The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Prolegomenon 19
has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological
explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely
enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.” 8 Power
law distributions help explain America’s place in the global network.
Even in distributed networks, certain power centers will necessarily
emerge through a sort of clustering pattern, just as certain Web sites
will emerge as supernodes within the larger net. Today these power
centers are called Bangalore, or Microsoft, or Archer Daniels Midland.
But the fact that they have names does not discount the continuing
affective force of the distributed networks they inhabit and
move through.
Since networked power is additive in its political strategies, control in
the information age is created through the selective articulation of certain
tactics here and others there.
It is a case not of distributive control winning out over centralized
sovereignty but of the orchestrated use of one against the other. In
this sense, it is necessary for networks to exist in order that sovereignty
may be created. In the rich philosophical literature on political
sovereignty, sovereignty is always compromised by “the outside.”
In Aquinas the earthly sovereign must still answer to God. In the
secularized version of Bodin, sovereignty is limited by the good of the
commonwealth (as is the case for Spinoza). In Grotius sovereignty of
one nation is always tempered by the sovereignty of other nations
and the possibility of war.
Today this same dynamic is at play. Networked power is based on a dia -
lectic between two opposing tendencies: one radically distributes control into
autonomous locales; the other focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies.
All political regimes today stand in some relation to networks. So it is possible
to have unilateralism and networks, a fact that makes the American
regime so beguiling.
When a sovereign networked power is able to command globally
and instantaneously, there exist what might be called “global - single”
command events. By “global - single” we mean that while the networked