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all, mark the political topology on which on which all the fundamental act of our age will occur: our own gating. But as essential as more technical knowledge is, I don’t think it’s likely to be where we come up short. Yes we need more computer coding academies, we need better popular education about network choices, we need to retool our leaders. But I don’t think it’s a shortage of bolt-heads that will do us in. Rather, given the unique pressures of what is ahead, I think it is our human side that may let us down. I’m sure we'll all be told in coming years that everything would be fine if we just let the New Caste figures take over, with their bloodless technological tools. These revolutionaries are a crucial part of the story of human progress, but they cannot alone write the next chapters. | think, asked to run our government, they’d likely end up like Plato’s pro-Spartan relatives in that awful dictatorship of the Thirty: A crew of buddies convinced they can get things under control who become rapidly overwhelmed by the human element, by wild network thumos and then reduced toa murderous madness. They would use technology to manipulate our voting just as they might manipulate our options for a new liver - or news or financial security. “One of the reasons computer software is so abysmal is that it’s not designed at all, but merely engineered,” the computer scientist Terry Winograd has written. “Another reason is that implementers often place more emphasis on a programs internal construction than its external design.”2’! This black-box temperament, the sense of efficacy as a final value for code, of internal design, of closed control, isa dangerous fit to the human business of free politics. But to expect our current leaders to catch up? I fear this is also unlikely. It’s not merely that they continue to wield the aging tools of industrial power with a strange confidence. No, their failures - which don’t seem to faze them much - are less dangerous than where they might yet succeed: Control, surveillance, the shredding of liberty in the name of an elusive safety. These leaders are fascinated by how the new tools might be used to extend the rule of a system that serves their interests, that serves them. The fear that such tools might one day snap back upon them (or us) is muted by ignorance and dulled by greed; by vision that does not extend much beyond “What’s in this for me?” So we find our future not in our own hands, but instead in the grip of two groups: One ignorant of networks; the other ignorant of humanity. The only answer, then, is to educate ourselves. We need to cultivate a sensibility that permits us to see through this manipulation; and then to act. The instincts of technology and of history must emerge in our calculations now. What will serve us best in a technical age is a sense of humanity that the old political machines and the New Caste digital ones can’t match. One of the most famous gates that Plato and Socrates drew around their imagined, ideal and perfect republic was a kind of electric fence against, of all things, poets. As Socrates explains in The Republic, poets “maim the thoughts of those who hear them.” Poetry appeared to the philosophers as a pernicious force, an injection of 271 “One of the reasons”: Terry Winograd, Bringing Design to Software (New York: ACM Press, 1996) p. 5 201 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018433