Essay on network control and historical analogies without specific allegations

man, in response to simple or complex historical causes, profoundly changes his technical equipment.”25 Control of water in those ancient ages and control of information in our own are not so different. We are in the midst, after all, of a change in our own “technical equipment.” We should read Wittfogel with one eye on our own age, particularly his warnings. “Like the tiger, the engineer of power must have the physical means with which to crush his victims,” he wrote of those older orders. “The agromanagerial despot,” he said of the masters of those connected water systems, “does indeed posses such means.” We should ask: Are we watching the emergence of an infomanagerial despotism? Who controls the dataflows we rely on now? The protocols? If we want to earn an honest understanding of how power works now, we need to begin by looking under the carpet in for the marbles, in a sense. We need to touch and follow the networks themselves, observing their construction and flow as Wittfogel once traced the transmutation of ancient water systems into the politics of an earlier age. We too need to go down, inside the connected systems of our era before we can come back up and begin, confidently, to act. That journey won't always be easy because it will require us, as we'll see, to consider some ideas that make no sense using our current way of thinking. But, remember: The idea of a democracy sounded like a laughable joke to hereditary heads of state until the 18% century — Let the peasants vote for what they want? The implications of our new networks will set uncomfortably against many of our own habits and biases - or at least what we've been told our habits and biases should be by an older generation. But once we have mastered this new instinct, there will finally be a day after which we will look at the world and really feel the new logic at work. We’ll be Napoleon, not Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. And from that day on, everything will honestly be different. 4, We are still early in this age of network revolution. It was less than 50 years ago, after all, that the first digital communication switches emerged. Today, devices, places, people - are all losing what we might think of as their innocence of isolation. The “Internet of Things” will expand the range of connected devices - phones, refrigerators, heart-lung machines - from 10 billion today to 50 billion in less than a decade. And even with 50 billion connected points only 2 percent of the world’s people and devices and locations will be linked?’. The analysis of this linked space is a young discipline, younger even than the nearly newborn technologies at play. It was only in the mid-1990s that the first sophisticated studies of “network science” 25 “Contrary to popular belief’: Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism; a Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957) 27 “The Internet of Things”: See “The Zettabyte Era - Trends and Analysis” from Cisco Systems (San Jose) 2015 27 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018259