and, later, crazy. In arguing that the Catholic Church, with all of its magnificent
trappings of faith, was really a useless toll gate, Luther was picking at a still larger,
more significant question: How should power be split? If Luther was right, and God
should be accessible directly to each of us, then some other questions tumbled after
that one. Should we have direct access to political power? To ideas? To money and
land and control of our own economic destiny? Could “from faith to faith,” be recast
as “from idea to idea” or “truth to truth” or – and this turned out to be the really
91 “When I came to the words”: Preserved Smith, The Life and Letters of Martin
Luther, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911) Introduction
67
violent shift – “from citizen to citizen as equals”? The Church was merely one of
many institutions that had sat massively, reliably, comfortably (and greedily)
between people and power.
Luther, it later emerged, was not alone. An era of awkward answers had begun. The
Prussian astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, for instance, had preceded Luther by a
couple of decades with his own questioning of the unquestionable. “Those who
know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the idea that the earth
remains at rest while the heavens move around it would regard it as an insane
pronouncement if I said the opposite,” he wrote. Machiavelli, Galileo, Erasmus, a
growing list of great, transformative names – they were all working away in this
same questioning spirit. Their insane pronouncements, when proven true, opened
the way to still further insights. The Enlightenment had begun. The old power
centers acted almost as if nothing had changed; maybe they believed nothing would
ever need to. “What was, still is,” the Catholic Church pronounced confidently (and
absurdly) at the Council of Trent in response to Luther’s Reformation. But there was
no turning back. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, the motto of the
era could best be summarized as: Dare to know! “The Enlightenment,” he explained,
“requires nothing but freedom.” 92
This, it emerged, was a hell of an expensive requirement.
4.
In the years after Luther’s 95 Theses, Europe was torn apart. The continent’s
longstanding image of power – balled up, concentrated, unquestioned – was ripped
away. Another picture emerged. The idea of personal access to God, a kind of “one
man, one prayer” approach to religion, which opened in turn other fundamental
struggles. The credibility of nearly every sacred body that had once depended on
controlling people and limiting their choices – the Church, those kings, feudalism,
myths – faced a creeping erosion. “Human knowledge and human power come to the
same thing,” the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon observed in the
midst of this shift in his artillery shell of a book The New Organum. Human
knowledge, he means, is human power. You can imagine the energy, the promise of
the book as it was passed in Latin copy to Kepler in his study in Linz (then Lintz), to
Gallileo in Venice a decade before his imprisonment. It was this same human power
to question even the most sacred ideas that the masses of Enlightenment Europe
would use, gleefully at times, to claw apart most of the old structures. 93 Luther’s
heresy led initially to the Wars of the Reformation, battles that pulled every
European royal family into a struggle between church and state, and then between
each other. The bloodletting of The Thirty Years War, the first truly pan-European
92 “The Enlightenment”: Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is
Enlightenment?” Kant: Political Writings, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991) p. 54
93 “Human knowledge”: Francis Bacon, The New Organon. Cambridge Texts in the
History of Philosophy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 32
68
conflict, established in its aftermath a new balance that let each King select the
religion of his subjects. Cuius regio, eius religio as the agreements of Westphalia
decided in 1648 – or Whose realm, whose religion. This produced some stability, but
not for long. You could read that line, after all, very personally and see what it
demanded next: My realm, my religion.
In a sense, this revolutionary tumult was necessary to pull power from a
comfortable, established asymmetric arrangement, in which a few people controlled
so much, and into something more symmetric. Luther’s Reformation thinking made
God directly, instantly accessible to anyone. (Just as Copernicus’ scientific way of
thinking gave us, eventually, the ability to question if God existed at all.) Individuals
– and the very birth of the idea of individualism was another heretical slap at the old
institutions – could balance and contend and argue as equals. The notion that men
were “created equal” became increasingly evident in this generation, even as
establishing that equality triggered the French Revolution, the American Civil War
and countless similar conflicts. Democratic systems aspired to enshrine this new
balance, shifting countries from rule-by-birth to rule-by-majorities. In economics,
markets reflected the new picture of power too. How good is that product? What is
the price? Is there demand? became the essential questions, not Which Lord controls
that field. Releasing power into the busy arms of businessmen, politicians, scientists
and artists meant ideas, politics and innovations contended one against the other.
They got better. They evolved. And the sum of all these interacting pieces made
sustained economic growth into a reality for the first time in history. In a
“commercial society,” Adam Smith explained in The Wealth of Nations, “Every man
lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant.” 94 Smith didn’t mean
everyone was really a merchant, rather that in a world of markets each of us – our
labor, our ideas, our capital – is a commodity. We are liberated, but only to compete.
For votes, for jobs, for resources.
If the old faiths and institutions couldn’t stand the pressures of these powerful,
equalizing forces, then new ones had to be built. “The scaffolds humans erect,” the
Nobel prize-winning economist Douglass North called these foundations. 95 The idea
of equality of influence or power – not merely opportunity – demanded new
containers: voting booths, congresses, unions. Rule of law was one of the most
urgently essential: a single code that could be laid down evenly across a society,
demanding that principles of order outweighed the habitual advantages of
prominence or power or birth. Law aspired to make men equal in front of courts.
This, in turn, suggested a new degree of fairness up and down the social order.
Broader literacy, the standardization of measurements or the birth of universal
credit and currencies were all tools for spreading access. Museums, scientific
congresses and industrial fairs helped turn sparks of theoretical knowledge into the
94 In a commercial society: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008) 32
95 “The scaffolds humans erect”: Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of
Economic Change, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010) 48
69
practical heat of industry. 96 Ever-more efficient use of iron, of steam, of electricity all
reflected a virtuous loop of theory and practice, between the lab and the market, the
scientist and the businessman.
This fusion of the instinct for competition, for constant new innovation, delivered
the modern world you and I live in today. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations,” Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1849 about the speed of this change, “are swept away.
All new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid,
melts into air.” 97 As more people “dared to know”, the big ideas and big thinkers
attracted an audience. Arguments started. New ways to record and share the
answers appeared too. Locke or Newton or Darwin were as notable for the crowd of
debating, curious citizens they attracted as for their ideas. Such contentious
discussions were designed to elicit truth, to give individuals that same shocking
sense Luther had felt on discovering a powerful idea by himself; but as important
was that these debates were recorded – written and then distributed in journals,
books and letters. For most of history, after all, knowledge suffered from its own
fragility and asymmetry: There was always a chance, maybe even a likelihood, that
some important insight would be lost in a plague, strangled as heretical, burnt up in
a library fire, or dissolved by some military misfortune. This is why, for instance, we
have almost all of Shakespeare and why we are missing so much of Sappho.
Widespread knowledge changed this. A solid, inarguable base endured. “If I have
seen further,” Newton famously wrote, “it is because I have stood on the shoulders
of giants.” Those shoulders for Netwon were enshrined in libraries, scientific
journals and the massive sense of what had come before swaddled in the Cambridge
walls that surrounded him. In this sense, the preservation and advance of
knowledge, the new symmetry, was not only the largest shift of power in history. It
was also the best thing that ever happened to the human race.
In other ways, of course, it was very nearly the worst. Symmetry had a darker edge.
It meant that nations decided the strategic questions of the day by throwing
massive, deadly power at one another in unprecedented volume. With each passing
year, Europe’s engines of science and industry were grinding out tools of
unprecedented destruction. Napoleon’s greatest victories were enabled as much by
the industrial strength of French artillery factories as by the liberated masses of the
French revolution. When France was unseated by the British Empire, it was
manufacturing scale and naval depth that tipped the balance. London’s clubby
mastery was, in turn, challenged by Germany’s efficient, iron-and-blood commercial
engines. Size and scale and safety became linked. This sense of the undeniable
power of industrial mass was Winston Churchill’s only comfort for two nervous,
lonely years after 1939 as he paced the hours until what he hoped was America’s
entry into The Second World War. “I knew that the United States was in the war, up
96 Museums, scientific congresses: Joel Mokyr, “The Intellectual Origins of Modern
Economic Growth”, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, No. 2 (June 2005) p 290
97 “All fixed, fast-frozen relations” Karl Marx and Freiderich Engels, “The
Communist Manifesto,” in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the
Communist Manifesto (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1988) 212
70
to the neck and in to the death,” he wrote the day after Pearl Harbor. “Hitler's fate
was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground
to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming
force.” 98 Or, the reverse of that coin: Admiral Yamamoto grimly to Emperor
Hirohito: “If you tell me that it is necessary that we fight, then in the first six months
to a year of war against the U.S. and England I will run wild, and I will show you an
uninterrupted succession of victories. I must tell you also that, should the war be
prolonged for two or three years, I have no confidence in our ultimate victory.” 99
Ground to a powder. This was symmetry at its most pounding and decisive. Mass
against mass. This was a picture of power that seemed undeniable in its pure logic.
Until now.
So how should we think about power in our own age? What picture best captures its
vibrant, unceasing demands?
It might be tempting now, as a first pass, to say we’ve left that world of purely
symmetric, mass-against-mass power behind. After all, a few figures, anywhere in
the system, can exert massive and even fatal, collapsing pressure. One clever hacker,
one terrorist, one hedge fund manager with a bad idea, even one purely accidental
mis-connection – never before has so much power accumulated in systems so
vulnerable to single slips. And our massive power – the US Army or our economy –
is hardly decisive despite its weight. It seems now that something can grow bigger
and weaker. A nation may have an ever-larger GDP, but if it is miswired somehow, if
its social or legal or youthful connections misfire a bit, then it may be still more
vulnerable. But this “power of a pinprick” asymmetry is not the whole story. Just
when the network looks like a way to tie together all sorts of small, even isolated
forces and bless them with decisive power, we notice something else. Tremendous,
even historic and undeniably massive concentrations of power. Platforms like
Facebook, software systems like Microsoft or search centers like Google are sort of
dense, impossible-to-replace gold mines. Google answers questions for more than
50% of the world every day. Is it the most powerful company in human history? Is
Facebook? And is their power widely distributed? Or is it concentrated in the
algorithms and cloud data of these firms? Anyhow, they are among the first of a
totally new species of firm.
The leap we have to make in understanding our networked age – and by this I don’t
just mean the Internet, but really any connected system you’d care to consider –
begins with this idea: On connected systems, power is defined by both profound
concentration and by massive distribution. It can’t be understood in simple either/or
terms. Power and influence may yet become even more concentrated than it was in
5.
98 “Hitler’s fate was sealed”: Winston Churchill, The Second World War: The Grand
Alliance, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986) 540
99 Or the reverse of that coin: Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and
Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 349–353.
71
feudal times and more distributed than it was in the most vibrant democracies.
Network power, we might say, exists as a sort of skin or surface that ties together
billions of points to each other and to vital, centralized cores. We know our world is
filling with more and better and faster connected devices distributing themselves at
an unmeasureably quick pace; but we are also breeding powerful centralized
knowledge and computing basins. Biological research labs now engage in complex
DNA analysis with powerful desktop tools (distribution), but to work efficiently,
they demand fast reference to the patterns revealed only in immense genetic
datasets (concentration). You can snap high quality videos with your phone
(distribution); you share them with millions on a connected central stage like
Facebook or YouTube (concentration). A financial engineer can architect a new and
profitable trading instrument on his tablet (distribution), but his hopes for profit
depend on instant connection to busy, price-setting markets were prices are set
(concentration.)
This sort of pulling, taffy-like web of ties between small (your watch) and big
(connected data systems) stretches constantly. It’s what you need to picture when
you think of an image of network power. The wired masses in Tahrir square, for
instance, emerge like magic on some once-invisible surface that forms between their
phones and powerful platforms like YouTube. Or: Hyper-linked terrorist groups
appear from nearly nowhere, jerking recruits from suburban London bedrooms via
massively connected messaging platforms. Recall Adam Smith’s line about the
Enlightenment, how a commercial society was one in which every man had to
become a merchant? Well, in our age of connection, every one of us is a node. We sit
on that tense, stretched surface between center and periphery. When we say
“connection changes the nature of an object,” this is the exact balance we have to
comtemplate. “Social structures,” John Padgett and Walter Powell wrote in their
masterful study of complex connected systems, The Emergence of Organizations and
Markets, “should be viewed more as vortexes in the flow of social life than as
buildings of stone.” 100 This idea has some eerie implications: Every structure –
congresses, universities, the company where you work, our minds even – is merely a
temporary collection of relations. And of course those relations can change at any
moment. The tension between concentration and distribution acts, in a sense, like
an hydraulic jaw. It pries power out of older, once-legitimate hands.
Consider the case of my father, a cardiologist. As a doctor he stands at the head of a
medical tradition run for thousands of years on the idea that the doctor is the center
of your care. If you show up at a hospital on a stretcher with a flat-line on some
heart monitor, my father’s decades of training and practice have always been your
best hope. But today, nearly every patient he sees – even the ones he brings back
from their black flat-line future – second-guesses him as soon as he’s out the door:
Googling their disease, tapping into websites of mixed reliability, joining some
online community of people with the same sickness while they still have tubes in
their nose. Meanwhile, his ideas about your case are under quickening pressure: An
100 Padgett and Powell, p. 8
72
emerging “Internet of DNA”, massive collections of treatment histories, or linked
databases of medical histories will be overseen by machine intelligences able to outdiagnose
him. 101 Constant, automatic links between body-borne sensors we’ll wear
(or swallow) and data centers will sharpen the edge these systems have on my dad
further still in coming years. They will notice things he could never hope to see –
small but portentous changes in your heartbeat, chemical chimeras from new
medications, how you’re feeling in each moment until your last.
It is the nature of networks that they create both massive concentration and
distribution. And in the process they simply rip apart many of our existing
structures. Look at our worrisome global economics at the moment. Extreme
concentration of wealth on one end and massive distribution of work tools to evercheaper
sources of labor runs on this exact same logic: it is a sort of jawing network
effect that is tearing up the middle class, producing an ever-richer elite. Those who
have information in financial markets, for instance, possess a secret and vital and
ever sharper edge over those who don’t. Which makes them richer still. Which
sharpens their cutting edge still finer. If we ask ourselves why the world now feels
on the edge of a deflationary shock – a moment where there is more supply than
there is demand, where the world waits to buy because “tomorrow it will be
cheaper” and sends economies spiraling as a result – one reason is this way in which
networks are pulling on our economics. On the one hand, wealth is concentrated in
fewer and fewer hands by the leverage of knowledge and a head start and
connection – a phenomenon known, in fact, as a “rich club” distribution by network
theorists. The middle class is locked out of this group. Their wealth and power and
influence declines, as a result. This slashes overall demand, since a billionaire
consumes less of each additional dollar than, say, a school teacher. At the same time,
massive distribution of technology and connection is reducing demand for labor
while flooding the world with commodities, workers, newly linked-supply of items
like bedrooms and car seats.
The network effect works its usual jawing destruction here: Connection decreases
demand and increases supply. It concentrates capital in a few hands, even as it
distributes tools of work to cheaper and more distributed people and machines. The
middle is class torn inexorably apart from both ends. It’s not wrong to wonder, as
some economists have, if capitalism is a system best yoked to older, slower
puritanical values that encouraged saving, not consumption – and to ask if wiring
markets to instant networks is not, in the end like trying to warp speed a carriage.
Anyhow placing an economy on a network surface produces new, ripping pressures
as apparent in middle-income nations as they are in middle class households. “We
are being destroyed,” a South Korean friend said to me about the hollowing out of
his national economy. Korean computer and television and compute manufacturers
had hoped they could develop their own essential software, that their hardware
manufacturing technology would be unmatchable. In fact, software triumph was
101 Meanwhile, his ideas about your case: I. Akyildiz, Pierobon, M.
Balasubramaniam, S. Koucheryavy, Y., "The internet of Bio-Nano things,"
Communications Magazine, IEEE , vol.53, no.3, pp.32-40, March 2015
73
drifting to cores in Silicon Valley and Redmond – a contest between Microsoft and
Apple and Google. And the prized Korean manufacturing excellence was no match
for cheap Chinese and then Vietnamese labor welded to assembly-line technology.
We see this pattern of network-led shredding nearly everywhere now, the result of
powerful cores of knowledge and wide distribution of connection. Newspapers –
removed from relevancy by crowd-sourced newsfeeds and constantly-connected
smart databases. Once indomintable television networks, devoured by cheap homemade
videos and large-scale platforms that use the Internet for distribution. Bitcoin
and other first-generation block-chained currencies eating at the once
unquestionable authority of central banks. Drones hovering along on a skein of GPS
and data links are also among the new citizens of this connected skein. They are
products of a data web: They depend on centralized connection and the distribution
of technology, data, and design. They may do to old ideas of security and power
what the fusion of GPS and smart phones and databases have done to hotel chains or
medicine. Massed, self-organized drone fleets can turn aircraft carriers and exposed
battle groups from sources of strength into vulnerable and even dangerously selfdefeating
antiques. They will remake urban landscapes. Think of the way that Baron
Hausman redesigned Paris in the 18 th Century to manage with the Enlightement-age
danger of liberated, angry citizens. The creation of the city’s wide boulevards,
central axes for easy movement of the police, and intersections engineered to
quarantine riots was a reaction against the demands of mass liberty. Our cities are
now vulnerable not simply to mass protest risk, but to the pinch of asymmetric
levitating drones. The sensations of safety behind walls, up a staircase, inside a
windowed room all begin to slip away. Drone risk – and all the potentially
wonderful elements of constant, instant drone assistance – will command a
retooling of cities, much as automobiles did a century ago.�
So this is power: Cores and distribution. They way that tension pulls particularly on
certain, once-essential structures and objects and people explains a lot about our
age – including the failure of so many institutions. Connectivity changes the nature
of an object. That’s true for your doctor, your bank account, your army – and for
billions of people whose lives alter irreversibly once they connect to markets, to
knowledge, to the world. To connect now is to be exposed to this fresh young skin of
linked power, a lively surface that transports anything at near instant speed. We
have to ask just how many of the “scaffolds humans erect” that were essential for
Enlightenment-era advances will be pulled down. And of course we face the exciting,
uneasy task of thinking up the new scaffolds we now must build.
If you have the tools or the skill to see the world this way, as a vibrating and pulling
mesh of connections, then you can look at a tanks or soldiers or years of stability
and see possibility. A friend who controls the largest secure Bitcoin vault in the
world, put it to me once this way: “Platforms mattered once; now it is protocols.” His
point was that the pipes and rules connecting the varied systems of our world affect,
fundamentally, the distribution of power. The rules of the Bitcoin blockchain or the
implications of a protocol like IPv6 or DNSSSEC reveals something about how we’ll
all connect in the future. Once these new rules become visible to you, then even the
74
most inarguable current sources of influence and control – the US Dollar, say – look
weak. The Seventh Sense is defined first by an intuitive feeling for just how power is
being re-geared now. If you look at a kid with a phone and think “Strong”, you have
the Seventh Sense. If you look at an angry, barely educated terrorist wannabe and
think, “Junior Varsity”, you don't. And as a result you may be about to have a very
unpleasant surprise.
Try this: Ball up your right hand and hold it in front of you; now take your left hand
and open the fingers and hold it a few inches away with your fingers pointing back
towards the right. You can think of your left hand as the vibrating, living network of
connection – reaching towards the concentrated power that your right hand
represents. This is the heart of understanding our age. Networks live in that tension
between distribution and concentration. To connect any object – my dad, a
newspaper, a radio-controlled plastic drone – to this skein is to change, irrevocably,
its essence. The reason the legitimacy of old leaders is failing, the reason our
strategy is incoherent, the reason our age really is revolutionary, is that they are all
sitting in the midst of these pulling, powerful forces. We should steel ourselves for
the shredding imminence of this violence . But also – and you know this already, I
think – we must prepare ourselves for the possibility of immense construction.
Network power does not only pull apart. It also creates.
This paradox confused me, to be honest, for a long time. Power is, manifestly,
concentrated with astonishing efficiency now. And it is more widely dispersed than
ever too. We can stare at this difference, this strange polar tension and baffle
ourselves as we try to figure out just how and why it moves. The best way of
understanding this, I finally concluded, requires a cognitive leap, perhaps, over our
usual Western way of understanding the world as either “a” or “b”, as either
“distributed” or “concentrated”, and into a view of how opposites might ceaselessly
balance into a whole. Not “a” or “b” but “a” and “b” at the same time.
Let me tell you what I mean: In 1132 the Song Dynasty that had ruled China for
nearly 200 years collapsed in the face of an invasion by wild Manchurian soldiers
from the northern plains. The Song leadership – along with its best minds and
cultural figures – fled south from Beijing for a thousand miles, until they were safely
on the opposite bank of the Yangtze River. They settled in a lakeside city we know
today as Hangzhou. In those days Hangzhou was known as Lin’An, which might best
be translated as “Gazing at Peace.” The little town must have seemed to the Song
leaders a perfect respite from the horror and war they had left behind. The city lay
then, as it still does, along side XiHu or West Lake, a tranquil and horizon-filling
stretch of water framed by rolling hills and tea plantations. The famous poet and
statesman Su Dongpo later compared gazing at the lake to looking at a beautiful
woman – that same fused sense of calm, peace and astonishment you might feel
while considering the object of your own love. Stilled water is regarded in Chinese
culture – you may recall from Lake Tai Hu where Master Nan set his campus –as a
reservoir of yin energy. Song leaders had fled the angry yang energy of invasion for
the yin peace of the south. Yin energy is associated with calm, femininity, fertility.
Yang expresses action, violence, creation. Yang is the thunderstorm; Yin is the peace
75
that comes afterwards, as the crops absorb water and grow. The idea of a balance of
yin and yang is among the oldest in Chinese philosophy. “When heaven and earth
were formed, they divided into yin and yang,” the Huainanzi, one of China’s greatest
political texts explains. “Yang is generated from yin and yin is generated from yang.”
Hangzhou became a capital of yin. It produced perhaps some of the greatest Chinese
philosophy and poetry and art. Greatness emerged from that stillness – and, even
today, to sit by West Lake and drink a cup of the Dragon Well tea produced on the
nearby hillsides is to have every one of your senses flooded by tranquility.
That yin-yang balance gives us, in a sense, a way to understand that split power on a
network by seeing it is not, really, split. Network power is energetic and wild at the
ends, with all the creative energy of a world filled with devices, empowered human
dreams, and the violent slips of old balances. Yang. But at the center it is dense, still,
even quiet with the silently cranking algorithms of massively concentrated power.
The computer science pioneer Claude Shannon saw information in 1949 as wild,
uncertain, and pulsing with the instability of an entropic system. Yang. The machine
architect Norbert Weiner, writing at nearly the same moment in 1948, saw the
digital age differently – as an expression of stability and structure. Yin. 102 His vision
for a digital order, what he called “cybernetics,” emerged from the Greek concept of
kibernetes – the orderly steering of a ship through sometimes chaotic waters.
We now know: the humming webs around us are both. They are ordered and
structured. 103 Good and evil. Power in this connected age is concentrated and
distributed. Each feeds the other. The crops need the thunderstorm; the
thunderstorm feeds from the heat radiated off the land. Or: The yang violence of the
Manchurian wars bred the conditions for the yin renaissance in Hangzhou. The
massive distribution of connected points creates revolutions, economic disruption,
crackling innovation. But it also creates a need for more centralization, more
agreement on protocols or platforms. This idea of opposites balancing into a whole
is not unique to Chinese civilization. You can find it too in ancient Greek or Roman
tradition. Heraclitis, for instance, insisting, “All things are one.” Or in the view that
there can be no love without hate, no stillness without chaos, no beauty without the
unbeautiful and fortunately – as we’re about to see – no destruction without
creation.
102 The computer science pioneer: See D. Bawden and L. Robinson, “Waiting for
Carnot”: Information and Complexity. Journal of the Association for Information
Science and Technology, 66: 2177–2186; Norbert Wiener Cybernetics, or control and
communication in the animal and the machine (New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons,
1948); Warren Weaver, “Science and complexity”, American Scientist, 36(4), 536
103 They are ordered: Carlos Gershenson, Péter Csermely, Peter Erdi, Helena
Knyazeva, and Alexander Laszlo,“The Past, Present and Future of Cybernetics and
Systems Research”, arXiv:1308.6317v3, 23 Sept 2013
76
Chapter Five:
Fishnet
In which we learn why networks spread so quickly.
1.
In 1959 a young aeronautical engineer named Paul Baran, who had been working at
Howard Hughes’ aircraft design factory in Los Angeles, arrived for his first day at
work at a low-slung, modern building along the Santa Monica beach in California.
RAND – a stylish 1950’s acronym for Research & Development – had been
established by the US Air Force with an ambitious aim: How might the best minds of
math and science be bent to the purpose of winning the Cold War? RAND was a
dream destination for many researchers, offering a fusion of patriotism, technology
and California sun. The place became known for a relaxed, intellectual atmosphere –
an energy of open creativity that belied the dangerous, nuclear-tipped problems
sitting inside its locked safes and eager minds. Shortly after settling in, Baran was
given one of the most troubling, deeply secret of these puzzles.
The Cold War was then in its early days. The debate over how to manage an age
when it was, for the first time, possible for humans to destroy the planet was
colored still by fresh memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was charged too with
the fear of communist expansion, not an unreasonable worry for Americans who
had just fought a world war against two other, dangerously totalitarian forces. A
cold fear lingered in the minds of many citizens and military planners: Given a
window of vulnerability, might the USSR loose a fast nuclear attack? Avoiding such a
risk became a primary concern of American diplomacy and defense thinking,
particularly in the establishment of some sort of deterrent to a Soviet attack.
Moscow had to know, and trust, that any attempt to strike-first would be met with a
devastating reply. “The chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win
wars,” the nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie wrote in a 1946 memo. “From now on
its chief purpose must be to avert them.” 104 Deterrence rested on this hope that the
USSR would be persuaded not to launch a snap-strike because of the certainty of a
nation-levelling reply. This logic, this “balance of threat” depended in turn on
America’s ability to launch such a strike. If the Soviets could wipe out America’s
ability to respond, then Moscow’s leaders might move first, snap of America’s claws,
and then pick the world apart at their leisure. If Krushchev’s famous, mocking
dangerous ”We will bury you!” line from 1956 really meant what it said, then such a
move would provide an awfully convenient first shovel.
In the late 1950s, when Baran arrived at RAND, the Cold War was at its chilliest and
one of the most carefully guarded American secrets was this: If the USSR attacked,
104 “The chief purpose of our military”: Bernard Brodie, “The Weapon: War in the
Atomic Age and Implications for Military Policy,” in Brodie Ed, The Absolute Weapon:
Atomic Power and World Order, (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1946) 76
77
there might be no response. The US, with its priceless collection of bombers and
missiles and million-man army, could not strike back for the simple reason that the
nation’s field officers would have no way to talk to each other, or to commanders in
Washington. The military radio and telephone systems America depended on for her
safety would not likely endure an initial Soviet strike. This was the problem Baran
had been told to solve.“At the time we didn’t know how to build a communication
system that could survive even collateral damage by enemy weapons,” he recalled
later. RAND determined through computer simulations that the AT&T Long Lines
telephone system, a copper web that carried essentially all the nation’s military
communications, would be cut apart by relatively minor physical damage. 105
The military had spent, already, a fortune on the problem. (They had spent half a
fortune, it turned out, trying to hide it.) The result was an expensively designed,
gorgeously featured telephone network linking military bases to strategic command
posts. But because the lines and their switching centers were laced out in a pattern
with just a few big central nodes, like a bicycle wheel with spokes, it had almost no
chance of surviving the very thing it was designed to help prevent, a Soviet strike. If
you gazed at an inked-out map of this network, with its central hub staffed by senior
commanders and then radiating lines out to bases and missile silos, it even looked,
well, like a target. If the USSR could bullseye those hubs with a bomb or two, the rest
of the network would fold. The Soviets could do whatever they wanted: Invade
Berlin, roll into France, obliterate Los Angeles. America’s military would be deaf.
And as Soviet missiles became more accurate, this seemed an inevitability. “We will
soon be living in an era,” Baran wrote, “in which we cannot guarantee survivability
of any single point.”
The situation, as a carefully screened handful of scientists at RAND knew, was in fact
even more perilous. Shortly before Baran arrived at RAND, scientists testing
hydrogen bomb designs in the Pacific discovered that radiation from their
explosions fuzzed communications for hundreds of miles. A Soviet attack, even if it
105 “At the time”: There is a fair amount of debate about this question of if the
Internet design was intended for survivability or if some other systemic need – such
as linking research institutions – accounted for the distributed architecture that
emerged. See, for instance, Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, et al, “A Brief History of
the Internet”, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 39 Issue 5,
October 2009, 22-31. However, an examination of primary source documents shows
the evolution of Baran’s thinking clearly and produces documentary evidence for
the origins of the problem he and various figures at RAND were aiming to solve.
Others arrived at the packet switching model, but it is clear Baran’s path to the
design emerged from the security problems he was considering. For much of the
information here see “Oral History: Paul Baran” Interview #378 for the IEEE History
Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (Available online);
Paul Baran, “On Distributed Communications I: Introduction to Distributed
Communications Networks,” United States Air Force Project RAND (August, 1964);
Baran “On Distributed Communications XI: Summary Overview,” United States Air
Force Project RAND (August, 1964)
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missed those crucial, central AT&T nodes, would still reduce American military
communications to a bunch of hissing, empty phones. “Our communications were so
vulnerable,” Baran said, “that each missile base commander would face the dilemma
of either doing nothing in the event of a physical attack, or taking action that would
mean an all out irrevocable war.” You could, uneasily, picture the moment of
decision: Some Colonel alone in his bomb-laden plane over Europe or deep in some
cornfield missile silo wondering “Launch or not?”. This was a horrifying possibility.
Baran began to ask: Was there some other way to send a counter-strike signal?
There was a sense of life-saving preciousness in such a setting about connectivity
itself. To hold it, manage it, protect and control it – in the face of the extreme
pressures of a nuclear balance, such connection marked the difference between
safety and catastrophe.
2.
You can, at the heart of many revolutions, find the warm hints of human psychology
pressing out. This is the roiling, unscratchable instinct for change that marks a really
revolutionary temperament – and that often is the only sort of personality that can
imagine and then deliver a solution to impossible problems. Conservatives like
things as they are, even if “as they are” is sometimes broken or dysfunctional or
dangerous. Revolutionaries are different. They don’t seem to choose their role. They
have a vision for how the world ought to be, a vibrating and instinctive picture of
power, and driven by passion or anger or faith or some wild genius, they chase that
vision relentlessly, even into madness. If they are lucky, however, they live in an age
where their crazy hopes catch onto some larger human hunger. Khomeini worried
that the Shah would never fall. Lenin was preparing to abandon revolutionary
politics in 1916. Jobs was told the iPhone could never be built as he wished. Then, in
an instant, revolution.
We might ask: What set Martin Luther on his revolutionary course to demand
instant access to God? Luther would tell you that his first inspiration had come to
him one night in the summer of 1505, while he was walking home in a
thunderstorm, when a lightning bolt landed a foot or two away. 106 Luther had been
struggling for years with an inner battle, with a tension between his faith and what
it demanded of him. Then, when that lightning cracked free from the storm, a
sensation of total terror was replaced by a new feeling. The nearness and power of
God snapped past him in that moment. It clarified everything. He dropped his law
studies the next day and within a year he was an Augustinian monk, preaching –
often hundreds of sermons a year, ever angrier, ever clearer – about the closeness of
God, the real, tangible, bolt-from-the-blue passage of faith to faith. He was totally,
completely converted.
106 Luther would tell you: Albert Beutel “Luther’s Life” in Ed. Donald K. McKim, The
Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003) 4
79
Long before Paul Baran dreamed up the networks that were required to solve the
“deaf, dumb and blind bomber pilot” challenge, he lived through the sort of moment
that left an indelible psychological mark – one that remains visible in the revolution
he made, as Luther’s lightning-bolt of faith is in the unadorned churches and simple
liturgy of Lutheranism. Baran was born in Grodno, Poland in 1928. His father had an
uneasy sense about what was coming to Europe and he moved the family to America
when Paul was six. Pesach Baran became Paul Bran in America, a model student, a
prize-winning mathematician and eventually at Hughes and Rand he established
himself as one of the great American engineers of his generation. And like so many
refugees of that era, the sharp, irreversible exodus left him with a question. How,
exactly, to stay connected – to family, to tradition, to history? As the murderous mist
of Nazism swept over Europe, the problem took on a searching urgency: How to
maintain a connection, any connection, in the face of utter catastrophe? As he neared
retirement decades later, Baran recalled his life’s work with this resonant line: “I
was concerned,” he said, “with survivability.” The problem that animated his life as
much as it did his networks.
Two years after arriving at RAND, Baran began to discern the outlines to a solution
to the dangerous problem of American military communications. In a series of
lectures for Air Force officers starting in the summer of 1961, Baran began working
his way towards an answer, speech by speech and equation by equation. He didn’t
fully know where he was heading when he began the talks, he said, but he had an
instinct that some other design must be out there, some completely fresh way to
handle the “survivability problem” and by the end of his lecture tour, he had found
it.
Baran’s new design for a durable network had begun with an idea that didn’t work.
The Pentagon, he’d thought, might broadcast thousands of coded messages over AM
radio frequencies all at once as an attack approached. “We interrupt this program to
say: It’s Christmas in July!” Missile silo commanders and bomber commanders
would cluster by their transistor radios, collecting a “launch” code with the ease of
listning to a late-night baseball game. That target-shaped, “Just Aim Here” web of
phone lines would be replaced by something far more distributed, harder to wipe
out with a single Semyorka-7 missile shot. But this approach had problems too. It
relied fatally on broadcast towers and on insecure AM radio waves. But the idea of
such a widespread, insidiously untargettable network got Baran thinking. Sending
out the messages and letting them find their own way had a lot of appeal, if it could
be done. There would be no central hubs. Information would sail over linked lines in
the way radio signals moved in the air. Military communications, in Baran’s system,
would bounce from point to point on this tapestry, at each stop being re-directed
towards their intended destination. The resulting network, if you drew it out, would
look like a fishnet: Lots of links connected to a few knotted nodes. And because the
bundles of data, Baran called them packets, could be moved by the network itself,
you could cut or nuke or sabotage the net in a few places and still use it. The packets
would would find another path. Even a badly ripped up and irradiated network
could, in theory, carry a “launch” – or a recall – message safely from the White House
to a bomber pilot.
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“The early simulations,” Baran recalled, “showed that after the hypothetical network
was 50% instantly destroyed, the surviving pieces of the network reconstituted
themselves within a half a second.” That was a way of saying that his messages were
finding new routes on the network even after huge parts of the system had been
taken off line. And they were doing it nearly instantly. Better still, as he began to
model these fishnet, “distributed” networks, Baran discovered that they were not
only capable of surviving attack, they were also incredibly efficient. “If built and
maintained at a cost of $60 million (1964 Dollars),” he calculated, his design would,
“handle the long distance telecommunications within the Department of Defense
that was costing the taxpayer about $2 billion a year.”
Baran travelled the country for most of 1961 and 1962, classified presentation and
slide-rules in hand, trying to persuade skeptical generals, engineers and other
scientists. It was, he found, a nearly impossible task. He recalled a visit to the
towering AT&T switching headquarters on Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan. It
was,an implacable temple of the high-priests of hub-and-spoke network design.
That one building handled more telephone and telex traffic than nearly any other
single point on earth. Surely the place was very high on the USSR first-strike list for
exactly that reason. So Baran expected a friendly reception. After all, he’d be telling a
bunch of men with a uranium death sentence that he’d found a way to get them off
the Soviet target list. His new “mesh” network would mean that bombing AT&T
would be largely pointless. It wouldn’t blind US commanders. If only they’d redesign
their network, the AT&T engineers might save their own lives. They thought he was
insane.
“I tried to explain packet switching to a senior telephone company executive. In midsentence
he interrupted me, “ Baran recalled. “The old analog engineer looked
stunned. He looked at his colleagues in the room while his eyeballs rolled up,
sending a signal of his utter disbelief. He paused for a while, and then said, ‘Son,
here’s how a telephone works….’” Of course Paul Baran knew how a telephone
worked. You jacked one point to a switch to another point. That was the problem.
This was why AT&Ts design would be absolutely useless in the face of the
catastrophe he’d been told to prevent. Baran was, nerve and blood and bone, as an
analyst, and even as a refugee perhaps, alive with the imperative of survivability, of
how connection might mean the difference between war and peace. Those morons
in the AT&T building? What the hell could they be worrying about?
But it wasn’t just that $2 billion annual check from the US Defense Department those
wizened phone wizards were seeing vanish in Baran’s fishnet, it was a whole way of
thinking. The AT&T scientists wanted to control the addresses, the routes, the
timing of messages from the center. This sort of authoritarian design appeared more
efficient to them; perhaps it was even more psychologically comfortable since it
matched their own experience of being commanded and controlled. Karl Wittfogel,
the historian who identified the water totalitarians of ancient China or Egypt, would
have recognized them: Switch Despots! “We had arrived at a conceptual impasse,”
Baran reflected with the mild confidence of a man who knows he will eventually
81
win. He moved onto the next stop. Same result. And the next. Same result. Eventually
Baran’s engineering colleagues back at RAND were so affronted by the routine
dismissal of his logic that they spoke up. They had seen the classified briefings. They
knew just how easily the nation could be hobbled – and their Santa Monica building
was surely on some target list somewhere too. RAND’s scientists demanded a
detailed, critical study of the “distributed network model”. By the time they were
finished, the Air Force was preparing to begin construction.
Survivability. Plucked from that impossible looking puzzle was the first honestly
distributed network. You can sense the power of this inversion: A network with no
central control, survivable, uncuttable. The earliest large network built on the
Baran’s principles became known as ARPANET, the Advanced Research Project
Agency NETwork – a mesh of connections that, even today, serves as the backbone
for parts of the Internet. Even with the risk of nuclear war (hopefully) long gone,
packet switching networks of one sort or another still account for most of the data
moving in the world. Think of how true, how heat-hardened and useful an idea must
be to endure more than fifty years of technological change. And all the efficiencies
Baran first predicted 50 years ago on his slide rules are still at work. Every time you
make a call, share a video or ask a machine to think for you, that whole transaction
likely takes place through fishnet routed packets. If we had stayed with that old
AT&T model, we’d be living in a different world. Riots would be flipped off with a
single switch. Data flows would be monitored with the ease of watching a subway
turnstile. The far flung, wild creativity of our plug-and-play connected world would
be stilted, stifled. Each additional connection to the system would demand
bureaucratic central approval by the Switch Despots, concerned more with their
own power more than their survival. Instead, we have a slice-resistant mesh that
has grown by a billion times over, with its original architecture largely intact.
Packet switched systems such as the Internet mean that anyone with some string
and an ability to tie knots (which, in tech-speak, is anyone with some blinking fiber
optics and a TCP/IP connection) can add themselves into the global web. They can
connect. They can share. Practically, this is why you can so easily snap your phone
or tablet on and touch, more or less instantly, a whole world of data. Every minute
now an additional 10,000 devices are connected to the Internet. Medical tools,
Bitcoin mines, airplane diagnostic systems – and of course wired citizens, smartphones
and laptops and tablets. This ease of connection is an implicit part of a
Seventh Sense worldview. Anyone can connect. It’s as fundamental as Luther’s “Let
anyone can speak to God.” Or Kant’s “Dare to know.” When someone says “Why
would anyone want to share photos with the world?” or “Why would you ever hand
your DNA over?” they are missing the point that many objects now are only
complete or useful once they’re connected. When we say “connection changes the
nature of an object” we’re nodding towards the idea that constant connection is
almost a kind of right�for devices and programs and people. Anyhow, it is certainly
a kind of yearning.
When we described network power as stretched between distribution and
concentration, we should understand too that it is this design of Baran’s that
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permits the easy spread and accumulation of links.Terror cells or social networks or
financial markets all lay out in this fashion. Wide-open, convenience-making links
are expanding, and they serve as a kind of global nervous system, more sensitive
with each passing generation. These lines of connection run two ways, of course:
Networks permit any of us to connect to nearly anywhere, and to unimaginable
technological power. But, at the same time, the world connects back to us. Wired
jihadis and currencies and bio bits – they’re all tied in with us too. So yes: We’re
murdering the exotic with our data connections and machines and discount plane
flights. Should we be surprised when, from time to time now, the exotic shows up
and murders us right back?
We’ve seen, now, the way in which that pulling connection between center and
periphery – that tension of our network – pulls apart old structures. And this is the
first, urgent Seventh Sense understanding: Connection changes the nature of an
object by placing it on this tense mesh. Connect a patient, a doctor, a flying machine,
a currency – each is twisted and changed as a result. Some become great. Others
snap, never to be rebuilt. Some adjust, painfully. The pulling network action
accounts for our greatest new fortunes but also the tumbling of old ideas and
institutions. This is why our age is so uneasy. This is also part of the picture of
network power we have to keep in mind, the image of a stretched skein plucking
apart old structures. Baran’s fishnet grows, it locks everything it touches into a new
structure, one that resists the “arrest the usual suspects” sort of interruption. We’ve
said: Connection changes the nature of an object. To be connected to a Baran-style
system instead of a brush-cut 1950’s AT&T system makes a difference.
The connected devices themselves are constantly improving. Back in Baran’s day,
dozens of scientists counted themselves lucky to share a single computer. A few
decades later, the PC revolution gave everyone their own machine. And now, of
course, we each have many computers in our lives: phones, wired TVs, computers.
Because of connection, we have access to thousands of such devices in data
centers. 107 We can touch them in an instant, a fusion of software and hardware and
connection that we are starting to know lean on as “everyware.” This now
commonplace magic was formalized back in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of the
founding engineers at Intel, who noticed the rather amazing fact that since the
introduction of integrated chips in 1959, the number of transistors on each tiny chip
had been doubling every two years. 108 It seemed hard to imagine this pace could
endure, but then it did and does, something known as Moore’s Law. Back in 1997
Andy Grove, who followed Moore as CEO of Intel, the chip giant, was named TIME’s
Man of the Year. I wrote that story and I remember Grove telling me, in a
confessional spirit: “I never stopped thinking about the business. I worked
107 And now, of course: Richard Harper, Tom Rodden, Yvonne Rogers and Abigail
Sellen Eds. Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the year 2020, (Redmond:
Microsoft Research Publication 2008)
108 This now commonplace magic: Chris Mack, “The Multiple Lives of Moore’s
Law: Why Gordon Moore’s grand prediction has endured for 50 years”, IEEE
Spectrum (March 30, 2015), accessible online.
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constantly. But when Gordon Moore left the office, he left the work. Mostly he’d go
fishing.” Moore had the certain confidence of a man who had spotted one of the
fundamental laws of our age, the compression of computing power and cost. He had
the “Let’s go fish” air of a man who had seen the inevitable. Grove, who as CEO had
to match the wild speed Moore’s Law suggested, had the total unease of a man
aware of just how fast a pace the inevitable was setting. Competition was
everywhere. One mistake sustained for six months could kill the entire, multi-billion
dollar business. It had happened to other firms. Often. Grove’s motto was best
captured in the title of one of his books. Only The Paranoid Survive. Each man was
right in his way. Moore’s law makes ever cheaper and more functional devices
spread. But Grove’s famous anxiety was honestly earned too: So much speed. So
much connection. Paranoia does seem the best reaction.
You have to wonder what that eye-rolling AT&T senior telecommunications
engineer who so mindlessly lectured Baran would have made of this new world. The
old New York City temple of phone switches where they met in 1961 has been
remade into a luxury condominium now. The company’s impregnable billions of
dollars of long distance revenue were eroded and then basically destroyed by free
packet-switched services running along the Internet. Son, let me tell you how a phone
works. What must Baran have really thought? Massive, widespread connection
changed everything. Including how a phone works. Baran eventually left RAND. He
founded several of the most important (and lucrative) companies of the early
Internet. Years later he understood with more precision what exactly had happened:
The real risk to those vulnerable AT&T systems wasn’t Russian missiles. It was an
information bomb of sorts, a concatenating desire for constant connection that
exploded many old tools of control. Yes, it took out the old structures. But, because
of the very way it was architected, for survivability, it had a remarkable feature that
even Baran had not quite expected: It enabled each of us to create too.
3.
We’re surrounded by so many networks now where relations and ties of all sorts
produce a constant, hard-to-predict, “I never thought of that before,” dynamism. Of
course you have to pity those AT&T wizards a bit. Let me tell you how a stock market
works. Or let me tell you how a biologist works. None of these have quite the same
answer as they would have two unconnected decades ago. Economies, ecosystems
or our politics or immune systems are charged with this energy of expanding
complexity. Innocuous looking devices or people take on peculiar, sometimes
dangerous aspects when connectedLinked networks of money or people or bugs
tumble into wildness over and over, in ways we can’t quite anticipate or explain..
“There are systems of crucial interest that have so far defied accurate simulation,”
the scientist John Holland observed in a famous paper that helped establish the
discipline of “Chaos Science”. 110 Holland spent years considering these puzzling,
hard-to-model systems and spotted at least one regularity: Whether it was webs of
110 “There are systems”: John Holland, “Complex Adaptive Systems”, Holland, John,
Daedalus; Winter 1992; 121, 1, p. ; Research Library pg. 17
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finance like the futures exchange or immunological networks or our own brains,
highly-connected systems shared what Holland labeled an “evolving structure” –
they never stayed the same. They seemed to shift, with an easy plasticity, in
response to internal pressures or external changes. In the process, they took on new
forms. In many cases, they became better, stronger, more adaptively fit. It wasn’t
simply that the unexpected appeared, it was that the systems were evolving. We
talked earlier about how political and economic ideas like serfdom or divine right
fade into history as new forms – a congress, a stock market – are born to replace old
ones. Holland thought the world filled with such evolutions, no different than
species adjusting (or not) to a hotter climate or some fast new predator. He called
the networks that produce these sorts of innovations “Complex Adaptive Systems”.
When Holland chose the word “complex” he was making an important distinction.
Complicated mechanisms can be designed, predicted and controlled. Jet engines,
artificial hearts or your calculator are complicated in this sense. They may contain
billions of interacting parts, but they can be laid out and repeatedly, predictably
made and used. They don’t change. Complex systems, by contrast, can’t be so
precisely engineered or guessed at with much real certainty. They are hard to fully
control. Human immunology is complex, in this sense. The World Wide Web is
complex. A rainforest is complex: It is made up of uncountable buzzing, connecting
bugs and birds and trees. 112 Order, to the extent it exists in the Amazon basin,
emerges moment-by-moment from countless, constant interactions. The uneven
symphonic sound of L’heure Blue, that romantic stopping point at dawn when the
night retreats bug by bug and you can hear the forest wakeing bird by bird is the
sound of complexity engaging in a never-the-same-twice phase transition.
The word “complex” comes to us from the Latin world plex, which nods at the
interwoven, layered nature of any object 113 . What looks simple – a flower, our skin,
the value of a dollar bill – is in fact plexus, loaded with twitches and influences. In
that stitching of new links, countless interactions sort of inevitably hiccup into
unexpected states and ideas and objects: financial panics or disease epidemics,
banks and revolutions. Traffic during rush hour is a complex system like this – the
atomic, moving bits of the system, of cars and pedestrians and bicycles together
determine the ultimate state of the system: jammed or no. Los Angles at 5 p.m. on a
Friday isn’t designed centrally; it’s honking and confused and aggravated rush hour
logic appears – slightly different every day – from interaction. . As any system fills
out with more actors and more types of connection, it becomes more complex and
harder to predict. Complicated systems don’t produce uncertainty in this same way;
appealingly, they just run. Strapping a complicated object to the wing of a passenger
plane makes sense, even if it takes decades of refinement to real reliability. A
complex object? Not so wise.
112 A rainforest: Simon A. Levin, Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons,
(Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999)
113 The word: Carlos Gershenson, “The Implications of Interactions for Science and
Philosophy”, arXiv:1105.2827v1, May 13, 2011
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Most of our networked world is a pool of buzzing, fresh interaction – not only hard
to predict, but constantly on the sharp edge of making something new. Scientists
like Holland call this “emergence”, the way that bottom-up interactions – between
cells or chips or traders or cars – create a larger order, often something that was not
there before. The fundamental uncertainty of this process means it’s often excluded
from the way we look at the world. It’s easier to assume a predictable, linear,
complicated logic is at work. An “a leads to b and c” sort of logic: revolution leads to
freedom which leads to democracy, for instance. That such predictions are often
wrong – and that we’re so often surprised by events in economics or politics – is a
reminder that compicated systems are often complex, lit with mechanisms that
almost gleefully snap off the fingers of meddling, confident planners. Too often we
look at some puzzle – Iraq, income inequality – and think it is merely “complicated.”
We should know better. “Macro models failed to predict the crisis and seemed
incapable of explaining what was happening to the economy in a convincing
manner,” the European Central Banker Jean-Claude Trichet lamented in the
aftermath of 2008s cascading, complex financial crises, when markets and officials
discovered that the problem with their system was not merely that it was “too big to
fail” but also “too connected to manage” – and possibly “too complex to
comprehend.” Trichet sounded a little shell-shocked. “As a policy maker during the
crisis I found the available models of little help. In fact, I would go further: In the
face of the crisis, we felt abandoned by the conventional tools.” 114
This sense of abandonment comes from an attempt to use a mechanical way of
thinking in age of complexity. 115 When you think an air force can simply pound an
insurgency to sand or that some old reliable business should survive because it rests
upon billions of dollars of infrastructure, you miss the energetic creative and
destructive power of complex connection. It’s not fully right to say: Networks
always beat hierarchies, because of course networks have layers and structures of
their own. But it’s not wrong to consider that complex systems tear easily at stiff,
competitive and overly-ordered ones, even the most carefully engineered
complicated ones. Think of the mafnicently ornamented dictatorships pushed to
collapse in recent years. Or, can you really look at the firm where you work and feel
a sense of living, flexible adaption in the face of connection?
In our age, the pressure of emerging change is particularly heightened by the very
nature of the digital devices themselves. The connected and algorithmic tools all
around us now lend themselves to the easy and cooperative interaction. In fact, that
114 Macro models: Jean-Claude Trichet “Reflections on the nature of monetary
policy non-standard measures and finance theory”, Speech at ECB Central Banking
Conference, Frankfurt, 18 November 2010
115 This sense of abandonment: Michele Catanzaro and Mark Buchanan, “Network
Opportunity.” Nature Physics Vol 9, March 2013 p. 121-122 or Cesar A. Hidalgo,
“Disconnected! The parallel streams of network literature in the natural and social
sciences”, (2015) arXiv:1511.03981
86
ability to plug into and share with one another is the essence of their power. 116 Your
data-enabled phone or camera or database or stock-trading program is easy and
powerful to use because so much of the world’s data – your Sigur Ros songs, your
home movies, your skin temprature – can be reduced to ones and zeros, freed for
fast transmission, endless storage and quick analysis. 117 A machine that can blithely
handle digital inputs of one sort, whether it is trading orders or music files, has the
capacity, in theory, to work with any data. Such adjustability is what forces app
companies, gaming businesses, or phone companies onto an exhausting treadmill of
constant upgrade. Interaction between the pieces of a system, every bit as much as
design or mechanical manipulation, is the reason why change happens. 118
Entrepreneurs mix GPS and phones to create a new business of tracking everything
from our cars to our children. Algorithmic trading programs engineer completely
virtual portfolios – you can buy the S&P Index but as your manager to strip out any
performance from tobacco and gun companies, for instance. Or: Terrorists meet
online and swap data. Some of the most astonishing systems of our new world have
grown up this way. Google’s back-end search systems, for instance, were not “topdown”
designed so much as they emerged, competed and evolved to deliver onceunimaginable
loads of data. No one at Google is “The Architect.” There is no central
approval for technology systems. Complexity and unpredictability and emergence
are regarded as the best way to grow. 119
Long before the idea of a smart phone or 3D goggles, the British mathematician
Alan Turing anticipated their arrival when he dreamed of what he called a
“universal device” 120 : A notional box that, starting from the ones and zeros of
digitized data, could be constructed to do anything. Since everything can ultimately
be reduced to a binary encoding, nearly any sort of data can be shared, studied,
combined or remixed. This easy programmability of so many objects around us now
is why our world now is more complex than, say, a world of interconnected rail cars
or ships might have been. Rail cars and ships don’t change much, and certainly not
instantly. In the digital world, however, many of the most essential objects and
nodes can be flipped around like digital Lego, connected in different ways. And
because they are increasingly “always on”, they are also always changing and
adjusting to what happens elsewhere on the network. This is true for some new
operating system dumped onto your phone that makes it more intelligent as it is for
an algorithm placed into a commodity market that causes unexpected chaos.
116 In fact; Paul Phister, “Cyberspace: The Ultimate Complex Adaptive System”, The
International C2 Journal, Vol 4, No. 2 2010-2011
117 Your data-enabled phone: Gershenson, p4
118 Interaction between: Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of
Embodied Interaction, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001) 4
119 Complexity and unpredictability: Randy Shoup speech “Service architectures
at scale: Lessons from Google and Ebay”, on infoq.com, July 14, 2015
120 Long before: S. B. Cooper and J. Van Leeuwen, Alan Turing: His Work and Impact.
(Waltham, MA: Elsevier, 2013)
87
We said earlier that the Seventh Sense is tuned to spot the unsettling ripples that
come from this fact: Connection changes the nature of an object. Doctors and voters
and machines now sit, we’ve seen, on that stretched skin that links central and
distributed power. This changes the nature of these nodes. A connected doctor is
different than an unconnected one. Well, here is another insight we should know:
The simple, benign looking act of connection makes complicated objects into
complex ones. The moment an object clicks into a network, it is subject to all the
wildness of complexity that may lie there: cascades, whipping external forces,
unexpected internal faults revealed only under the pressure of connection. Cargo
packages. Shares of stock. Linked to a whole system of constant evolution, even the
most innocent looking point is subject to distant twitches, infections or liberating
innovations. They become, as a result, complex. That old lemma of parenting –
You’re only as happy as your least happy child – can be laid upon our devices. You’re
as complex as the most complex device you’re linked to.
Linkage to a complex network is like the difference between a boxed and a pluggedin,
turned-on blender: one is dormant, one is spinning with a wild and dangerous
energy. Connection can change the essence of a whole system if it is designed in
certain ways, as complex forces work on what looks stable. It can, for instance, take
once pliant, cooperative systems, people and tools and make them competitive. 121
Jack an aspiring college graduate into a world where complex systems rip at his
finances, his data and his beliefs and you can end up with a crack in his values, a
move from aspiring middle class member to who knows what: nationalist, inventor,
communist, bitcoin banker. “I had no idea my doctor/aircraft carrier/phone/hedge
fund could do that!” is our common sort of surprise. Contagions, avalanches, tipping
points, feedback loops, infections – connectivity exposes us all to these forces.
“Everthing depends on everything else,” the mathemarical theorist Eugene Stanley
has observed of highly connected systems 122 . On networks that hover apart, isolated
from each other, small failures in one spot trigger limited damage 123 . But on highly
connected systems, tiny failures tumble around, breaking things.
Networks turn everything they touch from complicated to complex. Once a mesh of
connection is really flowing, it creates. Networks cause things to happen, in this
sense. New businesses, new fortunes, new ideas. Castell’s social protests emerged in
this way, appearing like condensate in the cooling jar of the post-2008 economic
crisis and then spreading, improving, evolving in scale and ambition faster than
most traditional politicians could track. Researchers following in his wake studied
the Spanish 15M demonstrations of 2011 and found it was composed largely of new,
121 It can, for instance: Martin Nowak, Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the
Equations of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2006)
122 “Everything depends on”:“Treading Softly in a Connected World”, Quanta
Magazine, Mar 18, 2013 by Natalie Wolchover
123 On networks: Sergey V. Buldyrev, et al. “Catastrophic cascade of failures in
interdependent networks”, Nature 464, 1025-1028 (15 April 2010)
88
young organizations that blossomed from connectivity. Other Spanish protest
groups, such as labor, anti-abortion activists or regional separatists, relied on
decades-old organizations. 15M – like Occupy Wall Street or pieces of the Arab
Spring or Al-Qaeda – relied on groups fresh-born into a hollow, worried political
vacuum. A survey of 15M members looked like a review of new Internet companies:
Young, wired, vividly unplugged from history and impossible to understand without
their constant connection. They were built by leaching people away from traditional
parties, the appeal was both the potential of the new and the chance to get away
from the rotting smell of old politics, surely an instinct many of us feel now. 124 This
is one reason it’s wrong to look at the world and consider it filled merely with
random events, with Black Swans. In fact, regularities and patterns appear many
places on the mesh of connection that surrounds us. They can be searched and
mapped and studied with the tools of data science, but of course they can also be
felt. They may surprise you if you don’t know how to look for them. But the
regularities are there. Human history is not only made of earthquakes.
4.
Even if it can’t be predicted, complexity in any system, whether it is an Indonesian
coral reef or a Russian computer network, can at least be measured. How many
points are connected? How quickly and deeply do they interact? It is the
multiplication of connection that produces a complex landscape. There won’t be
much emergence in a desert, for instance. You alone, unconnected: one point. You
online: Several billion. The essential benefit of many points connected in real time is
that they are an extremely fast feedback loop. This fine-tuning of action-reaction
forces them to adapt and adjust quickly, as if they were runners with a coach
constantly at their side. Compare the feedback loop of a marching Cairo street
protest to, say, the feedback loop of the old men around Mubarak. One was capable
of grabbing a new techniques and ideas in real time. The other stuck in a molasses
haze of old, sweet, slowing ideas. Faced with rapid change, a fast-adapting system
will nearly always perform a slow one.
When we say that networks can and will devour hierarchies this is one reason. All
the businesses that have been devoured by technology firms in recent years failed to
adjust fast enough. Network systems are more complex, their “org charts” are an
unnerving mess as a result of their speed. But under the mess is efficiency, growth,
innovation. Such systems can tip into failure easily, of course. But they also can
adjust their fitness before it is too late. The design of such systems becomes, then, a
matter of decisive power. And most of our essential systems now are designed for a
slower age. Refiguring the global financial system for an age of instant linkage was
one of the crucial conceptual puzzles of the 2008 crisis. Have we done that yet for
our taxes? Our voting? Our biological security? The chaos of those few weeks in the
markets in 2008 revealed new geographies of finance and speed, a mechanism that
had been wired to produce fortune for a few and to inspire, as a result, regulatory
124 They were built: See Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action,”
759
89
desperation in men like Trichet. I’m pretty sure we’ll see versions of this same sort
of crisis in many other areas.
More complexity produces more interaction, as you would expect. More pieces of a
system rushing and touching and changing each other in a perpetual and
accelerating dance. That process pushes, in turn, still more emergence. The easier it
is to combine things the more creativity is tickled into life. 125 You hear an amazing
mashup of the Bee Gees and Michael Jackson; you download the tools to make your
own. In every aspect of the connected world, growing complexity breeds emergence.
This is true in finance, in terrorism, in bio-development. Some intellectuals and
businessmen worry that we’ve arrived at the “End of Innovation” now. But this is
unlikely. Connected systems, almost as if they have a mind of their own, create and
surprise. The complex meshes of connection growing around us now, in a sense, are
like a rainforest. They hold and breed and support a range of species native to the
connected climate – things that couldn’t survive elsewhere, that were unimaginable
in an age without connection. Smart medical prediction devices. Apps on your
phone. Autonomous military robots. Self-driving cars. And we know that, lingering
ahead of us now, as well, are a series of technological leaps that will breed still faster
interaction and creation: Quantum computing, for instance, may yet push computer
to speeds to 100 billion times faster than what is achievable with older technology.
Self-taught, reasoning artificial intelltigence will spot patterns invisible to human
minds, they will offer everythying from computer-assisted explanation to whole
new theories of physics and math 126 . And autonomous robotic systems will press
into realms where our soft human frame cannot survive – deep underwater
biological cracks, for instance, or hot molecular material mixes. More data will flow
back at us from each of these pipes. 127 And as it arrives it will give us an even more
granular sense of our links to the world – and how they might be manipulated for
still more invention. “Many biological and social theories were impossible to test
because of lack of data,” one team of cyber-systems researchers noted. “Now we
have not only the data, but the methods to analyze it.” The result, they add with a
fast breath of relief that could be laid upon many sciences or theories we’ve
squeezed from limited data: “We are recovering from extreme reductionism in
science.” 128
When we say the network “wants” something, it’s a useful anthropomorphism: A
billion connected users want to be linked, so Facebook emerges. A trillon web pages
demand to be searched, so Google appears. Making such ties produces, first, that
125 The easier it is to combine things: See Eric Schmidt, “Conversation with Eric
Schmidt hosted by Danny Sullivan” at Search Engine Strategies Conference, August 9,
2006.p.1-2 2013 Nathaniel W. Husted
126 Self-taught: Michael Nielsen, “The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation”, Quanta
Magazine, June 23 2015
127 More data: Caitríona H. Heinl, “Artificial (Intelligence) Agents and Active Cyber
Defence: Policy Implications” in 6th International Conference on Cyber Conflict,
P.Brangetto, M.Maybaum, J.Stinissen (Eds.) 2014 p, 60
128 “We are recovering”:Gershonesen, et al. p 2-4
90
merciless clawing action we saw at the start of this chapter, which explains the
unique power (and value) of the essential firms of our age. Once that’s done,
however, once the mesh of distribution and connection is in place and growing, then
emergence begins. The completely new appears. This is why the most successful
investors or leaders of our era have a near pathological desire to push and break old
systems. They do this because they have a faith, an instinct, that if they shove hard
enough to snap an equilibrium, then something else will emerge. They are right.
They have all the laws of physics and history behind them. In commerce, the
destruction of old business models breeds new ones. In terrorism, brutal violence is
more useful than bottled anger; it’s a tool to speed the viral emergence of chaos
(and, some hope, a new politics). What emerges from change? Fresh structures,
gates that connect us and bind us .If the Seventh Sense features a nearly wild desire
to smash old equilibriums it is because of the total confidence that something else
will emerge.
Later in life, turning to a philosophical view, Paul Baran said that his webs,
distributing themselves around the world with such smooth and relentless energy,
were reflecting a kind of inevitable progress, a propensity of linked things to keep
linking. Even if he did not see and name our world exactly, he likely could have
predicted it. “Every object in the universe,” he once wrote, “is connected (by
gravity/radiation vectors) to every other object.” We know now just how much
truth is buried in Baran’s almost philosophical words. Objects and people and places
now feed data constantly into the network and to each other. This presses them to
evolve, to change, to connect again. It is simply a matter of time before those
connections bubble up into our real lives to change our economy, our security and
our leaders. That kludgey, parenthetically weird phrase of Baran’s – wired together
“(by gravity/radiation vectors)” – tells us a lot. The spread of links is like gravity
now. It is like radiation. Irresistible. All–penetrating and revealing the deep human
truth in Baran’s Holocaust-bred instincts: To survive and to connect are really the
same thing.
91
Chapter Six:
Warez Dudes
In which the Seventh Sense reveals a secret, dangerous architecture of connection.
1.
It was my second overseas trip. I blinked my eyes as dawn broke over Europe and
seeped inside the airplane. We began our descent into Amsterdam. I changed the
tapes inside my Walkman. Something a bit more upbeat seemed right. Peter Gabriel.
It was 1993. August.
Earlier that spring I’d heard about a plan for a giant summer computer hacking
conference that would be held outside Amsterdam. “Hacking at the End of the
Universe” it was to be called. I can’t recall now where I had picked up news of the
gathering, but it appealed to me immediately. I’d just moved to New York and had
been dipping into the city’s hacking scene. The “scene” was less a boiling, hip hive of
action than a group of computer amateurs, curious hangers on and early IT system
engineers who would gather in the grubby basement of the Citicorp Building on 53 rd
Street and Lexington some days after work to discuss various techniques for
tricking digital systems of all types. Hacking didn't have a deeply nefarious
connotation in those days; it was seen by most of us as a natural, even a healthy
extension of an interest in computers. The Internet had about 10 million users at the
time. The idea that, two decades later, it would connect more than three billion
people or that it would put millions of dollars into the pockets of some of the people
gathering in that basement was honestly unthinkable.
The bible of the group was a thin, irregularly stapled, photocopied magazine
published out on Long Island by a guy who used the nom-de-hack of Emmanuel
Goldstein, the hero of George Orwell’s novel 1984. The magazine was called “2600:
The Hacker Quarterly” and it offered a compilation of ideas about how to fool
around with systems of all sorts, from Atari gaming consoles to door locks. The
name “2600” came from one of the earliest hacks any of us at those little meetings
knew about, a famous 1970’s trick that involved using an audio tone at exactly 2600
hertz (about the pitch of a truck’s backup warning) to force the backbone routing
switches of the AT&T phone system to give up access to an “operator mode” which
would let the phone hacker – they were called phreakers – make any sort of call for
free. The hack didn’t really offer much practical pleasure except a chance to make
free phone calls anywhere in the world. Once you’d mastered the trick you pretty
quickly discovered there wasn't really anyone in Bombay you wanted to call
anyhow.
The real appeal, the deeper joy of the game, was different: It was the sense of secret,
ecstatic access. A feeling of control in the largest network on earth. At one point a
phreaker named John Draper figured out that the little plastic whistles stuffed as
children’s toys inside boxes of sugary Cap’n Crunch cereal produced the 2600 Hz
tone nearly perfectly. The hack made him a legend. He became known, inevitably, as
92
Cap’n Crunch. An article about Draper in Esquire in 1972 had, for instance, inspired
two teenagers named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to start their first company to
build and sell little phreaking boxes. Woz later recalled nervously meeting the Cap’n
one day in California. He was a strange, slightly smelly, and extremely intense
nomadic engineer. “I do it for one reason and one reason only,” the Cap’n huffed to
the writer of that Esquire article, who was a bit baffled why a grown man would find
whistling into phones so appealing. “I'm learning about a system. The phone
company is a System. A computer is a System. Do you understand? If I do what I do,
it is only to explore a System. Computers. Systems. That's my bag,” he said. “The
phone company is nothing but a computer." 130
I’d heard about the Amsterdam conference in the 2600 hacking circles, somewhere
between the debates about circuit boards and which company was best for the
relatively new service of email. The gathering was organized by group of Dutch
computer geeks who published their own magazine, Hack-Tic. I sent an email to the
founders. One of them, a man with the improbably exotic name Rop Gonggrijp, sent
back an irresistible reply. “On August 4 th , 5 th and 6 th we’re organizing a three-day
summer congress for hackers, phone phreaks, programmers, computer haters, data
travelers, electro-wizards, networkers, hardware freaks, techno-anarchists,
communications junkies, cyberpunks, system managers, stupid users, paranoid
androids, Unix gurus, whizz kids, warez dudes, law enforcement officers
(appropriate undercover dress required), guerilla heating engineers and other
assorted bald, long-haired and/or unshaven scum,” the invitation began. Data
travelers? Electro-wizards? Warez dudes? I had to go. “Also included,” the note
continued, “are inspiration, transpiration, a shortage of showers (but a lake to swim
in), good weather (guaranteed by god), campfires and plenty of wide open space
and fresh air.”
In those early days of the Internet, there was only the barest tickle of a commercial
instinct at work. If anything, most of the people at places like 2600 or Hack-Tic were
profoundly anti-commercial. They were hobbyists, as entranced by role-playing
games like Dungeons and Dragons as by their clapped-together, often unreliable
digital machines. It was no accident that firms like Apple had emerged from groups
with names like The Homebrew Computer Club, names that suggested a rooty, selfdefining
hippy ethos. Everyone you met in that world fell pretty squarely into one of
those weird-by-weirder categories Rop Gonggrijp had listed in his email. Their
relaxed, nerdish temperament was reflected in the design of the Internet itself –
open, generous, easy to manipulate, emotional at times in debates over protocols,
freedom loving. The net design was, as well, a reaction against the systems that
troubled all of us most. Like AT&T, say, which was closed, stingy, and tough
(therefore enjoyable) to manipulate.
Jon Postel, the American engineering and programming genius who had helped
write some of the essential original protocols of the Internet, summed up this point
130 “The phone company”: Secrets of the Little Blue Box, Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire
Magazine (October 1971)
93
of view in 1980 as an idea that he thought should characterize the architecture of
the Internet. “Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept.” 131
Postel’s idea became known as the “robustness principle” and it was meant to
determine how switches and nodes on the net should behave. They should, Postel
felt, be good at handling lots of different types of communications – they should be
“robust” – but they should also be careful not to spread too much non-standard
garbage out into the networks. This was an essential advance over the old ARPANET
Paul Baran had helped inspire. That system worked wonderfully by itself, in
isolation, as it sent humming nuclear launch codes zipping around, but it struggled
when it needed to interoperate with other networks. It wasn’t generous. The
Internet that Postel and others were designing was intended to be much, much
larger than ARPANET, so an ability to speak to others and be understood was
essential. It was like planning an airport: You wanted to be able to land lots of
different types of planes. But if someone started throw golf balls, jello and gasoline
on the runway you’d have a problem. It would slow down the system for everyone.
Postel was telling engineers: Be careful what you do and what you put onto the
system. Take responsibility on your end. Build something that’s generous in what it
will handle from others.
Be liberal in what you accept. From the first moments on the grass in Lelystad, the
small town just outside Amsterdam where the Hacking At the End of the Universe
conference gathered, the mad diversity that this idea suggested was an astonishing,
delightful fact. As broad and strange a group as Rop’s email had hinted might come
was in fact there, under the trees, happily running cables from tent to RV, powering
their connected routers with gas-fired generators, marveling at data transmission
speeds that today, your phone might manage from an underground garage with the
barest connectivity. The two-day outdoor festival was an example of human
interoperability. Postel’s Principle brought to life. Few of us knew most of the group.
Nearly everyone was, well, not the most social. But there was instant connection,
discussion, board gaming, and a degree of frank interoperating I’d never quite seen
before. It was a harbinger of two decades of digital cross connection yet to come.
Of all the people at the Hacktic conference, however, among the system managers
and Unix gurus and heating system guerillas (hey, everyone should have a hobby), it
was the Warez Dudes who were of the most interest – both to the participants in the
conference and to the white vans cruising nearby, allegedly filled with curious Dutch
police. The nickname came from the “wares” they had access to, which were largely
cracked open versions of commercial software that could be shared and distributed
and manipulated on private bulletin board systems. The Warez Dudes were pirates.
And like most pirates they had an early sense of the very edges of the law and of the
smell of money drifting along new and essential routes. If hacker culture was, in
those early days, a frontier society – and it was, even down to the sad shortage of
single women – these were the people living on the very furthest edges of the
131 “Be conservative”: Jon Postel “DOD Standard Transmission Control Protocol”
(1980) RFC 761, IED 129
94
wilderness. They fused often fantastic technical skill with the hacker’s instinct for
control – admixed with a criminal’s hunger for profit.
The first computer viruses and worms were part of what they sold. These had
appeared in the 1980s, mostly as curious intellectual exercises. There was a desire
among computer engineers, a scientific sort of craving, to see what might be done on
the systems they had built. It was not unlike those whistling telephone tones that
had so fascinated Cap’n Crunch and Steve Jobs and Woz. Could you make the big
room-sized machines twitch in ways no one had imagined? Absolute, undeniable
thrill ran through this sort of activity. I can still recall returning to my office one day
in the mid-1990s with a Ziploc-bag that contained a floppy disk marked “Viruses”
which I used to promptly break my computer so completely it had to be
reformatted. Twice. Such adventures, however, were also producing some of the
best programmers of my generation. Managing tricks inside those early systems
required then, as it does now, a profound intimacy with the code defining their
electrical operations. (Computer programs are called “code”; people who write and
test them are “coders”.)
But the secret moves behind those early cracks and exploits were rarely secret for
long. The informal culture of stapled together magazines like 2600 told you what
you needed to know about this band: It was a group that liked to share, to brag, to
indulge each other in stories about systems they had cracked open, to play with a bit
of light paranoia about who might be watching you and who might care. Computers.
Systems. That’s my bag. You might as well spread some of the adrenaline rush of
your adventure with others. The sense of a “shared alternate reality” most of us had
first experienced in games like Dungeons and Dragons or the pages of Dune fit nicely
into the digital world. This open, friendly temperament animated most of the people
spread across that Amsterdam field, jumping into the lake instead of showers,
talking math, buzzing at each other like a fridge. We had the programmer’s raw
fascination about what a machine might be made to do, even in ways that were
deeply unintended. We were harmless. The Warez Dudes, however, were different.
Their fascination was a greedy, nasty obsession.
2.
The business of playing with and inside of connected computer systems was, even
as we sat on that Amsterdam summer lawn, shifting. It was slipping from earnest
hobbyists and system managers to something a bit more sinister. We had just begun
using a new phrase, “malware,” to describe the malicious software that took
advantage of Postel’s “be liberal” instinct in order to devastate connected systems
that were filled with too many trusting, unlocked doors. It wasn’t merely the relaxed
system design of the early ‘net or computer systems that made exploitation easy. It
was also that the networks and machines themselves were slipping with a kind of
frictionless momentum towards increasing complexity. This meant, invariably, that
popular programs often shipped to users with mistakes or programming oversights
that invited hijack. The year before the Amsterdam conference, for instance, a cruel
program known as “Michelangelo”, which would overwrite the data on hard disk
95
drives with meaningless ones and zeros, spread onto millions of computers. Once a
machine was infected the overwrite command would activate every year on March
6 th – a twisted celebration of the birthday of the great Renaissance artist. But
because the program operated at the BIOS level – the basic input/output heart of
those early machines – it was nearly impossible to eradicate. Computer security
companies, soon to be known as computer “insecurity” companies because they
were (and are) constantly behinder, responded with the following rather
unconvincing advice: Turn your machine off on March 5 th . Turn it back on March
7 th . 132
Even the biggest, most powerful companies were shipping programs packed with
potential problems, cracks that were often baked into the design of a system,
invisible even to their makers. A couple of years after the Hac-Tic conference, for
example, a popular word processing program included a feature that could permit a
surreptitious hacker to make a computer to execute all sorts of nefarious commands
once a user had opened a harmless-looking document. This was sort of like shipping
hundreds of millions of door locks that would pop easily open for criminals who
knew to ask. Did you use a word processor in the 1990s? Likely your machine faced
this danger: You’d open a note from a friend or a memo from your boss and you’d
then instantly, unstoppably forfeit control of your computer, even if you didn’t know
or see or feel the impact for years. That problem was fixed – companies learned to
issue what became known as “patches” to plug the inadvertent leaks in their
systems – but that such a danger existed and could be profitably used was a sign of
a ruthless evolution. There were billions of dollars, even then, at stake.
As technology advanced, so did the malware, which was adapting and evolving to
new opportunities. Think of how hugely different our experience of machines is
today as opposed to just a few years ago. Hacking has matured as fast – maybe
faster. Early attacks were aimed at machines that had, essentially, no defenses.
Programs like “Michelangelo” were designed to act much like the viruses of a
common cold or food poisoning. They sickened and then controlled individual
machines, devices with no immune systems. Hackers faced a challenge in finding
ways to sneak these digital diseases onto computers, but of course they finally found
holes. They hid viruses on floppy disks or inside documents or spread-sheets that
appeared otherwise safe. Intelligence agencies became infamous for passing out
“free disks” at conferences or littering defense contractor parking lots with infected
USB sticks, waiting for some unsuspecting employee to pop them into a computer
and invisibly activate some bit of carefully installed, hidden malware. Or, in a clever
case of “know your target”, sneaking malware into the code of some particularly
violent video game, sure to be played by an adrenaline-addled system administrator
in a fit of afterhours boredom.
132 Turn it back on: For a discussion of Michaelangelo see entry for virus in
Encyclopedia of Computer Science 4 th Ed. (Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. ),
1839-1841,
96
Like so much about our world, rapid, widespread connectivity of the last decade has
sharpened these dangers. Connection changes the nature of an object; it can make it
much more vulnerable. It can make the harmless dangerous. Generally, once a
machine was jacked into a network, all sorts of fresh possibilities for mischief
flowed right along with the data. The move from a lone PC on your desk to a really
connected machine represented the difference between living in a small town and
walking the streets of New York City. In one place you’d have few encounters,
mostly familiar and harmless. In the other, you’d face an endless stream of the
strange, the new and the unexpected. This is what life is like every day for your
phone or your bank or military – a world of ceaseless assault, often from never-seen
weapons. Robert Morris Sr., a cryptographic and security genius who towered over
NSA code breaking programs for decades in the last century, compressed his
lifetime of experience cracking machines into “Three Golden Rules of Computer
Security”: 133
Rule One: Do not own a computer.
Rule Two: Do not power it on.
Rule Three: Do not use it.
He could have added a Fourth Rule: Do not connect it to anything.
Of course, as we look around today, we’re furiously, enthusiastically violating all
four of these rules pretty much every moment. In fact, our whole economic and
social dreamscape depends on breaking them. We want the best device, we want it
always on, we want to use it all the time. Utility and connection are almost
synonyms now. That the Warez Dudes, or their 21 st century brethren, are hungry to
exploit these systems offers us a chance to understand even more deeply just how
power works in this network age. Why are they so desperate to get inside? How
exactly do they do it? We’ve seen so far two important properties of life in the
network age. First, the way in which network power exists on a sort of new surface
of connected devices and cores, tied by strong data links that are slowly ripping
power out of old institutions. Think of my Dad’s role as a doctor or the sharing
economy shocks delivered by connected cars and bedrooms and labor, for instance.
Second, we’ve seen how networks are complex adaptive systems, where emergent
features –billion dollar businesses, terror organizations, drones – appear with an
easy, destructive frequency that is wiping out old leaders and replacing them with
new ones that better fit the demands of a connected age. Looking at the network
world and seeing that mesh, seeing the emergence of fit new species and the
impending extinction of others is the initial, essential part of the Seventh Sense.
Lingering deep inside the systems themselves, there is another lesson, however.
And, not surprisingly, it is most alive in the hackers. “Exploit engineers,” a team led
by researcher Sergei Bratus has argued, “show you the unintended limits of your
133 Bob Morris cite to come
97
system’s functionality.” 134 Hackers, they mean, reveal the dangerous holes of our
new world. The bad news is that the worst of them (and often the best of them skill
wise) did this at times by swiping your data, your money and finally your peace of
mind. Their fortunes and safety and curiosity – all of these are woven together in
their hot hunger to touch and pull and break the roots of the network. In a world of
expanding connection, they are both more powerful and more dangerous than ever.
3.
Networked systems of our age are confronted, constantly, with diverse, dangerous
challenges, each informed by that Gordian paradox so familiar to us by now: The
more connected we are, the greater the risks. And as bank balances, secret jet
engine designs, and other priceless digital data are developed and then slipped
safely away on connected machines, the rewards for cracking into the systems grow
– far faster than the (near zero) costs of trying to break in. “It is increasingly
obvious,” security researchers F.X. Lindner and Sandro Gaycken have said, “that the
state of the art in Computer Network Defense is over a decade behind its