Conceptual Essay on ‘Network Power’ and Its Influence on Global Geopolitics

power operates as much through light pulses running through fiber optic webs as it does in any physical sense. Think of the most influential geopolitical forces. The most lethal militaries. The greatest new commercial or financial efforts. All now depend on and are nearly defined by their fluency with different sorts of connection. Networks emerge when nodes - which can be composed of people, financial markets, computers, mobile devices, drones or any lively and connectable object - link to other nodes. Networks can be defined by geography, or by language or currency or data protocols or any of a thousand particular features.!! People who live in Bangalore, is a network. As is, Switches running DNSSEC protocol on the Internet or Businesses transacting in Rupiah. An engineer might say: Network power is simply the ceaseless summing, at any instant, of all these bundles of connection. Real, physical networks hum magnetically now in cities that now pulse and grow with accelerating, connected speed. New York City is network, in this sense, as is Beijing or - in a less evolved way - the Alaskan steppe. So while it’s tempting to call the 21st Century the “Urban Century”, in fact the billion-people a decade rush into cities is a symptom. A larger hunger for the constant knitting of lives together, for fresh and efficient connection drives us.!4 Of course completely, powerfully virtual instances of networks exist too: knit webs of computers teaching themselves how to read, or the fast, paranoid and careful buzzing of constantly alert cybersecurity firewalls. All of these systems are defined by relations. Their power comes from the number, the type and the speed of the connections they hungrily establish and then use. Networks don’t merely speed up our markets, our news, or our innovation - they revolutionize the nature of their power. Broad-based interconnection can cause and even determine events. These expanding, ever-thicker webs of data and linkage can be mapped, and taken together they reflect something we are coming to know as “Network Power’”.!3 By this phrase we mean not merely the Internet or twitter or crypto currencies like 11 Networks can be defined: For an excellent overview of networks the following texts are of use: Albert Barabasi, Linked The New Science Of Networks Science Of Networks. (S.1.: Basic Books, 2014), Mark Newman Networks: An Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010); Remco van der Hofstad, Random Graphs and Complex Networks. Vol. I, (Eindhoven University of Technology, 2015); Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit a Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and S. Boccaletti, V. Latora, Y. Moreno, M. Chavez, D.-U. Hwang, “Complex networks: Structure and dynamics,” Physics Reports, Volume 424, Issues 4-5, February 2006, Pages 175-308 12 A larger hunger: Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer “Urbanization as Opportunity,” Marron Institute Working Paper No. 1, 2014 13 These expanding, ever-thicker webs: See Castells, Manuel. Communication Power. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009; and Castells, Manuel. "Network Theory| A Network Theory of Power" International Journal of Communication, Volume 5(8 April 2011) 19 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018251