The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Prolegomenon 5
centralized armies fighting decentralized guerrillas? Hierarchies fighting networks?
Or is a new global dynamic on the horizon?
Second query: Networks are important. But does the policy of American
unilateralism provide a significant counterexample to the claim that power
today is network based? Has a singular sovereignty won out in global affairs?
We cannot begin to answer these questions definitively. Instead
we want to suggest that the juncture between sovereignty and networks
is the place where the apparent contradictions in which we live can
best be understood. It is the friction between the two that is interesting.
Our choice should not simply be “everything is different” or “nothing
has changed”; instead, one should use this dilemma as a problematic
through which to explore many of the shifts in society and control
over the last several decades.
Perhaps there is no greater lesson about networks than the lesson about
control: networks, by their mere existence, are not liberating; they exercise
novel forms of control that operate at a level that is anonymous and nonhuman,
which is to say material.
The nonhuman quality of networks is precisely what makes them
so difficult to grasp. They are, we suggest, a medium of contemporary
power, and yet no single subject or group absolutely controls a network.
Human subjects constitute and construct networks, but always
in a highly distributed and unequal fashion. Human subjects thrive on
network interaction (kin groups, clans, the social), yet the moments
when the network logic takes over—in the mob or the swarm, in contagion
or infection—are the moments that are the most disorienting,
the most threatening to the integrity of the human ego. Hence a contradiction:
the self - regulating and self - organizing qualities of emergent
networked phenomena appear to engender and supplement the
very thing that makes us human, yet one’s ability to superimpose top -
down control on that emergent structure evaporates in the blossoming
of the network form, itself bent on eradicating the importance of
any distinct or isolated node. This dissonance is most evident in network
accidents or networks that appear to spiral out of control—
Internet worms and disease epidemics, for instance. But calling such