Abstract analysis of network topologies as a new form of geopolitical control

enemy’s territory without ever possessing it, for instance, if it can manage to own the crucial topological infrastructures: banks, databases, communications systems. One nation might be able to pwn another in this bloodless fashion. Networks, you recall we said, will break nations in the future. This is just how such smashing control will be achieved, from the linked mesh running silently and irreplaceably under every element of national life. Today billion-dollar firms control cars, tools, or hotel rooms without possessing them. The links draw out value. Michaelangelo’s famous urging resonates here: Every block of stone has a sculpture inside of it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. Every network has a topology. It is the task of each of us to discover it. Topologies linger everywhere there is connection. Networks can be designed in countless ways: The fishnets of Baran, the hub and spoke of a data center, the ever- changing mesh of a trading system. But what they all share is connective topologies of one sort or another and - as a result - the fact that risk that lingers any one place in the system also exists nearly any other linked place. Constant connection produces, as an unsettling result, constant threat. Connection spreads, distant parts of the world are superglued via that topological folding. Topology is not marked out merely by a description of how we connect. Rather it is scored on what is called a “trust graph”, a kind of map of who you or a machine or a network trusts - and how much. An older generation still thinks a network is something made of wires and switches and plugs. But their real power comes from something far more ethereal. When you connect to a person or an object, you connect as well to its whole history of decisions about who to trust. Every EU country connects to the choices ofa single border guard, for instance. Who does he trust? Is he right? Financial systems and technology webs are the same. If you are what you are connected to, you are also - rather unnervingly - the sum of every trusting (or untrusting) choice someone or some machine has made. This creates a worrying result: “In the systems we've built now,’ Dullien has explained, “there is no way to establish who is in control.” If you or anyone your're linked to has made a trust mistake, you may be pwned, vulnerable, and one hacked slice from loss of control. Any object - your tablet computer, a digital currency, a hacked drone - can become dangerous now in this sense, hacked by Warez Dudes into lethality. And nearly any place can be attacked in some fashion or another, as long as it is connected. The old chestnut of military strategy, that a clever or desperate army can always “trade space for time” -make a gradual retreat in order to buy time, is nearly gone now. Space is a wall that can be breached by time manipulation tools; there’s no place to retreat to. Markets in Mongolia, airports in Europe, Chinese urban landscapes - all of these now can be struck, more or less at any time, because they are all connected. Unlike traditional conflict, where the location of your most terrifying dangers might be exactly pinpointed and watched, where military zones and civilian zones were carefully divided by front lines, a connected world is one of potential universal peril.2°! The distinction between battlefield and everyday streets disappears and it 201 Unlike traditional conflict: Derek Gregory, “The Everywhere War” The Geographical Journal, Vol. 177, No. 3, September 2011, pp. 238-250 139 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018371