BitCoin - these are, of course, expressions of a kind of network power. But “Network Power” is something larger. It represents a potentially comprehensive grasp, new in human history and enmeshing billions of connected lives and tens of billions of linked sensors and machines. It is becoming, with every passing moment, more comprehensive: more sensors, more links, more points and more speed. Cascades, epidemics and interactions are ubiquitous on all these networks, producing unexpected innovation in their collisions: the weaving of genetics and databases, for instance, or of terrorism and mobile messaging". Scientists who study networks call this sort of change “Explosive Percolation,” by which they mean an instant shift in the very nature of a system as it passes a threshold level of connectivity.15 This melding of nodes into a single fabric is not unlike the linking of water molecules one to another as the temperature drops. One moment you have something you can drink; the next you have ice. So: One moment you have a world of simply connected users, the next a billion-person platform like Facebook or YouTube solidifies. One day you have tumbling, angry fundamentalists; the nexta linked terror movement. And because the impact of terrorism - which might be best defined as violence with an aim of causing psychological impact - depends on connection, exploding the landscape of links instantly expands its effects.1° The network enables a new kind of terror. It changes its nature. Expands its impact. Such elemental phase transitions, where more means different, appear everywhere in linked natural systems- the formation of crystals, for example, of the collapse of an ecosystem when the last of a keystone species is hunted down. They appear on networks too. So you might say: A phase transtion lingers ahead of us in our security, our finances, our politics. The age we're entering now will be as different from the age we're leaving behind as the Enlightenment was from the dark feudal era that preceded it.
The Enlightenment’s revolution of free ideas and men and trade and capital demanded a new sensibility. Our age is similar. It insists already on a fresh feeling for the power that emerges as a result of connection. There’s an irony here: At the very moment when we might expect ourselves to be most free - liberated by wireless connections, by easy jet travel, by never-off communications - we find ourselves, inescapably, enmeshed and dependent. Mastery of connection turns out to be the modern version of Napoleon’s Coup D’Oeil. Connection increasingly defines the most elemental pieces of our lives. The old individualistic, me-first instincts don’t answer as well as they might once have when “me-first” now demands connection of some sort in order to get what you might want: Am education, better medical care, a pizza. What is true for the machines all around us now is true for us too: We are what we are connected to.
4 Cascades, epidemics and interactions: Dirk Helbing, “Globally Networked Risks and How to Respond,” Nature, 2013, 51-59.
15 Scientists who study networks: D. Achlioptas, R. M. D'souza, and J. Spencer. "Explosive Percolation in Random Networks." Science, 2009, 1453-455.
16 And because the nature of terrorism: See Anthony Richards, Conceptualizing Terrorism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
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