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also that everything is monitored. Remebered. Studied. The Warez Dudes’ drive to get ever closer to the core, to perform even that atomic level hacking, tells us something about just how much power is locked up in those central cores where this information accumulates. The 2600 hz whistle was, it seems, only the first of an endless series of battles for control of the roots and trunklines of modern power. All around us today, huge power accumulates to certain irreplaceable cores. We know this is a problem of connected age design: Giant search engines, certain algorithms, database or communications protocols overmaster us because they can gather so much data, so fast, and process it with unique fidelity. What makes a city? urban scholars often ask. We might wonder: What makes a platform for network power? The answer to both questions is the same: Density.15? If the first cities of Aztecs or Mesopotamiaman civilization differed from early tribal clusters because of their density, the same is true for our first platforms of instant connection. Facebook is denser than AOL ever was. More people, more data, thicker connections. Future platforms will be denser still. And if cities and density were once sadly unanticipated accelerants to plague, poverty and revolution, we should be aware of the risks of our own tight-clustered centers of dense connection. The security of these cores that link us to each other and our essential data - when jacked by hackers, by companies, or even by fast algorithms we don’t understand - is important not merely because of the possibility of total control a breach might represent, but because they show us the very fact of such totalizing control exists. To infect, surprise, sicken - all this is alluringly possible and dreamable for anyone with a hunger for mastery. Imagine if you knew your government could be switched instantly and invisibly to malice. (Or, to effectiveness!) Or picture a nation of connected citizens wired for flash-started nationalism and hate. Such a possibility exists on linked systems. This potential for total, weird control of the cores - and thus total control of anyone connected to them - should force us to wonder a bit. Every evil thing beats in those central nodes: The power to manipulate, to master, to destroy even. With such access I can change what you know about the world, how you vote, where your money sits, what you remember, how soon we spot (or don’t) a slipped knot in your DNA. “Just like every drinking binge ends at vodka, so every hacking session ends at kernel.org” Thomas Dullien, the mathematician and good-guy hacker who won a Pwnie in 2015 for lifetime security achievement, observed once!54. So much power in a connected system lies at its root: Kernel.org, for instance, is the reference copy for LINUX computer code that powers most digital machines on earth, sort of like the original DNA of the net. To manipulate Kernel.org would be to reach into the very spine of the Internet. If the aim is control, if it is to find and exploit the most fundamental of cracks in the surface of the black boxes, to get even deeper inside, 153 What makes a city?: Colin McFarlane, “The geographies of urban density: topology, politics and the city.” Progress in Human Geography (2015) p. 2 154 “Just like every drinking binge”: Halvar Flake/Thomas Dullien, “Why Johnny Can’t Tell If He Is Compromised,” speech delievered at Area41 Conference, (Zurich, June 2014) 107 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018339