Then, in the industrial revolution, time became money. Electric lights, for instance,
undid the restful distinction between night and day – and made 24-hour life and
manufacturing and economics possible and then, of course, inevitable. Movement
from countryside to city established a really new sense of what the German critic
Georg Simmel, writing in 1903, called tempo. “With each crossing of the street, with
the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up
a deep contrast with small town and rural life,” he explained. “The technique of
metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all
activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule.” 181 Punch
cards. Bus schedules. The forty hour work week. Our education, our manufacturing,
our markets and our lives all began to run on timetables. They had to, or the whole
project of industry would collapse. “Summer Afternoon” became a time to work.
Simmel worried, for instance, over the diffusion of pocket watches. To carry one was
like looking at a constantly draining bank account.
This sense of humans reduced to cogs – churned, run, disposed of on a schedule not
their own – unnerved the residents of that first mechanical age. Cities had been the
very first sorts of tight-packed networks; industrial cities ratcheted this further still.
They succeeded and failed by the degree to which they geared themselves and their
citizens to machine speed. When the Austrian novelist Robert Musil began The Man
Without Qualities, his classic story of the era, with the flattening of a Viennese citizen
by a speeding delivery truck, he meant to point out how urban speed and urban life
(and urban death) had become inseparable. And also the mismatch between the
weak breaks of the age and it’s acceleration. The book is alive with that pre-accident
slipping sensation you may have had: You are pressing hard on the brakes of the car;
you are going to hit something anyhow. “Cities can be recognized by their pace just
as people can by their walk,” Musil wrote in a line that any modern New Yorker or
180 “Summer afternoon”: Edith Wharton, A Backwards Glance, (New York: D.
Appleton-Century, 1934) See chapter 10 for her tale of an afternoon with James.
181 “With each crossing”: Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)
in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds. The Blackwell City Reader. Oxford and
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p. 11
130
Parisian would endorse. 182 “A man returning after years of absence would have
known, with his eyes shut, that he was in that ancient capital and imperial city,
Vienna.” To really get a feel for that age, watch just a few frames of Russian director
Dizga Vertov’s jittery 1929 black and white film Man with a Movie Camera 183 . Each
moment of the movie is alive with the tension of a new, rushing and industrial age.
You won’t be surprised Vertov’s list of requirements as he prepared to start filming
began: “1. A rapid means of transportation.” His aim was to immortalize urban
speed on the new medium film; he knew he needed to be fast. 184
To know a city by it’s pace. Musil was touching something deep here, an instinct that
beats in each of us and runs from this fact: The speed of an event affects how we
perceive it. The difference between what you will notice when walking up a hill –
chirping bugs, tiny rocks, changes in color and gradient – and driving up that hill is
so complete as to be almost different experiences entirely. 185 When the whole world
tumbles upon us at fiber-optic speed, when invasions and revelations and accidents
all spread at the rate of WiFi or cell phone radiation, our sense of time blurs. You
have to wonder what Simmel would have made of a smart phone. “It is not merely
that the medium is the message, but the velocity of the medium,” Paul Virlio
observed once in one of his many studies on speed and mind. 186
Life in our connected age is both instant and always on, what Simmel might have
called “the technique of network life.” This demolishes an older, easier sense of pace.
Computers were once switched on at 9 and off at 5 – just like their human masters.
But digital activity is constant now. The networks are paying attention all the time.
They have to. Our machines – tractors and trains and cars – used to echo our pace of
life. Now we echo theirs. The machines, the New Caste, the black boxes – they tick
along constantly, ever faster. We rely on them, as we’ve seen, for our safety. We
want them to be fast. To be instant. But what is this doing to us? Is completely
unhooking us from any sense of time really a good idea?
It was certainly true, as Brand insisted, that the Clock of the Long Now was meant as
a reminder, as a kind of constant totem to the fact that we’re all just a small tick on
182 “Cities can be recognized”: Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities Vintage
(1996) 3
183 To really get a feel: Vertov’s movie is shot in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and Krakow.
In 2003 The Cinematic Orchestra produced a modern soundtrack to accompany it.
184 “A rapid means”: Jonathan Dawson, “Dziga Vertov” Great Directors March 2003
Issue 25
185 Ajahn Brahm of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia tells a wonderful story
in his Dharma talks about a day in which he decided not to be driven up the road to
his monastery in Perth, but instead walked the road. He was flooded by the
sensations of nature, all invisible from the inside of a car. One way to change your
perspective, he means, is to change the speed at which you are moving through life.
See the Buddhist Society of Western Australia website for a catalog of his talks.
186 “It is not merely that the medium”: Paul Virilio, Information Bomb trans. Chris
Turner (London: Verso, 2000), 141
131
the endless long continuum. We do think in too short a time frame. But the clock
also, I began to suspect as I considered it, had another role. Those 10,000 years of
marked time were an attempt to scratch an itch bothering these pioneers of
cyberspace. It might even have been a sort of guilty sensation. After all, there was
something that they had demolished in their ceaseless fast connecting of the world –
maybe accidentally, but anyhow it could never be put back to where it was. If the
great industrial titans before them had, over several hundred years, vanquished
distance, lacing the world with trading networks, the men and women behind the
clock were fracturing something else, something that for all of human history had
seemed the only reliable, safe, sad constant of our condition: Time. For most of
history, time and space were seen as facts, immutable forces that could not be
overcome or adjusted or fought. Time particularly. The quintessential, tragically
non-negotiable condition of life. The backers of the clock were, in their “day jobs”, in
the business of overcoming, adjusting, fighting and even destroying an older sense
of time. What might once have taken years, they were committed to making happen
in an instant.
The Long Now project, then, was like one of those carefully isolated arctic freezers,
where samples of essential grains and DNA from Beethoven’s hair and Einstein’s
brain are sunk and iced against the godforbid day in which our basic feedstock or a
chunk of humanity has been wiped out by accident or disaster. Blasted into a
mountain hole, designed to last thousands of years, the clock is a repository for time
itself. It is a defensive museum, built against the moment when instant networks
finally devour the off switch and kill an older, essential feeling of time. The clockmakers
knew, I think, that they had helped to demolish a particular sense of pace
with their fast, instant networks. They wanted, with the knowledgeable keening of
the guilty, a new device, one carefully gated away from the very revolution they
were encouraging with their business and technical obsessions. This hunger for
speed had built their fortunes. Their revolution (and its IPOs) had paid for the clock,
frankly. And the hope for “instant world” had inspired their dreams long before
deep, fast connections were possible. Bezos’s first name for Amazon, Cadabara,
captured just this sense of waving wands and the eye-blink “Now you don’t see it,
now you do!” appearance of just what you want or need. Murdering time. You could
ask: What are the really networks for anyway? Would they feel guilty when they
confessed?
2.
Danny Hillis’s father was an epidemiologist. His mother was a bio-statistician. And
his childhood was a blur of infection-led family migrations. “Anywhere in the world
there was an epidemic, we would go,” he recalled. As the family bounced from Dehli
to Cairo to Dakha to Nairobi, racing diseases one after another, Danny developed a
vivid, energetic autodidactisism. He would collect knowledge from his parents, from
the streets around him, his new friends, anywhere. In a library in Calcutta, for
instance, he once found a copy of George Boole’s 1854 book “An Investigation Into
the Laws of Thought”. Boole invented symbolic logic on those pages and though his
instincts were grounded in an age of steam and machines, his vision still echoes in
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modern computer design. “Language,” Boole wrote, “is an instrument of human
reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought.” 187
Hillis has a magnetic intellectual charisma, as you might have guessed by now. An
afternoon with him resembles nothing so much as a lingering mental theme park:
Roller coasters of big ideas (a 10,000 year clock!) mixed with smaller sugary treats
(how to design a better fencepost). No wonder he fit in so well at Disney. Critics
accused Steve Jobs of having a “reality distortion field”, in which the Apple founder’s
charisma bludgeoned the boundaries of the practical. Hillis, by contrast, has a sort of
“reality enhancement field” in which much of the world as seen through his eyes or
heard in his light-hearted voice is sharper, filled with possibility.
From an early age Hillis had been interested in the dream of a thinking robot. Maybe
it was that the constant uprooting of his childhood left him with a giddy sense that it
was easier to assemble your own friends than to try to make them new at each stop.
But somehow this led him to the idea of an artificial brain, which was Danny’s main
idea when he arrived at MIT in the fall of 1972. The tinker-toy tic-tac-toe computer
he built was a nod to this hope, but it’s jerry-rig aesthetic masked deeper ambitions.
“Someday, perhaps soon, we will build a machine that will be able to perform the
functions of a human mind,” Hillis wrote at the start of his PhD thesis a few years
later. “A thinking machine.” 188
What Hillis and others like his mentor Marvin Minsky, realized was that the human
brain works differently than machine logic. Life, after all, is not a series of linear
math problems. (Much as we might wish it was at times.) You look outside. It occurs
to you to say to your wife, “What a lovely day.” This is not a result of some “a then b
then c” calculation, but rather the product of thousands of simultaneous inputs and
twitches dancing through the space of your consciousness. If you were to process
that same thought in a linear fashion, it might look like this: First, look at the sky,
examine the cloud-to-blue ratio, check for too much wind, sense the temperature,
open mouth. Your wife would be out the door before you’d even begun to speak. The
ability to operate on many different pieces of data all at once is one of the most
striking, enviable features of the human mind. But of course, you’ve probably,
recognized: That is fundamentally a network problem. How do you act instantly,
everywhere? Connection. So it was that, a dozen years after his tic-tac-toe machine,
Hillis began work on a device designed to think super fast. Faster than any computer
ever had. He called it The Connection Machine. “The ability to configure the topology
of the machine to match the topology of the problem will turn out to be one of the
most important features of the Connection Machine,” he wrote. Adding, in case the
187 “Language”: George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought: On Which Are
Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. (New York, N.Y.:
Dover Publications, 1951)
188 “Someday”: William Daniel Hillis, The Connection Machine, PhD. Thesis
Submission, MIT (1985) p. 2
133
academic panel at MIT missed the point: “(That is why it is called the Connection
Machine.)” 189
Hillis’s ambition to build this device boiled in him while he was at MIT, and it finally
outstripped what MIT could support, so he gathered a group of students and started
a small company. The Thinking Machines Corporation, blessed by some combination
of Hillis’s charisma and the fantastic promise of the project, became a magnetic field
for talent, ideas and money. In the early days of the firm, for instance, the hunt for
investors led Danny to the luxurious New York City apartment of William Paley, the
founder of CBS. Hillis lived then in a ramshackle house close to campus at MIT. He
drove a surplus fire truck to work most days. 190 Faced with the urbane, powerful 81-
year old founder of the largest radio and TV network in America, Danny jumped
right into a passionate introduction of his ideas about connection and networks.
Paley, cooly: "I didn't understand a word you said." Then: A check for $5 million.
Or there was the time that Hillis asked Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard
Feynman to tip him off about any smart scientists Thinking Machines might hire.
Feynman, pushing 60, volunteered himself and spent his summer vacations for the
next ten years with Hillis and his team. 191 When it came time to test the first
Connection Machine, it was Feynman’s data that revealed how well the black box
was doing its job. The architecture they had designed cranked through what would
have been a month’s worth of complex chromodynamics problems in hours. As the
machine got better, these already fast processing times improved by another factor
of 1,000. Such a machine, for scientists who were desperate for computed answers,
was like adding years to their life. If they could solve a problem in a week instead of
years? The whole texture of their careers would be altered.
“At times,” one fellow computer developer remarked, “the Connection Machine
seems so different from current computers that it seems more akin to science fiction
than high technology.” 192 Thinking Machines Corporation sold Danny’s computers to
Lockheed to model stealth fighters. Chevron used one to model oil fields. The US
government bought several to help to predict the weather. Puzzles long resistant to
mere power melted in the face of parallel consideration. Nothing was more exciting
about Hillis’s machines than this intimiate, unprecedented link between intelligence
and speed. If you have twice as many processors as I do, you can perhaps crack a
puzzle of genomics or cryptography a year faster. But say you have figured out how
to have 275,000 machines linked together and I have 1,000? You can solve a
189 Adding: Hillis thesis, p. 19
190 He drove: Po Bronson, “The Long Now: Time Traveling with Danny Hillis”, Wired
(May, 1998)
191 Feynman: W. Daniel Hillis, “Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine”
Physics Today February 1989, p. 78
192 “At times”: Michael J. Black “Book Reviews: The Connection Machine”, AI
Magazine Volume 7 Number 3 (1986) p 169
134
problem eight years sooner 193 . Between 2007 and 2015 the number of connections a
Hillis-style neural computer could handle grew from 1 million to 100 billion. This
speed did produce things very like science fiction: Accurate voice recognition. Realtime
genetics. And it also began to mark out, clearly, the powerful network territory
where our future will be decided.
3.
Of all the things that mark a change between our modern lives and the days of those
who came before us, few are as sensationally obvious as the sheer acceleration of
life, the reduction of delay and the emerging instantness of experience. Faster. What
is going on inside the machines, as Mel Conway’s old law would have told us, is
happening too on the surface of our lives. A feeling of breathlessness in the face of
speed isn’t new, of course. When Anna Karenina folds herself under an oncoming
train at the end of Tolstoy’s novel, for instance, her suicide is as much metaphor as
personal tragedy, a comment on the disorienting steam, engine, and rail pace of
modernity. Speed kills, old habits and ideas particularly. Between 1840 and 1940
travel times between Anna’s St. Petersburg and Vronsky’s Moscow shrunk by 10
minutes every year on average, loosing deep cracks in Russian economics and
politics, tearing apart Anna’s slow-moving world of glittering balls and hereditary
estates with the fast force of industry, modernity and then the awful pliers of
communism. Tolstoy’s own death in 1910 held a bit of this acute tension between
old and new velocities: At 82, hoping to live out his final days in the peace of a small
hut, he left his family for the rural Russian town of Sharmardino. By train. He died at
a station on the way, stopped quite literally, like an absurd figure in a Gogol novel, as
he was enacting the tragedy of trying to use the modern to get to the past.
At the same time in the late 19 th Century, the American rail system was working its
own transformation, but with almost no ambivalence. America was using the
modern to get to the future – as fast as possible. This was a decisive difference in
temperament. “The American frontier,” Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his
famous 1894 essay about borders and American life, “is sharply distinguished from
the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense
populations.” 195 American rails and roads (and trade) encountered no substantial
fortifications. They ran nearly unchecked into the wilderness. The only apparent
limit to expansion, that generation thought, was technology itself. The trains had,
from the start, an unusual purchase in American life. During the three decades after
1840, the refinement of small but important details – faster train engines, stiffer
carriage design, tracks that were straighter, an ability to move and re-load boxcars
at night, better time-table management – eased America into the steam engine age
193 You can solve: Adam Beberg lecture “Distributed Systems: Computation with a
million friends”, speech at Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (April
30, 2008) available online
195 “The American frontier”: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the
Frontier in American History”, The Annual Report of the American Historical
Association, 1894, pp. 119-227
135
at faster a pace than any nation. “The most significant thing about the American
frontier,” Turner explained, “is that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”
This brisk acceleration of rail transit revealed an axiom of speed that matters to us
still: The faster your speed, the less distance matters. Accelerate from five to fifty to
five hundred miles an hour and the mileage becomes less significant with each notch
on the speedometer. It all takes the same amount of time. Marx called the process
“the annihilation of space by time”. He was right. Speed kills distance. The simple
algebra linking increased speed and reduced distance had been apparent already in
the shift from rowed galleys to sailing ships, but the age of industrial transport by
rail or air meant that rapid changes, changes that affected the very quality of
movement, took place within the time frame of a single lifetime. The acceleration
from horseback to train to plane happened over a period of 150 years or so. Each
new acceleration diminished the impact of distance.
There’s a phrase for this process – “Space-Time Compression” – first identified by
the American sociologist Donald Janelle in 1965 196 . Janelle saw that the technologies
of transportation, trains and planes and boats, and all the little innovations that
made them move ever-faster, were disrupting old spatial habits. They helped move
goods more quickly, sure, but in the process they were also making the old,
geographic maps less useful. When you could fly over a mountain, its importance
diminished. In a wagon train you might have contemplated the desert with fear, by
car you’d merely consider it with care. In a plane it was irrelevant. Janelle concluded
that raw economics drove this compression as much as science. Centuries of
constantly collapsing space and time had been driven not least by the hunger to
poke into distant markets, to latch onto cheap labor, and to pull natural resources to
wherever they were needed. This was “civilization” as a verb.
The demands for ever more commerce, ever faster, ever more profitably suggested
that the horses-to-trains-to-cars-to jets acceleration was an inevitable feature of
modern markets. We should expect it to continue, Janelle figured. Great fortunes
would accumulate to those who mastered speed. To be fast is a competitive
advantage; to be faster! decisive. Absolute speed is absolute power, as the philosopher
Paul Virilio has framed it. 197 That idea of “Space Time Compression” sounded
felicitous enough, like the name of a clever magic trick. Space compressed? Time
reduced? But that felicity hid the violent, revolutionary nature of the mechanism so
powerfully at work. It meant that the battlefields of power, which for most of human
history had been over the control of space, would now become – rather incredibly –
about the control of time.
196 There’s a phrase: Janelle identified what he called “Space-Time Convergence;”
Later geographer David Harvey renamed it as “Space Time Compression,” which is
more commonly used today.
197 Absolute speed: See Armitage, John, Ed. The Virilio Dictionary (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2013)
136
Janelle published his first paper on space-time compression in 1965 in the pages of
the reference journal of mapmakers, The Professional Geographer. But he was, of
course, blowing up nearly everything professional geography thought it was about.
“Geographers, as physicists, have traditionally been concerned with the positions of
points (places) in space,” he wrote. “However, geographers have not employed the
concept of ‘velocity’ in studying spatial relationships. Yet it might be of value and not
too far-fetched for the geographer to ask ‘at what ‘velocities’ are settlements
approaching one another?’” We should ask ourselves the same question. At what
velocity are you and I getting closer to other points on the planet? Janelle was
writing in 1965. He was concerned then about the sound barrier as the practical
limit to speed. But imagine his insights applied to an age where networks are
switched always on, constantly packing the world ever tighter? Where a mistake or
an innovation or an attack in one place can happen instantly and everywhere,
because the speed limit is the speed of light?
4.
At first glance, of course, geography seems the least dynamic of sciences. It is rooted
in the glacial-paced realities of geology, a discipline where speed is usually
measured in the creaking, inches-a-century advance of tectonic plates. The faster
links of transportation, whether they are trains or planes or data connections, lay
blanket-like atop that slower-moving geological layer. These high-velocity networks
are, in a way, a new geography. Mathematicians and data architects call the
landscape they represent a “topology”. The word refers to maps that can be rearranged
as a result of connection, the way in which speed and distance between
two points does affect how “far apart” they are. You can think of it this way:
Geographies are pretty much constant; topologies can change in an instant. In
geographic terms, Moscow and St. Petersburg are always 450 miles apart.
When you hear a network engineer talk about designing for a certain “topology” you
should think of hearing an architect describe the natural geography where a bridge
or a sky-scraper will one day sit. When you use an app, link to a finance market, or
wire yourself with sensors you’re connecting to a topology that has been designed
and mapped – and where what you can do is determined by that landscape. An
appreciation for tone and movement on a topology is a sign the new sensibility we
have called the Seventh Sense. Napoleon saw the battlefields of his age differently
than his enemies. They saw flat surfaces for the collision of soldiers, he saw a third
dimension, saw air filled with artillery and decisive top-down dominance. Our
Seventh Sense masters, those who can perceive a new order emerging, see wired
topologies in this same fresh way. Even though these landscapses are often invisible
or made up only of narrow fiber strings, it’s important that we try to picture
network topologies as real, as alive and buzzing and rich with connection and data,
places where fortunes will be made and lost, wars fought – and every bit as
influential as physical geography.
Topologies represent the landscape where real-world edifices like the Web or the
NYSE or Hizballah are built. They can change shape, instantly, depending on who is
137
connected, and by the speed and thickness of that connection. The topology of Wall
Street in the 1920s, for instance, was largely defined by who happened to come to
the trading floor on a given day; today it is a global landscape, influenced by news,
rumors and real-time profit twitches anywhere on the planet. Just like moving a
river from one place to another would radically change the utility of a bridge, a
change in topology changes the shape of systems that depend on it. That Seventh
Sense instinct – the powerful can become useless because of connection, the useless
can become powerful – is earned first through a fluency and even faith in these sorts
of rapid, fate-changing topological shifts.
In recent years the topologies of our network world have changed at the pace of
technology, which is very fast indeed. Every new piece of a network, every new
platform or protocol, alters how we connect. This process works on our sense of
distance like an efficient, strange sewing machine: Something very far away can be,
suddenly, with one stitch of innovation, right on top of you. The speed and the
quality of a connection is what determines how honestly “near” or “far” something
is. Location is, in a sense, as changeable as velocity. 198
Distance, on any living, networked web, is an endlessly pliable sheet. Just as you can
bring two distant points on a piece of paper right next to each other by folding the
sheet, so you can glue points in networks together by bending the space on which
they are connected. A map of the networked world or of nations or even of our city
is not some given, settled graph. One small twist and we are, like it or not, right on
top of each other. This makes it particularly murderous to hold onto the old idea
that you and I are unconnected points. Do countries like America or China have
legitimate interests thousands of miles away from their coastlines? Of course. 199 In
this way, the entire premise of Enlightenment life, the atomic focus on the power of
the individual, becomes dangerous.
It is now essential to use virtual topologies to operate in the real world, to bend
these ethereal elements of connection to influence and even total control. Thomas
Dullien, one of the researchers who discovered that “rowhammer” chip hack
captured this in a new law of network security that echoes, in fact, through all of
connected life: You don’t have to possess an object in order to control it. “Being
hacked,” he explained in a 2011 speech called Why Johnny Can’t Tell If He’s
Compromised, “is loss of control without change of ownership or possession.” 200
Your phone, resting constantly in your pocket, may in fact be pwned at every
keystroke by someone thousands of miles away. This is an extremely important
idea, an expression again of how connection changes the nature of an object: It
makes it controllable without possession. An army might be able to master an
198 Location: John May and Nigel Thrift eds. Timespace: Geographies of Temporality
(London: Routledge, 2001) 2
199 Of course: Distributed Lethality in Proceedings (U.S. Naval Institute) Jan 2015 p.
343
200 “Being hacked”: Halvar Flake, Why Johnny Can’t Tell If He Is Compromised,
keynote Area41 Conference, June 2014, Zurich
138
enemy’s territory without ever possessing it, for instance, if it can manage to own
the crucial topological infrastructures: banks, databases, communications systems.
One nation might be able to pwn another in this bloodless fashion. Networks, you
recall we said, will break nations in the future. This is just how such smashing
control will be achieved, from the linked mesh running silently and irreplaceably
under every element of national life. Today billion-dollar firms control cars, tools,
or hotel rooms without possessing them. The links draw out value. Michaelangelo’s
famous urging resonates here: Every block of stone has a sculpture inside of it, and it
is the task of the sculptor to discover it. Every network has a topology. It is the task of
each of us to discover it.
Topologies linger everywhere there is connection. Networks can be designed in
countless ways: The fishnets of Baran, the hub and spoke of a data center, the everchanging
mesh of a trading system. But what they all share is connective topologies
of one sort or another and – as a result – the fact that risk that lingers any one place
in the system also exists nearly any other linked place. Constant connection
produces, as an unsettling result, constant threat. Connection spreads, distant parts
of the world are superglued via that topological folding. Topology is not marked out
merely by a description of how we connect. Rather it is scored on what is called a
“trust graph”, a kind of map of who you or a machine or a network trusts – and how
much. An older generation still thinks a network is something made of wires and
switches and plugs. But their real power comes from something far more ethereal.
When you connect to a person or an object, you connect as well to its whole history
of decisions about who to trust. Every EU country connects to the choices of a single
border guard, for instance. Who does he trust? Is he right? Financial systems and
technology webs are the same. If you are what you are connected to, you are also –
rather unnervingly – the sum of every trusting (or untrusting) choice someone or
some machine has made. This creates a worrying result: “In the systems we’ve built
now,” Dullien has explained, “there is no way to establish who is in control.” If you
or anyone you’re linked to has made a trust mistake, you may be pwned, vulnerable,
and one hacked slice from loss of control.
Any object – your tablet computer, a digital currency, a hacked drone – can become
dangerous now in this sense, hacked by Warez Dudes into lethality. And nearly any
place can be attacked in some fashion or another, as long as it is connected. The old
chestnut of military strategy, that a clever or desperate army can always “trade
space for time” –make a gradual retreat in order to buy time, is nearly gone now.
Space is a wall that can be breached by time manipulation tools; there’s no place to
retreat to. Markets in Mongolia, airports in Europe, Chinese urban landscapes – all of
these now can be struck, more or less at any time, because they are all connected.
Unlike traditional conflict, where the location of your most terrifying dangers might
be exactly pinpointed and watched, where military zones and civilian zones were
carefully divided by front lines, a connected world is one of potential universal
peril. 201 The distinction between battlefield and everyday streets disappears and it
201 Unlike traditional conflict: Derek Gregory, “The Everywhere War” The
Geographical Journal, Vol. 177, No. 3, September 2011, pp. 238–250
139
takes with it – if we don’t handle this properly – something even more precious: The
division between periods of peace and of war.
That the knotting together of distance, speed and power changes the nature of an
object was something Janelle, the father of “Space Time Compression,” anticipated.
He labeled it “Locational Utility”, the way in which something becomes more useful
or powerful or relevant as it is drawn closer to us by increased connection and
speed, even if it stays the same “distance” away 202 . A nuclear weapon three hours
from landing and one that is three months away are, nearly, a different object
entirely. Adam Smiths’s famous remark in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that most
people would be more perturbed by the loss of half a finger than the news that a
million Chinese had perished, begins to take on a different color in an age when a
billion and a half Chinese are nanoseconds away. 203 When we say that connection
changes the nature of an object, we mean this; Networks change the “locational
utility” of anything they touch. When connection makes an object instantly, clearly
visible, it revolutionizes its potential. Little wonder so many great fortunes are being
made in applying this trick of plugging goods into compression engines like apps or
matching services. It’s hard to know if firms like Airbnb or Uber will be around in a
decade, but the economic energy they release emerges right out of Janelle’s theories:
Connect a car seat or an empty room and you change its nature. You give it value.
Part of our unease now – and part of the problem we have in strategizing about the
world or our businesses – is that stability on our topological maps is some time off
yet. There is so much yet to be connected. So many new topologies to be built.
“Time is a ride,” Danny Hillis once remarked in an early meditation about his rocksunk
clock, “and you are on it.” 204 He was right. That ride takes place, in a connected
age, on topological rails. And just how “instant” you are will be a mark of what sort
of ride you’re on. In the same way that rivers and oceans and mountains define
different landscapes in real geographies, topological neighborhoods too will each
bounce with funny quirks. Some will be super fast. Others yoked by politics. Citizens
of Santa Fe or Mumbai may choose to compress time in different ways. But they will
all share a common desire. To do more with less. The German philosopher Peter
Sloterdjik, writing about the way in which some people breeze through airports and
borders (with first class tickets and pre-approved immigration) while others
struggle to move at all out of refugee camps or poverty traps, has labeled the
winners of this new order as a kind of “kinetic elite” 205 . They are a kind of temporal
elite, in possession of golden keys to a special, frictionless topology. The technology
to eliminate space and capture time.
202 He labeled it: Donald G. Janelle, “Spatial Reorganization: A Model and Concept”,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Volume 59, Issue 2, 1969)
203 Adam Smith’s: famous remark: Adam Smith and Knud Haakonssen. The Theory
of Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 198
204 “Time is a ride” Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and
Responsibility. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 67
205 The German philosopher: Sloterdjik, TK
140
The computing programming technology that lingers inside most data centers now
and that makes sense of the ceaselessly arriving bits – Here is information on a
billion people. How many are named Bob? – is known as MapReduce. The name
combines two well-know computer fuctions, Map and Reduce, and it is just the sort
of program Janelle and Hillis would have dreamed up, had they ever met.
MapReduce divides computation work among thousands of machines, just the sort
of massive parallelism Hilli had in mind. What it implicitly does, however, is crunch
what might have taken years into microseconds. If the charmed phrase of James’
stately Victorian elites more than a century ago was “Summer Afternoon,” ours
might be “MapReduce”, a kind of magic two word code for a whole way of living and
thinking.
5.
The most successful political and economic systems of the past, the ones that
marked the winning “convergence” club of humanity’s last great leap, let people
liberate themselves into a life of their dreams. Liberty meant tearing down old
barriers to influence and security and knowledge; tipping over the Bastille, escaping
colonialism. And it meant, too, providing a scaffolding of education, of social
support, of laws and stability for citizens. The industrial, urban and rich countries
that populate our world now evolved that way because their citizens made them so.
They escaped the tyranny of the pre-modern, of a world where the small town you
were born in and the pattern of your parents’ life were a kind of prision for your
hopes. This was the whole trick of the Enlightenment, after all: What do you want to
be? You decide! What do you want your nation to be? Decide that too. Dare to know!
Look ahead now. The very best future political and economic arrangements will
need to do something more than simply liberate us. They will have to enable and
permit citizens to compress time. Just as the idea of a democracy was shocking once,
this concept of a system tuned not merely for liberty but for compression of time
should rattle us a bit. Certainly the attempt to achieve such an aim, to build the
scaffolds and rails a time compressed world demands, will jostle much of what
existst now. But to be modern means, in essence, the right, the ability to engage in
compression. Nations or corporations or ideologies that can deliver this liberty of
velocity – and that can construct and manage the flat-out fast, networked, artificially
topologies such a life demands – will grow, thrive, accelerate even faster. The others,
slowed by history or blocked by social or ideological designs, will miss the turn.
They will be the new divergence club. Fast networks will elude them. Self-defense
will be impossible; their time will be as vulnerable to easy manipulation and attack
as the resources of China and Africa and Latin America were in the face of greedy
colonialist plunder several hundred years ago.
There is no equality of justice between the weak and the strong, the Italian historian
Giambattista Vico once noted. 206 So in our age. Between the fast and the slow? No
206 Vico, New Science
141
equality either. Partly this is because of something Janelle spotted: The remarkable
advantage, the wealth and opportunity, that accrues to the people and nations and
businesses that can compress space and time. Die Ware liebt das Geld, Marx
famously wrote: Commodities love money. Speed is now the decisive commodity –
and it loves money. (The feeling is mutual.) Velocity lets us achieve that ancient goal
of doing more with less. The race for speed lights something competitive: The faster
I go, the faster you feel you need to go, the more powerfully you feel your slowness.
The centripetal charm of acceleration, the way that speed attracts us, and then
makes us demand even more speed, honestly surprised the earliest architects of
steamships and rail and airlines and roads. They under-guessed how popular their
tools of space-time compression would be. Surely the maximum number of people
who would ever want to zip from LA to New York would be about 1,000 per week,
jet airline pioneers assumed. Would more than a few hundred engineers really want
their own computers, Gordon Moore asked at a dinner party shortly after Intel
proposed putting his chips in the first PCs. Yes, it turned out. Billions more. Highway
designers call this surprise “induced traffic”: The faster a highway, the more people
pile onto it. Urban planners in Los Angeles in the 1950s looked at their packed,
congested roads and thought they could fix them by adding lanes. They embarked
on construction programs, tore up the transportation network that girded the city
and built a new one featuring optimistic 20-lane highways as wide as a football field
and flat as a plate. Traffic got worse.
Say’s famous economic law that “supply creates its own demand” seems especially
fulfilled in an age where velocity is so valuable. Speed too creates its own demand.
The faster any one piece of the network starts to rattle and move, the more
profoundly we notice how slow the leftover bits are. We want them accelerated too.
Total network bandwidth grew by an heroic factor of 1000 times between 2005 and
2010. Speed? It increased by just 20 times. Induced traffic.
What is it, exactly, that we’re so hungry for? The extreme end of fast connectivity is
what computer systems designers call “statefulness” – a word that has nothing to do
with states like nations, but rather with the condition of a connection, the “state” it
is in. Early electrical circuits were either in a charged or uncharged “state”, switched
on or off. Today when we talk about a “stateful” connection, we mean a link that we
maintain, always on. It’s the difference between a video call and a letter, between
looking at your wife here and now (a “stateful connection”) and a photograph of her
(“stateless”). Real-time everywhere connection doesn’t merely kill distance; it
attacks delay too. Older generations would “break state” when they left family at
home or friends at school with a “see you later.” Our generation? “See you always”.
We never quite leave. Technology permits us to remain in constant touch this way,
to neve break state. “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we
did, that’s what I’d want in life,” the milenial writer Marina Keegan wrote in a
famous essay that captured more than a little of this zeitgeist. “More than finding the
right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web that we’re in. This elusive,
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indefinable, opposite of loneliness.” 207 The early interface of Snapchat, where you
had to leave your finger resting on the screen in order for the video to unspool, was
a kind of metaphor for this unbreakable relationship between touch and connection.
(As was, in a different way, the diffident “out of my life” left swipe of Tinder.)
“Good theories of the mind,” Hillis’ mentory Marvin Minksy once observed, “must
span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billion years in which our
brains have evolved; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of infancy and
childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.” 208
What we face now is a new time scale to add to Minksy’s list: The instant. Super-fast
networks are different than slower ones – even ones as “slow” as what we have
today. The ideal network is one that hovers near zero latency, where the time
between what you want (or what the machines want) and the effect is as short as
possible. You click a button to watch a movie and it starts instantly. You want to shut
down an enemy air force, you do it with a single switch. The fantasy of a really “zero
latency” system is impossible of course because even electrons moving through
copper are not instant, but near-zero? Light-speed? You’ve probably heard stories of
high-frequency stock traders who move next door to exchanges so they can capture
and profit on an extra sliver of a millisecond. That’s the quest for low latency. (And
more proof of the profitable link between speed and money.) Our challenge will not
be about being faster – the technology will make that inevitable – it will be about
managing the insane, still unknown demands of a world of suddenness. “In a
distributed system, it is sometimes impossible to say that one of two events
occurred first,” computer engineer Leslie Lamport wrote at the start of his famous
essay “Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System” – a sort of
technological parallel to Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” written a
century earlier. The problem, Lamport explains, is that what happens in one place
can happen nearly instantly everywhere. There’s no time to react; so your entire
worldview has to be capable of update at an instant’s notice. When the time
between a Warez Dude finding an exploit and your own systems being
compromised is zero, then the discovery of the hole and the creation of your
vulnerability happen effectively at the same time. “The relation ‘happened before’”,
Lamport explains, “is therefore only a partial ordering of the events in the system.
We have found that problems often arise because people are not fully aware of this
fact and its implications.” 209
Networks, we are discovering, don’t only compress space and time, they are
compressing in the process the path to knowledge. We might call this “skill-time
compression”: Techniques that once took a decade of training or that demanded
access to million-dollar machines, can now be understood, applied, and then evolved
207 “More than finding”: Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Lonelinenss”, Yale Daily
News, May 27, 2012 (accessed online).
208 “Good theories”: Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1986)
209 ”In a distributed system”: Leslie Lamport, “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of
Events in a Distributed System”, Communications of the ACM, July 1978, 558
143
unimaginably fast. No one had ever heard of the Syrian Electronic Army a year
before they were hijacking famous websites, injecting world-class malicious code
into opposition computers and demonstrating a digital attack fluency. 210 Of course
the charming side of such a shift is evident too: Walk the Vatican with an historian in
your ear, master sourdough in a weekend. There’s something not a little miraculous
in the way the networked tools to recombine DNA or hack computer code or design
viral software are getting both more sophisticated and simpler. If earlier eras put
epoch-making implements into human hands – the knife! the train! – our age is now
placing new, mind-shaping forces within instant reach.
In a networked world, economic or military power doesn’t come just from
controlling territory or information alone. It comes, more and more, from this
matery of the temporal. Securing territory today does not, alone, solve many
problems of safety. Control of information, of topologies and finally of time – this is
what matters most. Such temporal security will be elusive; always in need of
defense. The arrival of airpower in World War Two, for instance, shifted battles
from two to three dimensions. “Only large states are able to resist three-dimensional
envelopment,” the historian Nicholas Spykman wrote in 1942. 211 Even today, “Air
Superiority” is the precondition of nearly any American war. If we can dominate you
from above, nearly anything seems possible. But networks add a fourth dimension.
“Time Superiority.” Can you move faster than your enemy? Can you bog them down?
Or are you a victim of fourth-dimensional envelopment. Control of time – yours,
your enemies – this will decide your strength.
6.
Back in the fall of 1988, at about the same moment that Danny Hillis and his team
were busy peddling their amazing Connection Machine – and trying to smash every
world computing speed record they could find – another device appeared in the
world of massively parallel super computers. It was, everyone who saw it agreed, an
extremely strange machine. It’s appearance was completely unexpected. It’s
designer was not a famous thinker about parallelism, cavorting with TV network
founders and physics Nobelists. In fact, its very success emerged from this strange
face: The creator knew basically nothing about the sort of parallel design that
informed Hillis’ thinking. Which was strange, because it was far more “parallel” than
the Connection Machine could ever be. It was also cheaper. Simpler. And: It was
faster. In fact, it was the fastest parallel machine in history.
The machine began, quietly enough, in the mind of a 28-year old Cornell graduate
student named Robert Tappan Morris. Morris came by his computer chops honestly
enough: He was the son of Robert Morris Sr., the legendary NSA scientist we
encountered several chapters ago, the man who penned those partly amusing, partly
210 No one had heard: Edwin Grohe, “The Cyber Dimensions of the Syrian Civil War:
Implications for Future Conflict”, Comparative Strategy (2015), 34:2,
211 The arrival of airpower: Nicholas John Spykman, “Frontiers, Security and
International Organization,” Geographical Review, Vol 32, No 3 (July 1942) p. 439
144
terrifying Golden Rules of Computer Security.“Rule One: Don’t Own A Computer.” The
machine that Morris Jr. created was madeentirely of software. It took the form of a
compact, simply designed computer program he’d written and designed to spread
quickly and easily on the young systems of the Internet. It ran a mere 99 lines, took
most computers nanoseconds to execute and it worked like this: The program – it
later became known as a “worm” by the police who would come to find and arrest
Morris Jr. – would find an open door on a network-connected computer. (In 1988,
the pre-Warez Dude era, finding such doors was not difficult. Finding locked doors
was probably harder.) Once Morris’ program had slithered inside and loaded itself
onto the machine, like a dog slipping through an unattended puppy door, it would
sniff around, rattle a few more doors to find any passwords that had been left
unsecured. Then it would move on to the next machine. Knock, knock. Rattle, rattle.
Next machine. Morris designed his code to simply repeat this process over and over.
Filling, as a result, each machine’s memory with multiple, peformance-deadening
copies of the same program. A house full of puppies, in a sense. After several hours
of this flu-like spread, a wave of unplanned, unending computation began choking
the net.
Morris later explained he’d only meant his program as a demonstration, as a test of
sorts. He wanted to show how machines might be made more safe. But he seemed to
grasp, almost immediately, that he’d made a mistake and that the worm was
running away from him. He emailed a friend: How the hell to stop it? His friend had
no idea either. They scrambled at least to warn system administrators about the
dangerous code that would shortly devour their machines. “There may be a virus
loose on the Internet,” they wrote. But that note, in a bit of bad luck, was
quarantined inside a Harvard computer that had already been unplugged. So, a few
hours after Morris released his code, unwarned and unprepared, the Internet froze.
212 On November 2 nd and 3rd, 1988 machines around the world were shut off, cables
were pulled out of walls, and systems were wiped and restarted in a race to stop the
robot-like spread of the disease and then to finally kill it off. 213
The Morris Worm was, on those fall 1988 days, acting out a sober-minded insight of
the famed biological historian Alfred Crosby: “The nineteenth century was followed
by the twentieth century, which was followed by the…nineteenth century.” 214
Crosby meant that our age of topological connection meant we were back, again, in
an age of infections. And this was true: Morris program was mapping out, like an
epidemic, new routes in the age of high-speed digital contagion. But – and this is
why we care about it here – by the time it reached “peak infection”, the worm was
212 So, a few hours: David Moore, Colleen Shannon, k claffy, “Code-Red: a case study
of the spread of a worm on the Internet” IMW '02 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM
SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment (2002), 273-284
213 Morris later explained: Ted Eisenberg, DavidGries, Juris Hartmanis, Don
Holcomb, and M. Stuart Lynn, Thomas Santoro, “The Cornell Commission: On Morris
and the Worm”, Communications of the ACM (June 1989, 12: 9) 706
214 The Morris program: Alfred W. Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The
Influenza of 1918 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) xii
145
also doing something else. It had infected tens of thousands of machines, which
were all cranking away in unintended harmony. During the 48 hours of its brief and
unforgettable life, it was later calculated, the Morris Worm had become the most
powerful parallel computer in history. At its peak, it managed to achieve a
processing speed of 400 billion operations per second – about twice the speed of the
most expensive supercomputers of the day.
Like any unexpected epidemic, the worm became a social, cultural and technological
milestone. First, it caused Morris to be arrested. He was handed a $10,000 fine,
some community service and several years of probation. He later went on to found
an important Internet company, to join the faculty of MIT and to receive the highest
honors in computing for his (other) efforts.
Then, a year or so after the virus had been finally corralled, the computer scientist
Fred Cohen, one of the earliest specialists in malware – in fact, the man who
invented the term “computer virus” – wrote an article that challenged the notion
that all computer viruses are, inherently, bad. 215 What drew his attention was that
fabulous, unbelievable record of the Morris Worm: 400 billion computations each
second. “The features that make computer viruses a serious threat to computer
integrity,” he wrote, “can also make them a powerful mechanism.” 216 This optimistic
gloss, which sounded an awful lot like “The Plauge was great for humanity!” if you
didn’t follow Cohen’s logic, triggered a furious response. Eugene Spafford, also a
well-regarded computer researcher, fired back: “For someone of Dr. Cohen’s
reputation to actually promote the uncontrolled writing of any virus, even with his
stated stipulations, is to act irresponsibly and immorally.” 217
So here, then, is a line, of sorts. The Morris Worm, an expression of really massive
connection and interaction and speed, is a model for the world we live in now. Fast,
linking with a mind of its own, running best (or at least fastest) when it uses the
design of the system to spread on a topology optimized for speed. But who is right
about the implication of such an historic design. Cohen? Spafford? Do we want our
whole world cranking away, super fast, compressing time to nothing?
We can, all of us, decide to fight against the very ideas of a network. Or we can, like
Cohen suggested, look at the terrifyingly fast nature of this world and begin to see
something else. The totally unimaginable. Of course Spafford was not wrong. There
is something scary and thought-muddling about the idea of intentionally authored
computer viruses, running wild, ever faster. But there is something thoughtmuddling
about this whole world we’re entering. Networks are pulling at every
existing structure. They hum, really, with the most elemental and precious human
215 Fred Cohen: Frederick B. Cohen. A Short Course on Computer Viruses (Pittsburgh,
PA: ASP Press, 1990)
216 “The features”: Fred Cohen, “Friendly Contagion: Harnessing the Power of
Computer Viruses”, The Sciences Sept/Oct 199, 22
217 Eugene Spafford: Eugene Spafford, “Three Letters on Computer Security and
Society,” Purdue e-Pubs 1991, 91-088
146
data – our DNA, our wedding photos, our hopeful voice mails and most essential
knowledge, our small savings against disaster. In its speed and its depth, in its
increasingly comprehensive grasp of each of us and our world, this new network
order is at once the most amazing thing we’ve ever created and the most terrifying.
But recall, for a moment, Hillis’s dream for his parallel computer: “The ability to
configure the topology of the machine to match the topology of the problem.” What
if we really could rewire our thinking, our networks and politics and economics to
match the problems we face now? Finally, with the Seventh Sense kicking alive in
each of us, we can at least see the topological landscape where such a construction
might occur. Now we must turn to the exciting question of just how we’d configure it
to do our bidding.
We’ve covered a lot so far; perhaps it is worth a glance back.
First, we’ve come to see how networks really operate, the way in which they breed a
lively connected skein that concentrates and distributes power. These systems are,
as a result of their very design, plucking apart many of our old structures and ideas.
Recall my dad, the doctor, ripped one direction by millions of disease advice
websites (distribution) and in the other by massive diagnostic databases
(concentration). This pulling process creates too, as we saw: Billion-user firms (and
billion dollar fortunes) bred with breathtaking speed. Drones, derivatives, waves of
migrants torn from their states but plugged into technological tapestries – all of
these are products of network power. Connection, we learned, changes the nature of
any object. You. Me. Money. Terrorists. Pretty much anything. And because there is a
lot more of the world that has not yet been fully connected, it’s easy to see that we
live in a revolutionary age.
Second, we learned that the world of networks is complex. It’s made up of many
complicated pieces, but complexity is something entirely different: It’s the
unpredictable and colliding evolution you might see in a rainforest, where
uncountable forces intermingle to produce life and death, growth and change.
Scientists call this “emergence” – and it is happening on all our connected systems.
Connection produces new, ripplingly powerful and unpredictable structures. The
Arab Spring. The 2008 financial crisis. Connection changes complicated objects not
least by making them complex. This is why our whole world, even the parts we
might expect to be most stable, whips around now with a new and wild energy. In a
way, we saw, this should reward a careful confidence: Go ahead and break the old
systems. Something new will emerge.
Third, we followed the trail of hackers like the Warez Dudes and discovered
something unnerving about the networks around us. Not only are they
honeycombed with dangerous and unpatchable holes, but historically unmatched
amounts of power rests in their central cores. The reason hackers are so eager to get
to these kernels of power is that in doing so they can manipulate entire landscapes
of power with a profound efficiency. A “weird machine,” fired with an invisible and
dangerous hacked logic, is a possibility that flutters through any network. Trade.
Politics. Finance. Choices made in the center of network systems will redound on
147
each of us. This is why we say that if in the past the most important things happened
in public – wars, riots, and elections – in the future many of the most powerful shifts
will, rather worryingly, occur in secret.
Fourth, we met the New Caste that masters many of these hot cores of power, for
good and ill. Past eras were dominated by merchants, sages and soldiers who
competed and collaborated in the pursuit of power. Now a new, young technological
group is appearing. The nations and companies that train and equip them best of
them will have an incalculable advantage. But there’s a hitch: As much as this group
knows about networks, they know little about history or politics or economics.
Dangerously, they often see the world as a machine to be coded.
Fifth, we unearthed a new and invisible set of landscapes that will decide much of
our future. These are called “topologies” and they are the connected fields on which
power moves now. The web where stocks are traded, cyber attacks occur, imports
are moved, or biological data are recorded and studied – each of these is a crucial
topology. Control of them will be as important in the future as control of sea or air
or capital once was.
And, finally, we learned what the networks are for: The compression of time. For all
their technical magnificence, we find that beating in the cold technological heart of
these systems is a most human desires, to negotiate a bit the one really inarguable
constant of our lives: We are all burning candles. The compression of time is why we
connect. It lets us do more, experience differently, live longer. What the demand for
liberty was to the Enlightenment, the call to compress time will be in our future – a
fundamental political demand. None of our existing institutions have been built to
answer this cry.
These six elements make up a rough outline of a new sensibility. To see them at
work in the world is the mark of a powerful way of thinking and feeling. The
Seventh Sense. And this is important, we saw, because the shift ahead of us really is
like the Enlightenment in its scale. It will tip everything over. It can’t be totally
understood in advance. We can see now that our old institutions are failing. Their
strategies for solving problems only makes them worse. We saw how, at that level of
war and peace, old ideas are laying new traps. No one in power seems to have a
clear, convincing picture of just what is going on. We can feel the danger we face,
like rippling heat from a nearby inferno – our world tugged into the future by a class
of old leaders who don't understand networks and a collection of new technologists
who don’t understand the world. We had better find some way forward that does
not depend entirely on either of these groups. The first may destroy our liberty in
the name of an elusive security; the other will consume our freedom in pursuit of a
mad efficiency. And there’s one last thing we didn’t really learn here, but I think you
probably suspected it even before you started reading many chapters ago and met
Master Nan and his warning of impending “spiritual illness”: If we’re going to shape
this world at all, we don’t have much time.
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Part Three:
Gateland
149
Chapter Nine
Inside and Out
In which the Seventh Sense brings us face to face with the most powerful feature of our
age – and perhaps of any age.
1.
The Shangani River runs in a small, green vale through some of Southern Africa’s
most remarkable nature. It marked, a bit more than a century ago, the northernmost
line of the British presence in Africa. If other parts of Queen Victoria’s colonial
empire crackled with desert harshness, the mountains and hills rolling up from the
Cape and down to the Shangani were notable for a pleasing softness, a shading
towards pastels in the changeable light of the region. For London’s colonial
mapmakers, South Africa was a long-eyed treasure, an ideal restocking and transfer
point for British ships headed for Lombok, Calcutta, Pondicherry and beyond. “We
have lost America,” the explorer William Dalrymple wrote Prime Minister William
Pitt in 1785. “An halfway house would secure us India, and an Empire to Britain.” 218
The African Cape would be that halfway house.
Following the 1814 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, which gave the British control of the Cape,
the English pressed into Africa and found each newly opened district delivered
more wealth than the last. A colonialist’s dream: Diamonds. Gold. Endless fertile
fields. The efficient engines of industry and exploration (and exploitation) of the
British African Company chewed easily, profitably, into the land. “Having read the
histories of other countries, I saw that expansion was everything,” the mining baron
Cecil Rhodes wrote in 1875. “The world's surface being limited, the great object of
present humanity should be to take as much of the world as it possibly could.” 219
And so the British did.
If there was a moment that showed the tenor, the power of this ruthless asymmetry
most clearly, it was the battle that exploded along the Shangani in 1893. The
Matabele, a powerful local tribe had been smash-and-run fighting the colonists for
years. The British had tried to charm, pacify and bribe the Matabele and their Chief
Lobengula with money and land. None of it worked. They tried threats. That did not
work either. “The Chief has had all your messages,” an imperial adjutant reported
back to Cape Town after another frustrating, pointless discussion in late 1892. “But
he has the art, not unknown to civilized despots, of ignoring what is not
convenient.” 220 Or perhaps the instinct of knowing what to avoid. One Boer
218 “We have lost America”: David Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony: History,
Literature, and the South African Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2012), 67
219 “The world’s surface being limited”: F. Vershcoyle Cecil Rhodes: His Political
Life and Speeches, 1881-1900 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1900) 7
220 “The Chief has had”: Copies and extracts of further correspondence relating to
Affairs in Mashonaland, Matabeleand, and the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Nov 1893,
150
commander, a blood enemy of Rhodes, had warned Lobengula: “When an
Englishman once has your property in his hands, then he is like a monkey that has
its hands full of pumpkin seeds – if you don’t beat him to death, then he will never
let go.” 221
So when, in October of 1893, the British finally tracked Lobengula down to the
banks of the Shangani, the two sides faced off for what promised to be an intense,
decisive battle. “It was just after 2:15a.m., a peaceful night, clear sky but on the dark
side,” one of the British infantrymen later recalled. “The bugles gave the alarm, the
camp was all excitement in a moment, all noise with the opening of ammunition
boxes and shouting of officers, the men were getting into their places. There was a
din outside from the on-rushing Matebele impis that had decided to attack in the
usual Zulu fashion.” The British soldiers were outnumbered. They were thousands
of miles from home, hanging on the thin end of a 5,000 mile supply line. The
Matabele knew the territory. They were fighting for the lives and families and honor.
But one sound was the decisive noise of the scale tipping towards the British
soldiers. A hushed clicking against the yelling all around. The opening of ammunition
boxes. The British, for the first time in African action, had mounted machine guns.
The weapons worked that morning on the Shanghani with a violence you and I
would have expected. They reversed, more or less instantly, the Matabele
advantages of men, familiarity, and even furor. Machine-gunned Matabele were
found, in the hours after the attack, perched in trees, dug into dirt mounds and piled
desperately atop each other, killed as they had scrambled. One British soldier wrote
later that that the weapons had mowed down the Matabele “like grass.” Lobengula
survived, but his army was massacred down to a squad and he was reduced to
pleading. “Your Majesty,” he wrote to Queen Victoria in the days after the battle,
“what I want to know from you is: Why do your people kill me?” 222 With this
missive, the Chief entered the ranks of the Queen’s powerless correspondents, onceomniscient
feeling men in Africa or Asia or India who wrote her after some
devastating battlefield reverse – baffled, confused, overwhelmed. Did she even read
the letters? It was hard to know, but that only made the pleading more perversely
imbalanced. The locals had no idea, really, what they were up against.
Martial leverage. It was the inarguable force of the 19 th Century. It made Europe’s
colonial masters. Of course they lied, stole, fought – did whatever sensible and
sleazy thing Cecil Rhodes and his ilk suggested was needed. The monkey with the
pumpkin seeds. Expansion was everything. Imperial dreamers in London, Berlin,
Brussels, Vienna and Paris saw with total clarity the immense historical imbalance
across the chasm of industry and science and reason. The “Convergence Club”
Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Telegram from Assistant Commisioner, Palapye, to
his Excellency High Commissioner, Cape Town, p 13.
221 “When an Englishman”: Vershcoyle, p 191-192
222 “Your majesty”: Report, Report, Volume 61 Sessional papers, (London:
Commonwealth Shipping Committee, H.M. Stationery Office, 1893), 77 from
University of Michigan online digitized library
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against the divergent, the left-behind. Rhodes confessed ambition for his company
to “take as much of the world as it possibly could,” was simply an armed, greedy
version of Kant’s “Dare to Know”. Just as no question was was unaskable, no place
was too far off to possess or exploit. No position was secured by history or distance
or sentiment. This was, for instance, the lesson taught to Lin Zexu, the Qing Dynasty
bureaucrat sent out from Beijing in 1839 to stop the British opium sales that were
reducing China to a drugged, useless coma. “Suppose there were people from
another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people
into buying and smoking it?” Lin wrote the Queen. “Certainly your honorable ruler
would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused?” Lin thought that he was speaking as
the voice of a great, eternal empire. Victoria never replied. To the extent Victoria
was aroused by anything in Southern China, it was likely by the way in which, a few
months after Lin’s letter, the British emasculated the Qing military and moved into
Hong Kong for a 150-year stay.
“Whatever happens,” the Hilaire Belloc had his Colonial character Captain Blood
famously quip in an 1885 poem, “we have got the Maxim and they ‘ave not.” 224 The
machine guns were a totem of dominance in Shangani and on other colonial front
lines; they marked a gulf between modern and unmodern, between industrial and
agricultural. The weapons had first appeared in the mid-1800s on battlefields in the
American Civil War, after the inventor Richard Gatling sent a package of samples to
the White House and convinced President Lincoln – a famous gadget freak – that
their firepower might bring the Civil War to a faster close. Lincoln ordered the Army
to try the guns, but Gatling’s early attempts were honestly too immature to tell
decisively on the battlefields of the American south. Within a few decades, however,
the guns were perfected in places like Africa, or on the frontlines of the 1904 Russo-
Japanese War. They represented a compelling, inarguable logic of industrial war: A
machine and a gun. We mowed them down like grass. You could read that line as
metaphor: Mowing grass was, in the end, the act of a machine killing a wild, natural
world into a clean, useful order. The Europeans were the grass-clipping machine;
the rest of the world was, well, the grass. For a colonial temperament hardened for
“The Great Game” of empire on the playing fields of Eton, preparing a lawn for
tennis and a territory for exploitation were not particularly distinct acts.
The Shangani battle gunshots struck the European mind as powerful confirmation of
everything they suspected about the magic violence of an industrial age. The image
of such a device suited the aggressive, engineering-led mood of era. As Gatling – and
his competitor Hiram Maxim – peddled the guns, they faced a predictable resistance,
of course: Europe’s cavalry officers were in love with their well-bred horses. But the
age was, finally, the story of aggressive industry flattening old habits. Trains were
assaulting the countryside. Factories were pounding apart the habits of labor. Social
stampedes of speed-climbing nouveau riche, political attacks of new industrial
unions and counter attacks all expressed this aggressive energy. The soundtrack of
Germany in the decades after 1869, as Bismarck stitched together a new nation
224 “Whatever happens”: Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveler, (London: Edward
Arnold, 1898)
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from dozens of hereditary principalities, was the ceaseless ping-ping of rail-building
and welding and industry. How natural it must have seemed to add the rat-a-tat-tat
of a Maxim gun. Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s eldest son, wrote that defensive
thinking was, “utterly foreign to the German spirit.” Bismarck’s “Iron and Blood”
national motto became, finally, personal for many Germans, who were prouder to
leave their universities with a hot-red dueling scar on their faces than a subtle
ownership of Goethe in their hearts.
“During the decades before the First World War,” the political scientist Steven van
Evera has observed, “a phenomenon which may be called a ‘cult of the offensive’
swept through Europe.” 225 Wars, it was believed, would run with the same swiftness
of trains or the new industrial sewing machines or steam-fired printing presses. It
was this instinct that led German generals to assure the Kaiser in 1914 that a war
begun in August would be finished by Christmas. English university students
sprinted to enlistment centers in the days after the war began, worried the fight
might end before they tasted blood. French farmers moving from their crops to the
trench lines of Flanders, Russian aristocracy crowding towards the Danube, the
politicians who led them all – they operated, mostly, with this same conviction.
British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey’s mournful meditation on the evening of
August 3,1914, the first night of the war, was a lonely one: “The lamps are going out
all over Europe,” he said. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
The First World War was a kind of engineering tragedy. The disaster had deep roots:
domestic politics, the insecurity of kings, profound colonial greed. But also a
fundamental miscalculation about the nature of war and peace in an age of industry.
Machine guns – and all the tools of industrial war, from gas to battleships – were not
magic tricks of fast victory or permanent peace, as some had thought. A mechanized
modern army wasn’t, as much as it may have seemed in theory or drills or in
midnight massacres in the African bush, some steam-press built for cold rolling the
armies Belgium and Prussia and France. In fact, the weapons encouraged battle as
they piled endlessly in national arsenals. They tickled fears of fast or surprise attack,
even as they gratified that weird continental hunger for violence. Hilare Beloc’s
poetic joke, the sly we’ve got the Maxim, and they’ve not took on an unexpected
character when both sides had ‘em. The machine gun reached the fiery acme of its
purpose not as a spur to end wars altogether, as Gatling once hoped, but rather
when it was married to barbed wire, to shovels and to gas – and then admixed with
the trigger-tugging fear of 20-year-old boys. So: Sixty thousand British casualties in
one day alone, July 1, 1916 at the Somme.
The rhymes changed. Hilare Beloc’s jigs were a distant memory for the starved,
surprised and shocked men in the field. Siegfried Sassoon:
You smug faced crowds, with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
225 “During the decades”: Steven Van Evera, “Cult of the Offensive and the Origins
of the First World War”, International Security (Vol 9, No 1, Summer 1984) 58
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Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go. 226
As soldiers dug into trenches that would endure for a half-decade, a terrible
strategic fact dawned on the generals who led Europe’s armies. The Great War was
going to be a charnel house. The continent had built itself into a battle machine,
wired by trains and telegraphs and armies. There was no reverse gear. There was
not even a switch to slow it down, let alone turn it off. A massive, technologypowered,
fast-moving system with revolutionary implications, built beyond the
comprehension of any one figure or nation, had slipped out of control. And the men
in charge of planning and directing the use of this super-fast complex? They failed
everyone: their soldiers, their kings, their armies. They were all but insensible to the
real nature of their age.
Sound familiar?
2.
Here, then, is a question of the sort – violent, loaded with the possibility of tragedy –
that you’d rather not have to consider: A new way of war arrives, a new weapon, a
fresh idea about fighting. Does it make your world peaceful or treacherous? The
lethality of the equation of guns x machines at the end of the 19 th Century appeared
to some industrialists and bankers and statesmen inarguable evidence for peace.
Everyone with such a violently efficient weapon; who dares start a war? As we now
know, machines x guns was a formula for some of the worst killing in human history.
Gatling’s fond hope that his weapons would stop war was naïve, insane even. His
competitor Maxim had been clearer eyed. A friend told him: “Give up your chemistry
and electricity. If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will
enable those Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.” 227
So: Let’s be a bit warmer about this. Networks x weapons = what exactly? Is there
some disaster lingering in our own future, as unimagined from our current
perspective as machine guns and trenches were a century ago? Do we consider war
impossible now? There’s something sickening in such puzzles, of course. Think of
the men and women who, over the millennia, have contemplated similar questions
knowing full well the answer would be measured in blood and treasure and
children. Put yourself in the place of the population of Melos, a peace-loving
Mediterranean island whose destruction 2300 years ago was chronicled by
Thucydides in The Peloponesian Wars. “Surely you have noticed that you are an
island and we control the ocean,” an unwelcome Athenian general intimated to a
Melian citizens’ council one day 243 BC as his soldiers and ships collected
menacingly outside the city’s walls. Athens wanted the Melians to join an alliance
226 “You smug faced”: Seigfried Sassoon, “Suicide in the Trenches” in The War
Poems of Seigfried Sassoon, (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2004), 64
227 “Give up your chemistry”: John Ellis, A Social History of the Machine Gun (New
York: Pantheon, 1975) p.33
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against Sparta. The Melians – like poor Lin Zexu or Lobengula of the Matabele –
yearned only to be left alone. “You would not agree to our being neutral, friends
instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?” they asked 228 . No, the Athenians
replied, and then a line that has resonated through the problems of nations ever
since: “It is the nature of power that he who has it takes; he who does not must
submit.” The Melians voted stubbornly against surrender and for hope. Perhaps the
Spartans would mount a relief raid? The Athenians might change their minds?
Neither happened. The Melian men were betrayed and then massacred. Their wives
and children were sold as slaves.
What do networks do when they touch the balance of war and peace? How might we
use what we know, what we sense, about a connected age to manage the dangers
ahead? If an insane Cult of the Offensive flavored the end of the 19 th Century, our
own age vibrates, as we’ve seen, to a Cult of the Disruptive. The great tale of our
times is the diffusion of a new, promising and disorienting network order. We’ve
been told that all this interconnection makes war an impossibility. Everyone would
be a loser in such a war. But the way in which that earlier age was so horribly wrong
about the result of machines x weapons, should unnerve us. We don’t yet really know
what networks x weapons means – to say nothing of networks x networks x weapons.
Or, to sum up what we’ve seen so far in this book, very fast networks x artificial
intelligence x black boxes x a New Caste x compression of time x everyday objects x
weapons.�Would you look at that weird formula and say conclusively: “Hey, we’ll all
get along.” Me neither. We should worry about the day we might face a Melian
choice of our own, when some general or infomanagerial despot – or some clicking
computer – shows up, unwelcome, and says to us: It should be obvious you are
merely a node, and I control the network.
When leaders label the rise of China or cyberweapons or terrorism or the decline of
the US as the “main problem” of our age – and all of these have been designated as
such by famous foreign policy figures –they are missing the revolutionary, uniting
force that animates them all. Networks. Whether we are trying to slice apart the
roots of the Islamic State or slow Russian territorial dreams or understand narcoeconomics
or hedge-fund finance – connectivity touches and defines each problem.
New and essential platforms for finance and biological data and artificial intelligence
are emerging now, blossomed out of network connection. These ecosystems must be
design, built, protected. All while the world we know kicks back around us,
sometimes crumbling, sometimes fighting for its dear life. I promised earlier that
we’d apply the Seventh Sense to some practical problem, and the deadly test of war
and peace is the one I’d like to consider now. The sharpest challenge of truth for any
view of the world is, after all, the design of a grand strategy. Get it right and you can
secure your safety. The energy of the age can be your tool. Get it wrong and you reap
the Somme, Melos, Canton, the Shangani. Recall General Liu Yazhou’s line: “A major
228 The Melians: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Steven Lattimore trans.,
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998) Chap 5.; See also the excellent BBC
performance of certain elements of Thucydides in “The War That Never Ends”
available on YouTube
155
state can lose many battles, but the only loss that is always fatal is to be defeated in
strategy.”
The leaders of our major global powers may be as blind to the dangers and
possibility of our world as Europe’s heads of states were to the nature of their era
100 years ago. You know what the Seventh Sense is now. Who among them has it?
We should wonder if we’ve merely now done Hiram Maxim one better: Have we
developed something with our age of connection that will reach its fullest potential
in allowing us to slit each other’s throats more efficiently? I don’t think so, but
understanding why means we need consider the networks, to feel them out with our
new sense.
3.
The essential problem of politics is not difficult to state. It was true for Seneca in the
Roman Forum as it was for Lobengula on the Shangani riverbank or is now for
congressmen in Washington or cadres is Beijing: Who has power? Why? By power I
mean the ability to control others, to tell them what to do – or what not to do; and of
course to avoid being dictated to yourself in that “Surrender or die” way. Max
Weber, the German sociologist of the last century, had it right: Macht, the ability to
achieve what you want despite the resistance of others. 229 Don’t develop nuclear
weapons. Or Don’t attack us. Or, Join our alliance against Sparta are all examples of
power in action. The movement of power, from the balled-up fists of Kings and
Popes and Emperors, to the hands of markets and voters and citizens, and now into
a fresh, connected dynamic is the story of history. This is a lurching, worrisome,
dangerous process even if it suggests some miraculous transformations. Whole new
topologies of vital, life-giving control are emerging; surely contests for their mastery
will occur. The terrible human infection of a hunger for power and security isn’t,
much as we might wish, something quarantined safely to the pages of Homer or
Hitler.
So let’s pass beyond describing the new and surprising elements that make up a
Seventh Sense and onto its use. Examine our world with this instinct, for a moment.
Picture that constantly stretched, complex network, spitting out drones, viruses,
fortunes and disruption as it is wont to do. Recall the seething, insidious power of
the Warez Dudes, the New Caste, the black boxes they all hunger to penetrate and
make weird. Think of the compression of time, of twisting topologies that can place
the distant atop us in an instant. What single feature stands out? Our world shuffles
now, as all these forces slip into an order defined by closed spaces, by fresh in and
out borders. What the Seventh Sense reveals as it feels at this new arrangement is
gates. Everywhere. Facebook, bitcoin users, doctors with privileged access to
genetic databases – all are gated, in-or-out worlds. Look around and see how many
gates enclose you or your family or your company. The Internet. The FTSE 100. Your
Apple or Android operating system. In our connected age, the act of drawing lines
229 Max Weber: Max Weber and Sam Whimster, The Essential Weber: A Reader.
(London: Routledge, 2004), 355
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between points is also an act of drawing a line around those points. It is not simply
that we’re enmeshed in networks now; no, we’re enclosed even entrapped by them.
If the great ambition of Cecil Rhodes’ era was for the expansive conquest of
territory, in our own it is for the construction and manipulation of gated spaces.
Gatelands.
In an age of network power, no position is more important, formidable, influential
or profitable than that of the gatekeeper. Defining who is in or out of any network is
among the most essential moves of design. In financial markets, on the Internet
backbone or inside the human immune system, the accept-or-reject decision
determines a great deal. The first sign of order breaking down, whether it is the
Roman Empire or your lungs, is an inability to manage what slips in and out. Flows
of bits, of migrants, of gold and patents and medicines – all of these life-giving forces
can be controlled, bent for good or stopped for ill, as they pass through or collide
with gates. By gates I mean not only in-out passages but all of the tools that meter
and enclose the various Gatelands: Protocols, languages, block-chains. Whatever
binds and shapes an information topology. Any sort of code or encryption or binary
instruction that can unlock an in and out. If you want to make a fortune or a
revolution (or both), if you hope to shatter some barrier of tools or ideas between
you and a dream, or to lead a religious revival, spread an infection of hate or
revolution or insidious Morris-style computer code – then fundamentally this is
what you have to consider: Where are the gates? How to smash them? How to build
your own? We are entering, as a result of our dependence on networks of all sorts, a
landscape where the very clustering of power creates new border regions, bridges
and gates. If older, hierarchical systems craved a top – a king, a superpower, a Pope
– our connected, meshlike age demands valves and protocols and gates. It hungers
for connection, which means it hungers too for throttles and accelerators and
brakes. And of course people to run them. To speed them up. Slow them. Finger off
switches. This reordering of power will produce, is producing, a fight over
topological spaces for finance, biology, trade or pretty much any source of power.
The scramble is as urgent, decisive and essential as the one Rhodes and his peers
embarked upon. Inside or out? A fresh Meliananxiety haunts us: Are you the
gatekeeper? Or the gatekept?
We wander into Gateland the moment we switch our phones on. We enter it when
we book an airline ticket, when our genetics folds into a pool of data, or when we
take a new degree, master a computer language, or check on friends via one stateful
connected platform or another. We enter it, in short, when we connect. Gatekeepers
choose what we see. They determine the rules we follow, what we can and can’t
change. They reward us too – once we’re inside – with benefits of speed, knowledge
and safety. Gatekeepers, which can be people or protocols or code, decide who can
join closed communities and who is left out and why. They pass us the fine benefit of
the compression of time, even as they expose us to the zipper of instant potential
disaster hitting everyone in a closed space at once. Gatekeepers control, for instance,
how (and how fast) financial data moves between members of light-speed “in the
know” trading pools, and the suckers outside. What you can see in your phone or
your university computer, why, how – all of these choices have to be made by
157
gatekeepers. They can, if they wish, manipulate any step of life inside their enclosed
orbs of power – and by extension, they can twist data and machines and you. The
line between perverting search results and election results is a thin one. Such a
manipulation of data is trivial, which means the manipulation of you and I is,
technically at least, trivial. It involves the laying of our preferences – what do we
usually read, watch, who do we talk to, where do we live – against machine logic and
vast data fields. Manipulation of data = Manipulation of us.
The idea of gatekeeping first emerged as it related to newspapers, back in the 1920s
when politicians, advertisers and a few social scientists watched a print-information
explosion – and developed an uneasy feeling about how the world looked through
many newspapers. The personal whims of an editor, his political bent, his boss’
economic interest – all of these laid on “facts” like a heavy distorting blanket. Minor
twitches were turned into fear-mongering bait. Major global shifts were ignored.
The papers are (nearly) gone now, of course. And the idea of gatekeepers merely
bending headlines to suit a personal whim seems charmingly nostalgic. Gatekeepers
today have a far more profound, subtle reach. They might be governments or
regulators or CEOs or machines or research committees, each controlling the design
and development of some “rich get richer” tool we depend on and – by marking that
“in or out” line – exerting historic, invisible control. Genetic engineering secrets.
Unthrottled data flows. Product releases. Do you want accurate DNA analysis? Fast
protection from epidemic? A cyber-defense system? You can’t have any of these, you
know, unless you’re in someone’s fiercely guarded gateland. Even systems that look
open – the Internet, the world of US Dollar transactions, the election rolls – are
gated in certain ways. Of course there is – at times – a balance between the
gatekeepers and the gatekept, between those of us inside a system and the tools and
people who overmaster us. “In many cases, traditional literature focuses mainly on
gatekeepers as elites who hold power in their hands while the gated are treated as
powerless,” the information theorist Karine Nahon has written. “In networks,
however, it is necessary to give sufficient weight to the role of the gated, since being
subject to gatekeeping does not imply that the gated are powerless, lack
alternatives, or that gatekeeping is forced on them. Actually, being a gated
sometimes is a matter of choice.” 230 But sometimes, of course, it is also a matter of
inarguable necessity.
In the slower, less wired worlds of our past, gates mattered too of course. Nations,
governments, militaries, religious orders – all of these clustered behind (and
defended) marked lines. Map lines, front lines, dogmatic lines. The Triple Entente
that bound Britain, France and Russia together in the last century was as much a
gated system for their own security as the Peloponnesian League 2500 years earlier
had been. Deciding who could swap silk for spice beyond the Tang Dynasty’s border
was a gatekeeping choice, as consequential for Chinese strategists of the 8 th Century
as the decision about what might or might not be wheeled into the city was for the
230 “In many cases”: Karine Barzilai-Nahon, “Toward a theory of network
gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control.” Journal of the America
Society for Information Science 59(9), 1493–1512.
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tragically uncareful councils of Troy. But now, in an age where connection decides
so much, control over gates has a unique leverage. When you finally can feel out the
topology of our age, when in anger or frustration or hope or wonder you are ready
to act, then this is among the first questions you have to ask. I’m on the topology now,
where are the gates.
4.
Gates in an age of instant, everywhere, smart networks are, you can imagine,
different from the ones that girded Troy or the Tang dynasty. It’s not merely that
they’re made of bits and algorithms not bricks, it’s that the underlying nature of
their power is different. The most visible evidence of this distinction was first
observed by economists a couple of decades ago, as they contemplated the fortunes
of the information age, wealth that had been assembled at an eye-watering pace.
Unlike traditional businesses which turned over time into competitive slugfests with
very low profits, many high-tech firms seemed to run with a new, nearly inverted
logic. “Our understanding of how markets and businesses operate was passed down
to us more than a century ago by figures such as Alfred Marshall,” the economist
Brian Arthur wrote in the Harvard Business Review in the summer of 1996. “It is an
understanding based squarely upon the assumption of diminishing returns:
products or companies that get ahead in a market eventually run into
limitations.” 231 Marshall had been the first to name this phenomenon in the 1890s:
“Diminishing Returns”. As any line of business gets more competitive, the profits –
or “returns” to investment – shrink. Henry Ford invents a car, he has no competition
at first and fairly prints money. But Ford doesn’t enjoy his monopoly for long. Pretty
soon the Dodge brothers follow him into business, as does Walter Chrysler and then
a cascade of new auto companies. They all take a piece of the pie; profits for every
carmaking firm diminish. Then the Japanese pile in. The Koreans show up. These
new companies compete with growing intensity. Marginal profits decline for
everyone. Then the Chinese. And the Indians.
As he studied the balance sheets of infotech firms, Arthur noticed something
strange: Returns were increasing over time. As their markets matured some
companies made more marginal money with each passing day, not less. Marshall’s
19 th Century industrial economics had never contemplated such a lucrative
arrangement. “Increasing returns,” Arthur explained, “are the tendency for that
which is ahead to get farther ahead. They are mechanisms of positive feedback that
operate—within markets, businesses, and industries—to reinforce that which gains
success or aggravate that which suffers loss.” In other words: Winner takes all. No
second place. Arthur was thinking, as he wrote, about the then-nascent computer
software business. Say for instance, Arthur sent you a copy of his paper to read
before publication as a Microsoft Word document. Well, if you wanted to see what
he had to say, you’d pretty much have to own a copy of Word yourself. If you then
231 As he studied: Brian Arthur, “Increasing Returns and the World of Business”
Harvard Business Review (1996)
159
sent it along to some friends for their input, they’d be in the same bind. One after
another, in just this fashion, users tumbled into the program. It became a standard, a
“platform” in industryspeak.
And Microsoft enjoyed a particularly appealing economic leverage: Developing
Word may have cost millions, but once that work was done, each additional copy
cost just cents to produce. This astonishing speed loop of profitability demanded a
whole new economics. It also forced a reconsideration of what “competition” might
really mean. Once Excel or Windows had settled into place, had become a standard,
you couldn’t really compete with it. New, optimistic maybe even better rivals rushed
into the marketplace, but they were all assaulting the impregnable wall of habit, of a
locked-in technology. Should this be legal? Arthur wondered. Traditional economics
said such monopolies were bad for everyone. (As did the Department of Justice and
their global peers as they chased Microsoft for a decade.) But was that right? The
“platform dividend” that accrued to Microsoft was surely large, but if you could
somehow total up the benefit to the rest of us? The convenience, the efficiency, the
benefits of Microsoft’s billions of research spending might dwarf even Redmond’s
massive profits. “Increasing returns,” Arthur wrote, “cause businesses to work
differently and they stand many of our notions of how business operates on their
head.”
The essential phenomenon Arthur spotted at work two decades ago is something we
now know as “network effects” – an idea that changed how we think about
businesses, and particularly about the sticky and alluring power of gated, connected
systems in nearly any setting. In the years after Arthur’s paper, billions of us ran
madly along a course he had anticipated: We crashed our way as fast as possible
into those single, winning businesses – rewarding them with near monopoly
positions in exchange for the benefits of being “inside”. In the twenty years since
Arthur spotted increasing returns in software, eight different billion-user worlds
have emerged – and others are not far behind: Microsoft Office and Windows,
Google Search, Google Maps, Facebook, Google Chrome, YouTube and Android all
exhibit that appealing, “If you use it, I’ll use it!” logic. Profits and power, just as
Arthur would have expected, followed right along. The most valueable company on
earth in the early age of connection was one that, particularly, had perfected the
idea of a closed iWorld where the efficiencies and charm of inclusion made outside
assault difficult. Younger companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, Weixin and others
hover not far from a billion users and point us to this gated model spread and
repeated. It is easy enough to imagine a world where billions will be enmeshed
behind certain gates.
It was just as Arthur predicted: If ten people use WhatsApp or Facebook or
YouTube, it’s hard for the eleventh to do something different. And when the
eleventh person joins in, they make it harder still for the twelfth to walk a unique
path. So: Windows runs on 90% of the globe’s PCs, nearly 30 years after its first
release. Google has 65% market share. Android runs on 81% of new phones.
WhatsApp neared a billion users with less than 50 engineers on staff. Facebook
passed a billion connected people and faced no real competition. The rich got richer.
160
How? “Seven friends in ten days,” Facebook growth hackers repeated like a mantra
in the early years, a humming meditation that carried them from dorm room to
nearly every corned of the world 232 . If you or I joined the service and found seven
friends in ten days, we would most likely stay, enjoying the benefits of the gated
world, making it that much harder (impossible really) for friend number eight to
wander somewhere else. Pretty soon, there was essentially nowhere else to go
anyhow. The network magnetism worked so well that, as a result, Facebook’s speedlooping
connection machine cut the famous “six degrees of separation” posited by
Stanley Miligram – the number of leaps between any two people on the planet – to
four. 233
Network theorists who came after Arthur call these “rich get richer” systems “power
law distributed” because if you line up all the firms in a digital industry you find the
winners are exponentially – by a power of ten or one hundred – ahead of everyone
else. They slip free from the average gravitational center of a normal bell curve that
marks most traditional business. A normal distribution would shape up like a chart
of people who own cars: 20 percent driving Fords, 10 percent Nissans and Toyotas,
and so on. Or it might look like the distribution of height: Most men are between 5’7
and 5’11, but 50% are scattershotted at different heights. Network systems,
however, can breed commanding winners. It’s not like 50% of online users are on
the Internet and others are scattered across different systems. Users huddle into
single winning clusters. It’s as if 90% of the world always bought a Ford; or 90% of
people were exactly 5’ 11”. These systems run faster and better and more profitably
because they are locked-in, gated by technology standards and by common
connection. When we say that networks crave gates, this is the sort of gate we mean.
If you had to look for your friends one-by-one on Facebook, Friendster, MySpace,