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of network power: Contagions of fear, manipulation of data, the subtle and invisible influence of the boxes we depend upon but don’t understand.!73 Recall Francis Bacon’s Enlightenment line? That human knowledge is human power? Well, what is computer knowledge? It is human power? Or something else, in its entire, hidden immensity? You have to wonder if this packing of insight and vision and control into black boxes, or the hands of a small New Caste will bleed us of our liberty as a result. “Our constitution is called a democracy because the power to make decisions is not in the hands of a minority but of the whole people,” Pericles reminded Athens in his Funeral Oration 2500 years ago. “We regard a man who takes no interest in politics not as harmless, but as useless.”!”4 Vital engagement is the food of democratic life. To be baffled to the outside of the essential boxes of power then, seems an instant sort of cancer on liberty. What do we make of a man who takes no interest in the networks of networks that control the power to make decisions? Perhaps you've heard of the famous manufacturing trilema: You can get something made any two of good, fast and cheap. If you want that custom table made quickly and well, it won’t be cheap. If you want it good and cheap, you had best be prepared to wait. In networks a similar puzzle emerges in my mind. Systems can be any two of fast, open or secure. A computer system that is really secure can be open, but it will be very slow, inspecting each packet and instruction like a bank security guard watching customers in a bad neighborhood. Think of the like an airport. Want it to be fast? Secure too? Then it won’t be very fast. Mostly what we want today are fast, secure arrangements for our markets, our nations, our data. So these will become, | think, ever less open. It used to be that history was made in public: Big visible wars and social shifts and revolutions. Pericles in the Athenian square; the churning protests of Jefferson’s Paris or the massing of armies. Now, however, subtle manipulations of technology, invisible to most of us and maybe even accidental, maybe weird, will produce historic-scale external effects. Changes to the network design will become political and social exploits in a sense, living versions of that atomic-level “rowhammer” hack that work on the connective energy of our world. Already social network analysis can be used to manipulate voting patterns. Soon, it will be possibly to precisely target any potential voter with a message engineered like a custom-made drug, designed to bind right to the DNA of your habits and beliefs. It represents the possibility for the complete technical perversion of politics. As the New Caste operates on the systems that are at the core of connected politics and economics, on how we vote or think or shop, they will vibrate the system in invisible ways even when they don't mean to be nefarious. Improvements may be as dangerously unpredictable as bugs. Small changes to algorithms or links or protocols mean our whole system may be pwned before we're quite aware. Such 173 “Democracy”: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 246 174 “Our constitution”: Thucydides, A History of the Peloponnesian War, (Oxford: Oxford University Clarendon Press, 1881),119 119 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018351