The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

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ignored, and the network is imagined nonetheless. Accidents, failures,
and exploits, both imaginative and material, are part and parcel of
any network. These are strange and often bewildering kinds of accidents
and failures—the accidents that are prescribed by the design,
the failures that indicate perfect operation.
Networks are elemental, in the sense that their dynamics operate
at levels “above” and “below” that of the human subject. The elemental
is this ambient aspect of networks, this environmental aspect—
all the things that we as individuated human subjects or groups do
not directly control or manipulate. The elemental is not “the natural,”
however (a concept that we do not understand). The elemental
concerns the variables and variability of scaling, from the micro level
to the macro, the ways in which a network phenomenon can suddenly
contract, with the most local action becoming a global pattern,
and vice versa. The elemental requires us to elaborate an entire climatology
of thought.
The unhuman aspects of networks challenge us to think in an elemental
fashion. The elemental is, in this sense, the most basic and the most complex
expression of a network.
As we’ve suggested in this book, networks involve a shift in scale,
one in which the central concern is no longer the action of individuated
agents or nodes in the network. Instead what matters more and
more is the very distribution and dispersal of action throughout the network,
a dispersal that would ask us to define networks less in terms of
the nodes and more in terms of the edges—or even in terms other than
the entire, overly spatialized dichotomy of nodes and edges altogether.
In a sense, therefore, our understanding of networks is all - too -
human . ..