ever better, like a video resolving itself from low-quality to HD in front of your eyes. Success attracts still more users. All of them are Google’s sensors, in a way. Medical diagnosis, cybersecurity, trading algorithms, search - pretty much any linked ball of chips and humans and sensors throbs with this logic. The best of the leading technology firms understand the power of this logic: Google’s TensorFlow artificial intelligence engine, for instance, was largely regarded by experts as nearly a decde ahead of competitors in 2015. So the company began giving away access for free. In traditional economic terms this would be insane; but with network logic the strategy is clear: The more people who use TensorFlow, the smarter it gets, which in turn attracts still more users. Dense and learning fusions of mind and data like TensorFlow and other soon-arriving AI systems are all gated universes. The “increasing returns” for those inside - you, me, our neighbors - breed mutual efficient success and, of course, massive power for their owners. We're part of the game too: The more people tied in, the better our lives get.
The topological charm of these explosively growing clusters was first teased apart by the electrical engineer Bob Metcalfe in the 1970s. Metcalfe was hunting fora better way to send data - say grocery lists to his wife - through Menlo Park and he perfected a connection protocol called Ethernet, which soon became a standard for linking machines. What Metcalfe noticed, as more and more users piled into the gateland of Stanford’s Ethernet-connected machines, was that the power of the system was growing exponentially with each additional user. This became known later as “Metcalfe’s Law”: The power of a network grows, massively, with each additional user. A system with one phone, for example, is really not very useful. Who would you call? A system with two phones means one possible connection - we can call each other. But when you increase the number of phones by a factor of two - from five to ten, say - the number of possible connections more than doubles from ten to 45 . The difference between Bob Metcalfe and his wife sharing grocery lists and a connected national network of husbands and wives is immense - an insight that led Bob Metcalfe and his wife to start a networking company that made them billionaires.
Metcalfe’s Law has another angle, and it’s here where some of the unnerving, dangerous political power of network gates is revealed: It’s not merely that the power of a network grows exponentially with each additional user; it’s that the cost of being cut out grows every bit as fast. Maybe even faster. If | shut you out of Google today, it’s painful. But tomorrow - after a day of new information and websites and services come on line - it will be even more costly. The network scientists Rahul Tongia and Ernest Wilson have called this “The Flip Side of Metcalfe’s Law.”235 To be excluded from a database of cancer genetics, for instance, when it has a million members is probably not such a painful problem; to be locked out of the chance to compare your genes with a billion others, however, is hugely costly. Maybe even fatal. Imagine if I cut you out tomorrow from the NYSE, your phone system, smart diagnostic webs, cybersecurity patches? It’s not like you can swap our your Ford for
235 The network scientists: Rahul Tongia and Ernest J. Wilson III, “The Flipside of Metcalfe’s Law”, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), 665-681
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