The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

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regard, reduced to the human sciences. For Heidegger, this absence
shows itself as a “missing ontological foundation,” on which “life itself,”
and specifically human life, is understood, without recourse to the
always - mystical and unstated “being of life” on which it is based.
Our questions are: At what point does the difference between
“being” and “life” implode? What would be the conditions for the
nondistinction between “being” and “life”? Perhaps this is where the
life sciences get hung up. They are confronted with anomalies, anomalies
that cross species barriers, that are at once “faceless” and yet
“living”: single - celled organisms known as myxomycetes (such as
the Physarum or Dictostylium), which, during their life cycles, may be
either an amoeba, a motile cell with flagellum, or a plantlike structure
giving off spores. Or the famous limit case of the virus. Is it alive?
It contains genetic material and is able to reproduce (or at least to
replicate). It shows a high degree of genetic adaptability in its mutations
and its ability to cross species boundaries. But it is not much
more than a strand of RNA and a protein coating. Then, on the opposite
side of the scale, there is the infamous case of Gaia . ..
What Heidegger’s point makes clear is that the question of “life”
has traditionally been separate from, but dependent on, an unquestioned
notion of “being.” In a way, the example of network science
presents us with the opposite case: a concept of “being” is arrived at
by a privative definition of “life.” Network science, it would seem,
assumes a minimally vitalistic aspect of networks, an assumption that
informs its studies of networks of all types, networks that all share a
being common to networks: “Whatever the identity and the nature
of the nodes and links, for a mathematician they form the same animal:
a graph or a network.” 21 Network science’s reliance on universality,
ubiquity, and a mathematical model suggests that it is really a
metaphysics of networks. It seeks a universal pattern that exists above
and beyond the particulars of any given network. For this reason,
network science can study AIDS, terrorism, and the Internet all as
the same kind of being—a network.
The philosophical impact of this view is that of network being, a
Dasein specific to network phenomena. However, what it means specifically
is confused. Does it mean the experience of being (in) a network,
a new network phenomenology? Does it mean the existence of