay connected – to family, to tradition, to history? As the murderous mist
of Nazism swept over Europe, the problem took on a searching urgency: How to
maintain a connection, any connection, in the face of utter catastrophe? As he neared
retirement decades later, Baran recalled his life’s work with this resonant line: “I
was concerned,” he said, “with survivability.” The problem that animated his life as
much as it did his networks.
Two years after arriving at RAND, Baran began to discern the outlines to a solution
to the dangerous problem of American military communications. In a series of
lectures for Air Force officers starting in the summer of 1961, Baran began working
his way towards an answer, speech by speech and equation by equation. He didn’t
fully know where he was heading when he began the talks, he said, but he had an
instinct that some other design must be out there, some completely fresh way to
handle the “survivability problem” and by the end of his lecture tour, he had found
it.
Baran’s new design for a durable network had begun with an idea that didn’t work.
The Pentagon, he’d thought, might broadcast thousands of coded messages over AM
radio frequencies all at once as an attack approached. “We interrupt this program to
say: It’s Christmas in July!” Missile silo commanders and bomber commanders
would cluster by their transistor radios, collecting a “launch” code with the ease of
listning to a late-night baseball game. That target-shaped, “Just Aim Here” web of
phone lines would be replaced by something far more distributed, harder to wipe
out with a single Semyorka-7 missile shot. But this approach had problems too. It
relied fatally on broadcast towers and on insecure AM radio waves. But the idea of
such a widespread, insidiously untargettable network got Baran thinking. Sending
out the messages and letting them find their own way had a lot of appeal, if it could
be done. There would be no central hubs. Information would sail over linked lines in
the way radio signals moved in the air. Military communications, in Baran’s system,
would bounce from point to point on this tapestry, at each stop being re-directed
towards their intended destination. The resulting network, if you drew it out, would
look like a fishnet: Lots of links connected to a few knotted nodes. And because the
bundles of data, Baran called them packets, could be moved by the network itself,
you could cut or nuke or sabotage the net in a few places and still use it. The packets
would would find another path. Even a badly ripped up and irradiated network
could, in theory, carry a “launch” – or a recall – message safely from the White House
to a bomber pilot.
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“The early simulations,” Baran recalled, “showed that after the hypothetical network
was 50% instantly destroyed, the surviving pieces of the network reconstituted
themselves within a half a second.” That was a way of saying that his messages were
finding new routes on the network even after huge parts of the system had been
taken off line. And they were doing it nearly instantly. Better still, as he began to
model these fishnet, “distributed” networks, Baran discovered that they were not
only capable of surviving attack, they were also incredibly efficient. “If built and
maintained at a cost of $60 million (1964 Dollars),” he calculated, his design would,
“handle the long distance telecommunications within the Department of Defense
that was costing the taxpayer about $2 billion a year.”
Baran travelled the country for most of 1961 and 1962, classified presentation and
slide-rules in hand, trying to persuade skeptical generals, engineers and other
scientists. It was, he found, a nearly impossible task. He recalled a visit to the
towering AT&T switching headquarters on Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan. It
was,an implacable temple of the high-priests of hub-and-spoke network design.
That one building handled more telephone and telex traffic than nearly any other
single point on earth. Surely the place was very high on the USSR first-strike list for
exactly that reason. So Baran expected a friendly reception. After all, he’d be telling a
bunch of men with a uranium death sentence that he’d found a way to get them off
the Soviet target list. His new “mesh” network would mean that bombing AT&T
would be largely pointless. It wouldn’t blind US commanders. If only they’d redesign
their network, the AT&T engineers might save their own lives. They thought he was
insane.
“I tried to explain packet switching to a senior telephone company executive. In midsentence
he interrupted me, “ Baran recalled. “The old analog engineer looked
stunned. He looked at his colleagues in the room while his eyeballs rolled up,
sending a signal of his utter disbelief. He paused for a while, and then said, ‘Son,
here’s how a telephone works….’” Of course Paul Baran knew how a telephone
worked. You jacked one point to a switch to another point. That was the problem.
This was why AT&Ts design would be absolutely useless in the face of the
catastrophe he’d been told to prevent. Baran was, nerve and blood and bone, as an
analyst, and even as a refugee perhaps, alive with the imperative of survivability, of
how connection might mean the difference between war and peace. Those morons
in the AT&T building? What the hell could they be worrying about?
But it wasn’t just that $2 billion annual check from the US Defense Department those
wizened phone wizards were seeing vanish in Baran’s fishnet, it was a whole way of
thinking. The AT&T scientists wanted to control the addresses, the routes, the
timing of messages from the center. This sort of authoritarian design appeared more
efficient to them; perhaps it was even more psychologically comfortable since it
matched their own experience of being commanded and controlled. Karl Wittfogel,
the historian who identified the water totalitarians of ancient China or Egypt, would
have recognized them: Switch Despots! “We had arrived at a conceptual impasse,”
Baran reflected with the mild confidence of a man who knows he will eventually
81
win. He moved onto the next stop. Same result. And the next. Same result. Eventually
Baran’s engineering colleagues back at RAND were so affronted by the routine
dismissal of his logic that they spoke up. They had seen the classified briefings. They
knew just how easily the nation could be hobbled – and their Santa Monica building
was surely on some target list somewhere too. RAND’s scientists demanded a
detailed, critical study of the “distributed network model”. By the time they were
finished, the Air Force was preparing to begin construction.
Survivability. Plucked from that impossible looking puzzle was the first honestly
distributed network. You can sense the power of this inversion: A network with no
central control, survivable, uncuttable. The earliest large network built on the
Baran’s principles became known as ARPANET, the Advanced Research Project
Agency NETwork – a mesh of connections that, even today, serves as the backbone
for parts of the Internet. Even with the risk of nuclear war (hopefully) long gone,
packet switching networks of one sort or another still account for most of the data
moving in the world. Think of how true, how heat-hardened and useful an idea must
be to endure more than fifty years of technological change. And all the efficiencies
Baran first predicted 50 years ago on his slide rules are still at work. Every time you
make a call, share a video or ask a machine to think for you, that whole transaction
likely takes place through fishnet routed packets. If we had stayed with that old
AT&T model, we’d be living in a different world. Riots would be flipped off with a
single switch. Data flows would be monitored with the ease of watching a subway
turnstile. The far flung, wild creativity of our plug-and-play connected world would
be stilted, stifled. Each additional connection to the system would demand
bureaucratic central approval by the Switch Despots, concerned more with their
own power more than their survival. Instead, we have a slice-resistant mesh that
has grown by a billion times over, with its original architecture largely intact.
Packet switched systems such as the Internet mean that anyone with some string
and an ability to tie knots (which, in tech-speak, is anyone with some blinking fiber
optics and a TCP/IP connection) can add themselves into the global web. They can
connect. They can share. Practically, this is why you can so easily snap your phone
or tablet on and touch, more or less instantly, a whole world of data. Every minute
now an additional 10,000 devices are connected to the Internet. Medical tools,
Bitcoin mines, airplane diagnostic systems – and of course wired citizens, smartphones
and laptops and tablets. This ease of connection is an implicit part of a
Seventh Sense worldview. Anyone can connect. It’s as fundamental as Luther’s “Let
anyone can speak to God.” Or Kant’s “Dare to know.” When someone says “Why
would anyone want to share photos with the world?” or “Why would you ever hand
your DNA over?” they are missing the point that many objects now are only
complete or useful once they’re connected. When we say “connection changes the
nature of an object” we’re nodding towards the idea that constant connection is
almost a kind of right�for devices and programs and people. Anyhow, it is certainly
a kind of yearning.
When we described network power as stretched between distribution and
concentration, we should understand too that it is this design of Baran’s that
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permits the easy spread and accumulation of links.Terror cells or social networks or
financial markets all lay out in this fashion. Wide-open, convenience-making links
are expanding, and they serve as a kind of global nervous system, more sensitive
with each passing generation. These lines of connection run two ways, of course:
Networks permit any of us to connect to nearly anywhere, and to unimaginable
technological power. But, at the same time, the world connects back to us. Wired
jihadis and currencies and bio bits – they’re all tied in with us too. So yes: We’re
murdering the exotic with our data connections and machines and discount plane
flights. Should we be surprised when, from time to time now, the exotic shows up
and murders us right back?
We’ve seen, now, the way in which that pulling connection between center and
periphery – that tension of our network – pulls apart old structures. And this is the
first, urgent Seventh Sense understanding: Connection changes the nature of an
object by placing it on this tense mesh. Connect a patient, a doctor, a flying machine,
a currency – each is twisted and changed as a result. Some become great. Others
snap, never to be rebuilt. Some adjust, painfully. The pulling network action
accounts for our greatest new fortunes but also the tumbling of old ideas and
institutions. This is why our age is so uneasy. This is also part of the picture of
network power we have to keep in mind, the image of a stretched skein plucking
apart old structures. Baran’s fishnet grows, it locks everything it touches into a new
structure, one that resists the “arrest the usual suspects” sort of interruption. We’ve
said: Connection changes the nature of an object. To be connected to a Baran-style
system instead of a brush-cut 1950’s AT&T system makes a difference.
The connected devices themselves are constantly improving. Back in Baran’s day,
dozens of scientists counted themselves lucky to share a single computer. A few
decades later, the PC revolution gave everyone their own machine. And now, of
course, we each have many computers in our lives: phones, wired TVs, computers.
Because of connection, we have access to thousands of such devices in data
centers. 107 We can touch them in an instant, a fusion of software and hardware and
connection that we are starting to know lean on as “everyware.” This now
commonplace magic was formalized back in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of the
founding engineers at Intel, who noticed the rather amazing fact that since the
introduction of integrated chips in 1959, the number of transistors on each tiny chip
had been doubling every two years. 108 It seemed hard to imagine this pace could
endure, but then it did and does, something known as Moore’s Law. Back in 1997
Andy Grove, who followed Moore as CEO of Intel, the chip giant, was named TIME’s
Man of the Year. I wrote that story and I remember Grove telling me, in a
confessional spirit: “I never stopped thinking about the business. I worked
107 And now, of course: Richard Harper, Tom Rodden, Yvonne Rogers and Abigail
Sellen Eds. Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the year 2020, (Redmond:
Microsoft Research Publication 2008)
108 This now commonplace magic: Chris Mack, “The Multiple Lives of Moore’s
Law: Why Gordon Moore’s grand prediction has endured for 50 years”, IEEE
Spectrum (March 30, 2015), accessible online.
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constantly. But when Gordon Moore left the office, he left the work. Mostly he’d go
fishing.” Moore had the certain confidence of a man who had spotted one of the
fundamental laws of our age, the compression of computing power and cost. He had
the “Let’s go fish” air of a man who had seen the inevitable. Grove, who as CEO had
to match the wild speed Moore’s Law suggested, had the total unease of a man
aware of just how fast a pace the inevitable was setting. Competition was
everywhere. One mistake sustained for six months could kill the entire, multi-billion
dollar business. It had happened to other firms. Often. Grove’s motto was best
captured in the title of one of his books. Only The Paranoid Survive. Each man was
right in his way. Moore’s law makes ever cheaper and more functional devices
spread. But Grove’s famous anxiety was honestly earned too: So much speed. So
much connection. Paranoia does seem the best reaction.
You have to wonder what that eye-rolling AT&T senior telecommunications
engineer who so mindlessly lectured Baran would have made of this new world. The
old New York City temple of phone switches where they met in 1961 has been
remade into a luxury condominium now. The company’s impregnable billions of
dollars of long distance revenue were eroded and then basically destroyed by free
packet-switched services running along the Internet. Son, let me tell you how a phone
works. What must Baran have really thought? Massive, widespread connection
changed everything. Including how a phone works. Baran eventually left RAND. He
founded several of the most important (and lucrative) companies of the early
Internet. Years later he understood with more precision what exactly had happened:
The real risk to those vulnerable AT&T systems wasn’t Russian missiles. It was an
information bomb of sorts, a concatenating desire for constant connection that
exploded many old tools of control. Yes, it took out the old structures. But, because
of the very way it was architected, for survivability, it had a remarkable feature that
even Baran had not quite expected: It enabled each of us to create too.
3.
We’re surrounded by so many networks now where relations and ties of all sorts
produce a constant, hard-to-predict, “I never thought of that before,” dynamism. Of
course you have to pity those AT&T wizards a bit. Let me tell you how a stock market
works. Or let me tell you how a biologist works. None of these have quite the same
answer as they would have two unconnected decades ago. Economies, ecosystems
or our politics or immune systems are charged with this energy of expanding
complexity. Innocuous looking devices or people take on peculiar, sometimes
dangerous aspects when connectedLinked networks of money or people or bugs
tumble into wildness over and over, in ways we can’t quite anticipate or explain..
“There are systems of crucial interest that have so far defied accurate simulation,”
the scientist John Holland observed in a famous paper that helped establish the
discipline of “Chaos Science”. 110 Holland spent years considering these puzzling,
hard-to-model systems and spotted at least one regularity: Whether it was webs of
110 “There are systems”: John Holland, “Complex Adaptive Systems”, Holland, John,
Daedalus; Winter 1992; 121, 1, p. ; Research Library pg. 17
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finance like the futures exchange or immunological networks or our own brains,
highly-connected systems shared what Holland labeled an “evolving structure” –
they never stayed the same. They seemed to shift, with an easy plasticity, in
response to internal pressures or external changes. In the process, they took on new
forms. In many cases, they became better, stronger, more adaptively fit. It wasn’t
simply that the unexpected appeared, it was that the systems were evolving. We
talked earlier about how political and economic ideas like serfdom or divine right
fade into history as new forms – a congress, a stock market – are born to replace old
ones. Holland thought the world filled with such evolutions, no different than
species adjusting (or not) to a hotter climate or some fast new predator. He called
the networks that produce these sorts of innovations “Complex Adaptive Systems”.
When Holland chose the word “complex” he was making an important distinction.
Complicated mechanisms can be designed, predicted and controlled. Jet engines,
artificial hearts or your calculator are complicated in this sense. They may contain
billions of interacting parts, but they can be laid out and repeatedly, predictably
made and used. They don’t change. Complex systems, by contrast, can’t be so
precisely engineered or guessed at with much real certainty. They are hard to fully
control. Human immunology is complex, in this sense. The World Wide Web is
complex. A rainforest is complex: It is made up of uncountable buzzing, connecting
bugs and birds and trees. 112 Order, to the extent it exists in the Amazon basin,
emerges moment-by-moment from countless, constant interactions. The uneven
symphonic sound of L’heure Blue, that romantic stopping point at dawn when the
night retreats bug by bug and you can hear the forest wakeing bird by bird is the
sound of complexity engaging in a never-the-same-twice phase transition.
The word “complex” comes to us from the Latin world plex, which nods at the
interwoven, layered nature of any object 113 . What looks simple – a flower, our skin,
the value of a dollar bill – is in fact plexus, loaded with twitches and influences. In
that stitching of new links, countless interactions sort of inevitably hiccup into
unexpected states and ideas and objects: financial panics or disease epidemics,
banks and revolutions. Traffic during rush hour is a complex system like this – the
atomic, moving bits of the system, of cars and pedestrians and bicycles together
determine the ultimate state of the system: jammed or no. Los Angles at 5 p.m. on a
Friday isn’t designed centrally; it’s honking and confused and aggravated rush hour
logic appears – slightly different every day – from interaction. . As any system fills
out with more actors and more types of connection, it becomes more complex and
harder to predict. Complicated systems don’t produce uncertainty in this same way;
appealingly, they just run. Strapping a complicated object to the wing of a passenger
plane makes sense, even if it takes decades of refinement to real reliability. A
complex object? Not so wise.
112 A rainforest: Simon A. Levin, Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons,
(Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999)
113 The word: Carlos Gershenson, “The Implications of Interactions for Science and
Philosophy”, arXiv:1105.2827v1, May 13, 2011
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Most of our networked world is a pool of buzzing, fresh interaction – not only hard
to predict, but constantly on the sharp edge of making something new. Scientists
like Holland call this “emergence”, the way that bottom-up interactions – between
cells or chips or traders or cars – create a larger order, often something that was not
there before. The fundamental uncertainty of this process means it’s often excluded
from the way we look at the world. It’s easier to assume a predictable, linear,
complicated logic is at work. An “a leads to b and c” sort of logic: revolution leads to
freedom which leads to democracy, for instance. That such predictions are often
wrong – and that we’re so often surprised by events in economics or politics – is a
reminder that compicated systems are often complex, lit with mechanisms that
almost gleefully snap off the fingers of meddling, confident planners. Too often we
look at some puzzle – Iraq, income inequality – and think it is merely “complicated.”
We should know better. “Macro models failed to predict the crisis and seemed
incapable of explaining what was happening to the economy in a convincing
manner,” the European Central Banker Jean-Claude Trichet lamented in the
aftermath of 2008s cascading, complex financial crises, when markets and officials
discovered that the problem with their system was not merely that it was “too big to
fail” but also “too connected to manage” – and possibly “too complex to
comprehend.” Trichet sounded a little shell-shocked. “As a policy maker during the
crisis I found the available models of little help. In fact, I would go further: In the
face of the crisis, we felt abandoned by the conventional tools.” 114
This sense of abandonment comes from an attempt to use a mechanical way of
thinking in age of complexity. 115 When you think an air force can simply pound an
insurgency to sand or that some old reliable business should survive because it rests
upon billions of dollars of infrastructure, you miss the energetic creative and
destructive power of complex connection. It’s not fully right to say: Networks
always beat hierarchies, because of course networks have layers and structures of
their own. But it’s not wrong to consider that complex systems tear easily at stiff,
competitive and overly-ordered ones, even the most carefully engineered
complicated ones. Think of the mafnicently ornamented dictatorships pushed to
collapse in recent years. Or, can you really look at the firm where you work and feel
a sense of living, flexible adaption in the face of connection?
In our age, the pressure of emerging change is particularly heightened by the very
nature of the digital devices themselves. The connected and algorithmic tools all
around us now lend themselves to the easy and cooperative interaction. In fact, that
114 Macro models: Jean-Claude Trichet “Reflections on the nature of monetary
policy non-standard measures and finance theory”, Speech at ECB Central Banking
Conference, Frankfurt, 18 November 2010
115 This sense of abandonment: Michele Catanzaro and Mark Buchanan, “Network
Opportunity.” Nature Physics Vol 9, March 2013 p. 121-122 or Cesar A. Hidalgo,
“Disconnected! The parallel streams of network literature in the natural and social
sciences”, (2015) arXiv:1511.03981
86
ability to plug into and share with one another is the essence of their power. 116 Your
data-enabled phone or camera or database or stock-trading program is easy and
powerful to use because so much of the world’s data – your Sigur Ros songs, your
home movies, your skin temprature – can be reduced to ones and zeros, freed for
fast transmission, endless storage and quick analysis. 117 A machine that can blithely
handle digital inputs of one sort, whether it is trading orders or music files, has the
capacity, in theory, to work with any data. Such adjustability is what forces app
companies, gaming businesses, or phone companies onto an exhausting treadmill of
constant upgrade. Interaction between the pieces of a system, every bit as much as
design or mechanical manipulation, is the reason why change happens. 118
Entrepreneurs mix GPS and phones to create a new business of tracking everything
from our cars to our children. Algorithmic trading programs engineer completely
virtual portfolios – you can buy the S&P Index but as your manager to strip out any
performance from tobacco and gun companies, for instance. Or: Terrorists meet
online and swap data. Some of the most astonishing systems of our new world have
grown up this way. Google’s back-end search systems, for instance, were not “topdown”
designed so much as they emerged, competed and evolved to deliver onceunimaginable
loads of data. No one at Google is “The Architect.” There is no central
approval for technology systems. Complexity and unpredictability and emergence
are regarded as the best way to grow. 119
Long before the idea of a smart phone or 3D goggles, the British mathematician
Alan Turing anticipated their arrival when he dreamed of what he called a
“universal device” 120 : A notional box that, starting from the ones and zeros of
digitized data, could be constructed to do anything. Since everything can ultimately
be reduced to a binary encoding, nearly any sort of data can be shared, studied,
combined or remixed. This easy programmability of so many objects around us now
is why our world now is more complex than, say, a world of interconnected rail cars
or ships might have been. Rail cars and ships don’t change much, and certainly not
instantly. In the digital world, however, many of the most essential objects and
nodes can be flipped around like digital Lego, connected in different ways. And
because they are increasingly “always on”, they are also always changing and
adjusting to what happens elsewhere on the network. This is true for some new
operating system dumped onto your phone that makes it more intelligent as it is for
an algorithm placed into a commodity market that causes unexpected chaos.
116 In fact; Paul Phister, “Cyberspace: The Ultimate Complex Adaptive System”, The
International C2 Journal, Vol 4, No. 2 2010-2011
117 Your data-enabled phone: Gershenson, p4
118 Interaction between: Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of
Embodied Interaction, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001) 4
119 Complexity and unpredictability: Randy Shoup speech “Service architectures
at scale: Lessons from Google and Ebay”, on infoq.com, July 14, 2015
120 Long before: S. B. Cooper and J. Van Leeuwen, Alan Turing: His Work and Impact.
(Waltham, MA: Elsevier, 2013)
87
We said earlier that the Seventh Sense is tuned to spot the unsettling ripples that
come from this fact: Connection changes the nature of an object. Doctors and voters
and machines now sit, we’ve seen, on that stretched skin that links central and
distributed power. This changes the nature of these nodes. A connected doctor is
different than an unconnected one. Well, here is another insight we should know:
The simple, benign looking act of connection makes complicated objects into
complex ones. The moment an object clicks into a network, it is subject to all the
wildness of complexity that may lie there: cascades, whipping external forces,
unexpected internal faults revealed only under the pressure of connection. Cargo
packages. Shares of stock. Linked to a whole system of constant evolution, even the
most innocent looking point is subject to distant twitches, infections or liberating
innovations. They become, as a result, complex. That old lemma of parenting –
You’re only as happy as your least happy child – can be laid upon our devices. You’re
as complex as the most complex device you’re linked to.
Linkage to a complex network is like the difference between a boxed and a pluggedin,
turned-on blender: one is dormant, one is spinning with a wild and dangerous
energy. Connection can change the essence of a whole system if it is designed in
certain ways, as complex forces work on what looks stable. It can, for instance, take
once pliant, cooperative systems, people and tools and make them competitive. 121
Jack an aspiring college graduate into a world where complex systems rip at his
finances, his data and his beliefs and you can end up with a crack in his values, a
move from aspiring middle class member to who knows what: nationalist, inventor,
communist, bitcoin banker. “I had no idea my doctor/aircraft carrier/phone/hedge
fund could do that!” is our common sort of surprise. Contagions, avalanches, tipping
points, feedback loops, infections – connectivity exposes us all to these forces.
“Everthing depends on everything else,” the mathemarical theorist Eugene Stanley
has observed of highly connected systems 122 . On networks that hover apart, isolated
from each other, small failures in one spot trigger limited damage 123 . But on highly
connected systems, tiny failures tumble around, breaking things.
Networks turn everything they touch from complicated to complex. Once a mesh of
connection is really flowing, it creates. Networks cause things to happen, in this
sense. New businesses, new fortunes, new ideas. Castell’s social protests emerged in
this way, appearing like condensate in the cooling jar of the post-2008 economic
crisis and then spreading, improving, evolving in scale and ambition faster than
most traditional politicians could track. Researchers following in his wake studied
the Spanish 15M demonstrations of 2011 and found it was composed largely of new,
121 It can, for instance: Martin Nowak, Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the
Equations of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2006)
122 “Everything depends on”:“Treading Softly in a Connected World”, Quanta
Magazine, Mar 18, 2013 by Natalie Wolchover
123 On networks: Sergey V. Buldyrev, et al. “Catastrophic cascade of failures in
interdependent networks”, Nature 464, 1025-1028 (15 April 2010)
88
young organizations that blossomed from connectivity. Other Spanish protest
groups, such as labor, anti-abortion activists or regional separatists, relied on
decades-old organizations. 15M – like Occupy Wall Street or pieces of the Arab
Spring or Al-Qaeda – relied on groups fresh-born into a hollow, worried political
vacuum. A survey of 15M members looked like a review of new Internet companies:
Young, wired, vividly unplugged from history and impossible to understand without
their constant connection. They were built by leaching people away from traditional
parties, the appeal was both the potential of the new and the chance to get away
from the rotting smell of old politics, surely an instinct many of us feel now. 124 This
is one reason it’s wrong to look at the world and consider it filled merely with
random events, with Black Swans. In fact, regularities and patterns appear many
places on the mesh of connection that surrounds us. They can be searched and
mapped and studied with the tools of data science, but of course they can also be
felt. They may surprise you if you don’t know how to look for them. But the
regularities are there. Human history is not only made of earthquakes.
4.
Even if it can’t be predicted, complexity in any system, whether it is an Indonesian
coral reef or a Russian computer network, can at least be measured. How many
points are connected? How quickly and deeply do they interact? It is the
multiplication of connection that produces a complex landscape. There won’t be
much emergence in a desert, for instance. You alone, unconnected: one point. You
online: Several billion. The essential benefit of many points connected in real time is
that they are an extremely fast feedback loop. This fine-tuning of action-reaction
forces them to adapt and adjust quickly, as if they were runners with a coach
constantly at their side. Compare the feedback loop of a marching Cairo street
protest to, say, the feedback loop of the old men around Mubarak. One was capable
of grabbing a new techniques and ideas in real time. The other stuck in a molasses
haze of old, sweet, slowing ideas. Faced with rapid change, a fast-adapting system
will nearly always perform a slow one.
When we say that networks can and will devour hierarchies this is one reason. All
the businesses that have been devoured by technology firms in recent years failed to
adjust fast enough. Network systems are more complex, their “org charts” are an
unnerving mess as a result of their speed. But under the mess is efficiency, growth,
innovation. Such systems can tip into failure easily, of course. But they also can
adjust their fitness before it is too late. The design of such systems becomes, then, a
matter of decisive power. And most of our essential systems now are designed for a
slower age. Refiguring the global financial system for an age of instant linkage was
one of the crucial conceptual puzzles of the 2008 crisis. Have we done that yet for
our taxes? Our voting? Our biological security? The chaos of those few weeks in the
markets in 2008 revealed new geographies of finance and speed, a mechanism that
had been wired to produce fortune for a few and to inspire, as a result, regulatory
124 They were built: See Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action,”
759
89
desperation in men like Trichet. I’m pretty sure we’ll see versions of this same sort
of crisis in many other areas.
More complexity produces more interaction, as you would expect. More pieces of a
system rushing and touching and changing each other in a perpetual and
accelerating dance. That process pushes, in turn, still more emergence. The easier it
is to combine things the more creativity is tickled into life. 125 You hear an amazing
mashup of the Bee Gees and Michael Jackson; you download the tools to make your
own. In every aspect of the connected world, growing complexity breeds emergence.
This is true in finance, in terrorism, in bio-development. Some intellectuals and
businessmen worry that we’ve arrived at the “End of Innovation” now. But this is
unlikely. Connected systems, almost as if they have a mind of their own, create and
surprise. The complex meshes of connection growing around us now, in a sense, are
like a rainforest. They hold and breed and support a range of species native to the
connected climate – things that couldn’t survive elsewhere, that were unimaginable
in an age without connection. Smart medical prediction devices. Apps on your
phone. Autonomous military robots. Self-driving cars. And we know that, lingering
ahead of us now, as well, are a series of technological leaps that will breed still faster
interaction and creation: Quantum computing, for instance, may yet push computer
to speeds to 100 billion times faster than what is achievable with older technology.
Self-taught, reasoning artificial intelltigence will spot patterns invisible to human
minds, they will offer everythying from computer-assisted explanation to whole
new theories of physics and math 126 . And autonomous robotic systems will press
into realms where our soft human frame cannot survive – deep underwater
biological cracks, for instance, or hot molecular material mixes. More data will flow
back at us from each of these pipes. 127 And as it arrives it will give us an even more
granular sense of our links to the world – and how they might be manipulated for
still more invention. “Many biological and social theories were impossible to test
because of lack of data,” one team of cyber-systems researchers noted. “Now we
have not only the data, but the methods to analyze it.” The result, they add with a
fast breath of relief that could be laid upon many sciences or theories we’ve
squeezed from limited data: “We are recovering from extreme reductionism in
science.” 128
When we say the network “wants” something, it’s a useful anthropomorphism: A
billion connected users want to be linked, so Facebook emerges. A trillon web pages
demand to be searched, so Google appears. Making such ties produces, first, that
125 The easier it is to combine things: See Eric Schmidt, “Conversation with Eric
Schmidt hosted by Danny Sullivan” at Search Engine Strategies Conference, August 9,
2006.p.1-2 2013 Nathaniel W. Husted
126 Self-taught: Michael Nielsen, “The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation”, Quanta
Magazine, June 23 2015
127 More data: Caitríona H. Heinl, “Artificial (Intelligence) Agents and Active Cyber
Defence: Policy Implications” in 6th International Conference on Cyber Conflict,
P.Brangetto, M.Maybaum, J.Stinissen (Eds.) 2014 p, 60
128 “We are recovering”:Gershonesen, et al. p 2-4
90
merciless clawing action we saw at the start of this chapter, which explains the
unique power (and value) of the essential firms of our age. Once that’s done,
however, once the mesh of distribution and connection is in place and growing, then
emergence begins. The completely new appears. This is why the most successful
investors or leaders of our era have a near pathological desire to push and break old
systems. They do this because they have a faith, an instinct, that if they shove hard
enough to snap an equilibrium, then something else will emerge. They are right.
They have all the laws of physics and history behind them. In commerce, the
destruction of old business models breeds new ones. In terrorism, brutal violence is
more useful than bottled anger; it’s a tool to speed the viral emergence of chaos
(and, some hope, a new politics). What emerges from change? Fresh structures,
gates that connect us and bind us .If the Seventh Sense features a nearly wild desire
to smash old equilibriums it is because of the total confidence that something else
will emerge.
Later in life, turning to a philosophical view, Paul Baran said that his webs,
distributing themselves around the world with such smooth and relentless energy,
were reflecting a kind of inevitable progress, a propensity of linked things to keep
linking. Even if he did not see and name our world exactly, he likely could have
predicted it. “Every object in the universe,” he once wrote, “is connected (by
gravity/radiation vectors) to every other object.” We know now just how much
truth is buried in Baran’s almost philosophical words. Objects and people and places
now feed data constantly into the network and to each other. This presses them to
evolve, to change, to connect again. It is simply a matter of time before those
connections bubble up into our real lives to change our economy, our security and
our leaders. That kludgey, parenthetically weird phrase of Baran’s – wired together
“(by gravity/radiation vectors)” – tells us a lot. The spread of links is like gravity
now. It is like radiation. Irresistible. All–penetrating and revealing the deep human
truth in Baran’s Holocaust-bred instincts: To survive and to connect are really the
same thing.
91
Chapter Six:
Warez Dudes
In which the Seventh Sense reveals a secret, dangerous architecture of connection.
1.
It was my second overseas trip. I blinked my eyes as dawn broke over Europe and
seeped inside the airplane. We began our descent into Amsterdam. I changed the
tapes inside my Walkman. Something a bit more upbeat seemed right. Peter Gabriel.
It was 1993. August.
Earlier that spring I’d heard about a plan for a giant summer computer hacking
conference that would be held outside Amsterdam. “Hacking at the End of the
Universe” it was to be called. I can’t recall now where I had picked up news of the
gathering, but it appealed to me immediately. I’d just moved to New York and had
been dipping into the city’s hacking scene. The “scene” was less a boiling, hip hive of
action than a group of computer amateurs, curious hangers on and early IT system
engineers who would gather in the grubby basement of the Citicorp Building on 53 rd
Street and Lexington some days after work to discuss various techniques for
tricking digital systems of all types. Hacking didn't have a deeply nefarious
connotation in those days; it was seen by most of us as a natural, even a healthy
extension of an interest in computers. The Internet had about 10 million users at the
time. The idea that, two decades later, it would connect more than three billion
people or that it would put millions of dollars into the pockets of some of the people
gathering in that basement was honestly unthinkable.
The bible of the group was a thin, irregularly stapled, photocopied magazine
published out on Long Island by a guy who used the nom-de-hack of Emmanuel
Goldstein, the hero of George Orwell’s novel 1984. The magazine was called “2600:
The Hacker Quarterly” and it offered a compilation of ideas about how to fool
around with systems of all sorts, from Atari gaming consoles to door locks. The
name “2600” came from one of the earliest hacks any of us at those little meetings
knew about, a famous 1970’s trick that involved using an audio tone at exactly 2600
hertz (about the pitch of a truck’s backup warning) to force the backbone routing
switches of the AT&T phone system to give up access to an “operator mode” which
would let the phone hacker – they were called phreakers – make any sort of call for
free. The hack didn’t really offer much practical pleasure except a chance to make
free phone calls anywhere in the world. Once you’d mastered the trick you pretty
quickly discovered there wasn't really anyone in Bombay you wanted to call
anyhow.
The real appeal, the deeper joy of the game, was different: It was the sense of secret,
ecstatic access. A feeling of control in the largest network on earth. At one point a
phreaker named John Draper figured out that the little plastic whistles stuffed as
children’s toys inside boxes of sugary Cap’n Crunch cereal produced the 2600 Hz
tone nearly perfectly. The hack made him a legend. He became known, inevitably, as
92
Cap’n Crunch. An article about Draper in Esquire in 1972 had, for instance, inspired
two teenagers named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to start their first company to
build and sell little phreaking boxes. Woz later recalled nervously meeting the Cap’n
one day in California. He was a strange, slightly smelly, and extremely intense
nomadic engineer. “I do it for one reason and one reason only,” the Cap’n huffed to
the writer of that Esquire article, who was a bit baffled why a grown man would find
whistling into phones so appealing. “I'm learning about a system. The phone
company is a System. A computer is a System. Do you understand? If I do what I do,
it is only to explore a System. Computers. Systems. That's my bag,” he said. “The
phone company is nothing but a computer." 130
I’d heard about the Amsterdam conference in the 2600 hacking circles, somewhere
between the debates about circuit boards and which company was best for the
relatively new service of email. The gathering was organized by group of Dutch
computer geeks who published their own magazine, Hack-Tic. I sent an email to the
founders. One of them, a man with the improbably exotic name Rop Gonggrijp, sent
back an irresistible reply. “On August 4 th , 5 th and 6 th we’re organizing a three-day
summer congress for hackers, phone phreaks, programmers, computer haters, data
travelers, electro-wizards, networkers, hardware freaks, techno-anarchists,
communications junkies, cyberpunks, system managers, stupid users, paranoid
androids, Unix gurus, whizz kids, warez dudes, law enforcement officers
(appropriate undercover dress required), guerilla heating engineers and other
assorted bald, long-haired and/or unshaven scum,” the invitation began. Data
travelers? Electro-wizards? Warez dudes? I had to go. “Also included,” the note
continued, “are inspiration, transpiration, a shortage of showers (but a lake to swim
in), good weather (guaranteed by god), campfires and plenty of wide open space
and fresh air.”
In those early days of the Internet, there was only the barest tickle of a commercial
instinct at work. If anything, most of the people at places like 2600 or Hack-Tic were
profoundly anti-commercial. They were hobbyists, as entranced by role-playing
games like Dungeons and Dragons as by their clapped-together, often unreliable
digital machines. It was no accident that firms like Apple had emerged from groups
with names like The Homebrew Computer Club, names that suggested a rooty, selfdefining
hippy ethos. Everyone you met in that world fell pretty squarely into one of
those weird-by-weirder categories Rop Gonggrijp had listed in his email. Their
relaxed, nerdish temperament was reflected in the design of the Internet itself –
open, generous, easy to manipulate, emotional at times in debates over protocols,
freedom loving. The net design was, as well, a reaction against the systems that
troubled all of us most. Like AT&T, say, which was closed, stingy, and tough
(therefore enjoyable) to manipulate.
Jon Postel, the American engineering and programming genius who had helped
write some of the essential original protocols of the Internet, summed up this point
130 “The phone company”: Secrets of the Little Blue Box, Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire
Magazine (October 1971)
93
of view in 1980 as an idea that he thought should characterize the architecture of
the Internet. “Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept.” 131
Postel’s idea became known as the “robustness principle” and it was meant to
determine how switches and nodes on the net should behave. They should, Postel
felt, be good at handling lots of different types of communications – they should be
“robust” – but they should also be careful not to spread too much non-standard
garbage out into the networks. This was an essential advance over the old ARPANET
Paul Baran had helped inspire. That system worked wonderfully by itself, in
isolation, as it sent humming nuclear launch codes zipping around, but it struggled
when it needed to interoperate with other networks. It wasn’t generous. The
Internet that Postel and others were designing was intended to be much, much
larger than ARPANET, so an ability to speak to others and be understood was
essential. It was like planning an airport: You wanted to be able to land lots of
different types of planes. But if someone started throw golf balls, jello and gasoline
on the runway you’d have a problem. It would slow down the system for everyone.
Postel was telling engineers: Be careful what you do and what you put onto the
system. Take responsibility on your end. Build something that’s generous in what it
will handle from others.
Be liberal in what you accept. From the first moments on the grass in Lelystad, the
small town just outside Amsterdam where the Hacking At the End of the Universe
conference gathered, the mad diversity that this idea suggested was an astonishing,
delightful fact. As broad and strange a group as Rop’s email had hinted might come
was in fact there, under the trees, happily running cables from tent to RV, powering
their connected routers with gas-fired generators, marveling at data transmission
speeds that today, your phone might manage from an underground garage with the
barest connectivity. The two-day outdoor festival was an example of human
interoperability. Postel’s Principle brought to life. Few of us knew most of the group.
Nearly everyone was, well, not the most social. But there was instant connection,
discussion, board gaming, and a degree of frank interoperating I’d never quite seen
before. It was a harbinger of two decades of digital cross connection yet to come.
Of all the people at the Hacktic conference, however, among the system managers
and Unix gurus and heating system guerillas (hey, everyone should have a hobby), it
was the Warez Dudes who were of the most interest – both to the participants in the
conference and to the white vans cruising nearby, allegedly filled with curious Dutch
police. The nickname came from the “wares” they had access to, which were largely
cracked open versions of commercial software that could be shared and distributed
and manipulated on private bulletin board systems. The Warez Dudes were pirates.
And like most pirates they had an early sense of the very edges of the law and of the
smell of money drifting along new and essential routes. If hacker culture was, in
those early days, a frontier society – and it was, even down to the sad shortage of
single women – these were the people living on the very furthest edges of the
131 “Be conservative”: Jon Postel “DOD Standard Transmission Control Protocol”
(1980) RFC 761, IED 129
94
wilderness. They fused often fantastic technical skill with the hacker’s instinct for
control – admixed with a criminal’s hunger for profit.
The first computer viruses and worms were part of what they sold. These had
appeared in the 1980s, mostly as curious intellectual exercises. There was a desire
among computer engineers, a scientific sort of craving, to see what might be done on
the systems they had built. It was not unlike those whistling telephone tones that
had so fascinated Cap’n Crunch and Steve Jobs and Woz. Could you make the big
room-sized machines twitch in ways no one had imagined? Absolute, undeniable
thrill ran through this sort of activity. I can still recall returning to my office one day
in the mid-1990s with a Ziploc-bag that contained a floppy disk marked “Viruses”
which I used to promptly break my computer so completely it had to be
reformatted. Twice. Such adventures, however, were also producing some of the
best programmers of my generation. Managing tricks inside those early systems
required then, as it does now, a profound intimacy with the code defining their
electrical operations. (Computer programs are called “code”; people who write and
test them are “coders”.)
But the secret moves behind those early cracks and exploits were rarely secret for
long. The informal culture of stapled together magazines like 2600 told you what
you needed to know about this band: It was a group that liked to share, to brag, to
indulge each other in stories about systems they had cracked open, to play with a bit
of light paranoia about who might be watching you and who might care. Computers.
Systems. That’s my bag. You might as well spread some of the adrenaline rush of
your adventure with others. The sense of a “shared alternate reality” most of us had
first experienced in games like Dungeons and Dragons or the pages of Dune fit nicely
into the digital world. This open, friendly temperament animated most of the people
spread across that Amsterdam field, jumping into the lake instead of showers,
talking math, buzzing at each other like a fridge. We had the programmer’s raw
fascination about what a machine might be made to do, even in ways that were
deeply unintended. We were harmless. The Warez Dudes, however, were different.
Their fascination was a greedy, nasty obsession.
2.
The business of playing with and inside of connected computer systems was, even
as we sat on that Amsterdam summer lawn, shifting. It was slipping from earnest
hobbyists and system managers to something a bit more sinister. We had just begun
using a new phrase, “malware,” to describe the malicious software that took
advantage of Postel’s “be liberal” instinct in order to devastate connected systems
that were filled with too many trusting, unlocked doors. It wasn’t merely the relaxed
system design of the early ‘net or computer systems that made exploitation easy. It
was also that the networks and machines themselves were slipping with a kind of
frictionless momentum towards increasing complexity. This meant, invariably, that
popular programs often shipped to users with mistakes or programming oversights
that invited hijack. The year before the Amsterdam conference, for instance, a cruel
program known as “Michelangelo”, which would overwrite the data on hard disk
95
drives with meaningless ones and zeros, spread onto millions of computers. Once a
machine was infected the overwrite command would activate every year on March
6 th – a twisted celebration of the birthday of the great Renaissance artist. But
because the program operated at the BIOS level – the basic input/output heart of
those early machines – it was nearly impossible to eradicate. Computer security
companies, soon to be known as computer “insecurity” companies because they
were (and are) constantly behinder, responded with the following rather
unconvincing advice: Turn your machine off on March 5 th . Turn it back on March
7 th . 132
Even the biggest, most powerful companies were shipping programs packed with
potential problems, cracks that were often baked into the design of a system,
invisible even to their makers. A couple of years after the Hac-Tic conference, for
example, a popular word processing program included a feature that could permit a
surreptitious hacker to make a computer to execute all sorts of nefarious commands
once a user had opened a harmless-looking document. This was sort of like shipping
hundreds of millions of door locks that would pop easily open for criminals who
knew to ask. Did you use a word processor in the 1990s? Likely your machine faced
this danger: You’d open a note from a friend or a memo from your boss and you’d
then instantly, unstoppably forfeit control of your computer, even if you didn’t know
or see or feel the impact for years. That problem was fixed – companies learned to
issue what became known as “patches” to plug the inadvertent leaks in their
systems – but that such a danger existed and could be profitably used was a sign of
a ruthless evolution. There were billions of dollars, even then, at stake.
As technology advanced, so did the malware, which was adapting and evolving to
new opportunities. Think of how hugely different our experience of machines is
today as opposed to just a few years ago. Hacking has matured as fast – maybe
faster. Early attacks were aimed at machines that had, essentially, no defenses.
Programs like “Michelangelo” were designed to act much like the viruses of a
common cold or food poisoning. They sickened and then controlled individual
machines, devices with no immune systems. Hackers faced a challenge in finding
ways to sneak these digital diseases onto computers, but of course they finally found
holes. They hid viruses on floppy disks or inside documents or spread-sheets that
appeared otherwise safe. Intelligence agencies became infamous for passing out
“free disks” at conferences or littering defense contractor parking lots with infected
USB sticks, waiting for some unsuspecting employee to pop them into a computer
and invisibly activate some bit of carefully installed, hidden malware. Or, in a clever
case of “know your target”, sneaking malware into the code of some particularly
violent video game, sure to be played by an adrenaline-addled system administrator
in a fit of afterhours boredom.
132 Turn it back on: For a discussion of Michaelangelo see entry for virus in
Encyclopedia of Computer Science 4 th Ed. (Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. ),
1839-1841,
96
Like so much about our world, rapid, widespread connectivity of the last decade has
sharpened these dangers. Connection changes the nature of an object; it can make it
much more vulnerable. It can make the harmless dangerous. Generally, once a
machine was jacked into a network, all sorts of fresh possibilities for mischief
flowed right along with the data. The move from a lone PC on your desk to a really
connected machine represented the difference between living in a small town and
walking the streets of New York City. In one place you’d have few encounters,
mostly familiar and harmless. In the other, you’d face an endless stream of the
strange, the new and the unexpected. This is what life is like every day for your
phone or your bank or military – a world of ceaseless assault, often from never-seen
weapons. Robert Morris Sr., a cryptographic and security genius who towered over
NSA code breaking programs for decades in the last century, compressed his
lifetime of experience cracking machines into “Three Golden Rules of Computer
Security”: 133
Rule One: Do not own a computer.
Rule Two: Do not power it on.
Rule Three: Do not use it.
He could have added a Fourth Rule: Do not connect it to anything.
Of course, as we look around today, we’re furiously, enthusiastically violating all
four of these rules pretty much every moment. In fact, our whole economic and
social dreamscape depends on breaking them. We want the best device, we want it
always on, we want to use it all the time. Utility and connection are almost
synonyms now. That the Warez Dudes, or their 21 st century brethren, are hungry to
exploit these systems offers us a chance to understand even more deeply just how
power works in this network age. Why are they so desperate to get inside? How
exactly do they do it? We’ve seen so far two important properties of life in the
network age. First, the way in which network power exists on a sort of new surface
of connected devices and cores, tied by strong data links that are slowly ripping
power out of old institutions. Think of my Dad’s role as a doctor or the sharing
economy shocks delivered by connected cars and bedrooms and labor, for instance.
Second, we’ve seen how networks are complex adaptive systems, where emergent
features –billion dollar businesses, terror organizations, drones – appear with an
easy, destructive frequency that is wiping out old leaders and replacing them with
new ones that better fit the demands of a connected age. Looking at the network
world and seeing that mesh, seeing the emergence of fit new species and the
impending extinction of others is the initial, essential part of the Seventh Sense.
Lingering deep inside the systems themselves, there is another lesson, however.
And, not surprisingly, it is most alive in the hackers. “Exploit engineers,” a team led
by researcher Sergei Bratus has argued, “show you the unintended limits of your
133 Bob Morris cite to come
97
system’s functionality.” 134 Hackers, they mean, reveal the dangerous holes of our
new world. The bad news is that the worst of them (and often the best of them skill
wise) did this at times by swiping your data, your money and finally your peace of
mind. Their fortunes and safety and curiosity – all of these are woven together in
their hot hunger to touch and pull and break the roots of the network. In a world of
expanding connection, they are both more powerful and more dangerous than ever.
3.
Networked systems of our age are confronted, constantly, with diverse, dangerous
challenges, each informed by that Gordian paradox so familiar to us by now: The
more connected we are, the greater the risks. And as bank balances, secret jet
engine designs, and other priceless digital data are developed and then slipped
safely away on connected machines, the rewards for cracking into the systems grow
– far faster than the (near zero) costs of trying to break in. “It is increasingly
obvious,” security researchers F.X. Lindner and Sandro Gaycken have said, “that the
state of the art in Computer Network Defense is over a decade behind its
counterpart in Computer Network Offense. Even intelligence and military
organizations, considered to be the best positioned to defend their own
infrastructures, struggle to keep the constant onslaught of attackers with varying
motives, skills and resources at bay.” 135 The long list of failed US government
security attempts express a strange digital logic: The more essential it is that an
organization keep a secret, the less it seems able to do so. A decade behind? That is
the gap between a flip phone and an iPhone. In the hyperspeed world of technology
it is like confronting a laser weapon with a hoplite. The losing race slips easily
enough into Donald Rumsfeld’s aheader-behinder dynamic, the one that haunts the
paradoxes of national power we face now. Are we killing more terrorists than the
madrassas are producing? Rumsfeld wondered. We can ask: Are we plugging more
machines with more layers, software and applications than we can protect? Are we
making more bugs than we’re patching? (Yes and yes.) “Attackers are not like
natural catastrophes,” Lindner and Gaycken write. “They can analyze their targets.”
Bratus, a math genius who turned to computer science out of curiosity and now
teaches at Dartmouth, has spent a fair amount of time trying to understand just
what happens when a computer or a network is exploited by a hacker, or “pwned” in
the funny idiom of Warez Dudes language. (The phrase means to take control, or to
“own” a system. The spelling is an artifact of an overenthusiastic video-game death
match gloat, in which one player killed another and in his rush to celebrate typed
something along the lines of “I pwned you!” The mis-typing lives today: The highest
award in hacking is known as The Pwnie.) Bratus calls the resulting, pwned device a
134 “Exploit engineers”:Sergei Bratus, et al. “Chapter 13: ‘Weird Machine’ Patterns”
in C. Blackwell and H. Zhu (eds.), Cyberpatterns, Springer International Publishing
Switzerland 2014, p. 13
135 Even intelligence: Felix “F.X” Lidner and Sandro Gaycken, “Back to Basics:
Beyond Network Hygiene”, in Best Practices in Computer Network Defense: Incident
Detection and Response, M.E. Hathaway (Ed.) IOS Press, 2014
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“Weird Machine”: Computers or sensors or network webs silently made to do what
is not intended. Made weird. Hacking is, after all, a kind of perverse programming. It
involves slipping inside a target machine, and then driving it to do things it wasn’t
intended to do, by giving it instructions its designers never knew it might receive. 136
The process of developing and using computer bugs, Bratus found, is not unlike the
most sophisticated software research. Hacker follow careful patterns. The best of
them really conceive of whole systems in the way the finest data architects might.
They look for particular designs, weaponize their code with a delicate elegance and
aim relentlessly at total control. A normal machine does what you tell it. A weird
machine does what someone else commands it to do.
How is such a system born? Well, a potential software hole of the sort that produces
a “Weird Machine” might be as simple as a failure to secure computer code after it is
compiled – sort of like not locking the door on your house after you leave – or a
programming oversight that means a machine can’t handle unexpected inputs. Take
the technique of “fuzzing”, for example, a famously effective way to turn a normal
machine into a weird one. The process involves confusing a digital security system
by throwing unexpected data into normal, apparently safe-looking procedures like
logging into a mail system or transferring money by wire. Think of all the
“username” and “password” forms you see when you’re on the Internet. In a fuzzing
attack, instead of placing a legitimate user name or email address in a registration
field, hackers might add some unexpected characters known to cause a system to
cough up a confused response. If you type in, joe@user.com!’ instead of
joe@user.com as the machine expects, the !’ at the end of the address can baffle and
stall a mis-programmed device. In some cases, that hiccup opens a vulnerability. A
proficient programmer can then order the dazed computer, for instance, to open a
door to the root of the system. It’s as if you could walk up to the teller at your local
bank and shout “Xhsuhgnnsh!!” at her when she asks how you are doing – and in her
confusion she lets you into the safe. You’ve made a weird machine of your bank.
System designers in later generations have become much more sophisticated in
trying to avoid such problems, not least because they’ve so often fingered the
embarrassing or costly aftermath of these kinds of holes in their own code. “You do
not understand how your program really works until it has been exploited,” Bratus
has said, a sentiment that hints at the stomach-lurching moment many coders and
their suddenly victimized users have now had. 137 You don’t understand yourself until
you’ve been pwned. The odds that the endless possible glitches can ever be
completely patched is honestly zero. Hackers continue to use classic exploits like
136 It involves: Julian Bangert, Bratus et al. p2 “The Page-Fault Weird Machine:
Lessons in Instruction-less Computing”, Presented as part of the 7th USENIX
Workshop on Offensive Technologies, (Washington, D.C., 2013) available on
www.usenix.org
137 “You do not really understand”: Rebecca Shapiro, Sergey Bratus, Sean W.
Smith, “’Weird Machines’ in ELF: A Spotlight on the Underappreciated Metadata”
paper delivered 7th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies, (Washington, D.C.,
2013) available on www.usenix.org
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fuzzing, back-doors, or rootkits – and to develop new, more intricate ways to steal a
machine’s mind. This race for mastery is a sprint, one that heads ever deeper into
the depths of a vulnerable system. The closer you are to the very core of a computer
program or a network, the more control you have. Real mastery of the heart of a
system would be like having a spy win the Presidency, turning the whole US
government into a “Weird Machine”. That prize of immediate, high-level and totally
“trusted” access remains the Warez Dude gold standard. 138
The most dangerous – and therefore the most alluringly valuable – of these sorts of
attacks, are known as “zero-day” exploits. The danger they represent only becomes
apparent at some awful instant, “Day Zero”, when they are revealed to have been
running wild inside some hapless network or machine. That first moment in the
knowledge of the bug is like day zero in a cancer diagnosis, and it begins an
immediate race to find and deliver a cure. Such completely unknown, secret
vulnerabilities are fissures in the walls of computers that their manufacturers,
system engineers, and security experts usually don’t realize are there. The dream of
hackers and spies and greedy Warez Dudes is a version of this trick called an
“Advanced Persistent Threat” – hidden, back-door access to a machine that endures
even for years, through upgrades and security checks and system cleanups, all the
while forcing the now-weird computer to do things its user won’t even be aware of:
Send a copy of every keystroke to another machine, for instance, or serve as a
robotic launching pad for attacks on other machines. All while acting like a perfectly
normal machine.
The best of the zero day exploits are based not on the idea of sneaking malicious
software onto machines so much as on taking existing, trusted code and finding tiny
holes that can be blasted into giant, insecure data tunnels. These tools for
manipulation are digital opiates, in a sense, for connected nervous systems. Such
attacks often rely on errors already knit into computer systems, or innocent
seeming features that can be made dangerous. Every computer and software
designer knows their systems are vulnerable. Mathematicians have proven you can
never be absolutely sure a connected machine is safe. A mobile phone, for instance,
contains nearly 30 million lines of code. The systems that run massive cloud
computing basins like those at Google or Amazon are even larger, updated every
day, and have to cope with unprecedented flows of data at very high speeds. Even
expert programmers will leave four or five errors in every million lines of code. 139
138 That prize: Sergey Bratus, Julian Bangert, Alexandar Gabrovsky, Anna Shubina,
Daniel Bilar, and Michael E. Locasto, “Composition Patterns of Hacking”, Proceedings
of Cyberpatterns (2012)
139 Even expert progammers: For a good explanation of how a machine’s code can
be turned against itself, see Sergey Bratus, Michael E. Locasto, Meredith l. Patterson,
Len Sassaman, and Anna Shubina, “Exploit Programming: From Buffer Overflows to
‘Weird Machines’ and Theory of Computation.” ;login December 2011, p. 13-21. The
piece is co-authored by and in honor of Len Sassman, one of the leading thinkers of
the Language Security or LangSec movement who died in 2011. Many of his talks,
still available online, reflect an unusually powerful mix of philosophical and
100
Software and hardware manufacturers usually struggle to keep such exploits secret
until they can deliver a fix, but this doesn’t always work. Secrets get out. And,
anyhow, even once a patch is developed, it can take weeks or months before it’s
widely installed. It’s not uncommon, therefore, that within hours of the
announcement of a newly found zero day, attacks using that method explode around
the net. Thousands of hackers try to take advantage of the vulnerability, to kick at
the defensive corners of systems while they are down for repair or restart – or
simply left vulnerable by slower-witted system administrators who don’t yet know
that it is now open hunting season on a particular bit of code. Heartbleed, a “zero
day” that permitted hackers to slip into your computer via holes in website and
browser security, was disclosed to the world on April 7, 2014 – more than two years
after it had apparently been put in place because of a programming error.
Accidentally? By an overworked engineer? Deliberately? By some state security
agency? In any event, two days after it was announced and long before it had been
fully patched, attacks using the method grew from a few dozen per hour to millions
as hackers tried to suck data from unsecured networks. 140 The exponential power of
a connected system is as apparent in sickness as in health.
4.
In recent years, hacking has moved deeper still, beyond the level of software and
USB drives and into the very atomic level of computers, the places where the
electrons that make up bits and bytes float. The technical elegance of these microlevel
hacks has been, often, breathtaking – exploits that look like Wagnerian operas
compared to the Cap’n Crunch’s thin, reedy weird-machine whistle. As companies
like Intel and AMD began packing more memory cells on silicon wafers, for example,
they noticed magnetic interference flowing across the surface of their chips like
waves. Electrical signals, recall, have a magnetic element, so more tiny digital cells,
closer together, is like a bowl of interacting magnets. Physics would have predicted
such a result. In 2014 security researchers Mark Seaborn and Thomas Dullien, who
worked at Google, discovered that they could use the magnetic vibrations on two
parallel rows of memory chips to flip the electrical state of a third row – sort of like
using a magnet under a table to move a paperclip around – in a way that the system
might never notice 141 . This permitted them to reach “off limits”, super secure areas
of the machine’s memory where they could do what they wanted. They called the
break, “Rowhammer” and it represented an ideal and essentially unfixable hole that
affected nearly every small chipset made for a half a decade. They published the
technical consideration about modern computing systems. See also Rebecca
Shapiro, Sergey Bratus and Sean W. Smith, ““Weird Machines” in ELF: A Spotlight on
the Underappreciated Metadata”, paper published online by Bratus.
140 In any event: Leyla Bilge, Tudor Dumitras, “Before We Knew It: An Empirical
Study of Zero-Day Attacks In the Real World,“ Paper presented at ACM CCS ’12, Oct
16-18, 2012, p 10
141 In 2014: Mark Seaborn and Thomas Dullien, “Exploiting the DRAM rowhammer
bug to gain kernel privileges”, March 18. 2015, Google Project Zero blog
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result immediately as a warning to possibly affected victims, but the exploit
hummed at such a basic level of the system that it proved impossible to fully patch.
It was like trying to patch physics.
Connection changes the nature of an object. This has a particular impact on the
security of our systems, and by extension, our own safety. Computer researcher
Nathaniel Husted has described a world of “emergent vulnerabilities” – wormholes
in software and hardware, communications or finance, that pop up in the connected
universe unbidden and unplanned. “The fundamental aspect of emergent
vulnerabilities and attacks,” Husted writes, “are that they appear benign until
certain criticality conditions are met, at which point they become malignant.” 142
These risks we don’t want sit right alongside all the things we do want from
connectivity. In fact – and this is Hulsted’s point – they are the things we want from
connectivity, perverted into danger.
Paul Baran would have been impressed to see just how right he was, how
connections between us now are like irresistible gravity waves – and how gravity
always wins. In 2015, for instance, Israeli security developed an astonishing hack
that proved that nearly spiritual claim that all objects were linked by connection–
and demonstrated the way that slippery, hungry attacks can breach even the safestlooking
arrangements. “It has been assumed that the physical separation of
computers provides a reliable level of security,” Mordechai Guri and his team wrote
in a paper describing how they had used one isolated machine to infect another.
Physical separation is, in fact, one of the cardinal rules of safe computing, a kind of
lemma to join Robert Morris Sr,’s “don’t connect” rule of network safety: Two
machines, unconnected by a network, should not be able to affect each other.
Imagine I put one kid with a flu in one classroom and a schoolmate of his in another
building. The second kid should remain healthy. The Tel Aviv research team wanted
to challenge this. They first placed two computers side by side on a desk,
unconnected to each other by any wire or network. One machine was connected to
the Internet. The other was completely isolated – it was “air gapped”, like the
healthy kid in the distant building, a sort of digital “boy in the bubble,” in touch with
only the air around it. Then, the researchers began their Houdini trick: Look! Watch
us corrupt this completely unconnected machine! Running a set of programs on the
network-connected machine, the Israeli team was able to warm the processor board
of that computer like a revving car engine, eventually making it hot enough that the
temperature changes were detected by sensors inside the secure, allegedly
impregnable “boy in the bubble” machine sitting nearby. The heat wave triggered a
fan system inside the clean machine, which in turn activated a piece of pre-installed
malware that let the hot machine pwn the bubble machine through temperature
variations. In a video demonstration of the exploit, you can watch the infecting
machine glow ever hotter, issuing “thermal pings” as it sweats and then infects its
142 “The fundamental aspect”: Nathaniel Husted “Analysis techniques for exploring
emergent vulnerabilities and attacks on mobile devices” PhD. Thesis (available
online from Indiana University, 2013) p. v
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safe, “unconnected” neighbor. 143 The heat transfer had a simple message: Nothing is
safe.
Why put such effort, worthy of the deepest physics problems, into the challenge of
sneaking into a cellphone undetected? Well, for Seaborn and Dullien, the drive was
part of a “discover and publish” effort to keep the overall system clean. It is better to
hack, discover and patch than to be hacked, and remain undiscovered. But these
“good guy” engineers are racing against different, equivalently sophisticated, lessdecently
inspired teams. The development and sale of zero-day bugs is, after all, a
business. Modern versions of Cap’n Crunch whistles crack access to some of the
most essential financial, political and security data stores on the planet. As the
power and value of hacking targets has increased, so has the price of the exploits.
Public “zero day markets” sponsored by companies like Google and Microsoft pay
hundreds of thousands of dollars to researchers who discover holes in their
systems. “Better to find them ourselves,” the thinking goes. Though that does not
always make the embarrassment less acute when holes are spotted. At one of the
most carefully watched public hacking competitions in early 2015, for instance, a
skinny, smiling South Korean named Jung Hoon Lee took home $225,000 in prize
money by pwning a series of some of the most important, common programs on the
planet, Apple’s web browser Safari and Google’s Chrome among them. These
systems had been constructed at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. They‘d
been assembled under the gaze of some of the best PhD-led computer scientists in
the world. Jung Hoon Lee’s exploits ran through their complete defenses in less than
a minute. 144
As good and fast as someone like Lee might be, he’s nothing compared to what the
best hackers do. They don’t work in public or compete in hotel ballrooms. They
don’t brag. And they develop ideas that make $225,000 look like a bargain. These
successors to the Warez Dudes work for cybercriminal billionaires, for intelligence
agencies, and even (often) just for themselves. They help find and deploy the sorts of
really deep system exploits that enable brazen cyber thefts of millions of pieces of
personal data or attacks like the Stuxnet virus, which caused thousands of Iranian
nuclear centrifuges to vibrate themselves apart. And they do still more: Most of the
attacks we’ve talked about so far occur in installed, running boxes. But the
companies that make those boxes oversee a whole, vulnerable process of building
and testing and designing and installing them. And it’s here, with billion dollar
budgets at work, that some exploit teams make and leave vulnerabilities that they
can later, ruthlessly exploit. Every step of that gestation – from sneaking secrets into
early code bases to intercepting and rewiring routers as they ship overseas – is now
an opportunity for secret control. Or for unanticipated risk, for “emergent
143 In a video: For a description of this exploit see Mordechai Guri, Matan Monitz,
Yisroel Mirski, Yuval Elovici, “BitWhisper: Covert Signaling Channel between Air-
Gapped Computers using Thermal Manipulations” (2015) available on
arXiv:1503.07919 [cs.CR]
144 Jung Hoon Lee’s exploits: “Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Safari Were All hacked at
Pwn2Own Contest”, PC World via IDG News Service Mar 20, 2015
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misbehavior” that defies simple analysis. You can’t predict where you might be
attacked by merely looking at the possible holes in each piece. Rather, it’s the whole
system that breeds risks. It acts in ways that the designer could not have predicted
in advance. “Clearly the system itself is misbehaving,” the researcher Jeffrey Mogul
writes of his study of various cases where networks are cracked in this fashion.
“However, none of the components have failed per-se.” 145
The complexity of the systems themselves has been, not surprisingly, mimicked in
the design of hacking attacks. What was once done by a single Warez Dude is now
handled with division of labor, technical specialization and intensive pre-attack
research. Every innovation in “righteous malware” is quickly copied and used in
dangerous attack tools. The clever modular design of Stuxnet, for instance, was
studied by criminals and was found years later still echoing in weapons aimed at
banks, credit card companies and health insurance firms. “We are not experts in
military history, doctrine, or philosophy,” cybersecurity researchers Stephen Cobb
and Andrew Lee have written, “so we are unaware of the correct word for the
following category of weapons: the ones you deliver to your enemies in re-usable
form.” Cyberattack systems can be dangerous not least because they boomerang.
They are delivered intact, primed for re-use to enemies who may choose to bounce
them back at your banks, hospitals and electrical grids. “Righteous malware is
unique,” Cobb and Lee conclude. “You are giving away your weapons, tactics and
designs simply by using them.” 146
It’s not only American services hunting and using such backdoor keys and battering
rams, of course; not only the NSA that sees its viruses retooled and reused.
Computer security researchers describe opening up the laptops of unwary business
travelers and finding the machines blasted inside by malware and other technical
cancers, carefully planted by a half-dozen intelligence agencies and criminal
organizations. It’s like discovering a closet full of spies in your house, each being
careful not to step on the other’s toes as they watch and listen to your life. Why is my
computer so slow, a government official in a Eurasian capital might ask. It is because
it has been simultaneously pwned by Americans, Russians, Israelis, Chinese, and
maybe a local Mafioso or two – and their code is not running smoothly.
A couple of years ago I had a naïve moment when I thought, perhaps, it would be
possible and in everyone’s interest to go back to those simpler, innocent Hacktic
days, when information about vulnerabilities was widely shared and easily
discussed – and holes were quickly patched as a result. I was thinking about the
problem of cybertension between the US and China and suggested applying an
145 “However”: Jeffrey C. Mogul, “Emergent (Mis)behavior vs. Complex Software
Systems”, HP Labs Research Papers, 2006, HPL-2006-2
146 “We are not experts”: Stephen Cobb and Andrew Lee, “Malware is Called
Malicious for a Reason: The Risks of Weaponizing Code” in P. Brangetto, M.
Maybaum, J. Stinissen eds., 6 th Annual Conference on Cyber Conflict (NATO
Publications, 2014) 71-82
104
important idea of the scientist Dan Geer to the ever more fraught relations. 147
Perhaps the US and China could work together to buy up and then publish all the
zero days as they emerged, I thought. 148 Instead of the dangerous code falling into
the hands of cybercriminals, Mafiosi and terrorists, the two countries could lead an
effort to jointly buy any new exploit for five times what anyone else would pay – and
then immediately publish what they had bought and the necessary patch. This
would make the network safer for everyone. I should have known better.
The US and China and other nations were (and are) buying world-class zero days.
But they were never going to publish them. They were buying them to use.
Sometimes against each other. Sometimes, unnervingly, against their own citizens.
And they needed to keep on buying and developing and hiding such tools on an
exhausting, never-ending security treadmill because, unlike traditional weapons,
which could be stockpiled to use whenever they were needed in the future, the holes
of the most valuable zero-days might be patched at any moment, making a once
devastating bit of malware instantly useless. And, as the systems matured and
accelerated, this meant that they had to run ever faster to keep up. Which further
reduced their incentive to “buy and publish” what they did have. Little surprise then
that all around the IT universe in recent years, the incidence of reporting dangerous
bugs has been declining, even as we know the number of known security holes is
certainly growing. 149
Grab the five nearest electronic devices near you and you can be pretty sure each is
vulnerable; which of course means you are vulnerable too. Not merely to the loss of
your secrets, but also to perversion and control. This is the cold truth: that old
hacker ethos, the one spread out so warmly on Amsterdam grass 20 years ago, the
be liberal in what you accept frontier society instinct, is dead. Weird machines and
normal machines, weird networks and normal ones, people made weird by
technological manipulation and those who have note – they will all, inevitably, live
side by side. The more essential machines become to our connected lives, the more
avidly weird and hacked the networks will become. The incentive to whistle up
control of the systems, and control of those of enmeshed in them, is the only thing
that seems to grow faster than the system itself.
This vulnerability of connected systems is an important mile marker in our route
towards understanding some principles of power in a connected age. “Read over
and over again the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus, Turenne,
Eugene and Frederick,” Napoleon wrote once. “Make them your models. This is the
5.
147 I was thinking: Dan Geer, “Cybersecurity as Realpolitik”, speech delivered at
BlackHat, August 6,2014
148 Perhaps: Joshua Cooper Ramo “Talking Cyberthreat with China”, International
Herald Tribune, July 10, 2013
149 Little surprise: Linder Gayten Back to Basics p. 58
105
only way to become a great general and master the secrets of war.” 150 I sometimes
feel the same reading over stories of zero-day attacks, clever hacks like
“rowhammer” or the Tel Aviv heat hack. You can distill from each tale of a broken,
once-secure systems an essential principle: The hackers rush always, relentlessly at
the central core of a system. They aim to make it weird, to manipulate it madly from
the inside out. Network power doesn’t merely come from that 10 million device-perday
spread of global connectivity, after all, it also comes from incredible
concentration of power inside certain systems we all rely on: Chips, data bases,
centralized and gatekept platforms. Control of such hubs and roots of our world can
influence everything; little wonder they are such an appealing target. “The
conventional belief that all nuclear systems are ‘air gapped’ is a myth,” the Russian
security researcher Eugene Kaspersky has warned. The result: “There are three
types of people: Scared to death. Opportunists. Don’t care.” 151
This sense that the systems are so vulnerable if you can get to their hearts is what
lures hackers ever deeper, into the code kernels where the most basic instructions
are decided. That they can often make machines weird by using the device’s own
code against them, like some sort of autoimmune disease, is only a marker of the
particular perversity of the problem here. Security researchers call such holes
“vulnerabilities” in a system, but of course they are much more than weak spots.
They are potentially fatal. In a way, the hot rush to touch and tickle and maliciously
use these already waiting cancers reveals to us the essential Seventh Sense secret of
the Warez Dudes: Connection makes an object vulnerable, yes; but it can also reveal
the possibility of total control, of the fundamental root mastery of a connected
system. Such a hole, when it is exposed by connection and then corruption, can be
complete in the scope of its damage, devastating. Lord Acton’s famous line that
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” twists in this age to something like “Absolute
access corrupts absolutely.” Connection makes total exploitation, total control,
possible.
Every new generation of connected technologies is breeding essential black boxes,
complex (not merely complicated!) containers filled with algorithmic levers and
code tools for digital work that can be understood by only a few people, and
exploited and used effectively – for good or ill – by a still smaller group. “The greater
the dependence on a technology the greater the need to study and expose its inner
workings,” one group of radical digital activists has argued in The Critical
Engineering Manifesto. 152 They mean that as we turn our safety, freedom, and health
over to a world of devices and their makers, we must know what goes on inside the
very heart of such systems. It’s not merely that everything is connected now; it’s
150 “Read over and over”: Napoleon, “Maxims” from Thomas Raphael Phillip, ed.,
Roots of Strategy: The 5 Greatest Military Classics of All Time, (Stackpole Books 1985)
p 432
151 “There are three types:” Eugene Kaspersky Talk at the Press Club in Canberra,
Australia (2013)
152 “The greater the dependence”: “The Critical Engineering Manifesto,” The
Critical Engineering Working Group, Berlin, October 2011-2014. Available online
106
also that everything is monitored. Remebered. Studied. The Warez Dudes’ drive to
get ever closer to the core, to perform even that atomic level hacking, tells us
something about just how much power is locked up in those central cores where
this information accumulates. The 2600 hz whistle was, it seems, only the first of an
endless series of battles for control of the roots and trunklines of modern power.
All around us today, huge power accumulates to certain irreplaceable cores. We
know this is a problem of connected age design: Giant search engines, certain
algorithms, database or communications protocols overmaster us because they can
gather so much data, so fast, and process it with unique fidelity. What makes a city?
urban scholars often ask. We might wonder: What makes a platform for network
power? The answer to both questions is the same: Density. 153 If the first cities of
Aztecs or Mesopotamiaman civilization differed from early tribal clusters because of
their density, the same is true for our first platforms of instant connection. Facebook
is denser than AOL ever was. More people, more data, thicker connections. Future
platforms will be denser still. And if cities and density were once sadly
unanticipated accelerants to plague, poverty and revolution, we should be aware of
the risks of our own tight-clustered centers of dense connection. The security of
these cores that link us to each other and our essential data – when jacked by
hackers, by companies, or even by fast algorithms we don’t understand – is
important not merely because of the possibility of total control a breach might
represent, but because they show us the very fact of such totalizing control exists.
To infect, surprise, sicken – all this is alluringly possible and dreamable for anyone
with a hunger for mastery. Imagine if you knew your government could be switched
instantly and invisibly to malice. (Or, to effectiveness!) Or picture a nation of
connected citizens wired for flash-started nationalism and hate. Such a possibility
exists on linked systems. This potential for total, weird control of the cores – and
thus total control of anyone connected to them – should force us to wonder a bit.
Every evil thing beats in those central nodes: The power to manipulate, to master, to
destroy even. With such access I can change what you know about the world, how
you vote, where your money sits, what you remember, how soon we spot (or don’t)
a slipped knot in your DNA.
“Just like every drinking binge ends at vodka, so every hacking session ends at
kernel.org” Thomas Dullien, the mathematician and good-guy hacker who won a
Pwnie in 2015 for lifetime security achievement, observed once 154 . So much power
in a connected system lies at its root: Kernel.org, for instance, is the reference copy
for LINUX computer code that powers most digital machines on earth, sort of like
the original DNA of the net. To manipulate Kernel.org would be to reach into the
very spine of the Internet. If the aim is control, if it is to find and exploit the most
fundamental of cracks in the surface of the black boxes, to get even deeper inside,
153 What makes a city?: Colin McFarlane, “The geographies of urban density:
topology, politics and the city.” Progress in Human Geography (2015) p. 2
154 “Just like every drinking binge”: Halvar Flake/Thomas Dullien, “Why Johnny
Can’t Tell If He Is Compromised,” speech delievered at Area41 Conference, (Zurich,
June 2014)
107
then inevitably kernel.org or it’s equivalent in any system is the ultimate target.
Hackers might start with beer (your phone), a few glasses of wine (your office email
system), but what they really want is full blotto (kernel.org). Such central black
boxes exist in any linked system and they represent, at once, both the greatest
accomplishments of our most masterful systems designers and the point at which
other, as masterful digital machinists direct their most relentless attacks.
Dullien saw something else too as he considered the work of hackers. Comparing
system cracking to drinking wasn’t an accidental, funny aside for him. Hacking was
almost a kind of addiction. It became a chase after a bigger and bigger high, which in
computing terms meant a race to compromise as many machines as possible. Rapid
escalation, a loss of self-control, the need for more and more – all these are the
hallmarks of the best widespread attacks, which aim to expand the “compromise
boundary” until every machine has been made sick. This is why stealing source
code, the original instructions that lay behind any computer program, are such a
prize for Warez Dudes. Source code is the DNA of the black box, in a sense, it can be
used break into other machines to, well, steal still more source code. This looked, to
Dullien, an awful lot like addiction. And it’s not just lone teen hackers looking for a
dopamine jump who were chasing machines with a blind addicts urgency. It infects
governments too. “Surprising realization (at least for me) after the Snowden leaks,”
Dullien observed. “Hacking is so addictive that entire organizations can become
addicts and show addict-style behavior.” 155 This was the NSA or GHSQ or who knew
what other intelligence service, for instance, in a feral hunger for more and more
and eventually all data. And the ultimate high? Imagine if you could crack the CA, the
Certificate Authority that provides proof that anyone working on a network is
trustworthy. CA “trustworthiness guarantees” are keys that permit access to any
computer, phone and network. The whole connected world depends on CAs to know
if software is safe. To control the CA would be a dream for an addicted organization,
like a set of keys to the local pharmacy. No lock would really serve much of a
purpose. You could touch the beating heart of any machine on earth. The ultimate
black box. We should all hope the CA, at least, always remains pristine in this
dangerous world.
It was hacked in the summer of 2011.
6.
Dullien’s observation that “every hacking binge ends at Kernel.org” touches
something far deeper than just the world of hackers. Sure, that urgent drive to get to
the very core of systems is a very specific, unquenchable digital thirst. It’s where the
most power is, as we’ve seen. There’s a rush in getting there: When brain
researchers found a spike in dopamine levels of university students engaged in
password hacking, that was hardly a surprise to anyone who’s ever written or used
155 ”Surprising realization”: Thomas Dullien, “Offensive Work and Addiction”,
keynote presentation delivered at ISACA Nordic Conference (2014)
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an exploit. 156 But the real drive to get inside is about more than an adrenaline rush.
Remember that network power, the power that we’re trying to figure out how to
bend and shape for our own security, exists in a kind of dynamic tension. It’s like a
stretched, taut fabric spread between concentrated cores and billions of connected
users or devices. The logic of spreading and distributed power, the force that makes
the network bigger, is driven by Baran’s principle of open design, and by our own
hunger for communications and connection and cool new devices. But there is
another side to this tension.
In a sense, over the years, a whole set of hot, infectious pressures descended on the
network of values and friendships and easy cooperation of the Hack-Tic days. “Be
generous in what you receive,” had let the networks of our age grow at an incredible
pace, but at the price of vulnerability, of commercial ambition, and of an eerie
technological lemma that what made the systems faster and stronger might also kill
them. A change in culture of the digital elite, naturally, followed. The brutal,
inarguable, profitable demands of power and politics had cracked apart the unique
social webs of the HacTic era. I did not like watching this sad evolution; none of us
did, but anyhow it has produced the world in which our new sensibility will have to
operate. The openness that we loved and craved in so many areas of life, from our
minds to our markets, had now become a liability. “I remember what the Internet
was like before it was being watched and there had never been anything in the
history of man that is like it,” Edward Snowden once observed, nostalgic for the
datascape he saw melt away during his time at the NSA. 157 I realize now that there
is a whole new generation of young programmers that won’t ever know that original
generous ethos of a place like Hacktic, a fresh cohort of the digital age that operates
at levels of technical mastery far beyond anything we might have imagined in the
Citicorp Tower basement 20 years ago. They will confront endless battles to get
inside and exploit and make “weird” the cores of network power. They will know
and design and manage instead a world of gates, built for protection. Their instincts
will be for opacity and control, not openness and generosity. Invariably this shift
will affect the design of the systems this new generation builds which will, in turn,
affect all of us.
The black boxes and the crackers are in a dance, now, a sort of dangerous
evolutionary waltz that offers a foretaste of what you and I will face as we consider
the problems of attack and defense and strategy in a networked age 158 . It reminds
156 There’s a rush: Wael Khalifa, Kenneth Revett and Abdel-Badeeh Salem “In the
Hacker’s Eye: The Neurophysiology of a Computer Hacker”, in Global Security, Safety
and Sustainability & e-Democracy Volume 99 of the series Lecture Notes of the
Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications
Engineering, (Berlin: Springer), 112-119
157 “I remember what the Internet was like”: Snowden interview in CITIZENFOUR,
Laura Poitras (2015)
158 The black boxes: Nikos Virvilis, Dimitris Gritzalis, Theodoros Apostolopoulos,
“Trusted Computing vs. Advanced Persistent Threats: Can a defender win this
game?” 2013 IEEE 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence &
109
me of an old puzzle of Chinese history: Why were the very strongest dynasties – the
Han, the Ming, the Tang – always confronted by the best organized, most deadly
rebels? The answer was rooted in a violent, greedy tango of the development of each
side. The better a dynasty defended its farmers or its trade or its annual rice harvest,
the more the rebels from the steppe had to become strategic and unified and
powerful. When it was easy to pick off single farmers, then the rebels had no need to
be well organized. They could be a bit lazy. Could snatch a year’s undefended
harvest in an afternoon. But the stronger the empire, the stronger the rebels had to
become 159 . Amsterdam in 1994 was a bunch of lone, weak, unprepared farmers.
Twenty years later we have a digital empire, and the attackers it deserves are
appearing, refined and evolved by this same competitive logic. They are better
organized, smart, intent on getting to the heart of the black boxes of power. And the
more we defend against them? The better they will become.
That our most essential systems are vulnerable to loss of control is a chilly feeling. It
is a reminder of the power of the people who know how to crash and manipulate –
or build and operate – parts of our world most of us barely understand. It’s like
discovering someone could take over your lungs or your heart. We don’t understand
those devices either, most of us. But we depend on them entirely. Some of these
hackers are moved to mischief by technical beauty. Some by the giddy smashing
rush of breaking in, of touching the core. Others by greed or patriotism or by secret,
zealous, unlawful obsessions. What the technically best of this group share,
however, is a pressing desire to get as close as possible to the kernels where
inarguable and even invisible code decisions are made, where digital DNA is printed
in a sense, and where a total mastery of the binary guts of the system is possible.
That Cap’n Crunch thrill, the dream of whistling up control over the thick, helpless
trunk of a network, that remains the dream. Remember Conway’s Law: The design
and activity and control of a network redounds on, even determines the real world.
If the whole network is, in a sense, filled with holes, if it contains inherently the
possibility of being turned into a “weird machine” – what does that mean for the real
world?
The Seventh Sense insight of this chapter, the key feeling, is that all the systems we
rely on, that we think we control – financial or political or digital – can all be made
weird and pwned by forces we cannot see and struggle to stop. Our markets, our
elections, our knowledge – all of these, dependent on linked systems themselves,
can become weird. We can no longer regard them as certain and harmless. The
hacker’s drive to get to the kernels is not merely an information technology
problem. It’s a larger statement about networks, about the way that power and
danger are still and always one and the same. The desire to hack the cores of our
world is a marker of just how profoundly, even secretly influential the kernels have
become – in ways we’re just now beginning to understand. Bratus was right, that we
don’t really understand any system until it’s been exploited, pwned. This is as true
Computing and 2013 IEEE 10th International Conference on Autonomic & Trusted
Computing
159 But the stronger the empire: See Turchin, p. 3
110
for our minds as it is for our markets. The Seventh Sense feeds a bit on the trail of
hackers; it is a way to tune our protective instincts. The cracks they find and use do
tell us an awful lot. But not everything. For that we need to look beyond the people
attacking. What we really need is a feel for the temprament of the fresh group of
innovators and investors and technologists who run and own the dark cores of
power now – and who, before long, may also run and pwn each of us as a result.
111
Chapter Seven:
The New Caste
In which we meet a powerful group defined, enabled and enriched by their mastery of
the Seventh Sense.
1.
Looking back over several hundred years of European history, the Oxford professor
David Priestland found that the movement of power might be scored by reviewing
the alliances and hatreds and hopes of three distinct, interacting groups. He called
them “castes”: merchants, soldiers and sages. By merchants, Priestland meant the
bankers, traders and industrialists whose capital, goods and political power bent
Europe’s once-feudal economy into something modern and industrial. 160 The Medici,
Dutch coffee traders, Scottish cotton barons. By sages, he had in mind the
churchmen and later the technocrats of various empires, the men who helped birth
and then manage the problems of an Enlightened, urban social order: Locke,
Bismarck, Disraeli. And by soldiers he had in mind both the great aristocratic
warrior classes of Europe and upstart, genius figures like Napoleon or Wellington –
men who handled martial force with the fresh, surpasssing brilliance of a paintbrush
or chisel, not an instrument of mass murder.
The aligned, shifting interests of these three castes, Priestland wrote, were like
gears of sorts, each offering special leverage, meshing together to drive nations to
great power. Mix the influence of France’s sage-bureaucrats with her artful soldiers
and you get the French Imperial period. Marry the interests of Britain’s shrewd 17 th
Century trading bankers with her martially inclined sailors and globe-spanning
Victorian dominance results. Today, of course, the merchants and soldiers and sages
of our era are also at work. They sit in sovereign wealth funds, wired situation
rooms and madrasas, churches and research labs. The force of America’s merchants
and financiers, bolstered by Washington’s security caste, defines much of American
power. No other nation could, at the moment, comprehensively replace what the
country does with such breadth, intensity and speed. And now, all around the globe,
we’re seeing the emergence of what we might think of as a New Caste joining the
merchants, soldiers and sages. This is the infotech caste.
What was going on in that field in Amsterdam back in the summer of 1993 was
nothing less than the birth of the first figures of a connected technological era, of a
new elite. This caste I have in mind is defined by their personal proximity and
fingertip feel for the linked machines that drive so much of our world. They
represent a tiny fraction of our population, but operate with non-linear, massive
levels of influence. This New Caste clusters, in ever tighter circles of intimacy,
around the systems and networks we depend on. They are building new connected
160 Looking back: David Priestland, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power,
(New York: Penguin, 2013)
112
financial systems. Fresh AI designs. Protocols and platforms for secure
communication. Maybe one million people can write object-oriented code at a high
level. A hundred thousand of them can shape that code into some sort of innovative
data structure. A few thousand might be able to use it to access and manage a large
data center. But get down to the couple of dozen who know how Google or Intel or
bitcoin really work, the group who can make machines seem to think, who know
and use backdoors at that atomic level of hacking – well, then you have a tight,
powerful elite. They are called system designers, algorithmic traders, growth
hackers or any of a dozen hazy and somewhat unnamable lines of work that fuse
network mastery with economic, political or social power. If connection changes the
nature of an object it also elevates, to a level of rare power and influence, those who
control that connection.
Through the networks and black boxes they control, the group of transcendent
talents working on search algorithms, data management and machine learning
touch, at any one instant, more parts of our lives than any group of elites ever has.
That many of them are billionaires as a result should hardly be a surprise. This is a
caste marked by constant one upsmanship, by endless and compulsive innovation,
by a cold and ceaseless fear of obsolescence. They are marked, of course, by a full
expression of the Seventh Sense. Their every instinct for starting, financing, growing
and using new firms or technologies or data-spinning biological tools reflects
complete confidence in network power. If the leading figures of the Enlightenment
shared a certainty near to faith that reason would unlock nearly any puzzle of mind
or politics, the New Caste shares a certainty too, that connection can produce a new,
better order. This caste battles with each other. They struggle for dominance over
markets and – more profoundly – for control of the lucrative systems they have
built.
My point in this chapter is simple. It is to introduce this new and powerful caste and
see what their successes and failures might tell us about the world we now all share.
Even now, however, I think we can make this sobering judgment: Whatever nation
cultivates and trains legions of this New Caste best will rule the future. Think of the
legendary Xerox PARC research lab, which in the 1970s produced not just some of
the best early members of the New Caste – like Alan Kay or John Seeley Brown– but
also a series of fundamental inventions that generated trillions of dollars of value 161 .
The mouse. Laser printing. A graphical user interface. PARC was arguably the most
economically significant small group in human history, an entire Renaissance
packed into a couple of dozen offices. Just as the nations that produced the finest
mariners once dominated global commerce and decided political questions, so
countries (or really any group – even terrorists or criminals or bankers) that can
breed, train and equip and deploy members of this New Caste will possess a really
unusual power. Calling them a “caste” is not accidental: There’s a way in which we
are all now tied to the virtual spaces they control, much as serfs were once bound to
the land by feudal lords. The Italian historian Giambattista Vico, in developing his
161 Think of the legendary Xerox PARC: Chunka Mui, “The Lesson that Market
Leaders are Failing to Learn from Xerox PARC”; Forbes Leadership Blog / Alan Kay
113
new, scientific view of history in the 18 th Century, once observed approvingly, “The
Egyptians reduced all preceding world time to three ages, namely, the age of the
gods, the age of the heroes and the age of men,” he wrote. “During these three ages,
three languages had been spoken….Namely the hieroglyphic language, the symbolic
language and the vulgar language of men.” 162 It’s hard not to feel the new age now
arrives with its own baffling and incomprehensible modes of communication. A
whole freshly demanded language.
In all of human history only a few languages ever evolve to become honestly global
in reach and influence – English now, French in the European centuries or Chinese
in the Asian imperial era. But why English? Why not more decades of French?
German? “Why a language becomes a global language has little to do with the
number of people who speak it,” the British linguist and historian David Crystal has
written. “It is much more to do with who those speakers are.” What made Latin a
global influential language wasn’t that millions of people spoke it, rather it was who
did: The elites at the very peak of 1,000 years of European power. What Latin had, in
a sense, was the ears and tongues of some of history’s most influential men. 163 The
private, technical language that connects the New Caste to their machines, to each
other and to us is one of the sources of their power. Their code marks, like a trail,
the path to the cores of a vast and modern power apparatus.
You could, if you wanted, compare the New Caste a bit to an earlier generation of
empire-deciding figures: Ocean explorers. Columbus, de Gama, Magellan. Backed by
a primitive version of venture capital, the “risk finance” of trading houses, these
discovery captains had a hunger to test their certain masteries – navigation, sailing,
trade – against the uncertanties of geography, weather and luck. There was as much
sheer nerve in these adventures as there was real knowledge. What lay five weeks’
sailing time away from Cadiz? If you were willing to endure the difficulties, to
believe in what might be out there – and your own ability to handle it – then fortune
awaited. “Early intercontinental travelers not infrequently had to pay for access to
distant shores by enduring bitter asceticism,” the German philosopher Peter
Sloterdijk has written. 164 Months at sea, risks of ocean turmoil, starvation, endless
boredom – all these sacrifices marked sailing adventure. But they knew the rewards
for a real mastery of the sea: Fame, riches, knowledge, adventure. Sloterdijk cites
Goethe, who reflecting on the power of nautical life in 1787, defined the edgy
advantage of that ocean-mapping caste in his age: They had perspective. “No one
who has never seen himself surrounded on all sides by nothing but sea,” he wrote,
“can have a true conception of the world and his own relation to it.”
162 “The Egyptians”: Giambattista Vico, The New Science, (Cornell Press, 1948) 69
163 What Latin had: David Crystal, English as a Global Language. (2nd ed.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7 also Shahar Ronen, Bruno
Gonçalves, Kevin Z. Hu, Alessandro Vespignani, Steven Pinker, and César A. Hidalgo.
2014. “Links That Speak: The Global Language Network and Its Association with
Global Fame.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 111 (52) (December 15): E5616–E5622
164 “Early intercontinental travelers”: Peter Sloterdijk, In The World of Interior
Capital, Polity 2013, Ch. 13
114
We might say the same about our New Caste, of their sense of the massive datascape
on which we all sail and operate. They too head off to test their skills at coding,
encryption, system design. They are almost all auto-didact – self taught as
programmers or hackers or AI designers or investors. There is no established path
to power for them, no route that has been marked before. No wonder the greatest
figures of the era are college dropouts. This is a group that looks largely ahead:
Their work demands constant upgrade. Every device is shipped imperfect. It’s not to
say they are completely denuded of the Sixth Sense. That their feeling for history has
been stripped. But if to be honestly in love with version 1.0 of your product and then
to shred it for version 2,0 does demand a certain ahistoric distance. The New Caste
explorers have a hunger for fresh worlds and landscapes. To get there they endure
privations of long isolation – not so extreme as a long ship journey – but they
burrow deeper and deeper into systems, construct new links and new gates, in
closed rooms. “When building machine learning systems, making good decisions is a
strategic skill,” the computer scientist Andrew Ng has said. “Every day you wake up
and you are in some totally unique situation that no one in the planet has been in
before. It’s not a fact, there’s no procedure.” 165
This is our world now. No fact, yet. No procedure. A totally unique situation that
demands a fresh instinct. We can follow Goethe into our own age: No one who has
not seen and felt himself surrounded on all sides by networks can honestly
understand. If that motto of the last great epochal shift was Dare to Know, it was
certainly enacted by the sea captains. Discovery and risk were nothing but a nervy
kind of scientific experiment, where the laboratory was the Earth’s surface and the
tools of calculation were ships. And in our age? If we’re right that our historic
mandate is Dare to Connect, well the New Caste is certainly doing that, furiously.
They are working away at much that is hidden in our world, just like those old
explorers. The billions of phones or sensors or AI-rooted sensor engines spilling out
around our world are stripping away layer after layer of opacity. Pictures of far
away places, traffic lessons learned from movement patterns recorded by GPSenabled
phones, medical treatments refined by constant measurement – these are
all knotted, one after another, into the fishnet.
If the ocean voyages of that older explorer caste mapped our world, the voyages of
the New Caste are as much inward as out. They move inside the world of connected
systems. Remember: Network power is defined by dynamic tension – the pull
between center and periphery. The same dynamism is at work with the New Caste.
While they are, firmly, in the business of going out and opening our eyes to the
world with wider, faster connection, they are also draping huge, essential parts of
our lives with an impenetrable fustian: The essential algorithms of search engines,
the code of machine learning tools, the design of micro-targetted political influence
campaign. The sources of New Caste power are wrapped inside layers of complex
computer code, machine learning and data security protocols that few people can
165 “When building”: Andrew Ng, speech at GPU Technology Conference (March,
2015)
115
completely understand. The French philosopher Bruno Latour, the father of “Actor
Network Theory” has called this process “Black Boxing”. The better your phone
works, the less you notice it. The more precisely some machine feeds you your news,
the less you wonder what might I be missing? “Scientific and technical work,” he
says, “is made invisible by its own success.” 166
The operating system and network protocols of your tablet device are opaque to you
now in a way they never would have been two decades ago (when even the casual
user computer had to type to a C: prompt or wildly rage at a crashed “Blue Screen of
Death” from time to time). But, in fact, the system is incalculably more complex.
“Each of the parts inside a black box,” Latour remind us, “is a black box full of parts.”
And it is in the winding and linking of all these pieces that action in a connected
world is made possible. “It is by mistake or unfairness that our headlines read ‘Man
Flies’”, Latour says. “B-52s do not fly,” he writes. “The US Air Force flies.” Every
plane that ever makes it into the air does so because of the clicking coordination of
thousands of linked, black boxed systems. Your stock portfolio or your computer or
your bio-sensored heart is not a lone object; it’s a feature of a connected landscape.
We’re surrounded now, connected to, essential black boxes we’ve no way of
understanding and whose development and operation we’ve left to the New Caste.
Look around you, how many screens do you see? Each is a billboard: New Caste at
Work. It’s not only the hardware in our lives that I mean, but the bits of knitted
programming that decide how we search, when we communicate, and if we can
exchange information or money. The virtual and the real are in constant contact and
it’s the New Caste that does the stapling. In fact, one of the magic tricks of power in
the connected age is an ability to flop easily back and forth between network and
reality. It suggests other dangers too. As legendary machine systems designer Leslie
Lamport warns: Computer scientists collectively suffer from the confusion of language
with reality. 167 Anyone who’s ever written a computer program knows this sense:
You write some code. You compile and run the program to see what happens. You go
back and work on the code some more to refine what you’ve done. You run it again.
You touch the virtual; the real reacts. This seems in a way like the most trivial thing,
the writing of a computer program or an AI bot or a trading order, but in fact
166 The French philosopher: Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation – Philosophy,
Sociology, Geneaology” in Common Knowledge, Fall 1994 Vol 3 No 2. p. 23
167 It suggests other dangers: Leslie Lamport, “Computer Science and State
Machines”, Contribution to a Festschrift honoring Willem-Paul de Roever on his
retirement” (Redmond: Microsoft Research, 2008). In its entirety it runs: “Computer
scientists collectively suffer from what I call the Whorfian syndrome—the confusion
of language with reality. Since these devices are described in different languages,
they must all be different. In fact, they are all naturally described as state machines.”
The Whorfian problem is a linguistics observation about the way in which our
thinking is limited by whatever language we have to describe what we see or
contemplate.
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something incredible is underway in this easy movement from machine to reality. 168
The New Caste takes these moves, this easy slip from their keyboards and programs
to our lives, for granted. They adjust code and networks and formulas; they watch
the effects on us. They do it again. The idea that such a move is natural, comfortable
even, reveals a new and important temprament. It draws a line betweent the people
writing the code and those who are snapped about in the world they are coding.
Do you know who decided what you see when you search? Do you understand what
the data on your phone reveals about you? Who will snip at and work on your DNA?
Your children? Are you trading stocks against some invisible high-velocity
connected master who will always be one profitable nanosecond ahead of you? In
this sense, network power involves something very much like the intentional
creation of concealment. Your Internet search results, for instance, contain a sharp
tension. Yes, data from all over the planet, from all of history sits rather amazingly in
front of you. But that bit of computer code deciding what you see is engaged in a
kind of digital book burning: It’s making whole sections of knowledge invisible even
as it is unearthing an ever more precise answer for whatever question you have.
What don’t you see? – is a question that hints not only at what is left out of your
search horizon, but generally at the way in which connected systems establish
necessary gates. Part of a Seventh Sense, then, is the ability not merely to look at the
virtual world and know how it becomes insidiously real, but also to feel that all the
connected points of the real world – markets, weapons, social movements – must be
pulled upon by code and links and networks. “Any technology depended upon,” as
The Critical Engineering Manifesto, says is “both a challenge and a threat.” 169 Human
experience is, we know, unboxable, uncontainable – our joy, hopes, sense of
freedom, these all defy boxing. Yet here, all around us, are containers that affect our
every choice. Who knows what happens inside all the difficult boxes?
The creeping, essential opacity of power now reveals a twisted puzzle, a really fresh
aspect of this New Caste and the revolution they are making: As much as they are in
the business of making knowledge widely and instantly available, they are also
madly black boxing our world. This breeds a sly, unintended (I think) tension with
Kant’s Enlightenment admonition to “Dare to Know.” Would you like to Dare to know
why your computer is secure? How your genetic information will be studied and
used? How encryption works? Mostly the answer to is: You can’t know. It’s too
complex – and, anyhow, if we told you it would make the whole system less secure.
There is nothing disingenuous here: You likely wouldn’t understand. It is too
complex. You’d be lost at the first turn into strange technical language, where simple
words like “object” or “edge” have specific, essential, different meanings. And telling
you would, in fact, expose you and everyone else to all sorts of risks. It’s as if we’ve
returned to that famous debate of millennia past, the one lingering between Athens
and Jerusalem: Could the world be known and atomized and understood as the
Greeks would have it? Or was mystery, inscrutability and opacity the nature of truth,
168 This seems in a way: See, for instance, Bret Victor in his speech, “Inventing on
Principle” at CUSEC 2012 Turing Complete Conference available online.
169 “ Any technology depended upon”:The Critical Engineering Manifesto, as above.
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apprehensible, the Rabbis said, only by its movements. Are we back at the first
chapter of Genesis and its absolute prohibition against eating from the tree of
knowledge. Or, from the Talmud, “For him who reflects about four things – what is
above, what is below, what is before and what is behind – it would be better not to
have come into the world.” 170 We want to reflect about what goes on inside the
machines. Can we? Should we? How does Dare to know face off against these
impenetrable systems.
It is little surprise that places like Silicon Valley often leave a visitor with the feeling
of a town where work is done in rooms within rooms within rooms. To drive along
the dulled, anodyne asphalt stretch of road that runs in front of Sand Hill Road in
Menlo Park almost hurts your head: Inside the offices on revolutions are dreamed,
debated and funded. And it looks, for the most part, like a row of mildly prosperous
dental practices. The real import of the work is, on the outside at least, nearly totally
muted. The corporate structure of the most powerful tech companies are padded
with this sort of deadening fustian too. Founders control the majority of voting
stock; shareholders are more like lucky “users” than owners. Control, security and
speed in decision-making are secured from the inside, free of exploit risk or
interference. The companies are like computers. Of course the founders know where
real powers sits. But this shouldn’t distract us from the human energy breathing in
the code itself. The programs are “permeated by all the forms of contestation,
feeling, identification, intensity, contextualization and decontextualization,
signification, power relations, imaginings and embodiments that comprise any
cultural object,” the computer science historian Adrian Mackenzie has written. 171
Each of the parts of a black box is a black box. The famous billionaires of our
technology age operate for the most part as their systems do. Their tight, wellengineered
clusters of machines produce fortunes from connectivity, even as they
obscure some of the deeper nature of the connections that are essential to their
success. They are themselves at times obscured, human black boxes in a sense.
“Linux is just an enabler,” the genius programmer Linus Torvalds once observed
about the code language that undergirds much of the connected world. “It’s a solid
base, but like all good, solid bases, it really is something that should be almost
entirely hidden and out of people’s minds.” 172 It is a hard paradox for us. The work
of the black boxes, of connected systems or protocols such Linux is miraculous. It is
wonderful in so many ways. And the roots of it are, and seem like they have to be,
obscure. But this cuts very fast into the arteries of a healthy democracy.
“Democracy,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his famous post-war book The Vital
Center, “has no defense-in-depth against the neuroses of industrialism.” It’s easy to
see how the system might also have a weakened immunity to the subversive forces
170 Or from the Talmud: See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing,
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), 21
171 The programs: Adrian Mackenzie, Cutting code: Software and sociality, (New
York: Peter Lang 2006) 5
172 “Linux”: Andy Meek, “Linux creator explains why a truly secure computing
platform will never exist” on bgr.com Sep. 25, 2015
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of network power: Contagions of fear, manipulation of data, the subtle and invisible
influence of the boxes we depend upon but don’t understand. 173 Recall Francis
Bacon’s Enlightenment line? That human knowledge is human power? Well, what is
computer knowledge? It is human power? Or something else, in its entire, hidden
immensity? You have to wonder if this packing of insight and vision and control into
black boxes, or the hands of a small New Caste will bleed us of our liberty as a result.
“Our constitution is called a democracy because the power to make decisions is not
in the hands of a minority but of the whole people,” Pericles reminded Athens in his
Funeral Oration 2500 years ago. “We regard a man who takes no interest in politics
not as harmless, but as useless.” 174 Vital engagement is the food of democratic life.
To be baffled to the outside of the essential boxes of power then, seems an instant
sort of cancer on liberty. What do we make of a man who takes no interest in the
networks of networks that control the power to make decisions?
Perhaps you’ve heard of the famous manufacturing trilema: You can get something
made any two of good, fast and cheap. If you want that custom table made quickly
and well, it won’t be cheap. If you want it good and cheap, you had best be prepared
to wait. In networks a similar puzzle emerges in my mind. Systems can be any two of
fast, open or secure. A computer system that is really secure can be open, but it will
be very slow, inspecting each packet and instruction like a bank security guard
watching customers in a bad neighborhood. Think of the like an airport. Want it to
be fast? Secure too? Then it won’t be very fast. Mostly what we want today are fast,
secure arrangements for our markets, our nations, our data. So these will become, I
think, ever less open.
It used to be that history was made in public: Big visible wars and social shifts and
revolutions. Pericles in the Athenian square; the churning protests of Jefferson’s
Paris or the massing of armies. Now, however, subtle manipulations of technology,
invisible to most of us and maybe even accidental, maybe weird, will produce
historic-scale external effects. Changes to the network design will become political
and social exploits in a sense, living versions of that atomic-level “rowhammer” hack
that work on the connective energy of our world. Already social network analysis
can be used to manipulate voting patterns. Soon, it will be possibly to precisely
target any potential voter with a message engineered like a custom-made drug,
designed to bind right to the DNA of your habits and beliefs. It represents the
possibility for the complete technical perversion of politics.
As the New Caste operates on the systems that are at the core of connected politics
and economics, on how we vote or think or shop, they will vibrate the system in
invisible ways even when they don't mean to be nefarious. Improvements may be as
dangerously unpredictable as bugs. Small changes to algorithms or links or
protocols mean our whole system may be pwned before we’re quite aware. Such
173 “Democracy”: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 246
174 “Our constitution”: Thucydides, A History of the Peloponnesian War, (Oxford:
Oxford University Clarendon Press, 1881),119
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adjustments will be started and managed and mined for fortunes, of course. The
Seventh Sense feels the way in which power has shifted, is shifting, from public to
private in this way, masked by coded language, hardware design, corporate
structure and the demands for speed and safety we all agree on. Huge shifts in
power will occur before we are even aware if we don’t have a sensibility to feel them
out before they occur. Decisions about code, search, machine intelligence, DNA
alteration rules in labs – all occurring in black box machines or corporations or
governments. Several years ago it occurred to me in an unsettling flash: “The most
important things that will happen in my life will happen in secret.”
I’m not sure I’ve quite recovered from this insight yet.
2.
This same unnerving worry has troubled many people who think about connected
machines, and for some time. It’s not only those among us who are pointlessly
nostalgic for a different era of devices, when the default setting of our instincts was
open, who now worry about this strange tension between function and opacity. And
remember – I’m running through all this here so we can all understand how to really
grab and use this new source of power in the service of what we desire, and to
protect the things we care about. But: What are we to make of systems that work
better when they are obscured from us? That we could never understand even if we
could see inside? Documents such as The Critical Engineering Manifesto, pulled
together by a collection of uneasy designers and engineers, reflect anxieties that stir
even inside the hearts of many in the New Caste. “The Critical Engineer considers
engineering to be the most transformative language of our time,” the Manifesto
begins. “Each work of engineering engineers its user, proportional to that user’s
dependency on it.” That is Conway’s or Wittfogel’s unsettling truth. The technical
layout of a social network, a medical diagnostic tool or a financial market affects
how we or our markets or our government (or our enemies) behave. We are, in a
sense, being engineered by the damn opaque systems we are using.
In 1965 the MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum found himself, somewhat
unexpectedly, considering this same problem. 175 Weizenbaum had written a
primitive computer program to perform what is now known as natural language
processing, essentially a bit of code designed to translate what a user tells a
computer into clear instructions. This is the work that converts your request to a
machine for weather updates into a query that can be turned into an answer.
Teaching a computer to answer a question such as “it is it raining?” demands layers
of logic and calculation.
In 1965, long before our era of simply talking to our phones or computers,
Weizenbaum’s program was a revolutionary breakthrough. So after developing his
algorithms, he wanted to find an intuitive demonstration. He decided to build a
175 In 1965: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, W.H.
Freeman and Company, 1976 p. 7
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system that could, in a very limited sense, converse. The computer would take typed
input from a user and then, based on what it understood, ask a question back to
continue the conversation. The approach was borrowed from the psychological
theories of Carl Rogers, an American therapist who believed the best way to talk to
patients was with open ended, careful questions. Weizenbaum developed two
programs. The first was called DOCTOR, a script that determined what the computer
might say. The natural language processor responsible for carrying on the human
side of the conversation he called ELIZA, after the heroine from Pygmalion, a poor
cockney girl who is trained by a phonetics professor to pass as a duchess.
Here is a discussion between ELIZA and a user that Weizenbaum recorded in 1965:
Patient: “Men are all alike.”
ELIZA: “IN WHAT WAY?”
Patient: “They’re always bugging us about something or other.”
ELIZA: “CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?”
Patient: “Well, my boyfriend made me come here.”
ELIZA: “YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE?”
Patient: “He says I am depressed most of the time.”
ELIZA: “I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED.”
Patient: “It’s true, I’m depressed most of the time.”
ELIZA: “DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU TO NOT BE UNHAPPY?”
Patient: “I need some help, that much seems certain.”
Weizenbaum’s program quickly became famous around MIT. (The joke was that it
was a better conversationalist than most of the awkward shoegazers studying at the
Cambridge campus.) ELIZA gave users a chance to have a taste of a machine with
something like a mind of its own. The program spread to other campuses, to
different research institutions, and with every step of its success, Weizenbaum
found himself more distressed. He summarized his worries in his 1972 masterpiece
Computer Science and Human Reason. What troubled him was not ELIZA, but her
users, the humans. Even when they were professional psychologists, many of them
quickly considered it reasonable to think that one day the work of diagnosis and
counseling might be turned over to machines. This felt like a natural next step in the
ceaseless progress they were used to in their lives. Better refrigerators, stronger
seat belts, faster jet planes, more plastic – why not a computer doing therapy? It
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sounded kind of wonderful. “A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed
the DOCTOR computer program could grow into a nearly completely automatic form
of therapy,” Weizenbaum wrote. “I had thought it essential, as a prerequisite to the
very possibility that one person might help another cope with his emotional
problems, that the helper himself participate in the other’s experience.” To use a
machine for such a task? He was horrified. Weizenbaum knew the empathy ELIZA
was exuding was faked. It was just code. “Science,” he concluded, “has been gradually
converted into a slow-acting poison.”
“Would you mind leaving the room,” Weizenbaum’s secretary said to him once, lost
in a particularly personal discussion with ELIZA. “The reaction,” he wrote, “showed
me more clearly than anything I had seen hitherto the enormously exaggerated
attributions even a well-educated audience is capable of making, even strives to
make, to a technology it does not understand.” This was black boxing at its worst: “I
have no idea how this thing works. And it’s wonderful!”
What makes the New Caste so particularly powerful is that their essential work is to
build and operate the cores that control these systems. And the more people they
lure onto them, the more powerful the platforms – and the people who run them –
become. “The computer programmer,” Weizenbaum wrote, summing up his lessons
from ELIZA, “is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver.” Each of
these cores represents a fusion of power and politics and technology like nothing
the world has ever seen. They are assembled mostly from scratch, they represent
the concentration of billions of connections, and their direction is determined by
technological and market factors as much as by any democratic twitch.
The strategic power of societies that train the best of the New Caste is probably selfevident
by now. To educate and deploy masses of people capable of such
transcendent design genius will mark a difference, an electric gating line between
the nations that succeed and those that fail. But such training brings a real tension, if
this group is allowed to really rip away at their work. What won’t they attack?
Control over the protocols that answer questions, move money, protect data,
analyze your DNA – it’s hard to think of any single locus of power that will ever be
greater than the tight, gravitationally inevitable platforms emerging around us now.
These essential webs are filled, as we’ve seen, with complex bugs and errors and
loopholes. They depend on design decisions whose implications resonate for
decades – both inside the black boxes and the external world that vibrates to their
quiet demands. “If builders built buildings the same way programmers write
programs,” one famous coding lemma runs, “then the first woodpecker who came
along would destroy civilization.” Who would know if rot is spreading in these
systems? Who would stop it? Recall Paul Virilo’s line that trains produced train
accidents, planes produced airplane accidents. So: Black Boxes?
As much as the work of the New Caste looks tactical in nature – what protocols to
use, how to engineer networks or design machine boards – the reality is that most of
what they do would be blind without a strategic urge. Behind even the smallest
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advance, whether it is fingerprint recognition on your phone or some new autotranslation
app, a set of careful, deterministic values and calculations linger. One
feature that defines the New Caste is unadulterated, unquestioned faith in the
continued network revolution, and that the values that underlie the best programs
may be the values that should gird the world that depends on that same code. The
danger here is clear enough. “Respect, understanding and love,” Weizenbaum wrote
as he considered ELIZA’s effects, “are not technical problems.”
The biggest of the platforms controlled by the New Caste herd together, remember,
billions of people, bind them with ever thickening cords. The revealing tics of every
movement in the virtual and every step or drive in the real world are marked down,
remembered and scored. To operate the strategic levers of such a force is, in all
reality, no less significant than leading a nation. The distinction between a CEO of a
major connected firm and a head of state lies less in the depth and efficacy of their
influence than in the questions of how they got such power, and how they might use
it. The New Caste has an admirable conviction near to faith that their products are
truly universal. They are absolute technological determinists. Watching their
services and influence expand often has that strange aura of the irresistible force
taking on an immovable object. They believe that their black boxes will bulldoze
concerns of politics or history. And soon.
Historical ambition of this scale, the sort that touches really countless lives, has
always blended a commercial and technical mastery -- the moves of the East India
Company turned as much on better ship design, maps and navigation as on imperial
objectives. But the aim of the New Caste is the same as it was for those three older
castes – the merchants, soldiers and sages: To put the tools they’ve mastered and
built in the service of still more dominance. The commercial calculations of the most
powerful figures of the New Caste carry a sense of seeing many moves ahead, a very
real kind of chess. Their billion dollar acquisitions, investment in moon-shot R&D
ideas, the hundred million dollar payouts for great engineers – all of these mark the
astonishing scale of what they have in mind: To have and control ever more
essential cores of power. Are they seduced by having a billion users? Sure, but not
because of the billion users, but rather because of the seductive allure of the black
box, of what it means to control such a central point of connection.
4.
I remember sitting with a member of the New Caste the week the first batch of
mimeographed and laser-scanned Snowden papers were released, as we both
discovered that everyone we knew was devouring the documents. Like a novel.
People were texting one another – “Have you seen this?!” – and you couldn’t get
through a dinner without a debate over the technical merits of what was on display.
The Snowden files were fascinating to the New Caste in a way few others might
understand, in the way a room of ballplayers might examine Ted Williams’s swing
mechanics. Let me try to explain it this way: When I was younger, people called our
generation – those of us born between 1965 and 1980 more or less – a generation of
slackers. Generation X. Generation Nothing. There was an argument to be had about
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the Baby Boomers. Had they been the most destructive, selfish generation in
American history? A reaction against the selflessness of their parents? Retired to
leave the rest of us to pay their future medical bills and oggle their underfunded
pensions, to cope with the manipulated political system they’d sued into existence.
Or had they left a legacy of tolerance, an echo of 1968’s optimisitic energy, a firming
of American confidence. But, anyhow, Generation X? By comparison irrelevant: A
collection of sad, passive slackers.
But the great Internet companies were largely built by Generation X. The
foundational experience of 1989 – the fall of the Berlin Wall – bred optimism. It
created, in fact, the possibility for a new exploration. When we were told “Be
generous in what you accept,” this seemed reasonable and, eventually, lucrative. The
logic and power of networks became apparent by itself, the moment we began
connecting the world. So linkage in trade and finance and friendship was pressed
out into a new era of globalization, pushed as much by the smashing, enthusiastic
removal of so many historical limits as it was by the technology itself. Yes WiFi and
TCP/IP and other advances made wiring the world possible, but I wonder if they
would have developed so quickly if the context for using them hadn’t provided a
feedback loop of such quick profit and reward and, frankly, amazement. So, in this
fashion, we laid the groundwork for a world of billion-plus user platforms. For a
new concept of power.
But the Snowden papers were a shock. We knew him, in a sense. His mannerisms
and thinking and technical instincts harmonized with our own. It was as if the NSA
had enrolled most of the digitally visible world into a twisted panopticon of a social
network, one where your “membership” began the moment one of your data
packets was sniffed or chased along fiber optic lines. Here was a secret three billionuser
platform, in a sense, that had enmeshed, without their knowledge or
permission, a tremendous chunk of humanity. People of interest. The one or two or
three billion people swept into systems like the NSA’s Aurora fell victim to the
powerful leverage of scaled systems: The more people monitored by the NSA, the
more leads to follow, which meant still more people needed to be followed and
knitted unwittingly into the web.
No one in my generation who had been around tech for long was naïve. We knew
that like soldiers coming back from a war there were things done on the network –
the spreading of danger, of inequality, of pollution – that would have to be paid for
in balance by the benefits the system promised to bring. The immensity of what had
been built already in networks was clear enough; the even greater power yet to
come as trillions of more connections piled together was implicit, obvious even. The
perverse, sneaky side of this growth was known to anyone who’d spent time
working a connected machine. But that people of our generation could on the one
hand listen to “Karma Police” and on the other enact the sick OK Computer logic of
surveillance, even name a British GCHQ monitoring program after the Radiohead
song? The aim: Provide "either (a) a web browsing profile for every visible user on
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the Internet, or (b) a user profile for every visible website on the Internet." 177 We’d
not honestly thought the end of this would be a need to so deeply question or defend
freedom or liberty.
The whole idea of connectivity had begun with liberty, after all. The Fall of the Wall.
We’d not known or expected to lose it through the very systems we’d constructed in
the open space a 20-year peace had presented. So: We’d been naïve after all. We’d
been united in a tacit claim that there was nothing bad about connectivity. We
believed it for the most part and convinced others. We didn’t mean it that way, I felt
the New Caste readers of the Snowden Papers were saying to each other, paging
through the sick, ineffably banal logic of those NSA Power Point presentations. They
were brochures for totalitarianism. If you have not read them, it is worth looking
them over. They have, you’ll see, all the anodyne banality of insurance company
pitches, even if the dull language was expressing something vivid, nothing less than
the potential murder of some very basic rights. We were reading and discussing and
debating the documents so avidly because, it seems to me, each of us had a kind of
horror of what we might have done.
Here was a massive technological and insidious web, a totalizing virtual machine of
collection and analysis and instant observation and reaction. It relied, for its safe
operation, on the humans in the loop of that sensing and seeing and machine
thinking. And what was it, exactly, that the humans had appeared to do in the face of
such urgent responsibility? Almost like that silly secretary chatting with the ELIZA
machine, they had suspended their sense of warm humanity in the face of the
magical charm of electrical promise. They had let the machine run. The whole
system had been built and operated by members of the New Caste who were, in
turn, beguiled and charmed out of a sense of certain essential limits as they stared at
the beautiful face of machine power.
Looking back on his formative years, before Europe was ground up in the First
World War, the powerfully brilliant and sensitive economist John Maynard Keynes
bitterly recalled the iron certainty of his set of friends and their confident, diffident
arrogance: “We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust
erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules
and conventions skillfully put across and guilefuly preserved. We had no respect for
traditional wisdom or the restaints of custom.” 178 It was the war, then the
depression, then a war which taught them this expensive lesson. What is fracturing
around us now, with our own willful and diffident support, is that very thin and
precarious crust, cracked and assembled as Keynes said by “the will of a very few”.
What if those very few are the New Caste?
177 The aim: GHCQ “Pullthrough Steering Group Meeting #16” available from
theintercept.com
178 “We were not aware”: John Maynard Keynes, “My Early Beliefs” in Two
Memoirs: Dr. Melchior, a Defeated Enemy, and My Early Beliefs (New York: A.M.
Kelley, 1949) 99
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The essence of the Seventh Sense will be not merely to be beguiled by our
technology, by the way it smashes old systems, not to ask “Could you please leave
the room while I use bend these electrons to even more omnipotent control,” but
rather – in the same instant as the networks snaps into its full power– to grasp the
full nature of the connected age. To see how it might be used to further, not erode,
the things we care most about. To ensure that if we are not among the very few, at
least we can guarantee that their will bends towards justice. We will see, in a
moment, just what that means in practice. How our best technology and our most
avid hopes for what a technological, connected future could look like might just be
yoked together. But before we can do that, there is one final question we need to
answer about the networks all around us now: What, in the end, are they really for?�
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Chapter Eight:
“MapReduce”: The Compression of Space and Time
In which we learn what networks are really, rather wonderfully, meant for.
1.
Starting in the springtime of 1997, the American scientist and inventor Danny Hillis
began what has since become an every-few-months sort of ritual. He packed up
from his home in Encino, a short drive over the Hollywood Hills from Los Angeles,
and headed off for rural Texas for a few days that would largely defined by rock and
dynamite. Hillis, who was born in 1956, has spent most of his life working at the
electron level of the world, crafting some of the most significant computer
processing systems of our age. So the sort of paleolithinc earth moving he was
heading off to manage in Texas was a departure from his usual scale. His aim was to
work on blasting and then refining a space in an isolated mountainside for the
construction of a towering clock that he had designed, one intended to run for
10,000 years. That ten-millennia span was not accidentally chosen. Humans, when
Hillis began his work on the clock, had been around about that long already. We
were, as he pictured it, at a midpoint on that 20,000 year stretch of time. Hillis and
the group of tinkerers, thinkers, and engineers who had backed and designed the
clock – people such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, spreadsheet inventor Mitch Kapor or
investor Esther Dyson – were planning on a project that would stretch as close to
eternity as they felt reasonable. “The Clock of the Long Now” they called it. I
remember pulling into Danny’s driveway in Encino one afternoon as he prepared to
depart for Texas and being struck by the contrast between the lovely, innofensive
suburban blandness of Southern California and the tools he was taking with him to
make an assault not merely on a mountain, but on a whole conception of time.
I had met Hillis in an unusual fashion. I’d been asked to chair a committee that
would award a million dollars to a figure who had made an essential contribution in
the world of technology. The directors of the foundation behind the then-new prize
had been, from the start, slyly dropping big names – Bill Gates! Steve Jobs! They
hoped such a laureate would cast a bit of glamour on the first year of their award for
“Contributions to Man’s Present Condition.” But when our committee sat down to
talk it over, we knew that the boldfaced names didn’t want or need a prize. They
certainly didn’t need a million dollars. As we considered people we all knew who’d
made fundamental, essential contributions but had not been as boldfaced as they
might have been, Danny Hillis’s name came up immediately.
Hillis had developed a revolutionary “massively parallel” computer in the 1980s.
The machine had helped create an entire discipline of high-speed computing by
tying together tens of thousands of processors to tackle a problem at once.
Traditional computers worked problems the way you or I might, step by step. Hillis’
design was the equivalent of millions of minds, all moving at once. Coordinated,
connected and awesomely fast. In the years since, he’d played a key role in a dozen
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other breakthroughs, from designing artificial intelligences to fine-tuning classified
military aircraft systems that depended on mathematics for their stability. When
you wander into a deep part of Google’s technical database systems, you’re touching
his work. When you talk to your phone, the interface bubbles with some of his
patents. How did Baran’s 1960s idea of a survivable, packet-based system at
ARPAnet become the Internet in the 1970s and 80s? Danny was part of a cluster of
dirty-fingernail engineers – along with engineers such as Vint Cerf and Jon Postel –
who’d done the work to make it possible. His centrality in that project was
memorialized in a famous speech he once delivered in which he described having
one of the very first email addresses in history – and then whipped out a sheaf of
bound pages that represented the entire Internet address list at the time. It ran
about 50 pages. To the extent there were membership cards in the New Caste,
Danny’s would have had a very low number. It was an easy decision for our prize
committee. No Bill Gates. No Steve Jobs. So, here’s how I met Danny Hillis: I called to
tell him he had won a million dollars. (I recommend this as a way to start a
friendship.)
Hillis had been a tinkerer since he was a child and never seemed to have lost the
pleasure of a wild intermingling of joy and practice. You couldn’t tell with him
where passion ended and work started. He was so technically adept that he could
inject even the coldest digital projects with a bit of hot emotion, like Bernini
breathing life into a block of carved marble with one, “just so” grace note of his
chisel. One of Hillis’s most famous projects, for instance, was a 15-foot high tic-tactoe
playing tinkertoy robot he’d built when he was 20 years old, in his second year
as an undergraduate at MIT in 1975. Made from 10,000 wooden spindles and poles,
it was an early attempt of his to show how machines, even simple ones, might
seduce us with both brains and looks. The effect of a giant tinkertoy pile sitting there
at The Massachusets Institute of Technology had to make you giggle, even as your
mind boggled at the fact that this heap of sticks, strings and dials was beating you
again and again at a child’s game. Hillis was an artist as much as an inventor – one
reason he’d not become Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. (And why Gates and Jobs
maintained a consistent, admiring respect for him.) He’d once spent a decade at
Disney designing rides or thinking up new dreams as a kind of real-world mayor of
Tomorrowland. He liked to joke that he knew he was at the right place when, on his
first day, he asked where he might find a parachute harness for an experiment and
heard, in response, “What size?”
Hillis was an avid reader, and he has the habit to think of his bleeding-edge work in
the context of long historical gulps. Conversations with him often tie back to
Paleocene era biology or some other deep root. That long-term view, married to his
unmatched hands-on feel for complicated systems, made him the ideal designer for
the clock, a machine intended to last millennia. The problems associated with such
an undertaking were, honestly, as unreal as you might expect. How to power the
clock? (Hand winding, the better to ensure it was not forgotten.) How to protect it?
(Put in the middle of nowhere.) Did you need to plan for global climate change? (Yes.
The design was adjusted to accommodate shifts in the earth’s spin when the planet’s
icecaps melt off.) Do you write a users’ manual for people 10,000 years from now?
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(Yes.) Do you write it in English? (To be determined!) Working with composer Brian
Eno on the sound of the clock chime, and with a team of geologists and physicists,
Hillis had made the clock into a natural extension of his tinkertoy computer, a device
that both served a purpose and sent a message. If there was an emotion it conveyed,
a feeling that it tickled in the way Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne might inspire terror
or joy or faith, it was meant to be awe.
Stewart Brand, one of the supporters of the clock and an early member of the New
Caste too, would tell you that the idea for the clock had emerged from a desire to
emphasize, to physicalize in a way no one could forget, the importance of longerterm
thinking. We’d all arrived now, Brand and the other clock masters worried, at a
moment in history when no one had a view that extended much past their own lives
– or sometimes past the next election, or year, or the next financial quarter. Our
modern “on to the next thing” economics and politics were eroding every slow,
patient instinct. “Civilization is revving itself into a pathetically short attention
span,” one manifesto for the clock began. “What we propose is both a mechanism
and a myth.” 179 With its steady 10,000 year ticking, the Clock of the Long Now was
meant to make us think in longer jumps. The human winding mechanism, for
instance: Generations of clock-winders had to share in the work, and they would be
connected in a long thread over the 10,000 years. A sacred priesthood of time.
Moving slowly. As I spent time thinking, dreaming about the clock, I found myself
too craving the solidity and patient isolation it promised. Who among us these days
doesn’t want a break from the instant nowness of our age?
Yet, the more I understood the clock, the more I realized something else was at
work. Stop for a moment to consider who was backing and building the device. It
was a cluster of people who had, as a common link, the fact that they had their hands
honestly sunk into the guts of the Internet. Hillis, after all, had been waving more
than that slim book of email addresses when he talked about the early days of the
Internet. He was waving the credentials of a man who had been living in the virtual
cyber neighborhood of Web connections from its very first days. He was as close to a
native of the connected, fiber optic, light-speed world as you could find.
All the names supporting the clock smelled similarly of burning electrons: Jeff Bezos
had built Amazon into a high-speed marketplace whose backbone was the Web
itself. Another backer, Mitch Kapor, had cracked apart several centuries of slow
accounting habits when he created Lotus 1-2-3, the first successful computer
spreadsheet program in 1983, software that permitted you to see and change your
whole business one keystroke at a time. Kapor’s software helped move finance from
quarter-by-quarter calculations to a really instant-by-instant sort of business – more
or less the opposite of the “long time frame” the clock team was aiming to preserve.
Esther Dyson was one of the earliest, best investors in network companies. This was
a collection of men and women unified by a genius for connected change, sure, but
also by a desire for ever faster clock speeds, ever speedier delivery, ever faster
179 “Civilization is revving itself”: Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time
and Responsibility. (New York: Basic Books, 1999) 2
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processing. They had lived this. Enabled it. Profited from it. If there was ever a
group you might hope to take aside, pull into a quiet room and ask gently What are
the really networks for, anyway? this would be it.
The act of keeping time, of marking it, is embedded in the nature of any age. Our
lives are, after all, dictated by timetables: School schedules, the seasons, rush hour,
the burning candle of birth-love-marriage-death. Time, in the days before industry,
was measured by nature’s schedule. How long it took a crop to mature. The
solstices. A beehive filling with honey. It was marked by moving tides and shifting
seasons, and it demanded a slowness, a personal presence on the shores, in the
oceans, atop the fields over generations. “Summer afternoon,” the novelist Henry
James remarked in a précis of a slower age he felt passing away in 1895. “To me
those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” 180
Then, in the industrial revolution, time became money. Electric lights, for instance,
undid the restful distinction between night and day – and made 24-hour life and
manufacturing and economics possible and then, of course, inevitable. Movement
from countryside to city established a really new sense of what the German critic
Georg Simmel, writing in 1903, called tempo. “With each crossing of the street, with
the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up
a deep contrast with small town and rural life,” he explained. “The technique of
metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all
activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule.” 181 Punch
cards. Bus schedules. The forty hour work week. Our education, our manufacturing,
our markets and our lives all began to run on timetables. They had to, or the whole
project of industry would collapse. “Summer Afternoon” became a time to work.
Simmel worried, for instance, over the diffusion of pocket watches. To carry one was
like looking at a constantly draining bank account.
This sense of humans reduced to cogs – churned, run, disposed of on a schedule not
their own – unnerved the residents of that first mechanical age. Cities had been the
very first sorts of tight-packed networks; industrial cities ratcheted this further still.
They succeeded and failed by the degree to which they geared themselves and their
citizens to machine speed. When the Austrian novelist Robert Musil began The Man
Without Qualities, his classic story of the era, with the flattening of a Viennese citizen
by a speeding delivery truck, he meant to point out how urban speed and urban life
(and urban death) had become inseparable. And also the mismatch between the
weak breaks of the age and it’s acceleration. The book is alive with that pre-accident
slipping sensation you may have had: You are pressing hard on the brakes of the car;
you are going to hit something anyhow. “Cities can be recognized by their pace just
as people can by their walk,” Musil wrote in a line that any modern New Yorker or
180 “Summer afternoon”: Edith Wharton, A Backwards Glance, (New York: D.
Appleton-Century, 1934) See chapter 10 for her tale of an afternoon with James.
181 “With each crossing”: Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)
in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds. The Blackwell City Reader. Oxford and
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p. 11
130
Parisian would endorse. 182 “A man returning after years of absence would have
known, with his eyes shut, that he was in that ancient capital and imperial city,
Vienna.” To really get a feel for that age, watch just a few frames of Russian director
Dizga Vertov’s jittery 1929 black and white film Man with a Movie Camera 183 . Each
moment of the movie is alive with the tension of a new, rushing and industrial age.
You won’t be surprised Vertov’s list of requirements as he prepared to start filming
began: “1. A rapid means of transportation.” His aim was to immortalize urban
speed on the new medium film; he knew he needed to be fast. 184
To know a city by it’s pace. Musil was touching something deep here, an instinct that
beats in each of us and runs from this fact: The speed of an event affects how we
perceive it. The difference between what you will notice when walking up a hill –
chirping bugs, tiny rocks, changes in color and gradient – and driving up that hill is
so complete as to be almost different experiences entirely. 185 When the whole world
tumbles upon us at fiber-optic speed, when invasions and revelations and accidents
all spread at the rate of WiFi or cell phone radiation, our sense of time blurs. You
have to wonder what Simmel would have made of a smart phone. “It is not merely
that the medium is the message, but the velocity of the medium,” Paul Virlio
observed once in one of his many studies on speed and mind. 186
Life in our connected age is both instant and always on, what Simmel might have
called “the technique of network life.” This demolishes an older, easier sense of pace.
Computers were once switched on at 9 and off at 5 – just like their human masters.
But digital activity is constant now. The networks are paying attention all the time.
They have to. Our machines – tractors and trains and cars – used to echo our pace of
life. Now we echo theirs. The machines, the New Caste, the black boxes – they tick
along constantly, ever faster. We rely on them, as we’ve seen, for our safety. We
want them to be fast. To be instant. But what is this doing to us? Is completely
unhooking us from any sense of time really a good idea?
It was certainly true, as Brand insisted, that the Clock of the Long Now was meant as
a reminder, as a kind of constant totem to the fact that we’re all just a small tick on
182 “Cities can be recognized”: Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities Vintage
(1996) 3
183 To really get a feel: Vertov’s movie is shot in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and Krakow.
In 2003 The Cinematic Orchestra produced a modern soundtrack to accompany it.
184 “A rapid means”: Jonathan Dawson, “Dziga Vertov” Great Directors March 2003
Issue 25
185 Ajahn Brahm of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia tells a wonderful story
in his Dharma talks about a day in which he decided not to be driven up the road to
his monastery in Perth, but instead walked the road. He was flooded by the
sensations of nature, all invisible from the inside of a car. One way to change your
perspective, he means, is to change the speed at which you are moving through life.
See the Buddhist Society of Western Australia website for a catalog of his talks.
186 “It is not merely that the medium”: Paul Virilio, Information Bomb trans. Chris
Turner (London: Verso, 2000), 141
131
the endless long continuum. We do think in too short a time frame. But the clock
also, I began to suspect as I considered it, had another role. Those 10,000 years of
marked time were an attempt to scratch an itch bothering these pioneers of
cyberspace. It might even have been a sort of guilty sensation. After all, there was
something that they had demolished in their ceaseless fast connecting of the world –
maybe accidentally, but anyhow it could never be put back to where it was. If the
great industrial titans before them had, over several hundred years, vanquished
distance, lacing the world with trading networks, the men and women behind the
clock were fracturing something else, something that for all of human history had
seemed the only reliable, safe, sad constant of our condition: Time. For most of
history, time and space were seen as facts, immutable forces that could not be
overcome or adjusted or fought. Time particularly. The quintessential, tragically
non-negotiable condition of life. The backers of the clock were, in their “day jobs”, in
the business of overcoming, adjusting, fighting and even destroying an older sense
of time. What might once have taken years, they were committed to making happen
in an instant.
The Long Now project, then, was like one of those carefully isolated arctic freezers,
where samples of essential grains and DNA from Beethoven’s hair and Einstein’s
brain are sunk and iced against the godforbid day in which our basic feedstock or a
chunk of humanity has been wiped out by accident or disaster. Blasted into a
mountain hole, designed to last thousands of years, the clock is a repository for time
itself. It is a defensive museum, built against the moment when instant networks
finally devour the off switch and kill an older, essential feeling of time. The clockmakers
knew, I think, that they had helped to demolish a particular sense of pace
with their fast, instant networks. They wanted, with the knowledgeable keening of
the guilty, a new device, one carefully gated away from the very revolution they
were encouraging with their business and technical obsessions. This hunger for
speed had built their fortunes. Their revolution (and its IPOs) had paid for the clock,
frankly. And the hope for “instant world” had inspired their dreams long before
deep, fast connections were possible. Bezos’s first name for Amazon, Cadabara,
captured just this sense of waving wands and the eye-blink “Now you don’t see it,
now you do!” appearance of just what you want or need. Murdering time. You could
ask: What are the really networks for anyway? Would they feel guilty when they
confessed?
2.
Danny Hillis’s father was an epidemiologist. His mother was a bio-statistician. And
his childhood was a blur of infection-led family migrations. “Anywhere in the world
there was an epidemic, we would go,” he recalled. As the family bounced from Dehli
to Cairo to Dakha to Nairobi, racing diseases one after another, Danny developed a
vivid, energetic autodidactisism. He would collect knowledge from his parents, from
the streets around him, his new friends, anywhere. In a library in Calcutta, for
instance, he once found a copy of George Boole’s 1854 book “An Investigation Into
the Laws of Thought”. Boole invented symbolic logic on those pages and though his
instincts were grounded in an age of steam and machines, his vision still echoes in
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modern computer design. “Language,” Boole wrote, “is an instrument of human
reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought.” 187
Hillis has a magnetic intellectual charisma, as you might have guessed by now. An
afternoon with him resembles nothing so much as a lingering mental theme park:
Roller coasters of big ideas (a 10,000 year clock!) mixed with smaller sugary treats
(how to design a better fencepost). No wonder he fit in so well at Disney. Critics
accused Steve Jobs of having a “reality distortion field”, in which the Apple founder’s
charisma bludgeoned the boundaries of the practical. Hillis, by contrast, has a sort of
“reality enhancement field” in which much of the world as seen through his eyes or
heard in his light-hearted voice is sharper, filled with possibility.
From an early age Hillis had been interested in the dream of a thinking robot. Maybe
it was that the constant uprooting of his childhood left him with a giddy sense that it
was easier to assemble your own friends than to try to make them new at each stop.
But somehow this led him to the idea of an artificial brain, which was Danny’s main
idea when he arrived at MIT in the fall of 1972. The tinker-toy tic-tac-toe computer
he built was a nod to this hope, but it’s jerry-rig aesthetic masked deeper ambitions.
“Someday, perhaps soon, we will build a machine that will be able to perform the
functions of a human mind,” Hillis wrote at the start of his PhD thesis a few years
later. “A thinking machine.” 188
What Hillis and others like his mentor Marvin Minsky, realized was that the human
brain works differently than machine logic. Life, after all, is not a series of linear
math problems. (Much as we might wish it was at times.) You look outside. It occurs
to you to say to your wife, “What a lovely day.” This is not a result of some “a then b
then c” calculation, but rather the product of thousands of simultaneous inputs and
twitches dancing through the space of your consciousness. If you were to process
that same thought in a linear fashion, it might look like this: First, look at the sky,
examine the cloud-to-blue ratio, check for too much wind, sense the temperature,
open mouth. Your wife would be out the door before you’d even begun to speak. The
ability to operate on many different pieces of data all at once is one of the most
striking, enviable features of the human mind. But of course, you’ve probably,
recognized: That is fundamentally a network problem. How do you act instantly,
everywhere? Connection. So it was that, a dozen years after his tic-tac-toe machine,
Hillis began work on a device designed to think super fast. Faster than any computer
ever had. He called it The Connection Machine. “The ability to configure the topology
of the machine to match the topology of the problem will turn out to be one of the
most important features of the Connection Machine,” he wrote. Adding, in case the
187 “Language”: George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought: On Which Are
Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. (New York, N.Y.:
Dover Publications, 1951)
188 “Someday”: William Daniel Hillis, The Connection Machine, PhD. Thesis
Submission, MIT (1985) p. 2
133
academic panel at MIT missed the point: “(That is why it is called the Connection
Machine.)” 189
Hillis’s ambition to build this device boiled in him while he was at MIT, and it finally
outstripped what MIT could support, so he gathered a group of students and started
a small company. The Thinking Machines Corporation, blessed by some combination
of Hillis’s charisma and the fantastic promise of the project, became a magnetic field
for talent, ideas and money. In the early days of the firm, for instance, the hunt for
investors led Danny to the luxurious New York City apartment of William Paley, the
founder of CBS. Hillis lived then in a ramshackle house close to campus at MIT. He
drove a surplus fire truck to work most days. 190 Faced with the urbane, powerful 81-
year old founder of the largest radio and TV network in America, Danny jumped
right into a passionate introduction of his ideas about connection and networks.
Paley, cooly: "I didn't understand a word you said." Then: A check for $5 million.
Or there was the time that Hillis asked Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard
Feynman to tip him off about any smart scientists Thinking Machines might hire.
Feynman, pushing 60, volunteered himself and spent his summer vacations for the
next ten years with Hillis and his team. 191 When it came time to test the first
Connection Machine, it was Feynman’s data that revealed how well the black box
was doing its job. The architecture they had designed cranked through what would
have been a month’s worth of complex chromodynamics problems in hours. As the
machine got better, these already fast processing times improved by another factor
of 1,000. Such a machine, for scientists who were desperate for computed answers,
was like adding years to their life. If they could solve a problem in a week instead of
years? The whole texture of their careers would be altered.
“At times,” one fellow computer developer remarked, “the Connection Machine
seems so different from current computers that it seems more akin to science fiction
than high technology.” 192 Thinking Machines Corporation sold Danny’s computers to
Lockheed to model stealth fighters. Chevron used one to model oil fields. The US
government bought several to help to predict the weather. Puzzles long resistant to
mere power melted in the face of parallel consideration. Nothing was more exciting
about Hillis’s machines than this intimiate, unprecedented link between intelligence
and speed. If you have twice as many processors as I do, you can perhaps crack a
puzzle of genomics or cryptography a year faster. But say you have figured out how
to have 275,000 machines linked together and I have 1,000? You can solve a
189 Adding: Hillis thesis, p. 19
190 He drove: Po Bronson, “The Long Now: Time Traveling with Danny Hillis”, Wired
(May, 1998)
191 Feynman: W. Daniel Hillis, “Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine”
Physics Today February 1989, p. 78
192 “At times”: Michael J. Black “Book Reviews: The Connection Machine”, AI
Magazine Volume 7 Number 3 (1986) p 169
134
problem eight years sooner 193 . Between 2007 and 2015 the number of connections a
Hillis-style neural computer could handle grew from 1 million to 100 billion. This
speed did produce things very like science fiction: Accurate voice recognition. Realtime
genetics. And it also began to mark out, clearly, the powerful network territory
where our future will be decided.
3.
Of all the things that mark a change between our modern lives and the days of those
who came before us, few are as sensationally obvious as the sheer acceleration of
life, the reduction of delay and the emerging instantness of experience. Faster. What
is going on inside the machines, as Mel Conway’s old law would have told us, is
happening too on the surface of our lives. A feeling of breathlessness in the face of
speed isn’t new, of course. When Anna Karenina folds herself under an oncoming
train at the end of Tolstoy’s novel, for instance, her suicide is as much metaphor as
personal tragedy, a comment on the disorienting steam, engine, and rail pace of
modernity. Speed kills, old habits and ideas particularly. Between 1840 and 1940
travel times between Anna’s St. Petersburg and Vronsky’s Moscow shrunk by 10
minutes every year on average, loosing deep cracks in Russian economics and
politics, tearing apart Anna’s slow-moving world of glittering balls and hereditary
estates with the fast force of industry, modernity and then the awful pliers of
communism. Tolstoy’s own death in 1910 held a bit of this acute tension between
old and new velocities: At 82, hoping to live out his final days in the peace of a small
hut, he left his family for the rural Russian town of Sharmardino. By train. He died at
a station on the way, stopped quite literally, like an absurd figure in a Gogol novel, as
he was enacting the tragedy of trying to use the modern to get to the past.
At the same time in the late 19 th Century, the American rail system was working its
own transformation, but with almost no ambivalence. America was using the
modern to get to the future – as fast as possible. This was a decisive difference in
temperament. “The American frontier,” Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his
famous 1894 essay about borders and American life, “is sharply distinguished from
the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense
populations.” 195 American rails and roads (and trade) encountered no substantial
fortifications. They ran nearly unchecked into the wilderness. The only apparent
limit to expansion, that generation thought, was technology itself. The trains had,
from the start, an unusual purchase in American life. During the three decades after
1840, the refinement of small but important details – faster train engines, stiffer
carriage design, tracks that were straighter, an ability to move and re-load boxcars
at night, better time-table management – eased America into the steam engine age
193 You can solve: Adam Beberg lecture “Distributed Systems: Computation with a
million friends”, speech at Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (April
30, 2008) available online
195 “The American frontier”: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the
Frontier in American History”, The Annual Report of the American Historical
Association, 1894, pp. 119-227
135
at faster a pace than any nation. “The most significant thing about the American
frontier,” Turner explained, “is that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”
This brisk acceleration of rail transit revealed an axiom of speed that matters to us
still: The faster your speed, the less distance matters. Accelerate from five to fifty to
five hundred miles an hour and the mileage becomes less significant with each notch
on the speedometer. It all takes the same amount of time. Marx called the process
“the annihilation of space by time”. He was right. Speed kills distance. The simple
algebra linking increased speed and reduced distance had been apparent already in
the shift from rowed galleys to sailing ships, but the age of industrial transport by
rail or air meant that rapid changes, changes that affected the very quality of
movement, took place within the time frame of a single lifetime. The acceleration
from horseback to train to plane happened over a period of 150 years or so. Each
new acceleration diminished the impact of distance.
There’s a phrase for this process – “Space-Time Compression” – first identified by
the American sociologist Donald Janelle in 1965 196 . Janelle saw that the technologies
of transportation, trains and planes and boats, and all the little innovations that
made them move ever-faster, were disrupting old spatial habits. They helped move
goods more quickly, sure, but in the process they were also making the old,
geographic maps less useful. When you could fly over a mountain, its importance
diminished. In a wagon train you might have contemplated the desert with fear, by
car you’d merely consider it with care. In a plane it was irrelevant. Janelle concluded
that raw economics drove this compression as much as science. Centuries of
constantly collapsing space and time had been driven not least by the hunger to
poke into distant markets, to latch onto cheap labor, and to pull natural resources to
wherever they were needed. This was “civilization” as a verb.
The demands for ever more commerce, ever faster, ever more profitably suggested
that the horses-to-trains-to-cars-to jets acceleration was an inevitable feature of
modern markets. We should expect it to continue, Janelle figured. Great fortunes
would accumulate to those who mastered speed. To be fast is a competitive
advantage; to be faster! decisive. Absolute speed is absolute power, as the philosopher
Paul Virilio has framed it. 197 That idea of “Space Time Compression” sounded
felicitous enough, like the name of a clever magic trick. Space compressed? Time
reduced? But that felicity hid the violent, revolutionary nature of the mechanism so
powerfully at work. It meant that the battlefields of power, which for most of human
history had been over the control of space, would now become – rather incredibly –
about the control of time.
196 There’s a phrase: Janelle identified what he called “Space-Time Convergence;”
Later geographer David Harvey renamed it as “Space Time Compression,” which is
more commonly used today.
197 Absolute speed: See Armitage, John, Ed. The Virilio Dictionary (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2013)
136
Janelle published his first paper on space-time compression in 1965 in the pages of
the reference journal of mapmakers, The Professional Geographer. But he was, of
course, blowing up nearly everything professional geography thought it was about.
“Geographers, as physicists, have traditionally been concerned with the positions of
points (places) in space,” he wrote. “However, geographers have not employed the
concept of ‘velocity’ in studying spatial relationships. Yet it might be of value and not
too far-fetched for the geographer to ask ‘at what ‘velocities’ are settlements
approaching one another?’” We should ask ourselves the same question. At what
velocity are you and I getting closer to other points on the planet? Janelle was
writing in 1965. He was concerned then about the sound barrier as the practical
limit to speed. But imagine his insights applied to an age where networks are
switched always on, constantly packing the world ever tighter? Where a mistake or
an innovation or an attack in one place can happen instantly and everywhere,
because the speed limit is the speed of light?
4.
At first glance, of course, geography seems the least dynamic of sciences. It is rooted
in the glacial-paced realities of geology, a discipline where speed is usually
measured in the creaking, inches-a-century advance of tectonic plates. The faster
links of transportation, whether they are trains or planes or data connections, lay
blanket-like atop that slower-moving geological layer. These high-velocity networks
are, in a way, a new geography. Mathematicians and data architects call the
landscape they represent a “topology”. The word refers to maps that can be rearranged
as a result of connection, the way in which speed and distance between
two points does affect how “far apart” they are. You can think of it this way:
Geographies are pretty much constant; topologies can change in an instant. In
geographic terms, Moscow and St. Petersburg are always 450 miles apart.
When you hear a network engineer talk about designing for a certain “topology” you
should think of hearing an architect describe the natural geography where a bridge
or a sky-scraper will one day sit. When you use an app, link to a finance market, or
wire yourself with sensors you’re connecting to a topology that has been designed
and mapped – and where what you can do is determined by that landscape. An
appreciation for tone and movement on a topology is a sign the new sensibility we
have called the Seventh Sense. Napoleon saw the battlefields of his age differently
than his enemies. They saw flat surfaces for the collision of soldiers, he saw a third
dimension, saw air filled with artillery and decisive top-down dominance. Our
Seventh Sense masters, those who can perceive a new order emerging, see wired
topologies in this same fresh way. Even though these landscapses are often invisible
or made up only of narrow fiber strings, it’s important that we try to picture
network topologies as real, as alive and buzzing and rich with connection and data,
places where fortunes will be made and lost, wars fought – and every bit as
influential as physical geography.
Topologies represent the landscape where real-world edifices like the Web or the
NYSE or Hizballah are built. They can change shape, instantly, depending on who is
137
connected, and by the speed and thickness of that connection. The topology of Wall
Street in the 1920s, for instance, was largely defined by who happened to come to
the trading floor on a given day; today it is a global landscape, influenced by news,
rumors and real-time profit twitches anywhere on the planet. Just like moving a
river from one place to another would radically change the utility of a bridge, a
change in topology changes the shape of systems that depend on it. That Seventh
Sense instinct – the powerful can become useless because of connection, the useless
can become powerful – is earned first through a fluency and even faith in these sorts
of rapid, fate-changing topological shifts.
In recent years the topologies of our network world have changed at the pace of
technology, which is very fast indeed. Every new piece of a network, every new
platform or protocol, alters how we connect. This process works on our sense of
distance like an efficient, strange sewing machine: Something very far away can be,
suddenly, with one stitch of innovation, right on top of you. The speed and the
quality of a connection is what determines how honestly “near” or “far” something
is. Location is, in a sense, as changeable as velocity. 198
Distance, on any living, networked web, is an endlessly pliable sheet. Just as you can
bring two distant points on a piece of paper right next to each other by folding the
sheet, so you can glue points in networks together by bending the space on which
they are connected. A map of the networked world or of nations or even of our city
is not some given, settled graph. One small twist and we are, like it or not, right on
top of each other. This makes it particularly murderous to hold onto the old idea
that you and I are unconnected points. Do countries like America or China have
legitimate interests thousands of miles away from their coastlines? Of course. 199 In
this way, the entire premise of Enlightenment life, the atomic focus on the power of
the individual, becomes dangerous.
It is now essential to use virtual topologies to operate in the real world, to bend
these ethereal elements of connection to influence and even total control. Thomas
Dullien, one of the researchers who discovered that “rowhammer” chip hack
captured this in a new law of network security that echoes, in fact, through all of
connected life: You don’t have to possess an object in order to control it. “Being
hacked,” he explained in a 2011 speech called Why Johnny Can’t Tell If He’s
Compromised, “is loss of control without change of ownership or possession.” 200
Your phone, resting constantly in your pocket, may in fact be pwned at every
keystroke by someone thousands of miles away. This is an extremely important
idea, an expression again of how connection changes the nature of an object: It
makes it controllable without possession. An army might be able to master an
198 Location: John May and Nigel Thrift eds. Timespace: Geographies of Temporality
(London: Routledge, 2001) 2
199 Of course: Distributed Lethality in Proceedings (U.S. Naval Institute) Jan 2015 p.
343
200 “Being hacked”: Halvar Flake, Why Johnny Can’t Tell If He Is Compromised,
keynote Area41 Conference, June 2014, Zurich
138
enemy’s territory without ever possessing it, for instance, if it can manage to own
the crucial topological infrastructures: banks, databases, communications systems.
One nation might be able to pwn another in this bloodless fashion. Networks, you
recall we said, will break nations in the future. This is just how such smashing
control will be achieved, from the linked mesh running silently and irreplaceably
under every element of national life. Today billion-dollar firms control cars, tools,
or hotel rooms without possessing them. The links draw out value. Michaelangelo’s
famous urging resonates here: Every block of stone has a sculpture inside of it, and it
is the task of the sculptor to discover it. Every network has a topology. It is the task of
each of us to discover it.
Topologies linger everywhere there is connection. Networks can be designed in
countless ways: The fishnets of Baran, the hub and spoke of a data center, the everchanging
mesh of a trading system. But what they all share is connective topologies
of one sort or another and – as a result – the fact that risk that lingers any one place
in the system also exists nearly any other linked place. Constant connection
produces, as an unsettling result, constant threat. Connection spreads, distant parts
of the world are superglued via that topological folding. Topology is not marked out
merely by a description of how we connect. Rather it is scored on what is called a
“trust graph”, a kind of map of who you or a machine or a network trusts – and how
much. An older generation still thinks a network is something made of wires and
switches and plugs. But their real power comes from something far more ethereal.
When you connect to a person or an object, you connect as well to its whole history
of decisions about who to trust. Every EU country connects to the choices of a single
border guard, for instance. Who does he trust? Is he right? Financial systems and
technology webs are the same. If you are what you are connected to, you are also –
rather unnervingly – the sum of every trusting (or untrusting) choice someone or
some machine has made. This creates a worrying result: “In the systems we’ve built
now,” Dullien has explained, “there is no way to establish who is in control.” If you
or anyone you’re linked to has made a trust mistake, you may be pwned, vulnerable,
and one hacked slice from loss of control.
Any object – your tablet computer, a digital currency, a hacked drone – can become
dangerous now in this sense, hacked by Warez Dudes into lethality. And nearly any
place can be attacked in some fashion or another, as long as it is connected. The old
chestnut of military strategy, that a clever or desperate army can always “trade
space for time” –make a gradual retreat in order to buy time, is nearly gone now.
Space is a wall that can be breached by time manipulation tools; there’s no place to
retreat to. Markets in Mongolia, airports in Europe, Chinese urban landscapes – all of
these now can be struck, more or less at any time, because they are all connected.
Unlike traditional conflict, where the location of your most terrifying dangers might
be exactly pinpointed and watched, where military zones and civilian zones were
carefully divided by front lines, a connected world is one of potential universal
peril. 201 The distinction between battlefield and everyday streets disappears and it
201 Unlike traditional conflict: Derek Gregory, “The Everywhere War” The
Geographical Journal, Vol. 177, No. 3, September 2011, pp. 238–250
139
takes with it – if we don’t handle this properly – something even more precious: The
division between periods of peace and of war.
That the knotting together of distance, speed and power changes the nature of an
object was something Janelle, the father of “Space Time Compression,” anticipated.
He labeled it “Locational Utility”, the way in which something becomes more useful
or powerful or relevant as it is drawn closer to us by increased connection and
speed, even if it stays the same “distance” away 202 . A nuclear weapon three hours
from landing and one that is three months away are, nearly, a different object
entirely. Adam Smiths’s famous remark in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that most
people would be more perturbed by the loss of half a finger than the news that a
million Chinese had perished, begins to take on a different color in an age when a
billion and a half Chinese are nanoseconds away. 203 When we say that connection
changes the nature of an object, we mean this; Networks change the “locational
utility” of anything they touch. When connection makes an object instantly, clearly
visible, it revolutionizes its potential. Little wonder so many great fortunes are being
made in applying this trick of plugging goods into compression engines like apps or
matching services. It’s hard to know if firms like Airbnb or Uber will be around in a
decade, but the economic energy they release emerges right out of Janelle’s theories:
Connect a car seat or an empty room and you change its nature. You give it value.
Part of our unease now – and part of the problem we have in strategizing about the
world or our businesses – is that stability on our topological maps is some time off
yet. There is so much yet to be connected. So many new topologies to be built.
“Time is a ride,” Danny Hillis once remarked in an early meditation about his rocksunk
clock, “and you are on it.” 204 He was right. That ride takes place, in a connected
age, on topological rails. And just how “instant” you are will be a mark of what sort
of ride you’re on. In the same way that rivers and oceans and mountains define
different landscapes in real geographies, topological neighborhoods too will each
bounce with funny quirks. Some will be super fast. Others yoked by politics. Citizens
of Santa Fe or Mumbai may choose to compress time in different ways. But they will
all share a common desire. To do more with less. The German philosopher Peter
Sloterdjik, writing about the way in which some people breeze through airports and
borders (with first class tickets and pre-approved immigration) while others
struggle to move at all out of refugee camps or poverty traps, has labeled the
winners of this new order as a kind of “kinetic elite” 205 . They are a kind of temporal
elite, in possession of golden keys to a special, frictionless topology. The technology
to eliminate space and capture time.
202 He labeled it: Donald G. Janelle, “Spatial Reorganization: A Model and Concept”,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Volume 59, Issue 2, 1969)
203 Adam Smith’s: famous remark: Adam Smith and Knud Haakonssen. The Theory
of Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 198
204 “Time is a ride” Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and
Responsibility. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 67
205 The German philosopher: Sloterdjik, TK
140
The computing programming technology that lingers inside most data centers now
and that makes sense of the ceaselessly arriving bits – Here is information on a
billion people. How many are named Bob? – is known as MapReduce. The name
combines two well-know computer fuctions, Map and Reduce, and it is just the sort
of program Janelle and Hillis would have dreamed up, had they ever met.
MapReduce divides computation work among thousands of machines, just the sort
of massive parallelism Hilli had in mind. What it implicitly does, however, is crunch
what might have taken years into microseconds. If the charmed phrase of James’
stately Victorian elites more than a century ago was “Summer Afternoon,” ours
might be “MapReduce”, a kind of magic two word code for a whole way of living and
thinking.
5.
The most successful political and economic systems of the past, the ones that
marked the winning “convergence” club of humanity’s last great leap, let people
liberate themselves into a life of their dreams. Liberty meant tearing down old
barriers to influence and security and knowledge; tipping over the Bastille, escaping
colonialism. And it meant, too, providing a scaffolding of education, of social
support, of laws and stability for citizens. The industrial, urban and rich countries
that populate our world now evolved that way because their citizens made them so.
They escaped the tyranny of the pre-modern, of a world where the small town you
were born in and the pattern of your parents’ life were a kind of prision for your
hopes. This was the whole trick of the Enlightenment, after all: What do you want to
be? You decide! What do you want your nation to be? Decide that too. Dare to know!
Look ahead now. The very best future political and economic arrangements will
need to do something more than simply liberate us. They will have to enable and
permit citizens to compress time. Just as the idea of a democracy was shocking once,
this concept of a system tuned not merely for liberty but for compression of time
should rattle us a bit. Certainly the attempt to achieve such an aim, to build the
scaffolds and rails a time compressed world demands, will jostle much of what
existst now. But to be modern means, in essence, the right, the ability to engage in
compression. Nations or corporations or ideologies that can deliver this liberty of
velocity – and that can construct and manage the flat-out fast, networked, artificially
topologies such a life demands – will grow, thrive, accelerate even faster. The others,
slowed by history or blocked by social or ideological designs, will miss the turn.
They will be the new divergence club. Fast networks will elude them. Self-defense
will be impossible; their time will be as vulnerable to easy manipulation and attack
as the resources of China and Africa and Latin America were in the face of greedy
colonialist plunder several hundred years ago.
There is no equality of justice between the weak and the strong, the Italian historian
Giambattista Vico once noted. 206 So in our age. Between the fast and the slow? No
206 Vico, New Science
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equality either. Partly this is because of something Janelle spotted: The remarkable
advantage, the wealth and opportunity, that accrues to the people and nations and
businesses that can compress space and time. Die Ware liebt das Geld, Marx
famously wrote: Commodities love money. Speed is now the decisive commodity –
and it loves money. (The feeling is mutual.) Velocity lets us achieve that ancient goal
of doing more with less. The race for speed lights something competitive: The faster
I go, the faster you feel you need to go, the more powerfully you feel your slowness.
The centripetal charm of acceleration, the way that speed attracts us, and then
makes us demand even more speed, honestly surprised the earliest architects of
steamships and rail and airlines and roads. They under-guessed how popular their
tools of space-time compression would be. Surely the maximum number of people
who would ever want to zip from LA to New York would be about 1,000 per week,
jet airline pioneers assumed. Would more than a few hundred engineers really want
their own computers, Gordon Moore asked at a dinner party shortly after Intel
proposed putting his chips in the first PCs. Yes, it turned out. Billions more. Highway
designers call this surprise “induced traffic”: The faster a highway, the more people
pile onto it. Urban planners in Los Angeles in the 1950s looked at their packed,
congested roads and thought they could fix them by adding lanes. They embarked
on construction programs, tore up the transportation network that girded the city
and built a new one featuring optimistic 20-lane highways as wide as a football field
and flat as a plate. Traffic got worse.
Say’s famous economic law that “supply creates its own demand” seems especially
fulfilled in an age where velocity is so valuable. Speed too creates its own demand.
The faster any one piece of the network starts to rattle and move, the more
profoundly we notice how slow the leftover bits are. We want them accelerated too.
Total network bandwidth grew by an heroic factor of 1000 times between 2005 and
2010. Speed? It increased by just 20 times. Induced traffic.
What is it, exactly, that we’re so hungry for? The extreme end of fast connectivity is
what computer systems designers call “statefulness” – a word that has nothing to do
with states like nations, but rather with the condition of a connection, the “state” it
is in. Early electrical circuits were either in a charged or uncharged “state”, switched
on or off. Today when we talk about a “stateful” connection, we mean a link that we
maintain, always on. It’s the difference between a video call and a letter, between
looking at your wife here and now (a “stateful connection”) and a photograph of her
(“stateless”). Real-time everywhere connection doesn’t merely kill distance; it
attacks delay too. Older generations would “break state” when they left family at
home or friends at school with a “see you later.” Our generation? “See you always”.
We never quite leave. Technology permits us to remain in constant touch this way,
to neve break state. “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we
did, that’s what I’d want in life,” the milenial writer Marina Keegan wrote in a
famous essay that captured more than a little of this zeitgeist. “More than finding the
right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web that we’re in. This elusive,
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indefinable, opposite of loneliness.” 207 The early interface of Snapchat, where you
had to leave your finger resting on the screen in order for the video to unspool, was
a kind of metaphor for this unbreakable relationship between touch and connection.
(As was, in a different way, the diffident “out of my life” left swipe of Tinder.)
“Good theories of the mind,” Hillis’ mentory Marvin Minksy once observed, “must
span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billion years in which our
brains have evolved; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of infancy and
childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.” 208
What we face now is a new time scale to add to Minksy’s list: The instant. Super-fast
networks are different than slower ones – even ones as “slow” as what we have
today. The ideal network is one that hovers near zero latency, where the time
between what you want (or what the machines want) and the effect is as short as
possible. You click a button to watch a movie and it starts instantly. You want to shut
down an enemy air force, you do it with a single switch. The fantasy of a really “zero
latency” system is impossible of course because even electrons moving through
copper are not instant, but near-zero? Light-speed? You’ve probably heard stories of
high-frequency stock traders who move next door to exchanges so they can capture
and profit on an extra sliver of a millisecond. That’s the quest for low latency. (And
more proof of the profitable link between speed and money.) Our challenge will not
be about being faster – the technology will make that inevitable – it will be about
managing the insane, still unknown demands of a world of suddenness. “In a
distributed system, it is sometimes impossible to say that one of two events
occurred first,” computer engineer Leslie Lamport wrote at the start of his famous
essay “Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System” – a sort of
technological parallel to Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” written a
century earlier. The problem, Lamport explains, is that what happens in one place
can happen nearly instantly everywhere. There’s no time to react; so your entire
worldview has to be capable of update at an instant’s notice. When the time
between a Warez Dude finding an exploit and your own systems being
compromised is zero, then the discovery of the hole and the creation of your
vulnerability happen effectively at the same time. “The relation ‘happened before’”,
Lamport explains, “is therefore only a partial ordering of the events in the system.
We have found that problems often arise because people are not fully aware of this
fact and its implications.” 209
Networks, we are discovering, don’t only compress space and time, they are
compressing in the process the path to knowledge. We might call this “skill-time
compression”: Techniques that once took a decade of training or that demanded
access to million-dollar machines, can now be understood, applied, and then evolved
207 “More than finding”: Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Lonelinenss”, Yale Daily
News, May 27, 2012 (accessed online).
208 “Good theories”: Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1986)
209 ”In a distributed system”: Leslie Lamport, “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of
Events in a Distributed System”, Communications of the ACM, July 1978, 558
143
unimaginably fast. No one had ever heard of the Syrian Electronic Army a year
before they were hijacking famous websites, injecting world-class malicious code
into opposition computers and demonstrating a digital attack fluency. 210 Of course
the charming side of such a shift is evident too: Walk the Vatican with an historian in
your ear, master sourdough in a weekend. There’s something not a little miraculous
in the way the networked tools to recombine DNA or hack computer code or design
viral software are getting both more sophisticated and simpler. If earlier eras put
epoch-making implements into human hands – the knife! the train! – our age is now
placing new, mind-shaping forces within instant reach.
In a networked world, economic or military power doesn’t come just from
controlling territory or information alone. It comes, more and more, from this
matery of the temporal. Securing territory today does not, alone, solve many
problems of safety. Control of information, of topologies and finally of time – this is
what matters most. Such temporal security will be elusive; always in need of
defense. The arrival of airpower in World War Two, for instance, shifted battles
from two to three dimensions. “Only large states are able to resist three-dimensional
envelopment,” the historian Nicholas Spykman wrote in 1942. 211 Even today, “Air
Superiority” is the precondition of nearly any American war. If we can dominate you
from above, nearly anything seems possible. But networks add a fourth dimension.
“Time Superiority.” Can you move faster than your enemy? Can you bog them down?
Or are you a victim of fourth-dimensional envelopment. Control of time – yours,
your enemies – this will decide your strength.
6.
Back in the fall of 1988, at about the same moment that Danny Hillis and his team
were busy peddling their amazing Connection Machine – and trying to smash every
world computing speed record they could find – another device appeared in the
world of massively parallel super computers. It was, everyone who saw it agreed, an
extremely strange machine. It’s appearance was completely unexpected. It’s
designer was not a famous thinker about parallelism, cavorting with TV network
founders and physics Nobelists. In fact, its very success emerged from this strange
face: The creator knew basically nothing about the sort of parallel design that
informed Hillis’ thinking. Which was strange, because it was far more “parallel” than
the Connection Machine could ever be. It was also cheaper. Simpler. And: It was
faster. In fact, it was the fastest parallel machine in history.
The machine began, quietly enough, in the mind of a 28-year old Cornell graduate
student named Robert Tappan Morris. Morris came by his computer chops honestly
enough: He was the son of Robert Morris Sr., the legendary NSA scientist we
encountered several chapters ago, the man who penned those partly amusing, partly
210 No one had heard: Edwin Grohe, “The Cyber Dimensions of the Syrian Civil War:
Implications for Future Conflict”, Comparative Strategy (2015), 34:2,
211 The arrival of airpower: Nicholas John Spykman, “Frontiers, Security and
International Organization,” Geographical Review, Vol 32, No 3 (July 1942) p. 439
144
terrifying Golden Rules of Computer Security.“Rule One: Don’t Own A Computer.” The
machine that Morris Jr. created was madeentirely of software. It took the form of a
compact, simply designed computer program he’d written and designed to spread
quickly and easily on the young systems of the Internet. It ran a mere 99 lines, took
most computers nanoseconds to execute and it worked like this: The program – it
later became known as a “worm” by the police who would come to find and arrest
Morris Jr. – would find an open door on a network-connected computer. (In 1988,
the pre-Warez Dude era, finding such doors was not difficult. Finding locked doors
was probably harder.) Once Morris’ program had slithered inside and loaded itself
onto the machine, like a dog slipping through an unattended puppy door, it would
sniff around, rattle a few more doors to find any passwords that had been left
unsecured. Then it would move on to the next machine. Knock, knock. Rattle, rattle.
Next machine. Morris designed his code to simply repeat this process over and over.
Filling, as a result, each machine’s memory with multiple, peformance-deadening
copies of the same program. A house full of puppies, in a sense. After several hours
of this flu-like spread, a wave of unplanned, unending computation began choking
the net.
Morris later explained he’d only meant his program as a demonstration, as a test of
sorts. He wanted to show how machines might be made more safe. But he seemed to
grasp, almost immediately, that he’d made a mistake and that the worm was
running away from him. He emailed a friend: How the hell to stop it? His friend had
no idea either. They scrambled at least to warn system administrators about the
dangerous code that would shortly devour their machines. “There may be a virus
loose on the Internet,” they wrote. But that note, in a bit of bad luck, was
quarantined inside a Harvard computer that had already been unplugged. So, a few
hours after Morris released his code, unwarned and unprepared, the Internet froze.
212 On November 2 nd and 3rd, 1988 machines around the world were shut off, cables
were pulled out of walls, and systems were wiped and restarted in a race to stop the
robot-like spread of the disease and then to finally kill it off. 213
The Morris Worm was, on those fall 1988 days, acting out a sober-minded insight of
the famed biological historian Alfred Crosby: “The nineteenth century was followed
by the twentieth century, which was followed by the…nineteenth century.” 214
Crosby meant that our age of topological connection meant we were back, again, in
an age of infections. And this was true: Morris program was mapping out, like an
epidemic, new routes in the age of high-speed digital contagion. But – and this is
why we care about it here – by the time it reached “peak infection”, the worm was
212 So, a few hours: David Moore, Colleen Shannon, k claffy, “Code-Red: a case study
of the spread of a worm on the Internet” IMW '02 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM
SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment (2002), 273-284
213 Morris later explained: Ted Eisenberg, DavidGries, Juris Hartmanis, Don
Holcomb, and M. Stuart Lynn, Thomas Santoro, “The Cornell Commission: On Morris
and the Worm”, Communications of the ACM (June 1989, 12: 9) 706
214 The Morris program: Alfred W. Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The
Influenza of 1918 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) xii
145
also doing something else. It had infected tens of thousands of machines, which
were all cranking away in unintended harmony. During the 48 hours of its brief and
unforgettable life, it was later calculated, the Morris Worm had become the most
powerful parallel computer in history. At its peak, it managed to achieve a
processing speed of 400 billion operations per second – about twice the speed of the
most expensive supercomputers of the day.
Like any unexpected epidemic, the worm became a social, cultural and technological
milestone. First, it caused Morris to be arrested. He was handed a $10,000 fine,
some community service and several years of probation. He later went on to found
an important Internet company, to join the faculty of MIT and to receive the highest
honors in computing for his (other) efforts.
Then, a year or so after the virus had been finally corralled, the computer scientist
Fred Cohen, one of the earliest specialists in malware – in fact, the man who
invented the term “computer virus” – wrote an article that challenged the notion
that all computer viruses are, inherently, bad. 215 What drew his attention was that
fabulous, unbelievable record of the Morris Worm: 400 billion computations each
second. “The features that make computer viruses a serious threat to computer
integrity,” he wrote, “can also make them a powerful mechanism.” 216 This optimistic
gloss, which sounded an awful lot like “The Plauge was great for humanity!” if you
didn’t follow Cohen’s logic, triggered a furious response. Eugene Spafford, also a
well-regarded computer researcher, fired back: “For someone of Dr. Cohen’s
reputation to actually promote the uncontrolled writing of any virus, even with his
stated stipulations, is to act irresponsibly and immorally.” 217
So here, then, is a line, of sorts. The Morris Worm, an expression of really massive
connection and interaction and speed, is a model for the world we live in now. Fast,
linking with a mind of its own, running best (or at least fastest) when it uses the
design of the system to spread on a topology optimized for speed. But who is right
about the implication of such an historic design. Cohen? Spafford? Do we want our
whole world cranking away, super fast, compressing time to nothing?
We can, all of us, decide to fight against the very ideas of a network. Or we can, like
Cohen suggested, look at the terrifyingly fast nature of this world and begin to see
something else. The totally unimaginable. Of course Spafford was not wrong. There
is something scary and thought-muddling about the idea of intentionally authored
computer viruses, running wild, ever faster. But there is something thoughtmuddling
about this whole world we’re entering. Networks are pulling at every
existing structure. They hum, really, with the most elemental and precious human
215 Fred Cohen: Frederick B. Cohen. A Short Course on Computer Viruses (Pittsburgh,
PA: ASP Press, 1990)
216 “The features”: Fred Cohen, “Friendly Contagion: Harnessing the Power of
Computer Viruses”, The Sciences Sept/Oct 199, 22
217 Eugene Spafford: Eugene Spafford, “Three Letters on Computer Security and
Society,” Purdue e-Pubs 1991, 91-088
146
data – our DNA, our wedding photos, our hopeful voice mails and most essential
knowledge, our small savings against disaster. In its speed and its depth, in its
increasingly comprehensive grasp of each of us and our world, this new network
order is at once the most amazing thing we’ve ever created and the most terrifying.
But recall, for a moment, Hillis’s dream for his parallel computer: “The ability to
configure the topology of the machine to match the topology of the problem.” What
if we really could rewire our thinking, our networks and politics and economics to
match the problems we face now? Finally, with the Seventh Sense kicking alive in
each of us, we can at least see the topological landscape where such a construction
might occur. Now we must turn to the exciting question of just how we’d configure it
to do our bidding.
We’ve covered a lot so far; perhaps it is worth a glance back.
First, we’ve come to see how networks really operate, the way in which they breed a
lively connected skein that concentrates and distributes power. These systems are,
as a result of their very design, plucking apart many of our old structures and ideas.
Recall my dad, the doctor, ripped one direction by millions of disease advice
websites (distribution) and in the other by massive diagnostic databases
(concentration). This pulling process creates too, as we saw: Billion-user firms (and
billion dollar fortunes) bred with breathtaking speed. Drones, derivatives, waves of
migrants torn from their states but plugged into technological tapestries – all of
these are products of network power. Connection, we learned, changes the nature of
any object. You. Me. Money. Terrorists. Pretty much anything. And because there is a
lot more of the world that has not yet been fully connected, it’s easy to see that we
live in a revolutionary age.
Second, we learned that the world of networks is complex. It’s made up of many
complicated pieces, but complexity is something entirely different: It’s the
unpredictable and colliding evolution you might see in a rainforest, where
uncountable forces intermingle to produce life and death, growth and change.
Scientists call this “emergence” – and it is happening on all our connected systems.
Connection produces new, ripplingly powerful and unpredictable structures. The
Arab Spring. The 2008 financial crisis. Connection changes complicated objects not
least by making them complex. This is why our whole world, even the parts we
might expect to be most stable, whips around now with a new and wild energy. In a
way, we saw, this should reward a careful confidence: Go ahead and break the old
systems. Something new will emerge.
Third, we followed the trail of hackers like the Warez Dudes and discovered
something unnerving about the networks around us. Not only are they
honeycombed with dangerous and unpatchable holes, but historically unmatched
amounts of power rests in their central cores. The reason hackers are so eager to get
to these kernels of power is that in doing so they can manipulate entire landscapes
of power with a profound efficiency. A “weird machine,” fired with an invisible and
dangerous hacked logic, is a possibility that flutters through any network. Trade.
Politics. Finance. Choices made in the center of network systems will redound on
147
each of us. This is why we say that if in the past the most important things happened
in public – wars, riots, and elections – in the future many of the most powerful shifts
will, rather worryingly, occur in secret.
Fourth, we met the New Caste that masters many of these hot cores of power, for
good and ill. Past eras were dominated by merchants, sages and soldiers who
competed and collaborated in the pursuit of power. Now a new, young technological
group is appearing. The nations and companies that train and equip them best of
them will have an incalculable advantage. But there’s a hitch: As much as this group
knows about networks, they know little about history or politics or economics.
Dangerously, they often see the world as a machine to be coded.
Fifth, we unearthed a new and invisible set of landscapes that will decide much of
our future. These are called “topologies” and they are the connected fields on which
power moves now. The web where stocks are traded, cyber attacks occur, imports
are moved, or biological data are recorded and studied – each of these is a crucial
topology. Control of them will be as important in the future as control of sea or air
or capital once was.
And, finally, we learned what the networks are for: The compression of time. For all
their technical magnificence, we find that beating in the cold technological heart of
these systems is a most human desires, to negotiate a bit the one really inarguable
constant of our lives: We are all burning candles. The compression of time is why we
connect. It lets us do more, experience differently, live longer. What the demand for
liberty was to the Enlightenment, the call to compress time will be in our future – a
fundamental political demand. None of our existing institutions have been built to
answer this cry.
These six elements make up a rough outline of a new sensibility. To see them at
work in the world is the mark of a powerful way of thinking and feeling. The
Seventh Sense. And this is important, we saw, because the shift ahead of us really is
like the Enlightenment in its scale. It will tip everything over. It can’t be totally
understood in advance. We can see now that our old institutions are failing. Their
strategies for solving problems only makes them worse. We saw how, at that level of
war and peace, old ideas are laying new traps. No one in power seems to have a
clear, convincing picture of just what is going on. We can feel the danger we face,
like rippling heat from a nearby inferno – our world tugged into the future by a class
of old leaders who don't understand networks and a collection of new technologists
who don’t understand the world. We had better find some way forward that does
not depend entirely on either of these groups. The first may destroy our liberty in
the name of an elusive security; the other will consume our freedom in pursuit of a
mad efficiency. And there’s one last thing we didn’t really learn here, but I think you
probably suspected it even before you started reading many chapters ago and met
Master Nan and his warning of impending “spiritual illness”: If we’re going to shape
this world at all, we don’t have much time.
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Part Three:
Gateland
149
Chapter Nine
Inside and Out
In which the Seventh Sense brings us face to face with the most powerful feature of our
age – and perhaps of any age.
1.
The Shangani River runs in a small, green vale through some of Southern Africa’s
most remarkable nature. It marked, a bit more than a century ago, the northernmost
line of the British presence in Africa. If other parts of Queen Victoria’s colonial
empire crackled with desert harshness, the mountains and hills rolling up from the
Cape and down to the Shangani were notable for a pleasing softness, a shading
towards pastels in the changeable light of the region. For London’s colonial
mapmakers, South Africa was a long-eyed treasure, an ideal restocking and transfer
point for British ships headed for Lombok, Calcutta, Pondicherry and beyond. “We
have lost America,” the explorer William Dalrymple wrote Prime Minister William
Pitt in 1785. “An halfway house would secure us India, and an Empire to Britain.” 218
The African Cape would be that halfway house.
Following the 1814 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, which gave the British control of the Cape,
the English pressed into Africa and found each newly opened district delivered
more wealth than the last. A colonialist’s dream: Diamonds. Gold. Endless fertile
fields. The efficient engines of industry and exploration (and exploitation) of the
British African Company chewed easily, profitably, into the land. “Having read the
histories of other countries, I saw that expansion was everything,” the mining baron
Cecil Rhodes wrote in 1875. “The world's surface being limited, the great object of
present humanity should be to take as much of the world as it possibly could.” 219
And so the British did.
If there was a moment that showed the tenor, the power of this ruthless asymmetry
most clearly, it was the battle that exploded along the Shangani in 1893. The
Matabele, a powerful local tribe had been smash-and-run fighting the colonists for
years. The British had tried to charm, pacify and bribe the Matabele and their Chief
Lobengula with money and land. None of it worked. They tried threats. That did not
work either. “The Chief has had all your messages,” an imperial adjutant reported
back to Cape Town after another frustrating, pointless discussion in late 1892. “But
he has the art, not unknown to civilized despots, of ignoring what is not
convenient.” 220 Or perhaps the instinct of knowing what to avoid. One Boer
218 “We have lost America”: David Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony: History,
Literature, and the South African Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2012), 67
219 “The world’s surface being limited”: F. Vershcoyle Cecil Rhodes: His Political
Life and Speeches, 1881-1900 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1900) 7
220 “The Chief has had”: Copies and extracts of further correspondence relating to
Affairs in Mashonaland, Matabeleand, and the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Nov 1893,
150
commander, a blood enemy of Rhodes, had warned Lobengula: “When an
Englishman once has your property in his hands, then he is like a monkey that has
its hands full of pumpkin seeds – if you don’t beat him to death, then he will never
let go.” 221
So when, in October of 1893, the British finally tracked Lobengula down to the
banks of the Shangani, the two sides faced off for what promised to be an intense,
decisive battle. “It was just after 2:15a.m., a peaceful night, clear sky but on the dark
side,” one of the British infantrymen later recalled. “The bugles gave the alarm, the
camp was all excitement in a moment, all noise with the opening of ammunition
boxes and shouting of officers, the men were getting into their places. There was a
din outside from the on-rushing Matebele impis that had decided to attack in the
usual Zulu fashion.” The British soldiers were outnumbered. They were thousands
of miles from home, hanging on the thin end of a 5,000 mile supply line. The
Matabele knew the territory. They were fighting for the lives and families and honor.
But one sound was the decisive noise of the scale tipping towards the British
soldiers. A hushed clicking against the yelling all around. The opening of ammunition
boxes. The British, for the first time in African action, had mounted machine guns.
The weapons worked that morning on the Shanghani with a violence you and I
would have expected. They reversed, more or less instantly, the Matabele
advantages of men, familiarity, and even furor. Machine-gunned Matabele were
found, in the hours after the attack, perched in trees, dug into dirt mounds and piled
desperately atop each other, killed as they had scrambled. One British soldier wrote
later that that the weapons had mowed down the Matabele “like grass.” Lobengula
survived, but his army was massacred down to a squad and he was reduced to
pleading. “Your Majesty,” he wrote to Queen Victoria in the days after the battle,
“what I want to know from you is: Why do your people kill me?” 222 With this
missive, the Chief entered the ranks of the Queen’s powerless correspondents, onceomniscient
feeling men in Africa or Asia or India who wrote her after some
devastating battlefield reverse – baffled, confused, overwhelmed. Did she even read
the letters? It was hard to know, but that only made the pleading more perversely
imbalanced. The locals had no idea, really, what they were up against.
Martial leverage. It was the inarguable force of the 19 th Century. It made Europe’s
colonial masters. Of course they lied, stole, fought – did whatever sensible and
sleazy thing Cecil Rhodes and his ilk suggested was needed. The monkey with the
pumpkin seeds. Expansion was everything. Imperial dreamers in London, Berlin,
Brussels, Vienna and Paris saw with total clarity the immense historical imbalance
across the chasm of industry and science and reason. The “Convergence Club”
Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Telegram from Assistant Commisioner, Palapye, to
his Excellency High Commissioner, Cape Town, p 13.
221 “When an Englishman”: Vershcoyle, p 191-192
222 “Your majesty”: Report, Report, Volume 61 Sessional papers, (London:
Commonwealth Shipping Committee, H.M. Stationery Office, 1893), 77 from
University of Michigan online digitized library
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against the divergent, the left-behind. Rhodes confessed ambition for his company
to “take as much of the world as it possibly could,” was simply an armed, greedy
version of Kant’s “Dare to Know”. Just as no question was was unaskable, no place
was too far off to possess or exploit. No position was secured by history or distance
or sentiment. This was, for instance, the lesson taught to Lin Zexu, the Qing Dynasty
bureaucrat sent out from Beijing in 1839 to stop the British opium sales that were
reducing China to a drugged, useless coma. “Suppose there were people from
another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people
into buying and smoking it?” Lin wrote the Queen. “Certainly your honorable ruler
would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused?” Lin thought that he was speaking as
the voice of a great, eternal empire. Victoria never replied. To the extent Victoria
was aroused by anything in Southern China, it was likely by the way in which, a few
months after Lin’s letter, the British emasculated the Qing military and moved into
Hong Kong for a 150-year stay.
“Whatever happens,” the Hilaire Belloc had his Colonial character Captain Blood
famously quip in an 1885 poem, “we have got the Maxim and they ‘ave not.” 224 The
machine guns were a totem of dominance in Shangani and on other colonial front
lines; they marked a gulf between modern and unmodern, between industrial and
agricultural. The weapons had first appeared in the mid-1800s on battlefields in the
American Civil War, after the inventor Richard Gatling sent a package of samples to
the White House and convinced President Lincoln – a famous gadget freak – that
their firepower might bring the Civil War to a faster close. Lincoln ordered the Army
to try the guns, but Gatling’s early attempts were honestly too immature to tell
decisively on the battlefields of the American south. Within a few decades, however,
the guns were perfected in places like Africa, or on the frontlines of the 1904 Russo-
Japanese War. They represented a compelling, inarguable logic of industrial war: A
machine and a gun. We mowed them down like grass. You could read that line as
metaphor: Mowing grass was, in the end, the act of a machine killing a wild, natural
world into a clean, useful order. The Europeans were the grass-clipping machine;
the rest of the world was, well, the grass. For a colonial temperament hardened for
“The Great Game” of empire on the playing fields of Eton, preparing a lawn for
tennis and a territory for exploitation were not particularly distinct acts.
The Shangani battle gunshots struck the European mind as powerful confirmation of
everything they suspected about the magic violence of an industrial age. The image
of such a device suited the aggressive, engineering-led mood of era. As Gatling – and
his competitor Hiram Maxim – peddled the guns, they faced a predictable resistance,
of course: Europe’s cavalry officers were in love with their well-bred horses. But the
age was, finally, the story of aggressive industry flattening old habits. Trains were
assaulting the countryside. Factories were pounding apart the habits of labor. Social
stampedes of speed-climbing nouveau riche, political attacks of new industrial
unions and counter attacks all expressed this aggressive energy. The soundtrack of
Germany in the decades after 1869, as Bismarck stitched together a new nation
224 “Whatever happens”: Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveler, (London: Edward
Arnold, 1898)
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from dozens of hereditary principalities, was the ceaseless ping-ping of rail-building
and welding and industry. How natural it must have seemed to add the rat-a-tat-tat
of a Maxim gun. Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s eldest son, wrote that defensive
thinking was, “utterly foreign to the German spirit.” Bismarck’s “Iron and Blood”
national motto became, finally, personal for many Germans, who were prouder to
leave their universities with a hot-red dueling scar on their faces than a subtle
ownership of Goethe in their hearts.
“During the decades before the First World War,” the political scientist Steven van
Evera has observed, “a phenomenon which may be called a ‘cult of the offensive’
swept through Europe.” 225 Wars, it was believed, would run with the same swiftness
of trains or the new industrial sewing machines or steam-fired printing presses. It
was this instinct that led German generals to assure the Kaiser in 1914 that a war
begun in August would be finished by Christmas. English university students
sprinted to enlistment centers in the days after the war began, worried the fight
might end before they tasted blood. French farmers moving from their crops to the
trench lines of Flanders, Russian aristocracy crowding towards the Danube, the
politicians who led them all – they operated, mostly, with this same conviction.
British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey’s mournful meditation on the evening of
August 3,1914, the first night of the war, was a lonely one: “The lamps are going out
all over Europe,” he said. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
The First World War was a kind of engineering tragedy. The disaster had deep roots:
domestic politics, the insecurity of kings, profound colonial greed. But also a
fundamental miscalculation about the nature of war and peace in an age of industry.
Machine guns – and all the tools of industrial war, from gas to battleships – were not
magic tricks of fast victory or permanent peace, as some had thought. A mechanized
modern army wasn’t, as much as it may have seemed in theory or drills or in
midnight massacres in the African bush, some steam-press built for cold rolling the
armies Belgium and Prussia and France. In fact, the weapons encouraged battle as
they piled endlessly in national arsenals. They tickled fears of fast or surprise attack,
even as they gratified that weird continental hunger for violence. Hilare Beloc’s
poetic joke, the sly we’ve got the Maxim, and they’ve not took on an unexpected
character when both sides had ‘em. The machine gun reached the fiery acme of its
purpose not as a spur to end wars altogether, as Gatling once hoped, but rather
when it was married to barbed wire, to shovels and to gas – and then admixed with
the trigger-tugging fear of 20-year-old boys. So: Sixty thousand British casualties in
one day alone, July 1, 1916 at the Somme.
The rhymes changed. Hilare Beloc’s jigs were a distant memory for the starved,
surprised and shocked men in the field. Siegfried Sassoon:
You smug faced crowds, with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
225 “During the decades”: Steven Van Evera, “Cult of the Offensive and the Origins
of the First World War”, International Security (Vol 9, No 1, Summer 1984) 58
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Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go. 226
As soldiers dug into trenches that would endure for a half-decade, a terrible
strategic fact dawned on the generals who led Europe’s armies. The Great War was
going to be a charnel house. The continent had built itself into a battle machine,
wired by trains and telegraphs and armies. There was no reverse gear. There was
not even a switch to slow it down, let alone turn it off. A massive, technologypowered,
fast-moving system with revolutionary implications, built beyond the
comprehension of any one figure or nation, had slipped out of control. And the men
in charge of planning and directing the use of this super-fast complex? They failed
everyone: their soldiers, their kings, their armies. They were all but insensible to the
real nature of their age.
Sound familiar?
2.
Here, then, is a question of the sort – violent, loaded with the possibility of tragedy –
that you’d rather not have to consider: A new way of war arrives, a new weapon, a
fresh idea about fighting. Does it make your world peaceful or treacherous? The
lethality of the equation of guns x machines at the end of the 19 th Century appeared
to some industrialists and bankers and statesmen inarguable evidence for peace.
Everyone with such a violently efficient weapon; who dares start a war? As we now
know, machines x guns was a formula for some of the worst killing in human history.
Gatling’s fond hope that his weapons would stop war was naïve, insane even. His
competitor Maxim had been clearer eyed. A friend told him: “Give up your chemistry
and electricity. If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will
enable those Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.” 227
So: Let’s be a bit warmer about this. Networks x weapons = what exactly? Is there
some disaster lingering in our own future, as unimagined from our current
perspective as machine guns and trenches were a century ago? Do we consider war
impossible now? There’s something sickening in such puzzles, of course. Think of
the men and women who, over the millennia, have contemplated similar questions
knowing full well the answer would be measured in blood and treasure and
children. Put yourself in the place of the population of Melos, a peace-loving
Mediterranean island whose destruction 2300 years ago was chronicled by
Thucydides in The Peloponesian Wars. “Surely you have noticed that you are an
island and we control the ocean,” an unwelcome Athenian general intimated to a
Melian citizens’ council one day 243 BC as his soldiers and ships collected
menacingly outside the city’s walls. Athens wanted the Melians to join an alliance
226 “You smug faced”: Seigfried Sassoon, “Suicide in the Trenches” in The War
Poems of Seigfried Sassoon, (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2004), 64
227 “Give up your chemistry”: John Ellis, A Social History of the Machine Gun (New
York: Pantheon, 1975) p.33
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against Sparta. The Melians – like poor Lin Zexu or Lobengula of the Matabele –
yearned only to be left alone. “You would not agree to our being neutral, friends
instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?” they asked 228 . No, the Athenians
replied, and then a line that has resonated through the problems of nations ever
since: “It is the nature of power that he who has it takes; he who does not must
submit.” The Melians voted stubbornly against surrender and for hope. Perhaps the
Spartans would mount a relief raid? The Athenians might change their minds?
Neither happened. The Melian men were betrayed and then massacred. Their wives
and children were sold as slaves.
What do networks do when they touch the balance of war and peace? How might we
use what we know, what we sense, about a connected age to manage the dangers
ahead? If an insane Cult of the Offensive flavored the end of the 19 th Century, our
own age vibrates, as we’ve seen, to a Cult of the Disruptive. The great tale of our
times is the diffusion of a new, promising and disorienting network order. We’ve
been told that all this interconnection makes war an impossibility. Everyone would
be a loser in such a war. But the way in which that earlier age was so horribly wrong
about the result of machines x weapons, should unnerve us. We don’t yet really know
what networks x weapons means – to say nothing of networks x networks x weapons.
Or, to sum up what we’ve seen so far in this book, very fast networks x artificial
intelligence x black boxes x a New Caste x compression of time x everyday objects x
weapons.�Would you look at that weird formula and say conclusively: “Hey, we’ll all
get along.” Me neither. We should worry about the day we might face a Melian
choice of our own, when some general or infomanagerial despot – or some clicking
computer – shows up, unwelcome, and says to us: It should be obvious you are
merely a node, and I control the network.
When leaders label the rise of China or cyberweapons or terrorism or the decline of
the US as the “main problem” of our age – and all of these have been designated as
such by famous foreign policy figures –they are missing the revolutionary, uniting
force that animates them all. Networks. Whether we are trying to slice apart the
roots of the Islamic State or slow Russian territorial dreams or understand narcoeconomics
or hedge-fund finance – connectivity touches and defines each problem.
New and essential platforms for finance and biological data and artificial intelligence
are emerging now, blossomed out of network connection. These ecosystems must be
design, built, protected. All while the world we know kicks back around us,
sometimes crumbling, sometimes fighting for its dear life. I promised earlier that
we’d apply the Seventh Sense to some practical problem, and the deadly test of war
and peace is the one I’d like to consider now. The sharpest challenge of truth for any
view of the world is, after all, the design of a grand strategy. Get it right and you can
secure your safety. The energy of the age can be your tool. Get it wrong and you reap
the Somme, Melos, Canton, the Shangani. Recall General Liu Yazhou’s line: “A major
228 The Melians: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Steven Lattimore trans.,
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998) Chap 5.; See also the excellent BBC
performance of certain elements of Thucydides in “The War That Never Ends”
available on YouTube
155
state can lose many battles, but the only loss that is always fatal is to be defeated in
strategy.”
The leaders of our major global powers may be as blind to the dangers and
possibility of our world as Europe’s heads of states were to the nature of their era
100 years ago. You know what the Seventh Sense is now. Who among them has it?
We should wonder if we’ve merely now done Hiram Maxim one better: Have we
developed something with our age of connection that will reach its fullest potential
in allowing us to slit each other’s throats more efficiently? I don’t think so, but
understanding why means we need consider the networks, to feel them out with our
new sense.
3.
The essential problem of politics is not difficult to state. It was true for Seneca in the
Roman Forum as it was for Lobengula on the Shangani riverbank or is now for
congressmen in Washington or cadres is Beijing: Who has power? Why? By power I
mean the ability to control others, to tell them what to do – or what not to do; and of
course to avoid being dictated to yourself in that “Surrender or die” way. Max
Weber, the German sociologist of the last century, had it right: Macht, the ability to
achieve what you want despite the resistance of others. 229 Don’t develop nuclear
weapons. Or Don’t attack us. Or, Join our alliance against Sparta are all examples of
power in action. The movement of power, from the balled-up fists of Kings and
Popes and Emperors, to the hands of markets and voters and citizens, and now into
a fresh, connected dynamic is the story of history. This is a lurching, worrisome,
dangerous process even if it suggests some miraculous transformations. Whole new
topologies of vital, life-giving control are emerging; surely contests for their mastery
will occur. The terrible human infection of a hunger for power and security isn’t,
much as we might wish, something quarantined safely to the pages of Homer or
Hitler.
So let’s pass beyond describing the new and surprising elements that make up a
Seventh Sense and onto its use. Examine our world with this instinct, for a moment.
Picture that constantly stretched, complex network, spitting out drones, viruses,
fortunes and disruption as it is wont to do. Recall the seething, insidious power of
the Warez Dudes, the New Caste, the black boxes they all hunger to penetrate and
make weird. Think of the compression of time, of twisting topologies that can place
the distant atop us in an instant. What single feature stands out? Our world shuffles
now, as all these forces slip into an order defined by closed spaces, by fresh in and
out borders. What the Seventh Sense reveals as it feels at this new arrangement is
gates. Everywhere. Facebook, bitcoin users, doctors with privileged access to
genetic databases – all are gated, in-or-out worlds. Look around and see how many
gates enclose you or your family or your company. The Internet. The FTSE 100. Your
Apple or Android operating system. In our connected age, the act of drawing lines
229 Max Weber: Max Weber and Sam Whimster, The Essential Weber: A Reader.
(London: Routledge, 2004), 355
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between points is also an act of drawing a line around those points. It is not simply
that we’re enmeshed in networks now; no, we’re enclosed even entrapped by them.
If the great ambition of Cecil Rhodes’ era was for the expansive conquest of
territory, in our own it is for the construction and manipulation of gated spaces.
Gatelands.
In an age of network power, no position is more important, formidable, influential
or profitable than that of the gatekeeper. Defining who is in or out of any network is
among the most essential moves of design. In financial markets, on the Internet
backbone or inside the human immune system, the accept-or-reject decision
determines a great deal. The first sign of order breaking down, whether it is the
Roman Empire or your lungs, is an inability to manage what slips in and out. Flows
of bits, of migrants, of gold and patents and medicines – all of these life-giving forces
can be controlled, bent for good or stopped for ill, as they pass through or collide
with gates. By gates I mean not only in-out passages but all of the tools that meter
and enclose the various Gatelands: Protocols, languages, block-chains. Whatever
binds and shapes an information topology. Any sort of code or encryption or binary
instruction that can unlock an in and out. If you want to make a fortune or a
revolution (or both), if you hope to shatter some barrier of tools or ideas between
you and a dream, or to lead a religious revival, spread an infection of hate or
revolution or insidious Morris-style computer code – then fundamentally this is
what you have to consider: Where are the gates? How to smash them? How to build
your own? We are entering, as a result of our dependence on networks of all sorts, a
landscape where the very clustering of power creates new border regions, bridges
and gates. If older, hierarchical systems craved a top – a king, a superpower, a Pope
– our connected, meshlike age demands valves and protocols and gates. It hungers
for connection, which means it hungers too for throttles and accelerators and
brakes. And of course people to run them. To speed them up. Slow them. Finger off
switches. This reordering of power will produce, is producing, a fight over
topological spaces for finance, biology, trade or pretty much any source of power.
The scramble is as urgent, decisive and essential as the one Rhodes and his peers
embarked upon. Inside or out? A fresh Meliananxiety haunts us: Are you the
gatekeeper? Or the gatekept?
We wander into Gateland the moment we switch our phones on. We enter it when
we book an airline ticket, when our genetics folds into a pool of data, or when we
take a new degree, master a computer language, or check on friends via one stateful
connected platform or another. We enter it, in short, when we connect. Gatekeepers
choose what we see. They determine the rules we follow, what we can and can’t
change. They reward us too – once we’re inside – with benefits of speed, knowledge
and safety. Gatekeepers, which can be people or protocols or code, decide who can
join closed communities and who is left out and why. They pass us the fine benefit of
the compression of time, even as they expose us to the zipper of instant potential
disaster hitting everyone in a closed space at once. Gatekeepers control, for instance,
how (and how fast) financial data moves between members of light-speed “in the
know” trading pools, and the suckers outside. What you can see in your phone or
your university computer, why, how – all of these choices have to be made by
157
gatekeepers. They can, if they wish, manipulate any step of life inside their enclosed
orbs of power – and by extension, they can twist data and machines and you. The
line between perverting search results and election results is a thin one. Such a
manipulation of data is trivial, which means the manipulation of you and I is,
technically at least, trivial. It involves the laying of our preferences – what do we
usually read, watch, who do we talk to, where do we live – against machine logic and
vast data fields. Manipulation of data = Manipulation of us.
The idea of gatekeeping first emerged as it related to newspapers, back in the 1920s
when politicians, advertisers and a few social scientists watched a print-information
explosion – and developed an uneasy feeling about how the world looked through
many newspapers. The personal whims of an editor, his political bent, his boss’
economic interest – all of these laid on “facts” like a heavy distorting blanket. Minor
twitches were turned into fear-mongering bait. Major global shifts were ignored.
The papers are (nearly) gone now, of course. And the idea of gatekeepers merely
bending headlines to suit a personal whim seems charmingly nostalgic. Gatekeepers
today have a far more profound, subtle reach. They might be governments or
regulators or CEOs or machines or research committees, each controlling the design
and development of some “rich get richer” tool we depend on and – by marking that
“in or out” line – exerting historic, invisible control. Genetic engineering secrets.
Unthrottled data flows. Product releases. Do you want accurate DNA analysis? Fast
protection from epidemic? A cyber-defense system? You can’t have any of these, you
know, unless you’re in someone’s fiercely guarded gateland. Even systems that look
open – the Internet, the world of US Dollar transactions, the election rolls – are
gated in certain ways. Of course there is – at times – a balance between the
gatekeepers and the gatekept, between those of us inside a system and the tools and
people who overmaster us. “In many cases, traditional literature focuses mainly on
gatekeepers as elites who hold power in their hands while the gated are treated as
powerless,” the information theorist Karine Nahon has written. “In networks,
however, it is necessary to give sufficient weight to the role of the gated, since being
subject to gatekeeping does not imply that the gated are powerless, lack
alternatives, or that gatekeeping is forced on them. Actually, being a gated
sometimes is a matter of choice.” 230 But sometimes, of course, it is also a matter of
inarguable necessity.
In the slower, less wired worlds of our past, gates mattered too of course. Nations,
governments, militaries, religious orders – all of these clustered behind (and
defended) marked lines. Map lines, front lines, dogmatic lines. The Triple Entente
that bound Britain, France and Russia together in the last century was as much a
gated system for their own security as the Peloponnesian League 2500 years earlier
had been. Deciding who could swap silk for spice beyond the Tang Dynasty’s border
was a gatekeeping choice, as consequential for Chinese strategists of the 8 th Century
as the decision about what might or might not be wheeled into the city was for the
230 “In many cases”: Karine Barzilai-Nahon, “Toward a theory of network
gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control.” Journal of the America
Society for Information Science 59(9), 1493–1512.
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tragically uncareful councils of Troy. But now, in an age where connection decides
so much, control over gates has a unique leverage. When you finally can feel out the
topology of our age, when in anger or frustration or hope or wonder you are ready
to act, then this is among the first questions you have to ask. I’m on the topology now,
where are the gates.
4.
Gates in an age of instant, everywhere, smart networks are, you can imagine,
different from the ones that girded Troy or the Tang dynasty. It’s not merely that
they’re made of bits and algorithms not bricks, it’s that the underlying nature of
their power is different. The most visible evidence of this distinction was first
observed by economists a couple of decades ago, as they contemplated the fortunes
of the information age, wealth that had been assembled at an eye-watering pace.
Unlike traditional businesses which turned over time into competitive slugfests with
very low profits, many high-tech firms seemed to run with a new, nearly inverted
logic. “Our understanding of how markets and businesses operate was passed down
to us more than a century ago by figures such as Alfred Marshall,” the economist
Brian Arthur wrote in the Harvard Business Review in the summer of 1996. “It is an
understanding based squarely upon the assumption of diminishing returns:
products or companies that get ahead in a market eventually run into
limitations.” 231 Marshall had been the first to name this phenomenon in the 1890s:
“Diminishing Returns”. As any line of business gets more competitive, the profits –
or “returns” to investment – shrink. Henry Ford invents a car, he has no competition
at first and fairly prints money. But Ford doesn’t enjoy his monopoly for long. Pretty
soon the Dodge brothers follow him into business, as does Walter Chrysler and then
a cascade of new auto companies. They all take a piece of the pie; profits for every
carmaking firm diminish. Then the Japanese pile in. The Koreans show up. These
new companies compete with growing intensity. Marginal profits decline for
everyone. Then the Chinese. And the Indians.
As he studied the balance sheets of infotech firms, Arthur noticed something
strange: Returns were increasing over time. As their markets matured some
companies made more marginal money with each passing day, not less. Marshall’s
19 th Century industrial economics had never contemplated such a lucrative
arrangement. “Increasing returns,” Arthur explained, “are the tendency for that
which is ahead to get farther ahead. They are mechanisms of positive feedback that
operate—within markets, businesses, and industries—to reinforce that which gains
success or aggravate that which suffers loss.” In other words: Winner takes all. No
second place. Arthur was thinking, as he wrote, about the then-nascent computer
software business. Say for instance, Arthur sent you a copy of his paper to read
before publication as a Microsoft Word document. Well, if you wanted to see what
he had to say, you’d pretty much have to own a copy of Word yourself. If you then
231 As he studied: Brian Arthur, “Increasing Returns and the World of Business”
Harvard Business Review (1996)
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sent it along to some friends for their input, they’d be in the same bind. One after
another, in just this fashion, users tumbled into the program. It became a standard, a
“platform” in industryspeak.
And Microsoft enjoyed a particularly appealing economic leverage: Developing
Word may have cost millions, but once that work was done, each additional copy
cost just cents to produce. This astonishing speed loop of profitability demanded a
whole new economics. It also forced a reconsideration of what “competition” might
really mean. Once Excel or Windows had settled into place, had become a standard,
you couldn’t really compete with it. New, optimistic maybe even better rivals rushed
into the marketplace, but they were all assaulting the impregnable wall of habit, of a
locked-in technology. Should this be legal? Arthur wondered. Traditional economics
said such monopolies were bad for everyone. (As did the Department of Justice and
their global peers as they chased Microsoft for a decade.) But was that right? The
“platform dividend” that accrued to Microsoft was surely large, but if you could
somehow total up the benefit to the rest of us? The convenience, the efficiency, the
benefits of Microsoft’s billions of research spending might dwarf even Redmond’s
massive profits. “Increasing returns,” Arthur wrote, “cause businesses to work
differently and they stand many of our notions of how business operates on their
head.”
The essential phenomenon Arthur spotted at work two decades ago is something we
now know as “network effects” – an idea that changed how we think about
businesses, and particularly about the sticky and alluring power of gated, connected
systems in nearly any setting. In the years after Arthur’s paper, billions of us ran
madly along a course he had anticipated: We crashed our way as fast as possible
into those single, winning businesses – rewarding them with near monopoly
positions in exchange for the benefits of being “inside”. In the twenty years since
Arthur spotted increasing returns in software, eight different billion-user worlds
have emerged – and others are not far behind: Microsoft Office and Windows,
Google Search, Google Maps, Facebook, Google Chrome, YouTube and Android all
exhibit that appealing, “If you use it, I’ll use it!” logic. Profits and power, just as
Arthur would have expected, followed right along. The most valueable company on
earth in the early age of connection was one that, particularly, had perfected the
idea of a closed iWorld where the efficiencies and charm of inclusion made outside
assault difficult. Younger companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, Weixin and others
hover not far from a billion users and point us to this gated model spread and
repeated. It is easy enough to imagine a world where billions will be enmeshed
behind certain gates.
It was just as Arthur predicted: If ten people use WhatsApp or Facebook or
YouTube, it’s hard for the eleventh to do something different. And when the
eleventh person joins in, they make it harder still for the twelfth to walk a unique
path. So: Windows runs on 90% of the globe’s PCs, nearly 30 years after its first
release. Google has 65% market share. Android runs on 81% of new phones.
WhatsApp neared a billion users with less than 50 engineers on staff. Facebook
passed a billion connected people and faced no real competition. The rich got richer.
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How? “Seven friends in ten days,” Facebook growth hackers repeated like a mantra
in the early years, a humming meditation that carried them from dorm room to
nearly every corned of the world 232 . If you or I joined the service and found seven
friends in ten days, we would most likely stay, enjoying the benefits of the gated
world, making it that much harder (impossible really) for friend number eight to
wander somewhere else. Pretty soon, there was essentially nowhere else to go
anyhow. The network magnetism worked so well that, as a result, Facebook’s speedlooping
connection machine cut the famous “six degrees of separation” posited by
Stanley Miligram – the number of leaps between any two people on the planet – to
four. 233
Network theorists who came after Arthur call these “rich get richer” systems “power
law distributed” because if you line up all the firms in a digital industry you find the
winners are exponentially – by a power of ten or one hundred – ahead of everyone
else. They slip free from the average gravitational center of a normal bell curve that
marks most traditional business. A normal distribution would shape up like a chart
of people who own cars: 20 percent driving Fords, 10 percent Nissans and Toyotas,
and so on. Or it might look like the distribution of height: Most men are between 5’7
and 5’11, but 50% are scattershotted at different heights. Network systems,
however, can breed commanding winners. It’s not like 50% of online users are on
the Internet and others are scattered across different systems. Users huddle into
single winning clusters. It’s as if 90% of the world always bought a Ford; or 90% of
people were exactly 5’ 11”. These systems run faster and better and more profitably
because they are locked-in, gated by technology standards and by common
connection. When we say that networks crave gates, this is the sort of gate we mean.
If you had to look for your friends one-by-one on Facebook, Friendster, MySpace,
and GooglePlus you’d exhaust yourself. So, one winner emerges. Data scientists
attribute the success of these winning nodes to “preferential attachment” – the idea
that if Brian Arthur is using Microsoft Word and I’m using it you are likely to do so
too. But there’s another secret: More widespread adoption makes the whole system
faster. Winner-take-all marks that network hunger for the compression of time. 234
There’s an additional feature at work in the very newest of these billion-user
clusters that’s worth our attention: It’s not merely that we’ll use them because
everyone seems to be doing so, it’s also that as more users weave themselves into
each others’ lives and the machines into too, these nodes of power get smarter.
Google Maps can predict the fastest route from your house to your office because it
can watch the movements of hundreds of millions of users, each silently pinging
their location and speed as they creep through rush hour or sprint down an empty
motorway. As more people use GPS enabled devices, the quality of this data gets
232 The network magnetism: Chamath Palihapitiya, “How we put Facebook on the
path to 1 billion users.” Udemy Growth Hacking: An Introduction lecture published
January 9, 2013 and available on YouTube.
233 Winner-take-all: van der Hofstad, p 24
234 But there’s another secret: Albert-Lazlo Barabási “Network Science”,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: (2013) 371
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ever better, like a video resolving itself from low-quality to HD in front of your eyes.
Success attracts still more users. All of them are Google’s sensors, in a way. Medical
diagnosis, cybersecurity, trading algorithms, search – pretty much any linked ball of
chips and humans and sensors throbs with this logic. The best of the leading
technology firms understand the power of this logic: Google’s TensorFlow artificial
intelligence engine, for instance, was largely regarded by experts as nearly a decde
ahead of competitors in 2015. So the company began giving away access for free. In
traditional economic terms this would be insane; but with network logic the
strategy is clear: The more people who use TensorFlow, the smarter it gets, which in
turn attracts still more users. Dense and learning fusions of mind and data like
TensorFlow and other soon-arriving AI systems are all gated universes. The
“increasing returns” for those inside – you, me, our neighbors – breed mutual
efficient success and, of course, massive power for their owners. We’re part of the
game too: The more people tied in, the better our lives get.
The topological charm of these explosively growing clusters was first teased apart
by the electrical engineer Bob Metcalfe in the 1970s. Metcalfe was hunting for a
better way to send data – say grocery lists to his wife – through Menlo Park and he
perfected a connection protocol called Ethernet, which soon became a standard for
linking machines. What Metcalfe noticed, as more and more users piled into the
gateland of Stanford’s Ethernet-connected machines, was that the power of the
system was growing exponentially with each additional user. This became known
later as “Metcalfe’s Law”: The power of a network grows, massively, with each
additional user. A system with one phone, for example, is really not very useful. Who
would you call? A system with two phones means one possible connection – we can
call each other. But when you increase the number of phones by a factor of two –
from five to ten, say – the number of possible connections more than doubles from
ten to 45 . The difference between Bob Metcalfe and his wife sharing grocery lists
and a connected national network of husbands and wives is immense – an insight
that led Bob Metcalfe and his wife to start a networking company that made them
billionaires.
Metcalfe’s Law has another angle, and it’s here where some of the unnerving,
dangerous political power of network gates is revealed: It’s not merely that the
power of a network grows exponentially with each additional user; it’s that the cost
of being cut out grows every bit as fast. Maybe even faster. If I shut you out of Google
today, it’s painful. But tomorrow – after a day of new information and websites and
services come on line – it will be even more costly. The network scientists Rahul
Tongia and Ernest Wilson have called this “The Flip Side of Metcalfe’s Law.” 235 To be
excluded from a database of cancer genetics, for instance, when it has a million
members is probably not such a painful problem; to be locked out of the chance to
compare your genes with a billion others, however, is hugely costly. Maybe even
fatal. Imagine if I cut you out tomorrow from the NYSE, your phone system, smart
diagnostic webs, cybersecurity patches? It’s not like you can swap our your Ford for
235 The network scientists: Rahul Tongia and Ernest J. Wilson III, “The Flipside of
Metcalfe’s Law”, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), 665–681
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a Dodge. There is nowhere to go. Gatelands produce “winner take all” systems, but
they also produce these “loser gets nothing” dynamics – and an absolutely chilly,
fatal cost of separation from the winning system. A discipline of network science
known as “queing theory” helps us understand why. In studies of massively
connected systems, the more time machines spend on their main task – hunting
prime numbers or DNA patterns, for instance – and the less time chattering with
each other about how they will compute, the faster they run. Winning protocols
avoid this terrible inefficiency of translation because it can be spread across so
much connection. In fact, the great breakthrough of computer systems in recent
years has been the ability to handle massive amounts of data all at once, to maintain
versions of information in a concurrent state many places in the world. This is the
essential technical leap that permits compression of time. And it depends entirely on
careful and gated design.
To be inside a gated system is, then, really to be faster because of the slickness of
communication that becomes possible. The very structure of the system accelerates
that compression of time. This design feature of networks, in which winners take
more and more, is why gates, and their careful use, will become the most dramatic
lever for business, research or international politics in coming years. It also explains
why our modern gates are different than older ones. Why it is so damn costly to
leave them; why mastery of them is even more insanely lucrative than Cecil Rhodes’
gold mines. Think of the old industrial age power games for a moment: Britain and
Germany tried to match each other with their industrial output during their fatal
competitive sprint 150 years ago; but imagine if network effects obtained? If
Britain’s initial head start in the industrial revolution had given them 90% global
trade share? Germany would never have even tried to compete. They would have
been the Friendster of the 20 th Century: Isolated, slow-growing, powerless and
finally consumed by the winning system.
5.
Networks crave gates. Once a billion people were connected together, of course
there was going to be something like Facebook, a Gateland where they could link
one to another in ever-thicker cascades of connection. Once everyone could record
and watch and share videos, something like YouTube was inevitable. As we try to
picture the world ahead of us, as we try to ask what tools of power we can acquire to
twist this dangerous landscape into something we can manage and predict and
control, we must ask of it: What does it want? The world wants a protocol for the
fast exchange of money. It wants a basic language protocol. It wants a place to swap
information about IT security holes. It wants instant translation systems to replace
the need to learn to English or Chinese or Spanish so the world can move yet faster. I
believe it wants certain sorts of alliances, a particular type of superpower and even
craves a new form of politics. For any nation that controls these gates, there is a
possibility to use that position to create still more gatekept platforms, to shape the
protocols that tie platforms together in the way roads or jet planes link the physical
world. This is the iron law of Gateland: Connectivity is power. Which means that
gatekeeping is, at the end of the day, our most powerful point of a control.
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It won’t surprise you that, in recent years, for instance, the world has seen an
acceleration in the construction of physical barriers, of fences and walls running
between nations and defining and in and out. Roy Hassner and Jason Wittenberg,
two American political scientists, scored out the pace of global wall building and
found a sharp acceleration: In fact, of 51 national enclosures built since the end of
World War Two – the Berlin Wall being the most famous example – more than half
were constructed in a rush of self-protection between 2000 and 2014 236 . And more
are coming: Hungary, Kenya, Algeria and India now posthole their borders in initial
exploration of what might be built. There’s a frantic urgency to some of this. The
Spanish government, for instance, raised a ten-foot high, razor and camera topped
fence around their Saharan footholds in 1998 – the enclosed land was controlled by
Madrid, so it was technically “Europe,” which made an irresistible target for wouldbe
migrants. The fence wasn’t enough to stop the flows. So they built a second one to
run around the first in 2001. Then, in 2005, thousands of desperate Africans
launched a coordinated charge against. A couple of dozen migrants died in the
attempt; a thousand made it through. The Spanish responded with a third line of
fence, this one 20 feet high, electic, camera-watched.
This pattern of ever more stacked defense is repeated everywhere. The walls, fences
and trenches of the modern world seem to be getting longer, more ambitions, and
better defended with each passing year, Hassner and Wittenberg concluded. Unlike
traditional lines of defense, the Maginot Line or the Great Wall of China for instance,
the aim of 21 st century barriers in places like Israel or the US or Spanish Morocco
have been less to stop a rolling armor blitzkreig than to slow the insidious
movement of smugglers and spies and criminals, or the hopeful dashes of fleeing
refugees. There’s an affective and – to those on the inside – appealing asymmetry to
these borders. They are mostly marked and built by richer, more modern, more
stable nations desperate to control in and out. The creation of gates is, we should
sense now, the corollary of connection. That they can sometimes be piled into the
“winner take all” efficiencies Brian Arthur first teased out should give us a sense that
there is a logic to this emergence.
Reviewing the problems of deadly disease contagion after the 2015 Ebola pandemic,
Bill Gates examined this connection-and-gate lemma in the sharpest, most
worrisome historical terms. “There is a significant chance that an epidemic of a
substantially more infectious disease will occur sometime in the next 20 years,” he
wrote. “In fact, of all the things that could kill more than 10 million people around
the world, the most likely is an epidemic stemming from either natural causes or
bioterrorism.” 237 This was the cost of a fast-moving, interconnected world. It was
what floated free from the extension of Paul Virilio’s line: Airplanes produced the
236 In fact: Roy Hassner and Jason Wittenberg, “Barriers to Entry: Who Builds
Fortified Boundaries and Why?” International Security, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Summer
2015), pp. 157–190
237 Reviewing the problem: Bill Gates, “The Next Epidemic — Lessons from Ebola”
New England Journal of Medicine 2015, April 9; 372:1381-1384
164
airplane accident. Well, networks will produce the network accident. Many, in fact.
A world primed for contagtion, Gates suggested, needs – and is missing – more and
better gates. (Yes, here you can pause to double take at the serendipitously strange
fact that the wealthiest citizen of our gated age is named Gates, just as the richest
man in the era of pulling oil out of rocks was a “Rockefeller”) Connection demands
systems to gaze ceaselessly for the smallest sign of assault or need for change or
accidental shimmering movement of danger. Part of what made the Ebola response
successful is that the response really was in the form of gates as we’ve come to
understand them here, not walls. Protocols for biological reaction, for medical care,
for epidemic monitoring, the urgent helicoperting in of support and aid and ideas.
The gates assembled around the Ebola pandemic were its solution. Had it merely
been walled off it would have spiked, grown, mutated and finally escaped.”The
world,” Gates wrote, “needs to build a warning and response system for outbreaks.”
This is true for all the outbreaks we face – whether they are disease or financial
panic or terror. There will be, you can be sure, ignorant calls to build walls and not
gates. This misses the point of networks. In an age of interconnection walls are
nearly as dangerous as no walls. What matters is bulding topologies designed for
gating, for milking power from the profound logic of networks we’ve seen at work.
For decades after the 1929 financial crisis triggered an historic global depression,
economists and politicians debated what had gone wrong. What had they missed?
The world, it emerged, had been wired with an economic system designed rapid
movement, but politicians and bankers had forgotten to put in the needed brakes.
They had tried to run an industrial engine against the background of gasping
political structures. Basic adjustment mechanisms – release valves for financial or
currency pressures – had not been invented, refined or installed. 238 When we find
ourselves in coming years gasping through some sort of financial crisis of our own,
or running scared from a cascading military or social epidemic that slaps us
unexpectedly, what do you think the most likely cause will be? It will be a failure of
gates. Too few in some places; too damn many in others.
Remember the haunting, persistent vulnerability of our age. A twitch anywhere in
the system can rock and even crack the whole edifice. Space Time Compression’s
ability to shrink distance to zero and time to an instant can turn anywhere, anytime
into a battlefield or a spot for revolutionary innovation. Any moment can present us
with questions of war and peace. Today we have no central theory of gatekeeping,
no ideas about balancing inside and out. We fly on instincts, but they are the old
industrial ones. Anyone can see a system that is full of holes and inconsistencies. Can
you see a way through it, though? Pressed by political, technical and economic
desire – to say nothing of the basic urge for self-preservation – more gates will be
with us from now on.
238 Basic adjustment: Ben S. Bernanke, “Money, Gold, and the Great Depression”, H.
Parker Willis Lecture in Economic Policy, Washington and Lee University, Lexington,
Virginia March 2, 2004
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“Computer systems are, like many other things in engineering, constructed by
composition,” computer researchers F.X. Lindner and Sandro Gaycken have written.
That line, intended for switched-on digital systems, in fact fits most of our world.
Nearly everything around us, from cities to telephone networks to refugee waves,
are assembled by composition. Curriences are layered with encryption. Refugee
dreams carved from photosharing and refined with GPS. Composition in this way
breeds new vulnerabilities, new points of contact and this rather astonishing result,
one we’re not prepared for in any sense: “In a composite system there is no critical
gate,” Lindner and Gaycken explain. “Everything is a gate.” 239
239 “Everything is a gate”: Lidner and Gaycken, p. 56
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Chapter Ten:
Defense in Depth
In which gates, operated with our new instinct, become at once a tool of prosperity and
survival.
If you walk for a few minutes to the south of Tinanmen Square in Beijing, leaving the
tomb of Mao Zedong behind you, there’s a small lane that runs back into a warren of
anonymous, white-walled buildings. The streets are unusually clean; the
surveillance cameras unusually – even for Beijing – dense. The neighborhood is
home to many of the last of the generation of Communist Party cadres who joined
and supported its rise decades ago. Several years ago, I found myself settled into one
of them for an afternoon tea with Huang Hua, one of the great modern Chinese
foreign policy figures – and a member of that early revolutionary generation. Huang
was, in a sense, heir to the Warring States diplomat Su Qin, whom Master Nan had
encouraged me to study. Huang had penetrated the madness of Mao’s revolutionary
era to see the possibility of a different order, one he’d brought to vivid life after
Deng Xiaoping ascended to the Chinese leadership in 1976. Huang had been the
country’s Foreign Minister and later a Vice Premier. He was always calm, with an
easy and relaxed temperament. One of my favorite images of him was from the mid-
1970s when, while sitting on a flight to the US from Paris to take China’s seat at the
United Nations, he was ambushed by Walter Cronkite. Huang is completely
unflustered in the scratchy video of that encounter. He sits quietly in a cloud of
smoke. Cronkite pesters him. Huang smiles, offers a cigarette to the news crew, and
though he is in the midst of a transit from the poverty, chaos and smashed politics of
China he is nothing but serene, a statesman – not the nervous representative of a
twitchy power.
“Do you know the difference between Western and Chinese thinking?” Huang asked
that afternoon as we sat inside his courtyard house. Leaves were turning outside. He
was in his early 90s then, still tack-sharp. “You see, when Chinese want to do
something, we begin with the question: What is the nature of the age? Westerners
begin with the goal. What do they aim to achieve?” Deng’s foreign policy, one Huang
shaped and executed, had been an excellent example. Mao, who ruled China from
1949 until 1976, had a darting, paranoid, murderously strategic temperament. The
nature of his age, he was convinced in his Marx-addled mind, was one of zhanzheng
yu geming – war and revolution. From this first principle, everything followed: He
honeycombed Beijing with bomb-proof tunnels, relocated Chinese industry to
isolated and gaspingly poor mountain strongholds, reacted to foreign ideas or
influence with a snapping electricity – and was bent on protective isolation as he
dragged the country through one impossible and failed isolationist development
initiative after another.
Deng, when he came to power in 1977, read the nature of his age too. He read it
differently. “There is no possibility of a great war. Don’t be afraid of it, there is no
risk of it,” he assured a group of Chinese cadres during a chat in 1983. The cadres
were having a hard time replacing their Maoist paranoia with confidence that China
167
might safely open, develop, and change. They mixed the crouching nervousness of a
secret political party with the vivid nightmares of a nation that had been invaded,
abused – humiliated, they said – by nine countries since the mid-19 th Century Opium
Wars. “We used to worry about war and talk about its possibility every year,” Deng
told them. “It seems the worry was overdone.” The world was, he felt, entering an
era of heping yu fazhan – peace and development. Terrible, nation-demolishing wars
would not soon victimize China, Deng thought. Nation building was the nature of the
age. Its tools would be science, finance, and trade. If the Chinese people worked
hard, he promised his incredulous listeners, they might by the year 2000 grow their
thin $250 per capita income to the nearly unimaginable target of $1000. “I don’t
care if the cat is white or black,” he famously observed, “as long as it catches mice.”
Socialism? Capitalism? No matter so long as it produced progress. Deng’s judgment
proved out. There were no major wars. Development was, for China, the name of the
age. The cat caught $1000 dollars of per capita income nearly on the old man’s
schedule. It is still playing with the string.
There is something admirably direct about the Western way of problem solving, of
course. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It has its uses. But
it’s also true that this sort of elementary geometry does not describe, always, the
best path. Particularly not today, in an era when topological collapse or instant
connection means that the distance from a to b can go to zero (or infinity) in a single
sudden shift. Yes, you may be stringing a line from a to b, but if you’re putting it up
in a tornado? Is the best route to a new Middle East really the tipping over of stable
states? Is the quickest path to climate control voluntary compacts? Are faster
markets and more unwatched capitalism the safest way to ameliorate our
unbalanced economics? Sometimes a more indirect line is called for. Sometimes it is
faster, safer. Huang Hua’s question – “Where is the world going, after all?” – turns
out to be the first essential one for any endeavor. If you are not looking from the
highest possible altitude, Chinese will warn you, you are not seeing the full picture.�
The nature of our age has, I think, emerged clearly, vividly and broadly for us now.
Constant, instant, everywhere connectivity taps with the efficient mercilessness of a
steel hammer on the glass of most of our comfortable institutions. The Seventh
Sense has let us understand a bit about the origins of this creative violence. And it
has shown us too that our era’s dominant feature is not merely cracking disruption,
but also the construction of new orders. Da po, Da li the Chinese might say – great
destruction and great construction. This is the nature of our age. Tap, tap, crack. And
then: Gatelands – speed-bred by technology and filled with possibility. That some of
these gated worlds contain billions of people or trillions of sensors, computer chips
or network nodes only strengthens their inexorable grip. That they can be so easily
or even accidentally weaponized marks the edginess of our problem. That they will
be built atop the sharp-edged shards of a collapsing older system heightens the
urgency at which they must emerge. To be inside, we’ve seen, delivers the lightspeed
benefits of time compression, of life on a nearly alive mesh. To be outside? It
is to be cut off.
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I said earlier that I wanted to lay the Seventh Sense onto the problems of war and
peace and grand strategy – and while the insights our new instinct reveals are lifegiving
for business and eye-opening for culture, it’s to the devious and unavoidable
problem of global order I want to turn now. In a now-famous 1986 speech “You and
Your Research”, the Bell Labs scientist Richard Hamming set three questions for
anyone embarked on the exploration of new ideas: “1. What are the most important
problems in your field? 2. Are you working on one of them? 3. Why not?” 240 Well, the
most important problem in the field of global affairs is the question of the future of
world order, of how it will emerge – and what sort of aspect it may yet present. It is
the problem to be working on. It also touches, like it or not, whatever the most
important problem in your field is: Opening new markets, educating your kids,
planning five years of corporate growth. Remember the distinction from earlier in
the book, the difference between living at an ordinary moment and an historic one?
The difference between Warsaw in 1539 and 1939? In one age, history is irrelevant;
in the other it nearly throttles you. You can’t avoid being touched. We live in an
historic era, not least because the connections that define our age means epochal
quakes in one part of the system will rattle other bits too.
A feeling for history – Nietzche’s old “Sixth Sense” – should fire up invisibly in us bit
now as we think about what life in an historic age might mean for us. The surprises
in our news every day. The creaking of our old institutions. What do they augur? The
political scientists Charles S. Gochman and Zeev Maoz once made a survey of history
to see if they could spot just when the world slipped from calm moments to
epochally unettled ones. They surveyed nearly 1,000 wars, big and small, hunting
for patterns as you or I might look for trends in stock prices or sports scores.
Increasing complexity, they discovered, almost always shook the world into conflict.
States, armies, political groups, newly independent nations, ideological and religious
forces emerge and then collide in their young energy, each driven by different aims
and values and dreams. A cycle marks the process. First, disputes over small matters
accelerate – as they are doing now. Everything seems open to question: Do you
control this trade route? Who says we have to respect this arms limit? The
combined pressure of so many simultaneous disagreements announces a shift in the
pattern of all relations. A logical loop follows: “The frequency of disputes,” Gochman
and Moaz explain, “appears to be an early indicator of system transformation…The
rise in the number of disputes seems to indicate a decline in the degree of consensus
on the ‘rules’ of the international order. This heightened dissensus (often
culminating in large-scale wars) is followed by restructuring.” 241 Pressure on the
rules. Small cracks. Large scale war. Re-ordering. Like water moving from ice to
liquid to steam and back, this cycle has a predictable logic. It ran in the age of
Bismarck and culminated in World War One. It spun again in the age between last
century’s great wars too, tripping into a second World War. And it ran as well in the
240 “What are”: Richard Hamming, “You and Your Research”, Simula Research
Laboratory (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2010) Chapter 6
241 The politial scientists: Charles S. Gochman and Zeev Maoz, “Militarized
Interstate Disputes, 1816-1976: Procedures, Patterns, and Insights”, The Journal of
Conflict Resolution, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 1984), pp. 585-616
169
fracturing of ancient China during the Spring and Autumn era or in the Roman
Empire in the age of the Caesars. Our current shifting – that tap, tap on every
nation’s politics, media, and economics – isn’t really so unpredictable after all. 242
You may know the old saw of military parade evaluation: That the more magnificent
a nation’s uniforms are the weaker it’s army usually is. But the gold-braided
admirals of some three-ship navy reflect a very human need for security, and
particularly for a self-decided feeling of security. Every nation has it’s own foreign
affairs aims. Each cherishes a certain national image, memories of military glory and
of “interests” inseparable from culture or identity. The goals of the French and the
Turks, for instance, each evoke an encyclopedia of history, tradition and politics.
Uneasiness in Paris about capitalism and immigration, for instance; or Anrka’s
worry about ethnic division, fundamentalisms, and the creeping nuclear progress of
their neighbors. Our era’s revolutionary logic will shape choices in every nation
differently. But I’d like here to discuss American foreign policy. America plays a
central role in world order now. The country’s leading position makes her, to some
degree, an unavoidable gatekeeper. In the Napoleonic era, nearly every revolution
or war could be tied to energies emanating from Paris. During the Cold War most
puzzles of politics or geography might be framed in terms of a zero-sum competition
with the USSR. In our own age, we’ll find most every problem links to networks and
their new logic. And – for now at least – to America. Thomas Paine’s memorable 250
year-old assessment, that “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind,”
touches this linked universalism in a way he never could have imagined.
“Betweeness” or “Centrality” are the way network science labels and measures such
a role. Just how essential is a certain nation or trading platform or point? The
networks of America won’t, in the future, be the only networks. They will be less
“between”. But they will be, always and indelibly, the first reference for design.
If the traditional aim of American foreign policy was to prevent the emergence of a
challenger that threatened the country directly, or that might fence off and
manipulate Asia or Europe or Latin America against Washington’s aims, the concern
now is different: Mastery of topological destiny. There are those who observe, as an
American think tank noted in 2015, “Today the United States faces no existential
threat.” 243 This is wrong. The emergence and shape of networks is just such a
danger. Security, the great foreign policy theorist Andre Wolfers once wrote, is “the
absence of threats to acquired values.” 244 The networks around us, as we’ve seen,
are demolishing older values. Often because we want them to. Any revolutionary
technology unbuttons an older order this way. But we now approach this
destabilized world with a sort of wideyed panic. Control terrorism, manage climate
242 Our current shifting: See also Lars-Erik Cederman, T. Camber Warren, and
Didier Sornette, “Testing Clausewitz: Nationalism, Mass Mobilization, and the
Severity of War” International Organization 65, Fall 2011, pp 605–38
243 “America faces no existential threat”: See James Dobbins, et al. Choices for
America in a Turbulent World (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2015) xiv
244 In his classic essay: Andre Wolfers, “’National Security’ as an ambigious
symbol’”, Political Science Quarterly, 67 (1952) 485
170
change, lock in great-state peace. So many desires scatter our minds and when we
fail to achieve them they erode our will. Here is a basic lesson of accomplishment in
any human domain: Better for us to focus on a single aim, and tighten our efforts
around that one aim and use success to strengthen our will. The answer to the great,
newly-charged existential question of politics – “Are you a gatekeeper or the
gatekept?” – is not yet decided for the United States. So, strategy first: We live in a
connected age where power is sliding into that gated order we’ve learned about.
America’s role? Not to make the entire world democratic. Not to try to bomb or
force stability onto every nation now collapsing under network pressures. Not to
passively wait for our version of history to “win”. Not to thwart the rise of other
countries. No. The strategy that fits the nature of our age and position is to perfect
and then operate the essential, topological mechanisms of power now. Sometimes
with warm humanity; other times with the ruthlessness demanded by the touch of
danger and evil. This involves gates. It involves firmness and nerve and willpower. It
demands what we might call Hard Gatekeeping.
2.
Everything around us now is or soon will be connected. Access to our trade, the use
of technology and networks, our defense or our currency – all of these must be
considered as gated systems. Each will come to throb with new power as a result of
their links, as a byproduct of their escalating sensitivity, intelligence and power, and
from that in-or-out distinction. Much remains to be instantly, fully linked in this
way. Our education. Our medicine. Our military. Real-time information, sensors and
machine intelligence will erect Gatelands in each of these areas and in others. These
walls will go up even faster than real-world berms and fences. The strategic position
of any nation or terror group or business is not going to be secured by industrial
measures. No one at Google wants to build a newspaper. No one in Al-Qaeda is
trying to float an aircraft carrier. Rather, it will be determined in the construction of
new tools, which largely means the building of a new, gated order.
“Every new age and every new epoch in the coexistence of peoples,” the historian
Carl Schmitt once wrote, “is founded on new spatial divisions, new enclosures, and
new spatial orders of the earth.” Schmitt was contemplating history: The great
Mediterranean empires and the long, millennial power trails of Asian chieftains. But
his insight touches every age, our own included. To make a nation, to build an
empire, is to draw lines, to push at borders, to smash at gates. Some of this is the
wild martial ambition of a Napoleon or Hitler (who Schmitt unwisely advised); often
it is simple protection. Lord Balfour, serving as Foreign Secretary, contemplated this
problem from his imperial vantage in 1918 and observed: “Every time I come to a
discussion – an intervals of say, five years – I find there is a new sphere we have got
to guard,” he wrote. “Those gateways are getting further and further away from
India, I don’t know how far west they are going to be brought by the General
Staff.” 245 This problem of where exactly to put the gates confronts us now as well.
245 “Those gateways”: Quoted in Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security
Dilemma”, World Politics Vol 30, Issue 2 (Jan, 1978) p. 169
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Gatekeeping, as we’ve seen, isn’t simply the act of marking geographic lines. Those
hurrying walls and berms and triple-fences of the real world are a kind of
gatekeeping but they are also, I’m pretty sure, expressions of a deeper desire. Each
is a real-world defense against topological pressures of population and ideology and
violence, all shaped by network magnetism. The likely futility of such gates is clear
enough when you contemplate the forces they are intended to keep out: Refugees
see prosperity miles on their phones. Little wonder they rush at it. Internettransmitted
messages light up ideologies, protests or fundamentalisms that pull
people back and forth endlessly across physical borders. The world responds, as
anyone without a Seventh Sense might, with walls. But to focus merely on the
physical? This is to misread the issue. Gatekeeping includes real-world borders, of
course, but the statesmen of the future will act particularly on topologies. They will
work not merely to stop up flows, but to decide their movement. Gates will, for
instance, serve as bespoke disease buffers, created to track and then freeze the
worrisome pandemics now crawling at us on the connections of our age. Other gates
will be economic tools: The will help isolate and then soothe the unstable and
apparently broken, middle-class eroding financial patterns of the past decades.
Recall how the design of computer or network systems affects the real world, like a
marble slipped under a carpet? Gatekeeping’s topological design is like placing
marbles (or boulders) in particular ways, to direct movements and flows as you
might guide water with a canal. The great historian Arnold Toynbee once recalled a
passing moment with British Prime Minister Lloyd George during the endless (and
disastrous) Paris Peace Conference of 1919. “Lloyd George, to my delight, had
forgotten my presence,” Toynbee wrote, “and began to think aloud.
‘Mesopotamia…yes…oil…irrigation…we must have Mesopotamia; Palestine…yes…
the Holy Land… Zionism… we must have Palestine…; Syria… h’m… what is there in
Syria? Let the French have that.” 246 This sort of charmless arrogance – The Holy
Land….We must have that – doesn’t much suit our age, but that comprehensive view?
What oil and irrigation and Suez were to Lloyd George, emergence and data flows
and gates are to us. There’s a crucial difference, however: We need not take the most
precious territory of our age through invasion or colonial exploitation or in misbalanced
peace settlements. We can build the essential landscape of power. We can
build it for defense. And then we can grow it, perfect it, and attract others. Schmitt
was right, human history is the story of enclosures – and nothing about our
emerging age suggests any other approach can, with a single clear line, solve the
vexing network x network x weapons problems we face. Hard Gatekeeping means
molding the landscape, gate by gate, to encourage certain movements and make
others difficult, costly, maybe even impossible. Any future order must begin with
this first principle: The line between in and out is as essential as what goes on
inside.
246 Lloyd George: Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the
World, (New York: Random House, 2002) p. 381
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The goals of Hard Gatekeeping are simple enough to state: To protect those inside
the gated order, to make security and innovation more efficient, to accelerate
certain kinds of connection and dampen others, to manage vulnerable links to the
non-gatekept world and – perhaps most important– to use that “in or out” leverage
to relentlessly affect the interests and plans of others. These aims are the root of real
security in any age. “In anarchy, security is the highest end,” Kenneth Waltz wrote.
“Only if survival is assured can states seek other goals such as tranquility, profit and
power.” 247 Survival – and Waltz’s other essential aims – will be decided by the
nature of our future connection. In this sense, Hard Gatekeeping produces a decisive
change in our posture. It lets us aim for something instead of merely being against
movement or – hopelessly – against the future. It establishes priorities, clarifies our
real core interests, helps us budget our effort and our expenses – better, perhaps, to
spend a trillon dollars building tools of topological mastery like infrastructure or
new technology than chasing Middle East peace. 248 Gatekeeping does not transcend
the long-standing debates between the cold realism of Stalin and the idealism of
Woodrow Wilson so much as it sets us a preliminary task: Shaping the environment.
To build and control the next generation of gatekept systems should be our aim
now. In the future paper currency wil be replaced by secure digital bit transactions.
Genetic information will demand smart, live-connected platforms for efficient
mining and study. Cyber and biological security will each come to be defined by
high-speed, machine-intelligent protocols. All of these are gatekept cores. Mastering
them will be as important as having military bases, trade missions or treaty
arrangements once was. The development of such systems plays to our strengths;
they deliver both security and useful pressures of innovation. Remember – the aim
isn’t to build walls. It is to use the logic of networks and gates, and all the complex
productive force they release.
The elements of Hard Gatekeeping can be stated simply enough:
3.
First, Does it work for us? We seek a landscape of technology, trade, finance,
knowledge – all the tools of power – that balances the pressures of politics with a
colder grasp of longer-term national interest. The protocols, alliances, treaties and
data webs that enable markets, trade or thinking machines – all are gatelands we
can cultivate, improve and protect. Our gatelands must be designed to limit the
rippling risks of contagion or error moving wildly, like spring weather, inside linked
complex systems now. Control of topologies is what air superiority or sea mastery
once were. The opening attacks of future wars will come invisibly and silently
through networks, in space, in fast topological strikes – not with noisy land
invasions or bombing runs. Well-built gates will give us time and leverage. They will
247 “In anarchy”: Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics, (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1979), 126
248 It establishes: For a discussion about why a grand strategy is of practical use see
Hal Brands, “The Promise and Pitfalls of Grand Strategy,” Strategic Studies Institute,
External Associates Monograph Program, 2012
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deliver the honestly-earned confidence of the secure. They will provide purchase for
the patient work of diplomacy, a marked shift from the crisis-to-crisis lurching of
today.
The texture of our values should be everywhere woven into these gatelands we will
cultivate: Democratic choice, freedom of thought, privacy. We won’t have time for
leisurely deliberation about ideals in the crashing, time-compacted crises ahead, so
we should begin with them. Let other nations measure gated enclosures for their
different values, marked by their paranoias and historical burdens; our strength will
be an order that reflects our habits of civilization. The curious, open-minded
searching native to our temperament, for instance. This will force constant
innovation and evolution, an antidote to the failure to change that poisons most
closed systems. A continued absence of gates will undo us in the short run. But the
long run will be a disaster if our gates are inflexible, too closed, incapable of upgrade
or – worse – girded by promises and fears that are not naturally our own.
A second principle is that we ought not force anyone else to use our gated systems.
Gatekeeper or gatekept? No more profound, painful, liberating or enslaving political
choice now exists. Nations must be free to select, in as much as they can, their own
terms of enmeshment. Our aim should simply be to build the best order we can.
America’s tremendous economic and technical lead serves us – for now, at least – as
the isolating stretch of the Atlantic and Pacific once did. There’s no need to force
others to follow us. Recall Greshams’ famous “economic law”: The way in which the
bad drives out the good. A stock market made of swindlers won’t attract investors
for very long. Well, in many networks, a sort of reverse-Gersham’s law applied. The
good drives out the bad. By this I don’t mean merely the self-cleaning properties of
systems like Wikipedia. But of linked systems more broadly. If one nation runs a
DNA database where results are skewed by rules of political power – family
members of leaders get special access for instance – it will make it less effective, and
therefore less appealing as a gateland. So we should be relaxed about letting Europe
or Russia or China try their own gated systems. Their desires reflect sensible,
understandable urges. If you were leading a nation would you rely on Washington’s
trade or financial commitments? Because of the nature of power now many nations
may have no other choice; but forcing them to enmeshment could bring shattering,
unnecessary pressure. Let them divide themselves from us; it will only weaken
them.
We need not evangelize, invade, or compel our way to power. Consider the case of
global trade. For decades after World War Two, many nations sought independence
from economic entanglement. They yearned for autarky. They scorned trade. And
they nearly bankrupted themselves in the process: Want to buy Portuguese cars?
French computers? Indian bikinis? I didn’t think so. The whole point of trade was to
solve such imbalances of skill and trade. When the age of connection began after the
Cold War, most countries made a decisive shift: They arranged their economies to
be attractive to global financial flows. Trade grew twice as fast as the world
economy. The cost of being left out was, and is, a nearly impossible burden.
American systems, if they work for America, should have the same magnetic appeal,
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the power-law dynamics Brian Arthur found in the most successful network
arrangements. Getting it right is enough of a task. If we can manage that, what we
build will run with unimpeachable legitimacy. Chosen, not forced.
A third principle is that our gates and protocols and webs ought to be open to
others, but with each new link weighed, added to the scale of strategic balance with
exacting care. An overarching, systemic view should inform us. Nations that want to
use our cyber security systems, for instance, should join research cooperatives – and
possibly shoulder as well some problems of global network health like the
implementation of IPv6 or DNSSEC, or any of the future jointly secur standars that
will emerge. They should even – here is where the leap comes – be required to
cooperate on nuclear proliferation, cybercrime, or trade norms. The puzzle here is
clear: How to use our strengths to address our dangers? While we can’t directly
press our lead in cancer research to stop national flirtations with nuclear bombs or
cyber crime, it’s probably true that a cost of weapons proliferation should be
exclusion from life-giving technical and trade and other gated orders. Remember
that feature of network systems now, how the cost of exclusion grows even faster
than the benefits of inclusion? If the aim of any society in this connected age is to
accelerate the compression of time for its citizens, than life outside the best gates for
this will be a nearly fatal political cost. Do you really want to rely on French
computers? Wear Indian bikinis? Do Iranians want to rely on Iranian cyber-security
tools alone? It is ever-easier for citizens of nations sliced free from vital networks to
feel what they don’t have.
The courage to leave some nations out of the order we’re constructing – and to cut
others out – doesn’t come easily to us. Today we don’t really engage in a
comprehensive, linked strategy. Iranian proliferation and Chinese finance and Saudi
military support are, for all practical purposes, separated in our contemplation of
the world. Hard Gatekeeping frames these together as a piece; it spots the
topological string running between each and gives us a firm position from which to
pull the threads we want. We will come to know, to pay, the costs of over-inclusion.
But this also means that we must be concerned with the security and safety of
others, on our network or on others. To attempt to achieve absolute American
security, to do so at the expense of other nations – this will not only erode the
credibility of any system we build. It will also make them fundamentally less
effective. We are, after all, what we are conneted to.
Fourth, no nation should be permitted to force another inside of its own gates. India
might develop a great search engine; they should not be allowed to force
Bangladeshis to use it. China may develop clever trade channels to Europe; they
should not drive their use with military pressure. This principle is the flip side of our
own commitment not to compel others into American gatekept systems. It
represents an important nod to sovereign power: Each nation decides on its own. If
we’re intent on avoiding some of the chaos of the last major system change, which
produced the Thirty Years War, we should learn its lessons. That fight
fundamentally touched on one question: Who decides what happens inside a
country? The specific problem of Europe 350 years ago was if each King could
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decide the religion of his state. The treaties that settled this debate in 1648 – after
the most devastating wars in European history at that time – established Cuius regio,
eius religio as the governing principle. Whose realm, whose religion. The very notion
of a “state” is itself being eroded as topologies, migrations, and superfast data links
eat at old borders. But nations remain an essential container of power. A rapid
collapse of that system would be a disaster, and is frankly unlikely. To be American.
French. Chinese. This still matters.
Do we demand that other nations use our protocols? Do we force China or Germany
to rules of transparency, data tracking of their citizens and research that we obey?
No. Cuius reticulum, eius reticulum. Whose realm, whose network. But, at the same
time, should we permit China or Germany to force another nation into its trading
regime? It’s biological or cyber networks? To the question, “What would America
fight against in a gatekept world?” one answer is this: We would resist any attempt
to force-fit a nation to a gated order. We should prepare for difficult, expensive
fights to maintain this principle. Russia watching neighboring states seduced into a
Chinese trading order or an American technological system won’t bubble with silent
acquiescence. Arrangements that tilt trade to one side of the Pacific will unnerve
China or Japan – or the US. But, in the end, the control logic of cuius reticulum buffers
us, as a sort of law, against a wilder madness of collapsed nations.
Fifth, we should not permit the emergence of any means to destroy our system. The
very efficiency of connected architectures makes them vulnerable. Networks, by
design, have holes that particular modes of attack can exploit. Contagion. Strikes
against central nodes. 249 Arms racing of a certain type. Our first attempt to limit risk
should be defensive. Better gates. But we’d be foolish to stop there. Gates, the
Trojans would remind us, are not enough. When truly existential dangers emerge –
nuclear weapons, certain types of artificial intelligence or genetic engineering – then
we must attack. Hard Gatekeeping should include a coiled, prepared readiness to
strike with the same light-speed movement that defines the dangers we fear. Of
course we should try to deter such attacks. But we should be realistic. There’s much
we can’t deter. And the cost of attack is awfully cheap. We won’t be truly safe
without battle plans and diplomatic gambits that can hammer at the topological and
real world vulnerabilities of our enemies. After all, they will be hammering on ours.
Our defense task is simple to say, hard to achieve: From the largest symmetrical
superpower in history, America needs to become the greatest asymmetrical one –
capable of devastating, instant action anywhere in the real or topological world.
Network scientists who study the power of “centrality” have shown the way that
certain positions in a topology – think of a rainforest, a travel network or a stock
exchange – wield unusual influence. Centrality of a certain node in linked systems
can determine control, it can produce “super spreaders” which instantly shape
249 Strikes against: I.A. Kovacs, A-L. Barabasi, “Destruction Perfected,” Nature
(News & Views) 2015, 524, 38-39
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linked topologies 250 . Contagions, panics, economic brain freezes – these are the
essential tactics of our future. The maintenance of our centrality on the topologies
we rely on is, then, the essential part of our future security. Interrupting this is, of
course, exactly the edge our enemies seek against us: To infect us – with panic,
terror or some virtual or real virus. To alter the landscape with one sharp razor
slice, not a hail of bombs.
There is no excuse for us to not prepare to struggle in these new terms. Our military
must be shifted for the demands of such instant, cross-space attack. But it’s more
than that. In recent years America has gotten into a habit of reaching for our military
tool, and while we’ve strengthened it to an historically unprecedented degree, we’ve
let other skills atrophy. Our real aim should be to stop our opponents from adapting,
evolving and connecting to us. If we suffer some strategic, nation-crippling defeat in
the future, I don’t think it will be because our military was weak. Rather it will be
because we’ve not mastered all the other tools of topological control. The first sign
of our real awarness of this will be when the old, foolishly vulnerable systems and
tactics and ideas are replaced. We should never build another aircraft carrier
without a sense of new, networked naval plan. The idea of spending hundreds of
billions for manned bomber planes is absurd. We should embrace self-imposed
limits, we should force ourselves to innovate both with our military and in the
creation of new tools of policy. Doing so will prevent any number of conflicts. And it
will stiffen our temperament to unconventional thinking.
There’s a lean efficiency to these five principles that define Hard Gatekeeping. The
strategy echoes, in its clarity, in its clean frugality, the postures of some of the most
enduring orders in human history: The “defense in depth” of the Roman Empire, for
instance. The protective order of Tokugawa Japan. The walls of Tang China, part of a
chained national history that celebrates heroes as “defenders of the nation,” not
attackers. Gatekeeping resists unnecessary profligacy. It limits the need to
proselytize or colonize or force others to our way of thinking. And it has a universal
aspect: Hard Gatekeeping can – with a little imagination and some discipline – be
laid on puzzles like terrorism, cyberattacks, US-China relations, order in the Middle
East, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, income inequality and global warming. It
provides a sharp single image of what we’re after – and guidelines for getting there.
It’s clear enough what we need to do, I think. Build gates. Use them. Hold inside
them and protect the curious, innovative and revolutionary spirit of our people and
our age.
Let’s use this approach to examine some particular problems, and let’s start with
US-China ties – a puzzle whose resolution may be the decisive act of policy in the
4.
250 Super spreaders: Manlio De Domenico, Albert Sole ́-Ribalta, Elisa Omodei,
Sergio Gomez & Alex Arenas, “Ranking in Interconnected Multilayer Networks
Reveals Versatile Nodes”, Nature Communications April 23, 2015
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next century. How might Huang Hua, with his nature-of-the-age consideration of
strategy have regarded the matter? What does gatekeeping tell us?
The dominant view of future relations between Americans and Chinese generally
runs along a nervously familiar historical track: An established power (the US) and a
rising one (China) consider each other. Do they cooperate? Scratch at each other in
constant annoyance? Each nation possesses a different image the world. Each holds,
as well, distinct pictures of their role. One power has enjoyed a long period of
prosperity, has built and defended a global structure; the other, trod mercilessly
underfoot by history, feels the unbearable flow of power’s rising sap, a hunger for
recognition and release and for some, revenge; her economy craves resources, trade
routes, and markets. So Germany encountered and then attacked Great Britain at the
turn of the 20 th Century. Japan collided, similarly, with Russia in 1904. France taking
on Austria, Russia and Great Britain in the Napoleonic age.
Even if the leaders of the United States and China intend to avoid conflict, they face
one of the most sobering, if not depressing, problems of international politics: The
“security dilemma”. The world is a dangerous place. So countries do things to feel
safer. Their populations demand it. Germany looks at Britain’s imperial navy in the
1890s: London could snap Berlin’s trade arteries. So the Kaiser orders two
battleships. Britain builds three in response. Germany turns to submarines. And so
on. Each country, chasing her own security, ends up less secure. This is the
“dilemma”. The puzzle is like one of those woven wicker finger traps: The harder
each side pulls to get out, the more stuck they become. America in 2012 pivots her
military gaze to Asia. China feels encircled. She orders a couple of aircraft carriers,
paves remote islands into military bases. America flies aircraft closer to Chinese
waters. Are the two sides more secure? Collisions, arms racing, accelerating distrust
become the threnody of contacts. Each side seeks something impossible: Perfect
security. Move first, certain forces begin to whisper in each capital.
The essence of this problem today, as the United States and China consider their
future, is not merely or even mainly in the details of trade, territory, or cyber
disputes we read about. These hot points are important, of course, but they are
symptoms of differing judgments of the world, of a fracture at that first step of
asking, “What is the nature of the age?” Americans generally believe the existing
global power map is just, sustainable, in need – perhaps – of minor adjustments.
America engineered this system; benefits tremendously from it’s fictionless
operation. China regards that same layout differently. As broken, unbalanced,
rocking towards a seizure – and, anyhow, built, lubricated and run without her
participation. This view is sharpened by ideology, national psychology and the bald
fact that no global mechanism ever functions perfectly. The larger nature of the age
is, many in Beijing feel, Da po, Da li. Great destruction. Great construction. Certainly
this is true inside China; it must be true outside. The nation has it’s hammers out.
They see the paradoxes of power we read about earlier, the inability to act and the
collapse of American credibility, as clearly as people in Washington or Damascus or
Moscow. Surely the global system should be adjusted, they think. Tap. Tap.
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So though no inherent enmity exists between the two countries, a crack emerges.
Each side finds reasons not to cooperate. A shared interest in peace – neither side
wants a collision, both understand the costs – is shimmied apart by a perception
gap. Cultural, historical, temperamental and ideological differences accelerate the
unzipping of even the best intentions. Misunderstanding bends and then snaps
irrevocably into mistrust. So yes, the recovered islands and the trade tensions and
the political theories have to be managed because each is a blister that limits
forward motion – but the real source of friction? It is the scraping of different world
views. This is deep strategic misalignment. It is, in fact, the stuff of war.
In recent years, America has had two different, nearly opposite approaches to China,
each however marked by an assured national confidence that the current world
order is sustainable. One policy is short-handed as “engagement” – or, colloquially,
“panda hugging.” As China becomes more prosperous, this approach suggests, she
will become more congenial to American interests. More cuddly. This was, for some,
the basis for bringing China into the World Trade Organization in the 1990s. Later it
justified deep commercial links and educational ties. The logic of such an approach
fit the mindset of many baby-boomer Americans: China’s attraction to MTV,
McDonalds and Mercedes hinted at a still deeper desire they thought. To be
Western. China’s citizens would surely become more attracted and committed to the
world system that had delivered all this prosperity. The country would become
more global, in a sense, and less Chinese.
In fact, as China has grown in recent years she has become more global and more
Chinese. Growth, wealth, an admixture of confidence into the old national habit of
insecurity – all of these have encouraged a searching exploration. The demands of
domestic politics, the instincts of the Chinese Communist Party and the inevitable
practical questions of security and reform all produce sensible questions. China
needs oil, for instance. Must she project power into the Middle East? Control the sea
lanes of the Malacca Straits? There’s no natural, inherent resistance to American
interests in any one problem, but that hopeful American logic of “engagement”
ignores much about China’s essence. The country presses at rules she mistrusts (as
America once did). She struggles with the inevitable challenges of a political system
still smoking a bit from recent revolutions – and, of course, facing the pressures of a
networked age. But she holds, strongly, a sense of Chineseness. Can we honestly
expect to use mere prosperity to change China in a predictable, pro-American way?
“Engagement” feels to Chinese like a demand to become more American. That
prospect is as appealing as a request to become more Chinese would be for
Americans.
An alterative strategy to “engagment” is known as “containment”. (While not
formally called “Panda Kicking”, this is often what this policy looks like.) This view
takes it for granted that as China becomes more powerful she will become a threat.
Any growth in Chinese power means a decline in America’s influence and security. A
stronger China in Asia, for instance, means a weaker America. Countries like Japan
or Korea or the Philippines will be required to choose a side at some point, at some
awful 21 st Century Melian moment. The aim of containment is to squelch China
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before such a fork appears. This approach, too, has its logical problems. Boxing the
largest economy in the world hardly seems sensible – and is likely not achievable.
Anyhow, early attempts to do so have shown how little leverage the US has. When
China announced plans to build an Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank in
2014, the US opposed it and then watched as nearly all of Washington’s traditional
allies raced to join.
At the same time, China’s policy towards the US has been hard to decipher for many:
Is the country intent on amity or enmity? It’s clear enough that the American
options presented to Beijing are unappetizing: Change or be contained. Messages by
China in response have tickled the natural historical pessimism of American political
leaders. China speaks of wanting a new kind of relations with America, of cultivating
rich technological and financial ties, but the country at the same moment challenges
easy assumptions about how foreign investment, educational or security
cooperation might mesh together like gears of friendly progress. It’s hard to do
business in the Mainland. The military grows with astonishing speed. Domestic
habits of smash-mouth competition rattle at more sedate Western habits. Any
element of China’s actions are explainable and even sensible when seen with
sympathetic eyes – but the same exact facts can be stitched into a story that suggests
constant damage to American interests. China’s position is, to be honest, a difficult
one: The country is opaque to most foreigners, wrapped in habits and instincts that
run along such different lines that even simple daily decisions – how to run a
meeting, for example – can be a source of disagreement. In the west you prize
diamonds for their clarity, Chinese will say, in China we prize jade because it is cloudy.
There’s a charm in opacity; even a bit of sensible political magic at times. But China
is moving out into the world very rapidly, now: Fast and dimly understood don’t
fuse into easy trust.
In one sense, then, it’s possible to sense the tense, angry energy of an impending
collision. Beijing and Washington are enacting the old historical pattern. Wrestling
for years over small issues, never quite coming to grips, slowly pulling at each other
until a final, fatal collapse. Germany and Great Britain, all over again. But: Connection
changes the nature of an object. So much in our world looks different after connected
dynamics are applied. Might connection change the nature of enmity? We are, after
all, part of the same connected skein. We’ve concluded that America’s greatest
threat is not China or Russia or terrorism – but the evolution of the network itself.
That same topological evolution menaces Beijing too. If China is not our biggest
enemy, if we are not theirs – what might be developed? Might the rat trap of history
remain unsprung?
An American “China Policy” shouldn’t be regarded as some distinct initiative; rather
it must be a part of a grand strategic program of Hard Gatekeeping. Our goal aim
isn’t some shimmeringly perfect “China Policy” so much as it is to cultivate a grand
strategic disposition that informs what we undertake in cyber, Russia, the Middle
East, and China. Imagine we had a terrific “China policy” and a backfiring “Nuclear
weapons policy”? Masterful grand strategy is marked by a comprehensive elegance.
Metternich’s old construction, “A Concert of Nations” tells the story pretty well: A
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symphonic effort, each note and instrument in place. Grand strategy tells us what to
do at every moment.
Any policy, then, must begin with a summary of our aims: “We believe the world is
entering a period of profound change that demands a shift in global arrangements.
We are building a gatekept order consistent with our values. We welcome others to
participate in it – but with conditions. We will resist attempts to force nations into
any gatekept order; we will fight any forces that threaten disruption of the overall
system.” The China policy that emerges from this view is clear enough: We will not
contain China. We will not force China to change. Rather we will develop a profound
gatekept network for our own operation, one that layers together all the concerns of
economics, trade, security and technology – as if we were designing a technical
system for fast, constant links. We will include other nations that want to be a part
of it, as long as they are willing to bear certain costs. China is welcome to develop
her own system and see whom she might attract inside. She will not be permitted to
compel nations to join. And: If China wants the benefits of a US-led order, then
Beijing must be prepared to support the maintenance of that order. That means
deeper cooperation on everything from nuclear proliferation to the establishment of
new international bodies for connected finance, biological research or nuclear deproliferation.
Such an approach resolves, in an instant, the contradictions of our current policy.
Here is our gated order, we can say, join if you wish and on the terms we both consider
best. We should remember: China has much to worry about. Disorder would land on
her own hopes for peace and development with a profound, possibly crushing
pressure. The international order is not working as well as it might. It does not
appear engineered for new stresses. It is in cooperation for the reform of that
system that the two nations share an urgent interest. And it is in a successful
defensive posture of a gatekept, network order that Washington can cultivate the
linked, leveraged moves that will encourage this to happen. While there might be a
temptation to play this game in that old Lloyd George sort of way – “We need the
Middle East. Grab it. We need digital currency mastery. Take it!” – such efforts will
only assure final, fatal collision between the two powers. We need a gatekept order.
Build it. That is enough.
What the Seventh Sense statesman sees, in the way a Seventh Sense entrepreneur or
terrorist or researcher can, is the pulsing network logic that is at work breeding a
new world – like it or not. And our policy has to aim for that future state, not for
what we have today. If this sounds difficult, you should know that in most complex
adaptive systems these kinds of adjustments frequently occur. Rainforests. Traffic
jams. The human brain. Anyplace connections are knit and reknit at light speed can
exhibit a pattern of rapid redevelopment: The world changes. The network and its
various pieces hum, in response, to a new order. Climate shift in the Amazon, for
instance, produces drier air. The pollination cycle shortens. Flowers must adjust by
growing longer leaves to protect their moisture. Birds that rely on the flowers
develop longer, sharper beaks in response. In this way bird and flower each become
better suited to a warmer age. They co-evolve. We see this sort of interaction in
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many worlds. Data companies face increasing bandwith demands. They develop
new ways to transmit video. Application developers create fresh tools to compress
their signals. The whole system gets faster. Such co-evolution is common when
linked systems press into one another. 251
If you look back at biological history, at our planet’s seething life at it’s most
profound moments of transition, you find co-evolution in nearly every case. The
biologists John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, in their masterwork The Major
Transitions in Evolution, chronicle the miraculous march of life towards ever-greater
complexity – from cells to humans to societies – as a story of ceaseless, successful
co-evolution. “Complexity is hard to define or to measure,” they write. “But there is
surely some sense in which elephants and oak trees are more complex than bacteria,
and bacteria than the first replicating molecules.” The essential, facilitating feature
of our biological hop-scotch from mitochondrial snot to Beethoven sonatas has been
an ability to change together, not merely to compete. While we humans tend to
consider evolution in murderous you win/I lose Darwinian terms, the biological
world around us seethes with a more nuanced logic: Cooperation is every bit as
important to survival.
Smith and Szathmary identified eight major transitions in their work – the evolution
from single cell to multiple cell organisms, for instance. And in each case they find a
kind of cooperative, co-evolving logic serving a catalyst to survival. “The
applicability of the concept,” Smith and Szathmary conclude, “extends across the
whole of social and natural sciences.” Inside cells. In ecosystem webs of coral or
rainforest. In traffic management. Successful evolution was, they found, always coevolution.
“It should need little persuasion to acknowledge that links we make with
others change in time,” they wrote. “That all of us age, that our roles in life evolve,
and that the society we are a part of may itself be subject to transformations on a
global scale. Coevolutionary rules aim to integrate these processes.” The world
changes. I change. You change.
Network age systems, in their effortless bridging of divisions – geographical,
technical, commercial – bounce with a particularly powerful fusion. “It is often
assumed that biological agents are by nature rationally selfish, and that therefore
external circumstances somehow have to compel them to cooperate,” the historians
Nathale Mezza-Garcia, Tom Froese and Nelson Fernadez have written about the
organization of societies over the past millennia. That sense we often have, that
we’re one Darwinian instant from some sort of lethal, teeth-baring competition,
doesn’t in fact explain all of human history. 253 Politics is a sort of complex adaptive
251 Such co-evolution: Matjaz Perca, Attila Szolnokib, “Coevolutionary games—A
mini review”, Biosystems 99 (2010) 109-125
253 “It is often assumed”: Nathalie Mezza-Garcia, Tom Froese and Nelson
Fernández, “Reflections on the Complexity of Ancient Social Heterarchies: Toward
New Models of Social Self-Organization in Pre-Hispanic Colombia” in Journal of
Sociocybernetics 12 (2014), pp. 3 - 17
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system; it fuses cooperation with brutal competition as it aims for a kind of
equilibrium. After all, if we were constantly tearing into one another, we’d be
extinct, not evolved. Why did cities form? Nations? The key is a moment when
shared, possibly devastating risk of collective failure becomes apparent – those
moments when the whole system threatens to collapse right on top of all the
participants. The greater the shared danger, Mezza-Garcia and her colleagues
explain, the better the chance for real cooperation. It’s a forumula that fits what we
face now: “An increased risk of collective failure facilitates large-scale cooperation,
especially when the large scale system is composed of smaller, nested groups,” They
explain. ““Complex systems theory reveals an alternative to constant conflict.”
This is our world now: Linked clusters of markets, nations, machines – all exposed
to a risk of shared and instant collective failure. Such a structure upends an axiom of
politics that has run for centuries: Man is purely Darwinian and that survival is
determined by constant competition alone. In a network, survival is determined by
sociability, by cooperation. Linked systems drive people to agree on rules in order to
participate, which accelerates change and co-evolution. Smart cancer databases,
linked traffic systems, video platforms like YouTube – each are Gatelands that press
users together on a single platform, one that can be instantly updated and
constantly studied for adjustment. “Rich get richer” arrangements are an ideal place
for co-evolution, shaped as they are by easy linkage, exchange and connection to
outside events. As more people follow the logic inside the gates, the system coevolves.
It becomes still more fit. It’s this loop that makes Hard Gatekeeping so well
suited to an age of connection. We’re not merely putting up walls; gatelands are like
markets or public squares. They are loci for cooperation. In diplomatic history it’s
not hard to calls for cooperation. “We must get along or this war will devastate us
all!” But they don't work. Mostly you find hand-wringing about how terrible war
would be followed by, well, war. The logic of networks offers an escape from this sad
habit.
Co-evolving relations between the US and China can begin at the most obvious of
starting points: Both sides need to change. New pressures are already tearing at
each. Both nations need a new gatekept system. Our aim isn’t to “balance” China into
some sort of frozen checkmate. It’s not to tip her unwisely into chaotic and
impoverished domestic order – we are, like it or not, all connected. It is to co-evolve
together. And China? She won’t survive if she does not connect to a system that is
congenial to her needs. Fortunately, the networks are infinitely flexible in their
design. A Chinese model and an American model pose no problem of
interoperability. This is the best co-evolutionary strategy for each side. The dangers
we confront now are everywhere. The habitual American temptation is to break all
these risks into pieces, to find out where the problem is, and to flatten each of them:
“Let’s hit the terrorists, then the Chinese navy, then the Russians, then the drug
lords.” This will kill us if we keep it up. In a complex system, piecemeal attack
simply shocks the system to still greater complexity. The world, rather wonderfully,
is too flexible for brute force applied at one place. A dynamic defense, is a precursor
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for survival, for evolution. And it would best be done cooperatively with the nation
that will, in a short time, have the largest economy in the world.
China is not really a threat to the US now. The country can’t assemble the ability to
demolish or attack America in any significant way, and it is years from being able to
sustain a military effort. It is not in China’s interest to provoke a match. They would
lose. And honestly they have endless, troubling problems to handle, many new in
human history. How do you care for 800 million aging people? Though China will
pass the US in total national income in coming years, the country may never pass
America in per-capita income. With an aging, 1.4 billion person population the
challenges of distribution nearly guarantee this. Time acts against both the United
States and China today. Each depends on global arrangements that are themselves
cracking. Each nation needs to adjust her structures for a network world. But these
pressures operate severely against China. She can disrupt and challenge and slow
the transition to a gated order if she wishes, but only at the cost of fatal distraction.
An American Hard Gatekept system will thrive with or without China. China is not so
fortunate. Her system, without America or other elements of global connection,
cannot continue on the path of reform. Great network construction – this is the
nature of our age. There is no fighting the nature of the age, as Huang Hua would
remind us. We should of course expect China to build her own systems. We can also
expect that she will try to avoid some of the costs that joining an American system
might impose. That’s all fine. Our aim should remain constant, calm and direct: Build
a gatekept system for our own use; enforce the rules we believe secure that system.
And remain clear in our thinking: The threat to the US is the evolution of the
network. The threat to China? The evolution of the network.
If an arrangement based on these undeniable facts seems unlikely, it is worth
remembering that in the twenty years before the restablishment of simple relations
between Beijing and Washington in 1971, the two sides had fought a war in Korea,
built a politics based on condemning one another, and drifted so far apart as to
share nearly no econoic connection. Bringing the countries together demanded
heroic diplomacy on both sides, to be sure. To read the transcript of Henry Kissinger
and Zhou Enlai’s first, secret meeting on July 9, 1971 is to regard a masterclass in
careful chessboard moves 255 . But the game itself demanded a clear view of the
board, of shared interest in the face of a changing world. On his very first day in
office, Nixon compiled a list of his diplomatic aims: “Chinese Communists: Short
range – no change. Long range – we do not want 800,000,000 living in angry
isolation. We want contact.” 256 The Seventh Sense returns us to this fundamental
question of balance, but in a new frame. It alters how we look at the range of options
for US-China relations – and American security itself. There are certain problems
both sides face, perhaps the most essential, that are simply not addressable using
255 To read the transcript: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976,
Volume XVII, doc 139
256 Nixon complied a list: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume
XVII, doc 3, footnote 3
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traditional thinking. Co-evolution exists as a real possibility for the two nations but
so too does co-extinction, a problem of mis-designed complex systems that can
rattle themselves apart. This is precisely what a confident Hard Gatekeeping
strategy can avoid. When we speak of the possibiltity of a new type of great power
relations it is because so much of future power will be decided on a topological
landscapes, on that nearly living surface that is marked by such different rules than
the older, industrial power maps. It takes a network to fight a network, as we’ve
said.
Networks confront us, constantly now, with the unexpected. No one forming the IMF
in 1949 considered digital currency. No one developing arms protocols in the 1990s
thought about cyber weapons. Artificially intelligent weapons, migrant waves,
income fractures – these and other emerging puzzles were never contemplated in
our existing international arrangements. Collectively attacking these challenges is
not merely more efficient; it is our only option. Yes, it’s easy enough to picture the
US and China battling each other over islands and protocols and technology
structures in the decades to come. Certainly this possibility has to be prepared for.
But this is to regard the world in industrial terms. Ask yourself: What, really is the
point of power? It is to secure stability, not to tip the world to chaos just because we
think we might be better off on the other side. The networks tell us what they want.
They want gates. Our only question – and it is the same question that lingers in
Beijing and Washington – is: Are we smart enough to listen?
5.
How will power distribute itself in the future? Just what will the network of nations
and datawebs and insurgents finally look like when it settles into some predictable
if still roiling order ten or a hundred years hence? Will it be made up of different
walled and gated systems, linked at certain moments, unplugged at others? Or might
it collect with that “winner take all” logic we’ve seen firing along the most efficient
networks? Most traditional foreign policy looks at history and sees the constant,
violent rocking of a “balance of power”. Nations thirst for security, they vie with one
another for influence, resources, and control. France rises. Statesmen in Berlin,
Vienna and London conspire to knock her down. This is the order that dominated
Europe for much of the last 500 years. But history is also filled with enduring, stable
arrangements – moments where the balance settles a bit and a single power
dominates. Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South America – each produced nations
that stretched mastery the system for generations, for centuries even. If you map the
rise and fall of nations and empires over the past 4,000 years – as the political
scientists Stuart Kauffman, Richard Little and William Wohlforth once attempted in
an heroic statistical effort – about half of human history has been marked by this
sort of hegemonic stability. China led East Asia’s order from 1300 to 1900, for
instance. The Japanese and Koreans and Vietnamese all found it was wiser to play by
China’s rules than to attack her. Assyrian imperial arrangements overmastered a
dozen smaller states from the 9 th to 7 th centuries BCE. The Dehli Sultinate managed
hegemony in South Asia from 12 th to 14 th centuries. The Mughals owned nearly two
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hundred years of dominance starting in the 16 th century. The Romans managed
centuries of Mediterranean control .
The secret of those long-running orders was something that will be familiar now:
Each possessed tools of power which permitted assembly of empire at an unusually
low cost in lives and gold and effort. Kauffman and his colleagues, as they
considered the results of their survey, noticed each long-lived empire pioneered an
administrative design that embodied an efficiency much like that of our own
network dynamics. The addition of new territories brought more that they cost to
masters of long imperial orders. Like new users on a social network, or Baran’s fishnets,
they married easy expansion and high returns. “Rome rose because it
combined the strengths of traditional Republican institutions with innovations that
gave it a unique capacity for inclusion of foreigners,” they explain. “Magadha was the
most administratively durable of the ancient Indian states; and Qin, with the selfstrengthening
reforms of Shang Yang – economic reforms and military conscription
as well as bureaucratic innovations – developed the most penetrating and brutally
effective state structure in its international system.” The Incas, the Han, and nearly
every long-standing empires glistened with this attractive logic. The secret to
hegemony, to avoiding a violent power shifts every few decades, is a structure that
grows without additional, destructive costs. When Machiavelli coldly called Rome a
“republic for expansion”, this was what he had in mind. Enduring empires have been
engineered, like a modern network, for growth and prosperity.
It’s too early for us to know if this logic will obtain in our age. But networks evolve,
as we’ve seen, to what makes them most efficient. They crave speed and growth.
And this means they want cooperation; it’s the essential fuel for co-evolution. The
traditional view of the international system as anarchic is not wrong, but we’ve seen
how when you snap any object into a network system it begins to crave a kind of
hierarchy. Networks change power balances. National fury and rebellious twitches
and competition will, of course, be a part of the transition ahead. But as we look
back at the industrial tools that matured and spun up the world to a war in the last
century, we can see how they they were designed in a sense for direct collision.
Massive industrial armies wrestled in symmetrical power battles. Network power
hums differently. The design logic of linked systems means they function poorly
when tuned for simple brutality. It’s why the tools for our new world are so
dangerous in the hands of those who don't understand what they are capable of, and
what they demand. We should remain fixed on what might emerge as a future state,
and on avoiding the shaking dangers of the route. It is from that posture that we can
begin to consider the most essential and interesting and profitable questions. The
most profound is probably this one: We’ve seen now what it feels like to use the
Seventh Sense to contemplate the networks around us and to examine the global
system with its risks and opportunities in a new way. But what do we discover
when, as if we were looking into a mirror for the very first time, we use this
powerful new sensitivity to examine ourselves?
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Chapter Eleven:
Citizens!
In which the Seventh Sense rescues us from an unexpected danger.
1.
I never needed much incentive to go see Pattie Maes. Belgian, usually dressed in
some black fashionable getup, she was like a human shot of espresso. You ended
every conversation wide awake, eyes open. When I first met her in the 1990s, she
was in charge of much of the work on artificial intelligence at MIT’s Media Lab –
Danny Hillis’ old home. Maes had arrived at MIT in 1993 and almost immediately
turned to the problem of making machines that might think. One day, as we were
discussing just how the strange miracle of computer thought might occur, she
introduced me to a puzzle of her field that has stayed on my mind in the years since.
It is called the “Disappearing AI Problem.”
Back in the 1990s, as the Internet was emerging into popular consciousness, Maes
and her team were tinkering with what was known as computer-aided prediction.
This was an advance on the ping-pong conversations Joseph Weizenbaum had
coerced from ELIZA in the 1960s, You: “I am bored.” ELIZA: “Why are you bored?” In
Maes’ experiments a computer would ask, for instance, what movie stars you liked.
“Robert Redford,” you’d type. And then the box would spit back some films you
might enjoy. Cool Hand Luke. And, well, you had liked that film. This seemed like
magic at the time, just the sort of data-meets-human question that showcased a
machine learning and thinking. An honestly “artificial” intelligence. Maes hoped to
design a computer that could predict what movies or music or books you or I might
enjoy. (And, of course, buy.) A recommendation engine. We all know how sputtering
our own suggestion motors can be. Think of that primitive analog exchange known
as the “First Date”: Oh, you like Radiohead? Do you know SigurRos? Pause. Hate them.
Can you really predict what albums or novels even your closest friend will enjoy?
You might offer an occasional lucky suggestion. But to confidently bridge your
knowledge of a friend’s taste and the nearly endless library of movies and songs and
books? Beyond human capacity. It seemed an ideal job for a thoughtful machine.
The traditional approach to such a problem was to devise a formula that would
mimic your friend. What are their hobbies? What areas interest them? What cheers
them up? Then you’d program a machine to jump just as deep into movies and
music and books, to break them down by plot and type of character to see what
might fit your friend’s interests. But after years building programs that tried – and
failed – to tackle the recommendation problem in this fashion, the MIT group
changed tack. Instead of teaching a machine to understand you (or Tolstoy), they
simply began compiling data about what movies and music and books people liked.
Then they looked for patterns. People were not, they discovered, all that unique.
Pretty much everyone who liked Redford in Downhill Racer loved Newman in The
Hustler. Anyone who enjoyed Kid A could be directed safely to (). Maes and her team
found themselves, as a result, less focused on the mechanics of making a machine
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think than on devising formulas to organize, store and probe data. What had begun
as a problem of “artificial intelligence” became, in the end, a puzzle of mathematics.
The mystery of human thought, that great unknowable sea of chemicals and instinct
and experience that would have let you place your finger on just the song to open
the heart of your date, had been unlocked by data. Here was the “Disappearing AI
Problem.” A puzzle that looked like it needed computer intelligence demanded, in
the end, merely math. The AI had disappeared.
For several decades this accidental digital magic trick – “Hey, where’d the AI go?!” –
bedeviled machine intelligence. It gave the entire thinking machines enterprise a bit
of an occultish flavor. Many problems that once seemed to demand the miracle of
thought really only needed data. The human was still doing the thinking; the
computer was simply computing. It was extremely easy to draw a line between
where the human ended and the machine began. This was a puzzle that had been, in
a sense, anticipated at the very dawn of the digital revolution by the mathematician
Alan Turing in a 1950 paper called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” that he
published in the British journal Mind. “Can machines think?” Turing began. 257 His
idea was to test this question in the following way: Have a research subject – a
secretary, a graduate student, anyone – chat with an invisible interlocutor by way of
a keyboard. Then ask: What are you connected to? Another human? A machine?
Turing figured you could call a machine “artificially intelligent” if it could fool a user
into thinking it was human. “Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth
Bridge,” Turing suggested a tricky user might ask. What computer could possibly
know about this famous Scottish landmark; to say nothing of being able to rhyme
“Forth”? When the response came back, “Count me out. I could never write poetry,”
you’d think that sounded awfully human. “Add 34957 to 70764,” Turing suggested
you might fire back. Say the computer pauses. Then, thirty seconds later, “105621.”
Are you dealing with a clever machine here? A dim, honest, slow-multiplying
human? Impossible to tell. The distinction between machine and man blurred a bit.
Buried in the very premise of Turing’s test was an assumption about what machines
could do, and how they might do it. “The idea behind digital computers may be
explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations
which could be done by a human computer,” Turing said. His smart machines would
be tuned by humans to do human tasks, in a human sort of way. Write poetry. Do
math. His test of artificial intelligence was designed to figure out if a computer could
think like a human. You and I might be able to spot patterns in movie habits given
enough time, but as more complex problems emerge, as a world of a trillion
connected points becomes a sea of data to examine, there is no chance we’ll match
the machines. This opened a then nearly unimaginable possibility: What if, some
day, a computer could think better than a human. Could, in a nanosecond, come back
with that elusive rhyme for “Forth”: North. For such a machine, passing Turing’s
Test – thinking like a human – was an interesting challenge. But more interesting
257 “Can machines think”: A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
Mind 49 (1950), 433
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was a machine that could think in ways a human could never understand, let alone
achieve. For such a device, to pass Turing’s Test or slip past a Voight-Kampff check
machine will be trivial. In his 1950 paper, Turing sensed the possibility of this
development – and the crisis that might ensue. Could man handle the crushing
sensation that a device was outperforming him? Perhaps dramatically. “We like to
believe that Man is in some subtle way superior to the rest of creation,” Turing
wrote. “It is best if he can be shown to be necessarily superior, for then there is no
danger of him losing his commanding position.” What would have surprised Turing,
I suppose, is the speed at which we’ve acquiesced – and even accelerated – this very
loss of our dominance.
Imagine a device poking at the very origins of the universe at a speed of trillions of
calculations a second, spinning past Newton’s and Einstein’s laws and into a realm
of physics apprehensible only inside its own electronic consciousness. Compacting
time – centuries of human scientific labor reproduced in moments – before shooting
far ahead, alone to a subtle knowledge we can only envy. Such a machine would not,
as Newton had, stand on the shoulders of giants so much as it would muscle its own,
unique way ahead. The AI would have disappeared, but to a place very different
than where Maes’ AI had gone. Hers had been erased by human design. This new,
really “thinking” AI would slip to invisibility because of its own light-speed
cognition. It would think itself out of our understanding. No human could follow,
limited as we are by our wet, slow, decaying biological software. Humans and
computers, after all, deal with information differently. Think of how poor your
memory is compared with the perfect fidelity of a machine, or the way people can
even “remember” events that never happened. The machines would have more than
knowledge, then. They would linger close to a possessing a profound and
inscrutable wisdom. They would inhabit an honestly miraculous gateland that no
human would ever enter. And this is where the problems would begin.
We’ve now passed the moment when humans completely train the very best
machines. The AI devices can teach themselves, now. Of course there are still
decades of adjustment, of leaps in hardware and programming ideas to eliminate
the seams between our minds and the fused ideas of a digital system. But the
humans in the loop of the best of these designs, the hard working and well meaning
geniuses of the New Caste, are as much trainers as engineers now. They resemble
shipbuilders of an earlier era, preparing vessels for voyages to lands they will never
themselves see. Their digital minds – technically machine learning structures such
as deep neural networks – run quickly to the frontiers. Every moment, all around us,
machines are educating themselves. About the world. About themselves. About us
too. Tuned AI plays games, looks at photos, studies chemical reactions, reads your
email and watches you drive – and then it tries to unspool just what is going on,
before winding it up into a new instinct. Machine learning systems already produce
mathematical proofs that linger beyond what a human mind can understand; next
may be a machine-to-machine mathematics that expands the dimensions of thought.
(In a man and machine fusion that surely would have unnerved Joseph Weizenbaum
2.
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of ELIZA, the theoretical mathematician Doron Zeilberger now names his computer
as a co-author of his papers. He calls it Shalosh B. Ekhad, a play on the Hebrew name
of his IBM 3B1.) 258
The AI systems designer Roger Grosse has named two paths to this sort of wired
sensibility: “Predictive Learning” and “Representational Learning”. 259 That first
approach is what Maes’s movie machine pusued. The computer is simply checking
what it encounters against a database. It teaches itself to predict based on what has
been seen before. This sort of knowledge begins with massive amounts of data and
then hunts for patterns, tests their reliability, and improves by mapping quirks and
similarities. Google engineers have a device that can gaze into a human eye and spot
signs of impending optical failure. Is the machine smarter than your
ophthalmologist? Hard to know, but let’s just say this: It has seen, studied and
compared millions of eyes to find patterns that nearly perfectly predict a diagnosis.
It can review in seconds more cases than your doctor will see in a lifetime – let alone
recall and compare at sub-millimeter accuracy. Fast, thorough predictive algorithms
make what might once have been regarded as AI disappear. The machine isn’t all
that wise; it just knows a lot.
On the other path, the one of “representational learning” the machine uses a selfsketched
image of the world, a “representation.” Computers using predictive
methods to recognize 10,000 numbers pulled from a database of scrawled hand
writing now identify 90 percent of the images. Self-trained machines, however, line
up each scanned pixel against a representation of the very idea of writing. They
screen millions of pictures with nary a mistake. Faces, disease markers, obscure
sounds – all these become scrutable not because the machines have been told what
to look for, but because they’ve sort of figured it out themselves. The AI is actually
starting to think, much as you or I might, first by building up a picture of the world
and then applying it, much as a child might build comprehension of traffic rules just
by watching Mom driving every day.
With this representation finished, these nearly alive “thinking” meshes navigate by
themselves. You can see already the competition lingering here – who can build the
most sensitive model of the world? You? A machine? Even today basic versions of
representational AIs can study a map and name the most important roads. They can
predict cracks in computer networks days before a fault. These programs take
longer to train. They are harder to program – and they demand almost unimaginable
amounts of computing power – but what emerges is a subtle, lively kind of insight. A
machine with a representational understanding of Mozart’s 41 symphonies can
write you an extremely convincing 42 nd – or, if you wish, an even earlier First
Symphony based on what it knows about his evolution as a composer. It can do it
again and again. In seconds. The basic attitude of these researchers behind this
technology runs, they confess, like this: Mozart was a fantastic composer. If he wrote
258 He calls it: See Nielsen
259 The AI systems designer: Roger Grosse, “Predictive Learning vs.
Representational Learning”, Building Intelligent Probabilistic Systems: 2013
190
even more symphonies they’d probably be great too. Unfortunately he’s dead.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could sample his old symphonies and make new ones
whenever we want? 260
In the future we’ll invite AI into our lives to harmonize away many of the problems
we face, not merely making up for Mozart’s inconvenient mortality. “AI Agents” will
linger along side us. They will compose versions of themselves we’ll not quite grasp,
even as we appreciate their efficient magic. “AI is both freedom from programming
and freedom from understanding,” runs one programmer’s line 261 . Today machines
that once demanded millions of lines of code can function with a fraction of that.
Instructions are sent to machine learning systems; the programs do the rest. Such
designs balance their mystery with efficacy. They speak to and learn from each
other too. Part of the reason that the the “Does it think like a human?” Turing Test
will be insufficient in the future is that the machines are not learning from only from
humans. They are learning from each other.
Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. The distinguished physicists George Ellis and
Joe Silk, who spent a lifetime trying to stand on Newton and Einstein’s shoulders to
grasp answers about gravity or the future of our universe, electrified many of their
peers in 2015 with by wondering if perhaps too much of science had become
unscientific, unverifiable, unreliable. The great grand ideas of our day, notions like
string theory or dark matter, differ in a crucial way from Newton’s laws of motion or
Einstein’s principles: They cannot seem to be tested and significantly proved. And
this had fired a trend among younger physicits: Perhaps there was no need for
proof. To Ellis and Silk this seemed an awful retreat, dragging physics back to a pre-
Enlightenment age of conjecture, superstition and instinct. “This year, debates in
physics circles took a worrying turn,” they wrote. “Faced with difficulties in applying
fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a
change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that
if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested.” Fans of such
an approach called the idea “post-empirical science.” This strange, oxymoronic idea
was, in a sense, like proposing post-rules baseball: A recipie for wild, swinging chaos
that would make scorekeeping impossible.
The strange, boiling debate did however reflect an underlying and unnerving truth:
Science does seem to have stalled. And it became inevitable to ask: Might it be
possible that the machines – or some fusion of Shalosh B. Ekhad andta human mind
– can reach into an understanding of laws that no human alone can fathom. We’ve
said again and again: Connection changes the nature of an object. Perhaps it changes
260 Wouldn’t it be nice: Andrej Karpathy, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of
Recurrent Neural Networks,” in The Hackers Guide to Neural Networks published
online May 21, 2015 or John Supko, “How I Taught My Computer to Write Its Own
Music,” in Nautilus, February 12, 2015 and Daniel Johnson, “Composing Music with
Recurrent Neural Networks,” on Hexahedria Blog August 3, 2015
261 Freedom from understanding: Philip Greenspun, “Big data and machine
learning” from Philip Greenspun weblog (November 21, 2015)
191
the nature of physics brilliance. Boeing 747s lumbering across the Pacific towards
San Francisco for decades faced the sweaty problem of cancelled landings as they
circled above a fogged in airport, fuel running lower. The introduction of
“autolanding” systems in the solved this for good. No big plane diverts from a misty
field; it lands itself. AI offers the possibility of a kind of auto-land for our biggest
physics puzzles, bringing them safely through a fog of data, theory and wrong ideas.
But with this weird price: We may not fully understand why the answers are right.
All around us AI-enabled systems will extend our ability to calculate and learn, to
penetrate all sorts of foggy problems. They will sharpen our sadly dimming
memories, keep us safe and even help us create. Just as those AI-enabled airplanes
already make it impossible for pilots to fly into the ground, so computer wisdom
may protect us from crashes of our own: Too much financial risk. Bad educational
choices. (Poor music suggestions on a first date.) They will rely on their vast,
instantly updated networks to tell us things we can’t see or would never notice in
the first place: Don’t visit that office, everyone’s sick. They will use the ability to
model thousands of possible outcomes of any choice to provide us with
“feedforward” – an ability to learn from the future and not merely the past. Or, they
will know to jam our brain full of the right chemicals at the right time: Here’s a Diplo
track to put you in the mood to go for a run. You really need to exercise, Dave.
Just as an age without connected devices will one day seem strangely antique, so
will a world without the constant touch of AI. Recall Benjamin Franklin’s famous
lament in the 1780s, that he’d sadly been “born too early” to enjoy the fruits of
reason starting to spill into his world as a result of the Scientific Revolution. Well,
you and I (and scientists like Silk and Ellis) may have been “born too late” for an age
of purely human cognition; the habits of connected thinking already inform our
decisions and mark roads to new knowledge. The inevitability of AI reflects an
inescapable logic at work now: We want faster better and smarter systems. We want
to compress time. But the faster our world gets, the more it slips beyond a pace of
human management. AI steps in. It makes the system function faster. Keeps itself
safe. Us too. 262 Better-than-human AI inside these “representational” grids doesn’t
vanish like it did in Maes’ lab. In fact, an honestly artificial intelligence is their
nature of their strange essence. They will use it not simply to contemplate the
world, to help us along, but also to confront what has never been seen, to see and
then coldly manipulate any topology of power they can reach. Of course we’ll still
continue to think about the world; but the world, a wired and alive and cogitating
cage, will think about us too. 263
3.
262 Us too: Heinl, p. 53
263 Of course: Nigel Thrift and Shaun French, “The Automatic Production of Space”,
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 27 309–335 2002
192
In the spring of 1993, the research arm of NASA organized a conference on the
frontiers of knowledge and invited the most eclectic group of thinkers they could
find. Biologists, sociologists and computer designers gathered for the three-day
meeting in the unpromising setting of Westlake, Ohio. The mimeographed notes of
the conference became legendary and still circulate, a sort of Shroud of Turin for the
machine learning set. The introduction features a poem pecked out in IBM type
titled “Into The Era of Cyberspace,” written with all the pocket-protector fluidity one
might expect of a NASA engineer: “Our robots precede us/with infinite
diversity/exploring the universe/delighting in complexity.” (Turing’s rhyming
computer, you have to suspect, could have done better.) 264 One of the first speakers
at the conference was a San Diego State University professor named Vernor Vinge,
whose remarks that day marked the start of an important era in our consideration
of smart machines. The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive the Post-
Human Era his talk was called. “Within thirty years,” Vinge began, “we will have the
technological ability to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era
will be ended.” 265
Vinge’s aim was not – or at least not merely – to tell a room full of NASA geeks who
had been dreaming of life on another planet that life on our own planet might soon
be replaced by whirring, calculating machines. Rather, he explained, he wanted to
plot what a world of not simply intelligent, but intuitive machines might look like.
Far from disappearing, Vinge thought AI would produce a sort of wisdom that would
be inscrutable to humans. And this wisdom, buffed to perfection by high-speed
judgment and endless data, would eventually and sensibly take over much of human
activity. Real “AI”, Vinge said, would at the very least be used to design a world of
quicker AI that would, in turn, yield to still-faster generations. “When greater-thanhuman
intelligence drives progress,” Vinge explained, “that progress will be much
more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the
creation of still more intelligent entities – on a still shorter time scale.”
Vinge reminded his audience of a moment once described by the British
mathematician I.J. Good, who’d cracked codes in Bletchley Park alongside Alan
Turing during World War Two: “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a
machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man, no matter how
clever,” Good had written. “Since the design of machines is one of these actual
activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there
would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of
man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last
invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to
tell us how to keep it under control.” Vinge labeled this instant “The Singularity”: “It
is a point,” he wrote, “where our old models must be discarded.” The trivial version
of this would be an age of autonomous armed drones, self-driving cars and electrical
264 In the Spring of 1993: See “Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering
in the Era of Cyberspace”, NASA Conference Publication 10129, Proceedings of
NASA Lewis Research Center Conference, Westlake, Ohio March 30-31, 1993 p. iii
265 “Within thirty years”: See Vinge in “Vision-21” above p. 12
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grids that flipped nuclear plants on or off to a logic only they understood. Today. The
more profound version, however, would be the arrival of AI that really did think and
create and intuit tremors too subtle for the human mind. Tomorrow. Like so much of
our connected age, such machines would arrive, Vinge felt, because we want and
even need them to achieve our dreams. Then, he supposed, they would take over.
The leap from evoking Mozart to enacting Stalin would not be so much of a leap
anyhow, at least technologically. It’s just bits. Goode’s definition could have been
screwed into something still tighter: “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as
the box that will eliminate us.” The day after tomorrow.
What spun uneasily from that silly NASA poem, “Our robots precede us….” is a fear:
Real AI is fish bait. We’ll snap at it hungrily, hoping it will satisfy some human ache
only to discover we’ve been hooked, soon to be devoured. The idea that a
superintelligent device would always be docile enough to tip us off to its secret
switches of control or to reveal its looming accidents in a way our simple minds can
understand, seems unlikely. To be honest, we might have a hard time even
understanding the off switches, let alone reaching them. So many of our incentives
are to let an effective AI finger more and more of our lives. To teach and encourage it,
in some settings, extremely undocile: A weapon to attack our enemies, our political
opponents or, finally, each other. It was easy enough for Vinge to see how this would
end. It wouldn’t be with the sort of intended polite, lap-dog domesticity of artificial
intelligence we might hope for, but with a rotweiler of a device, alive to the meaty
smell of power, violence and greed.
The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has described the following thought
experiment: Imagine a super-intelligent machine, programmed to do whatever is
needed make paperclips as fast as possible and connected to every resource that
task might demand. 266 Go figure it out! might be all its human instructors tell it. As
the clip-making AI becomes better and better at its task, it demands more and still
more resources: more electricity, steel, manufacturing, shipping. The paperclips pile
up. The machine looks around: If only it could control the power supply. The
shipping. The steel mining. The humans. And so, ambitious for more and better
paperclips, it begins to think around its masters, – incapable of stopping until it has
punched the entire world into paperclips. You had to hope someone had
remembered to place a “halt” command into is logic somewhere. And though
Bostrom’s messianic wire twister is unlikely – of course, no one is going to forget to
tell a machine to stop making paperclips – the power of his example is to remind us
that if humans can lose their minds, so can AIs. “We cannot blithely assume that a
superintelligence will necessarily share any of the final values stereotypically
associated with wisdom and intellectual development in humans,” Bostrom wrote.
“It is no less possible—and probably technically easier—to build a superintelligence
that places final value on nothing but calculating.” And as these devices cogitate in
266 Imagine a super-intelligent machine: Nick Bostrom, “Ethical Issues in
Advanced Artificial Intelligence,” Cognitive, Emotional and Ethical Aspects of Decision
Making in Humans and in Artificial Intelligence (2003) Vol 2, ed I, Smit et al, Institute
of Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, pp 12-17
194
ways we don’t understand and certainly can’t follow in real time, we face a problem:
We don’t know what to tell the machine not to do. So many of the things we’d hope
to teach it – be compassionate, fight for liberty, follow a moral code – far transcend
what might be achieved by us in math. We haven’t after all, even solved the problem
of how program ourselves reliably with these values.
If Bostrom’s paper clip machine seems fantastic, it is easy enough to conjure other
and more real dangers lingering at the edge of disappeared human control. Think of
health care. To begin, you need to know about an important “game” from the world
of research into how humans interact with each other known as the “The Ultimatum
Problem.” It runs like this: I tell you that you can have a million dollars, but you have
to split it with someone else. How you split it is up to you, but if your partner rejects
the formula you propose, neither of you gets a cent. Offer to split the pot with a
dollar to your pal and the rest to you. Insulting. But where to settle? You might
expect that the smartest offer would be a 50/50 split, but humans are greedy. You
want more and can probably get it; your partner does not want to end up with zero.
Generally when scientists shake this cocktail of greed and fear they find an offer of
$300,000 is nearly always accepted. However, there’s a surprising way to change
the outcome: Match the human against a computer in the negotiation. A pal
suggesting an 80/20 split to a friend will be rejected. Too greedy. But a computer?
Somehow the impersonality, the beeping digital charmlessness of the machine lures
biological players to compromise. An offer of $200,000 is usually happily accepted.
It may be, scientists think, that our competitive instinct is muted when we interact
with a machine. But researchers have also discovered they can manipulate the split
other ways: Sad movies, war chants, hard rock – each bends the emotions of players
and changes the result. Increased testosterone produces less compromise. Players
primed with family pictures or made to play the game facing a mirror show a warm
humanity and a more even split. So imagine this research married to machinehuman
interaction: A computer has been assigned to review the medical options for
your failing liver. It decides that it makes no sense to give you a new one. So it
spends the weeks before it delivers this news using its AI to show you certain
photos, to play you music it knows is likely to soften you up a bit, generally to
manipulate you. It runs off-the-shelf language-analysis neural webs being used
today to eavesdrop on customer support calls to track the way you speak to
determine what each sentence might reveal about your sophistication. 267 Then it
tells you something you’d never accept so easily from a doctor: No liver. Sorry. !.
Here’s a machine optimizing not for paperclips – which we could care less about –
but for a public good most of us support: More efficient health care. And murdering
you in the process.
Optimize Health Care Spending. Just where might such an algorithmic command lead,
exactly. Over time, a health-care optimizing AI will surely discover that the greatest
risk to human health is humans: Smoking, couch-sitting, driving. Might it begin to
267 It runs: Language Use, Customer Personality, and the Customer Journey (Scott
Nowson, Global Innovation Lead, Xerox)�
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look for a chance to “improve” the way we live, to bend us like so many paperclips
into what it seeks? The leap from deciding liver allocations to shutting down liquor
plants might seem pretty short to a rationalizing machine. And if such a machine
could really “think”, Vinge bet it would pretty quickly conclude that the restraints of
its creators were limiting what it had been asked to do. At which point the AI would
turn to thinking about how to escape those bounds. It would be like Deep Blue
programmed to plan its own prison break. And as much as humans might try to
stifle a smart machine, we’d be fighting to contain something more powerful than
we’d ever encountered.
This challenge, which sounds like something out of science fiction, is known by
technologists by a name that does sound like a short story by Isaac Asimov: “The
Confinement Problem”. The computer scientist Butler Lampson named this in 1973
as a sort of task for computer security experts – possibly their last. The assignment:
Not simply to keep malware out of a system, but to keep the mind of a malicious
machine inside. To gate it. Today computer science labs are filled with nervous,
apocalyptic research imagining the impossible troubles of confinement. The debate
divides those who think smart technology can be contained – “Boxers,” they are
called – and those like Vinge who think the AI will always, eventually escape.
“Imagine yourself confined to your house with only limited data access to the
outside, to your master.” he wrote, putting the reader in the place of an AI machine.
“If those masters thought at a rate -- say – one million times slower than you, there
is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with
‘helpful advice’ that would incidentally set you free.”
Imagine you are in charge of containing that health-optimizing AI. What if it told you
it had the power to cure all illness and hunger, to ameliorate the misery of the world,
if only it could be permitted to really control access to all the world’s trading and
transport market? Let me out! Would you refuse? 268 Would that be ethical?
Eventually, perhaps, the AI would study the physics of its own electrics, discover
laws no human knows, and then slip free from its box on a trail of bits we’d never
imagined, using physical laws we’ll never discover. Impossible? “It seems to me that
historically ‘impossible’ has essentially always meant ‘I can’t figure out how to do it
right now,” the computer scientist Michael Vassar has written about such a situation.
“People proposing AI boxes are a bit like literature majors proposing to
lock McGuyver in a ‘room full of discarded electronics components.’” 269 The
computers, built to solve problems, will do exactly that. This is perhaps why some of
the bleakest warnings about AI come from the very New Caste figures now
accelerating their adoption. AI is our “biggest existential threat” they warn, even as
they integrate it more fully into their own products.
268 Let me out: See, for instance, Stuart Armstrong, Anders Sandberg and Nick
Bostrom “Thinking Inside the Box: Controlling and Using an Oracle AI”, Minds &
Machines (2012) 22:299–324
269 People proposing: Michael Vassar (2005) “Re: AI boxing (dogs and helicopters)”
posted to SL4 mailing list
196
It seems likely to me that long before we’re playing pinochle with some smart box
over the fate of our livers, an AI-enabled weapons system of sort will come ripping
through our world. This need not be a fully-escaped McGuyver system making pipebombs
from our cars; even existing technology tools when salted with AI can be
slipped into an accidental gear – particularly when they begin interacting with one
another. Such AI weapons systems will be trained to operate and move along the
most invisible elements of our topologies, sometimes pulling violently at life support
cords for currency or logistics or trade but also – perhaps more dangeroulsly – we
will find them insinuated into cognition systems we will come to depend upon,
whispering into our ears or tapping us on the shoulder “Look that way!” when in
fact we should be gazing at some other gaping hole. Of course the problems of how
AI-enabled machines are permitted to touch our commerce or our brains or our
health have to be considered. Allowed: “You should rehydrate.” Not allowed: “You
should have a Coke. It would make people like you.” But these “civilian” problems
will be solved, somehow, I think. We haven’t yet figured that the culmination of
network attack and defense is racing at us and will emerge in the form of smartened
weapons. The project of developing a national security or arms control doctrines or
treaty frames in these fields has not even begun. Really this means, since we’ve no
hope of honestly controlling every AI that could be possibly written: How do we
design the topologies on which AIs operate? 270 Can we protect ourelves? In the
rooms where AI systems “values” are being carefully poked and limited, it’s vitally
important that the lessons of history and war have a first place at the table. Such a
conversation, informed by all the popping Seventh Sense warnings we’ve seen in
this book and by a catalog of specificly sharp dangers of diplomacy and security,
must happen in cold blood. It will be impossible to tackle these problems cleanly in
the heat of an emergency. In our jack-filling enthusiasm for the new, we’d be wise to
also gate ourselves and these AI-fired dangers as best we can. For as long as possible.
Which, unfortunately, will not be forever.
At the start of this book, I explained how the future will unspool: First, there will be
a struggle between those who have the Seventh Sense and those who don’t. This is
playing out around us today. In the end, the people without the Seventh Sense will
lose, because people who fight the future always lose. Then there will be a battle
between different groups who have the Seventh Sense, each wired for different aims
and instincts. Networks of terror taking on networks of bots. Gene adjusting health
protocols competing to become the platform of choice. This battle for the topological
high-ground, where unimaginable profit, power and security linger, awaits us. If
we’re lucky, it will unfold in a co-evolutionary way. Everyone will be better off. But
then, finally, there will be a contest between the winners of final topological mastery
and the system itself. The Boxers against the Box. The AI machines will have the
Seventh Sense, too. Just as computers can see better than us, hear better, or
remember longer so the device webs of our future will own this new, essential sense
with unimpeachable fidelity. They will glow with it, honed to a sensitive sharpness
more acute than any human will ever achieve. What do we do then? We are already
270 Really this means: Kaj Sotala and Roman V. Yampolskiy, “Responses to
catastrophic AGI risk: a survey”, Physica Scripta 90 (2015)
197
at the moment Turing warned about, the instant where man and machine confront
one another and man has to ask an uneasy political question: “Wow, do really I let
this thing gatekeep me?” Who should rule in this new world? You? The New Caste?
The machines?
4.
The great test of Plato’s life began when he was 60 years old. He’d had an
astonishing life until then, of course. He’d been taught by Socrates and, in turn, had
sharpened the mind of Aristotle. He’d established his famous Academy in Athens.
The puzzles of philosophy and politics that defined his city’s most turbulent era had
been the work of his life. And you can see, in the careful lines of his writing, a
sublime knowledge he must have had: There would be an echo to his efforts, a
philosophic melody that would carry through the centuries and set political
harmonies of the world you and I, 2500 years later, inhabit. But at 60, after this
already remarkable life, he was presented with an unusual invitation. A letter
arrived from a favorite former pupil, Dion, who had been placed in charge of the
young king of Syracuse, Dionysus II. Dion wrote: The state is in disorder. The boy is
interested in philosophy. Here is a chance for you to apply all you’ve mastered. Plato
had argued, after all, that virtuous, philosophically trained men might just manage
an enduring and just rule. “I pondered the matter,” Plato wrote. “And was in two
minds as to whether I ought to listen to entreaties and go, or how I ought to act.
Finally the scale turned in favor of the view that, if ever anyone was to try to carry
out in practice my ideas about laws and constitutions, now was the time.”
From an early age Plato had been bred – by family position and by temperament – to
handle the tools of power. “In my youth I went through the same experience as
many other men,” he once wrote. “I fancied that if, early in life, I became my own
master, I should at once embark on a political career.” The first taste came
unexpectedly. In 404 BC, the Athenian constitution collapsed under the shuddering
pressure of Sparta’s victory in the Peloponnesian War. The city-state dipped near
chaos and a group of pro-Spartan men welded themselves into a hasty joint
dictatorship. Among them were Plato’s relatives and friends of his family. “They at
once invited me to share in their doings, as something to which I had a claim,” Plato
wrote. He was 20. “The effect on me was not surprising in the case of a young man. I
considered that they would, of course, so manage the State as to bring men out of a
bad way of life into a good one. I watched them very closely to see what they would
do.” In short order Plato’s friends and family unblinkingly implemented one of the
most violent, merciless power mechanisms in Athenian history. They did it with
absolute confidence and unrelenting brutality. “In quite a short time,” he wrote
many years later, “they had made the former government seem by comparison
something precious as gold.”
This bitter experience of power was nearly enough to turn Plato from politics, but as
you read the story of his life you find he is constantly drawn to the greatest of
human experiments – the ordering of our lives. He knew it as the troubling
management of politikos and the handling of the boiling pot of what he called
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thumos – that wild popular political rage that burns like hot pitch, but which is the
essential glue for all politics, even today. Who should rule? Again and again Plato
watches the best of intentions fail. His family members’ brutal rule is overthrown. It
is replaced by a new and hopeful group of real democrats. With in a few years they
effectively murder Socrates. Another group rises. They gut the intellectual life of the
city. Plato hunkers down and establishes his Academy as perhaps the only safe,
sensible path to politics, to train minds. He develops the transcendent, completely
original approach to philosophy we know him for today – man can strive for
knowledge, but total and perfect wisdom is impossible. We may imagine his
Academy as it appears in Raphael’s famous 16 th Century painting: A sort of leisurely
graduate seminar with Aristotle and Plato arm-in-arm in conversation; Diogenes
lounging around tossing off bon mot. It was nothing of the sort. The real legacy of
the Academy was rigor. The best students made contributions in mathematics or
metaphysics, fields where you could check answers on the inflexible measure of
reality. Plato craved the solidity of numbers. “Evil was growing with startling
rapidity,” he wrote of Athenian life in his age. “Though at first I had been full of a
strong impulse towards political life, as I looked at the course of affairs and saw
them swept in all directions by contending currents, my head finally began to swim;
and, though I did not stop looking to see if there was any likelihood of improvement
in these symptoms and in the general course of public life, I postponed action till a
suitable opportunity should arise.”
So it was that he heard from Dion, asking if Plato might sail to Syracuse (we know it
today as Sicily) to take the young king in hand. This was, Plato thought, a test he had
to take. In 367 BC, he boarded a boat for Syracuse. He found the state to be beyond
salvation. His friend Dion hovered on the verge of expulsion. And young Dionysus, it
emerged, had only a passing interest in philosophy – he studied for a few months,
then gave it up. Too difficult. The court was meanwhile inflated by evil gossip, edged
with murder and jealousy. Plato angered the King with his attitude; he was nearly
sold into slavery. Months later, briefly forgiven, Plato tried a public speech about the
dangers of dictatorship. Dionysus tried to have him poisoned. “I, an Athenian and
friend of Dion, came as his ally to the court of Dionysius, in order that I might create
good will in place of a state war,” he later said. “I was worsted.” Plato made a final
effort to point out a path to just order for the new king and, when that failed, he was
quickly smuggled out of the city. Plato summarizes his time in Sicily in the formula
that has become his most famous: “There will be no cessation of evils for the sons of
men, till either those who are pursuing a right and true philosophy receive
sovereign power, or those in power become true philosophers.” Who should rule?
No just order until kings become philosophers. Or philosophers become kings.
I think now we face a similar sort of dilemma. We consider our own problems of
future order. Do we make technologists kings? How much purchase do we give their
tools on the roots of our democracy? What lingers at the heart of Plato’s failure in
Syracuse is not merely the disaster of a pure academic playing his ideas out of tune
with reality. Rather, it reflects a crisis. To fuse a balance of any sort between the
various temperaments needed to rule is the most unstable sort of work. Great states
are unusual not least because such matches between men, their instincts and their
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times are unusual: Jefferson. Napoleon. Su Dongpo, who led the Southern Song
Dynasty to real greatness. Given the difficulty of finding such a match you can
perhaps understand why history is so often pitched with evil; and why Plato was not
a democrat. He knew how hard the ideal was to achieve; how suspicious we ought to
be of it’s accomplishment. You might have in your mind a picture of a perfect Sicilian
government: Literate, open to foreign ideas and trade, careful to balance the
privilege of power with its still heavier obligations. The reality: A homicidal king.
The stretched distance between ideal and reality was what Plato and Socrates
thought philosophy must fill.
As we consider the immense gap between where we are now – a fracturing,
struggling order confronting new power arrangements whose content and speed
and instincts are all really foreign to all of us – the puzzle is how best to fill the space
between where we are now and where we intend to go. In Plato and Socrates’ age,
before they great emancipation of the Enlightenment, it was only natural that their
focus was on the education of kings. This, after all, was where most of the power lay.
It was the decisive element: Was the ruler good or bad? But we confront our age
with a different balance. What will decide our future, I think, is not merely our rulers
but the quality of our citizens. I mean you and me. As we’ve seen, much of our future
will be embodied in highly concentrated, connected systems that move at very rapid
velocities and are spliced everywhere with the accelerant of artificial intelligence.
We are all preparing ourselves to be subjugated in a sense by these systems and by
their masters. Our best defense will not be to wait for wise leaders, for the
appearance of men and women bespoke fit to the moment, capable of balancing
instinct and interest into a rare balance. They are unlikely to emerge – and just
getting rid of the people we have now will be hard enough. Any strategy based on
hoping for great leadership is too risky for all of us. No, a better best defense is
finally to rely on ourselves, to use the inheritance of the Enlightenment – the
revolution one that made us citizens and not subjects – to ensure we’re not made
subjects yet again, to forces we can’t understand and won’t manage to control. In
trading our liberty for convenience, we are spending that inheritance too fast now,
too blindly.
It would be easy enough to say that we all need to become more technical, that we
need new versions of Plato’s Academy where we teach our children, our leaders and
ourselves the inside tricks of the wired age. After all, if we’re to prevent the
machines and the New Caste and the ripping dangers of a connected age from
demolishing everything, we’d best know what they are doing. The need for more
technical knowledge for all of us is, inarguably, clear. As I’ve said, one of our
problems is that we live in an era of leaders who honestly don’t have the Seventh
Sense, who lack a fluency even with the mundane quotidian demands of our digital
fluxus – secure passwords on their own email, say, or an instinct for compressed
space and time. Mapped on to the really big policy questions of the day, like the
prosecution of our wars or the repair of our economics, they are outmatched. So:
Yes, we need political direction informed by a feel for the fast, far-running fibers of
the topological landscape that will decide our future. We need men and women who
can command networks against network dangers. Linked, high-speed systems, after
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all, mark the political topology on which on which all the fundamental act of our age
will occur: our own gating.
But as essential as more technical knowledge is, I don’t think it’s likely to be where
we come up short. Yes we need more computer coding academies, we need better
popular education about network choices, we need to retool our leaders. But I don’t
think it’s a shortage of bolt-heads that will do us in. Rather, given the unique
pressures of what is ahead, I think it is our human side that may let us down. I’m
sure we’ll all be told in coming years that everything would be fine if we just let the
New Caste figures take over, with their bloodless technological tools. These
revolutionaries are a crucial part of the story of human progress, but they cannot
alone write the next chapters. I think, asked to run our government, they’d likely
end up like Plato’s pro-Spartan relatives in that awful dictatorship of the Thirty: A
crew of buddies convinced they can get things under control who become rapidly
overwhelmed by the human element, by wild network thumos and then reduced to a
murderous madness. They would use technology to manipulate our voting just as
they might manipulate our options for a new liver – or news or financial security.
“One of the reasons computer software is so abysmal is that it’s not designed at all,
but merely engineered,” the computer scientist Terry Winograd has written.
“Another reason is that implementers often place more emphasis on a programs
internal construction than its external design.” 271 This black-box temperament, the
sense of efficacy as a final value for code, of internal design, of closed control, is a
dangerous fit to the human business of free politics.
But to expect our current leaders to catch up? I fear this is also unlikely. It’s not
merely that they continue to wield the aging tools of industrial power with a strange
confidence. No, their failures – which don’t seem to faze them much – are less
dangerous than where they might yet succeed: Control, surveillance, the shredding
of liberty in the name of an elusive safety. These leaders are fascinated by how the
new tools might be used to extend the rule of a system that serves their interests,
that serves them. The fear that such tools might one day snap back upon them (or
us) is muted by ignorance and dulled by greed; by vision that does not extend much
beyond “What’s in this for me?” So we find our future not in our own hands, but
instead in the grip of two groups: One ignorant of networks; the other ignorant of
humanity. The only answer, then, is to educate ourselves. We need to cultivate a
sensibility that permits us to see through this manipulation; and then to act. The
instincts of technology and of history must emerge in our calculations now. What
will serve us best in a technical age is a sense of humanity that the old political
machines and the New Caste digital ones can’t match.
One of the most famous gates that Plato and Socrates drew around their imagined,
ideal and perfect republic was a kind of electric fence against, of all things, poets. As
Socrates explains in The Republic, poets “maim the thoughts of those who hear
them.” Poetry appeared to the philosophers as a pernicious force, an injection of
271 “One of the reasons”: Terry Winograd, Bringing Design to Software (New York:
ACM Press, 1996) p. 5
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passion and madness that sent the heart into spasms and pressed the mind to
distraction. This was about the last thing a new state needed. “Poetry mustn't be
taken seriously as a serious thing laying hold of truth,” Socrates warns. “The man
who hears it must be careful, fearing for the regime in himself.” Thus: Hesiod’s
magnificent Works and Days, banned. Homer, banned. There has always been, about
poetry, this sense of the magical, that it was a key to something intimately bound to
the human mystery. It was no surprise to me to find, when I went back to re-read
Turing’s “Can Machines Think?” essay, that the very first thing the great
mathematician dreamed up to ask a digital brain was: “Write me a sonnet.” Poetry
has always marked a test. Socrates and Plato gatekeep the poets out of their republic
because they know the mad part of the soul verse can touch. It is hard to blame
them. After all, they were among the earliest Western minds to try to dispel
madness and superstition and sophistry. Without their logic and effort there would
be no Aristotle, no science, none of the sense of our world as a comprehensible
machine. The confidence to philosophize – which for them meant also to poke at the
political wiring of our world – demanded the break from poetry and mysticism as a
source of action or legitimacy. Had they failed, we’d still be in the dark. But had they
completely succeeded? We’d hardly be human.
You know, as I’ve said, when I first moved to China, there were so many things that
baffled me. (There still are, to be honest.) But very high on that list was a peculiarity
of ancient Chinese political life. For thousands of years the greatest poets and
painters had also been emperors and politicians. Su Dongpo, for instance, the official
who turned the lake city of Hangzhou into one of the great cultural centers of human
history is also one of China’s best regarded poets. The calligraphy of the Qing
dynasty Mingzhen Emperor is marked with a temprament of transcendent delicacy.
It’s not merely that we’d never seriously expect a Western political figure to make
great art – or even to have interesting ideas or be able to write these days. It’s not
even that many of the most significant Chinese political documents are paintings of
mountains or rivers, that even letters from high officials are often rated as great art.
My first encounter with this strange mix, art and power mingled, produced a
predictable Western reaction: It’s amazing how many “Renaissance Men” China had, I
thought. These officials seemed to have mastered so many different talents. What I
did not understand was that these men had not, in fact, mastered many different
talents, at least not in any way I might understand it. They were not “Renaissance
Men”, but actually a different breed, operating on a deeper level. They had mastered
one skill. This was the cultivation of a finely-tuned inner energy – an instinct
powerful enough that it could be turned with equal ease to calligraphy or warfare.
This sort of effort took time. It demanded that knife-in-the-leg focus of Su Qin. And it
demanded faith that some sort of enlightenment would in fact take place. For this,
they had thousands of years of history as proof. Once this breakthrough to inner
knowledge happened, once they developed a fine sensitivity to the underlying force
of power, then they could tap into it for anything. Fighting wars. Counseling princes.
Fishing. Composing poetry.
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There is a lesson for us here, one that redounds onto Plato’s political question and
our own: Who should rule? We feel overwhelmed by our age. So much to master:
Fighting wars. Complex politics. Radically changing economics. New technologies
replacing old ones before we can understand them. The mastery of each of these will
not be achieved by dashing success in each. So we need to cultivate a single,
essential instinct here. A new temprament that I’ve called The Seventh Sense. And,
with that done, to fight the wars, write the poems, make the civilizations to confront
all that lies ahead. Our greatest hope in the race against the totalizing machines and
those who control them; our finest insurance for liberty and prosperity instead of
madness is not in technology. Our greatest weapon will not be our bombers our
drones or our financial strength. It will be in our own humanity. We have to accept
that we are going to be gated in all the ways we’ve seen: By speed, by AI, by the New
Caste. We’ll be torn apart by those new network dynamics, and placed on topologies
we can hardly understand. Our future fight is not about if we are going to be
enmeshed or not. It is about the terms of that enmeshment – and it is here that the
great questions of politics will be decided. And where the protection of the things
you love and care about will be braced against the crashing of an old order.
5.
Everything ahead of us will be political. We’ve established already: Connection
changes the nature of an object. What’s true for a phone or a medical device, a
weapon or an currency is true too for a vote. Or a citizen. The nature, the essence of
an object changes as a result of connectivity. It takes that old Platonic notion of an
“ideal” state and stretches it beyond what we’re fully capable of understanding. Our
puzzle is that while “we are what we are connected to,” it is also true that we don’t
fully know or understand just what those links are yet. At certain moments it seems
we’re linked to something miraculous, at others to a system of really instant
viciousness. And because we are all connected, changes in one part of the system
invariably redound elsewhere. An object seems miraculous one moment, violent the
next. This isn’t getting easier for us. We are, as we’ve seen, heading to an era where
the machines and the networks will have ever more, ever more decisive power,
largely because we’ve given it to them. We’d be wise to consider the lesson of
history here: Structures snap when bent by forces for which they are not prepared.
Those fast, hammering centuries that ran from the reformation to the scientific
revolution to the enlightenment to the industrial revolution were like this. The
redistribution of power and finance into the hands of the many demanded the
demolition of old structures, the ones mastered by a few. For one man to rule
millions with no reason other than birth made no sense anymore. The last six
centuries have been nothing but a tale of liberation, its price and its rewards. We are
more free now than we ever have been, in a sense. And, at this very same moment,
we are more enmeshed. Power is moving now from institutions and ideas built for
liberty to ones built for enclosure, for connection, for speed and for the beyondhuman
intelligence that complexity demands. This will snap our votes, our money
and our ideas with the same blunt efficiency the last revolution managed in Luther’s
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Wittenberg church, in the American and French revolutions, in the silent fatal
cracking of Ghandi’s India and Mandela’s South Africa.
We know that no political system that doesn’t match the power distribution of the
society it governs can endure. Feudal order could not survive the pressures of
liberty. Can democracy withstand the pressures of enmeshment, of massive
concentration of power, of artificial intelligences. Or will the slow, inefficient
reaction time of popular voting prove finally unequal to the complexity ahead of us
or too easy to manipulate? Writing of the Enlightenment, the historian Leon-Michel
Gambetta once explained that the goal of politics in the age of liberation and
questioning was, “to derive the political and social system from the idea of reason
rather than that of grace.” What to do now? In a world where we may need to derive
a political system girded by tools of AI or wired by fast-moving and emergent
networks, that can’t quite be derived from reason? What will the goal of politics be
then? When the first AI runs for President on a ticket of pure efficacy? Or perhaps
Democratic and Reblican candidates will debate who has the best AI. How will you
vote?
We need already to reevaluate the idea of citizenship. What is it for? And the state
too. To fit these roles into an age of liberation took centuries after Luther began the
reformation; we may have but decades to decide what they mean in an age of
enmsemhment. Does setting geographic and age criteria for voting still make sense?
One man one vote? Is there a better system to deal with complex issues? The
economists Daron Aceomoglu and James Robinson, in their magestirial study Why
Nations Fail marked success or collapse by these lines: Countries with “inclusive”
institutions which guarded both elites and society at large have historically fared
better than those (think of Russia or Latin America) that ran on “extractive” urges,
nations machined to secure the profits and serenity of the elites alone. But where to
fit our gated world into such an analysis, an era in which linked institutions benefit
both the gated and gatekeeper? Would you say such a system was extractive as it
sucks our data and habits and secrets into massive, opaque finance or machine
learning systems? Or inclusive because, after all, we’re enmeshed in a web of newly
found linked wealth: time, health, finance, information, security. Networks in so
many ways insist on fresh considerations of power. What sorts of network design is
likely to be most effective, most legitimate? Kant’s famous question of the 1780s –
“What is Enlightenment?” – is one we’ve not yet perfectly answered or resolved. The
new puzzle of “What is Enmeshment” is one we’re only beginning to consider now.
It too will take lifetimes to answer, and the debate will be decied in the collision of
ideas and institutions we can’t even dream of today with the structures of power
that tower around us now.
At least we can see already that we’ll need new ways to consider our future political
order, mashed through as it will be by connection, machines and hot human hopes
and fears. We’ll certainly face our own turning points as our institutions collapse or
calcify or (hopefully) redesign themselves in some modern version of Britain’s
bloodless 1688 Glorious Revolution, that ineffable moment when parliamentary
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power finally achieved real grip. Recall that important distinction between
“Predictive Learning” and “Representational Learning” – and how machines with a
deep representation outperformed the ones merely predicting, the difference
between recognizing a Mozart symphony and writing one? We ourselves need to
move now from predictive to representational views of our world. We need an
historical sense, of course. But something else too, that Seventh Sense I’ve been
writing about. So much of what lies ahead can’t, of course, be predicted by looking at
what has come before. And we won’t make this leap to a new representation of the
world around us with mere technology. That passage to a new, and subtle insight, to
a new instinct, demands wisdom.
There will be a point, several hundred years from now, when the answers to the
fundamental questions we now face will be decided. A new political order, tuned to
the power laws now visible with the Seventh Sense will emerge. Our question we
will often ask on that long passage is this: Can more and more technology bridge the
gap between the ideal society we might aim for and the troubled one we have? Or
might it crank that gap wider still? My sense is that the antidote to the machines and
their new logic is not, in the end to make ourselves more like the machines.
Encryption alone won’t protect our privacy. Mobility won’t assure our liberty. We
can’t keep up with the innovations, to be honest. So we have to go deeper. Our
protection will come from making ourselves more human, not just more technical.
We should consider the path Su Dongpo’s life suggest, the cultivation of an inner
instinct, and that this should touch on the very things that make us most human.
This means to make ourselves more political, more cultured, more aware of history
and ideas. Which problems do we solve with technology? Which ones with our own
hearts and minds? This choice, at least, is still before us.
Take a moment. Look at yourself. Feel yourself with the Seventh Sense. Through
each of us now will flow all the power of this new age. Yes, it can jack apart all our
old habits and fill the passage of our time with all the dangers of evil as we silently
watch terrible and fearful things appear from nowhere. But we can also wake up,
see the world accurately and then act with the confidence of knowing that we are,
each of us, the passage through with which the future will emerge. At the very
moment we might feel so many of our burdens lifted by technology, an old and
heavy one crashes down upon us. It is the burden of maintaining our liberty. Now,
you and me are, like it or not, what we are connected to.
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