The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

156 Coda
The level of bits and atoms suggests to us not modern physics or
postmodern computing but something totally ancient—an ancient,
even pre - Socratic understanding of networks. The pre - Socratic question
is a question about the fabric of the world. Of what is it made?
What is it that stitches the world together, that links part to part in a
larger whole? The answers given, from Thales to Anaxagoras, involve
the elemental. Water, fire, air, “mind,” or some more abstract substance
. . . Heraclitus, for instance, gives us a world in which everything
flows—empires rise and fall, a person remains a person throughout
youth and old age, and one can never step into the same river twice.
For Heraclitus, it is fire that constitutes the world. But he does not
mean “fire” as a denotated thing, for the flame or the sun itself point
to another “fire,” that of dynamic morphology, a propensity of energentic
flux. This kind of fire is more elemental than natural. The
same can be said for Parmenides, who is now more commonly regarded
as the complement, rather than the opposite, of Heraclitus. The emphasis
on the “One”—the sphere without circumference—leads Parmenides
to the fullness of space, a plenum that emphasizes the interstitial
aspects of the world. If everything flows (the statement of
Heraclitus), then all is “One” (the proposition of Parmenides).
A movement between a world that is always changing and a world
that is immobile, between a world that is always becoming and a
world that is full—the movement and the secret identity between
these positions seem to describe to us something fundamental about
networks. Networks operate through ceaseless connections and disconnections,
but at the same time, they continually posit a topology.
They are forever incomplete but always take on a shape.
The shape also always has a scale. In the case of certain network
topologies such as the decentralized network, the scale is fractal in
nature, meaning that it is locally similar at all resolutions, both macroscopic
and microscopic. Networks are a matter of scaling, but a scaling
for which both the “nothing” of the network and the “universe”
of the network are impossible to depict. One is never simply inside or
outside a network; one is never simply “at the level of ” a network.
But something is amiss, for with fields such as network science and
new forms of data visualization, attempts are made to image and manage
networks in an exhaustive sense. The impossibility of depiction is