Essay on historical wartime rhetoric and modern power dynamics

to the neck and in to the death,” he wrote the day after Pearl Harbor. “Hitler's fate was Sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.”%8 Or, the reverse of that coin: Admiral Yamamoto grimly to Emperor Hirohito: “If you tell me that it is necessary that we fight, then in the first six months to a year of war against the U.S. and England | will run wild, and I will show you an uninterrupted succession of victories. | must tell you also that, should the war be prolonged for two or three years, I have no confidence in our ultimate victory.” 9° Ground to a powder. This was symmetry at its most pounding and decisive. Mass against mass. This was a picture of power that seemed undeniable in its pure logic. Until now. ay So how should we think about power in our own age? What picture best captures its vibrant, unceasing demands? It might be tempting now, as a first pass, to say we've left that world of purely symmetric, mass-against-mass power behind. After all, a few figures, anywhere in the system, can exert massive and even fatal, collapsing pressure. One clever hacker, one terrorist, one hedge fund manager with a bad idea, even one purely accidental mis-connection - never before has so much power accumulated in systems so vulnerable to single slips. And our massive power - the US Army or our economy - is hardly decisive despite its weight. It seems now that something can grow bigger and weaker. A nation may have an ever-larger GDP, but if itis miswired somehow, if its social or legal or youthful connections misfire a bit, then it may be still more vulnerable. But this “power of a pinprick” asymmetry is not the whole story. Just when the network looks like a way to tie together all sorts of small, even isolated forces and bless them with decisive power, we notice something else. Tremendous, even historic and undeniably massive concentrations of power. Platforms like Facebook, software systems like Microsoft or search centers like Google are sort of dense, impossible-to-replace gold mines. Google answers questions for more than 50% of the world every day. Is it the most powerful company in human history? Is Facebook? And is their power widely distributed? Or is it concentrated in the algorithms and cloud data of these firms? Anyhow, they are among the first of a totally new species of firm. The leap we have to make in understanding our networked age - and by this I don’t just mean the Internet, but really any connected system you'd care to consider - begins with this idea: On connected systems, power is defined by both profound concentration and by massive distribution. It can’t be understood in simple either/or terms. Power and influence may yet become even more concentrated than it was in 98 “Hitler’s fate was sealed”: Winston Churchill, The Second World War: The Grand Alliance, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986) 540 °° Or the reverse of that coin: Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 349-353. 71 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018303