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