All quotes from
Joshua's book
In a world of markets, each of us – our labor, our ideas, our
capital – is a commodity. We are
liberated, but only to compete.
In our age of connection, everyone of us is a node.
Someday soon, drones will demand the redesign of our
cities as automobiles did in the last century.
Yang is the thunderstorm; yin is the peace that comes afterward.
That yin-yang balance helps us understand the power split on a
network is not really split. Network
power is wild at the ends, with all the creative energy of the world filled
with devices, empowered human dreams, and the violent slips of old
balances. Yang. But at the center it is dense, still, and
even quiet, with the silently cranking algorithms of massively concentrated
power. Yin.
"Anyone can connect” marks our age as much as Luther’s “anyone can
speak to God” characterized the Reformation or Kant’s “dare to know” defined
the Enlightenment.
Massive, widespread connection changed everything, including how a
phone works.
Robert Morris Sr, a cryptographic and security genius who towered
over NSA code-breaking programs for decades in the last century, compressed his
lifetime of experience cracking machines into three golden rules of computer
security. Rule one: do not own a
computer. Rule two: do not power it
on. Rule three: do not use it.
All around us today, huge power accumulates in certain irreplaceable
cores. Giant search engines, certain
algorithms, database or communications protocols over master us. Imagine life
without search. Or a link to friends.
When everyone links to a core, that core links to everyone – like a
country with a single airport. Every evil thing beats in the potential of these
central nodes.
Systems can be fast, open, or secure, but only two of these three at
a time.
The faster your speed, the less distance matters.
The acceleration from horseback to train to plane speed happened
over a period of 150 years. Each new
acceleration diminished the impact of distance.
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 is irrelevant.
The faster links of transportation, whether they are trains or
planes or data connections, now lie, blanketlike, atop that slower-moving
geological layer. These high-velocity
networks are a new geography.
Mathematicians and architects call the landscape they represent a
topology. … Geographies are pretty much constant; topologies can change in an
instant. In geographic terms, Moscow and
Saint Petersburg are always 400 miles apart. In topological terms, they are as
far apart as the fastest connection between them – about 0.3 milliseconds on a
light-speed fiberoptic cable.
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, or to spread an infection of hate or revolution or
insidious computer code – then, fundamentally, this is what you have to
consider: where are the gates? How do you smash them? How do you build your
own?
The world should expect that the opening attacks of future wars –
directed at the United States or allies that it must defend – will come
invisibly and silently through networks or from space, not from noisy land
invasions or bombing runs.
While it’s tempting to call the twenty-first century the Urban
Century, in fact the billion-people-a-decade rush into cities is a
symptom. A larger hunger for the
constant knitting of lives together, for fresh and efficient connection, drives
us.
Scientists who study networks call this sort of change “explosive
percolation” by which they mean an instant shift in the nature of a system as
it passes a threshold level of connectivity.
This melding of many nodes in a single fabric – think of the way phones
tie together to make a telephone system – 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 hold ice. So one day you
have a few connected users; the next, a billion people are on facebook or
youtube. A new entity has formed.
The great insight of the Enlightenment was that the nature of an
object – a person, a piece of land, a vote, a share – changed when it was
liberated from fetters of tradition, ignorance, habit or fear. A peasant pulled from serfdom became a
citizen, which changed his politics, his economic hopes, his ability to learn
and teach. That shift triggered centuries of disruption. The world realigned
itself.
Protocols are rule books. On
the Internet, for example. Protocol rules place each bit of data in a reliable,
predicable order, just as diplomatic protocol might seat ambassadors at a
negotiation. This is why computers can speak to each other. But protocols are about more than bits. They
can be used to organize trade networks or stock markets too. Designing and controlling a protocol, then,
means that you can control almost everything important about a system.
The pre-network instinct to fear Chinese! or fear Spanish! is the
wrong one. As is the idea to teach the world Chinese or Spanish as a source of
power. Or, eventually, to demand that
everyone in the United States speak English.
Rather, can we control this turbo-smart connected language protocol? is
the right question. Many of the threats
we worry about today have been similarly simplified and misunderstood. Fear
deflation? Fear Isis? Fear the RMB? Such fear reflects a blindness. Finance, terrorism, and currency change when
they are connected. It’s the network we should be nervous about.
It’s hard to let go of old notions, not just because we’re attached
to them, but because in many cases what we’re being asked to hold on to next
makes no sense to us. We honestly don’t
understand what network connections can do to a market or a military enemy any
more than figures of hundreds of years ago knew what steam engines might do to
sailing.
Many of the most unsettling forces in our world are ones we
encourage. If I had said to you a decade
ago, “I’m going to record all your movements so that you can spend less time in
traffic”, is that really a deal you would have accepted? But if you use a GPS mapping system on your
phone, you have done just that.
Connected forces can move like a capricious monster, smashing
businesses or national economies or ecosystems with little warning and
merciless efficiency. Connected
terrorists have cost trillions to fight; linked-up businesses have demolished
trillions of dollars of profits from old sources with their cold, clicking
efficiency. Skype didn’t steal hundreds
of billions of dollars of long-distance telephone fees, for instance. It made them disappear.
When we say that ours is a revolutionary age, it’s not because you
can watch videos on your phone. It’s because of why you can watch videos on
your phone – and what that implies for the old, nervous structures around us.
