Philosophical discussion on network design, Conway's Law, and societal impact

between human choice and machine intelligence? Why is one computer system better than another? These decisions - and the people who make them - will determine power distributions. They will reverberate through our future with the same constant noise as the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, the Analects or the Koran still do. The real contests ahead will be over networks, and we will come to understand in this book how these struggles will unfold and how to fight them - but keep in mind that this means, in fact, a deeper conflict. A fight about values. Networks are like any organized system; they reflect the aims and ethics and habits of the people who build them. The price of meshing so many different aims and sensibilities, hopes and hatreds, will be costly. When Nan said that really, fully grasping our world would be expensive this is what he meant. Particularly if he’s right that we'll all be going half mad under the pressures of constant connection as we try to make the shift. We will pay with our old ideas, our current fortunes and - if we're not careful - our safety. Engineers know this idea that network design shapes the real world as “Conway’s Law.”21 Melvin Conway was an early AT&T systems designer who noticed that the organization of any connected telephone system had an impact on the communities or offices it touched. Who could call who was a kind of power map. The physical world, Conway realized, could be shaped and influenced by something other than a physical force; it could be reshaped by information flows, by connection. The expansion of airline routes to Indonesia, for instance, was a network design change that tilted real-life economic patterns. New flights enabled tourism, manufacturing, investment. In our connected age, the design of research studies, voter databases, genetic information sharing networks, financial webs - all of these will create bumps in the surface of our every day lives.2? The way in which phones or data links or mobile devices are tied together changes the way we act when we use them or when we handle them to touch each other, even if the design of these systems is insensible to us most of the time - the way a marble under a carpet might create a surprising bump. Networks can organize themselves in many different ways. And in the choice of layout, or the evolution of that layout in response to pressures of profit or technology, a great deal can be decided. “When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision,” the programmer and investor Paul Graham has written. “You're also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two.”24 You might ask: What drew tens of millions of people to watch live as Steve Jobs unveiled some new Apple device in the last years of his life? Of course, partly it was the cool technology, the warmly charming charisma of the man. But something else was at work, | think. What Jobs was unveiling atop those black-backed stages over 71 Engineers know this idea: Melvin E. Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?” Datamation, April, 1968. 23 In our connected age: Barbara Schewick, Internet Architecture and Innovation, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010) Chapter 1 24 “When you decide what infrastructure to use”: Paul Graham, “Great Hackers”, on paulgraham.com July 2004 25 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018257