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all, mark the political topology on which on which all the fundamental act of our age
will occur: our own gating.

But as essential as more technical knowledge is, I don’t think it’s likely to be where
we come up short. Yes we need more computer coding academies, we need better
popular education about network choices, we need to retool our leaders. But I don’t
think it’s a shortage of bolt-heads that will do us in. Rather, given the unique
pressures of what is ahead, I think it is our human side that may let us down. I’m
sure we’ll all be told in coming years that everything would be fine if we just let the
New Caste figures take over, with their bloodless technological tools. These
revolutionaries are a crucial part of the story of human progress, but they cannot
alone write the next chapters. I think, asked to run our government, they’d likely
end up like Plato’s pro-Spartan relatives in that awful dictatorship of the Thirty: A
crew of buddies convinced they can get things under control who become rapidly
overwhelmed by the human element, by wild network thumos and then reduced to a
murderous madness. They would use technology to manipulate our voting just as
they might manipulate our options for a new liver – or news or financial security.
“One of the reasons computer software is so abysmal is that it’s not designed at all,
but merely engineered,” the computer scientist Terry Winograd has written.
“Another reason is that implementers often place more emphasis on a programs
internal construction than its external design.”271 This black-box temperament, the
sense of efficacy as a final value for code, of internal design, of closed control, is a
dangerous fit to the human business of free politics.

But to expect our current leaders to catch up? I fear this is also unlikely. It’s not
merely that they continue to wield the aging tools of industrial power with a strange
confidence. No, their failures – which don’t seem to faze them much – are less
dangerous than where they might yet succeed: Control, surveillance, the shredding
of liberty in the name of an elusive safety. These leaders are fascinated by how the
new tools might be used to extend the rule of a system that serves their interests,
that serves them. The fear that such tools might one day snap back upon them (or
us) is muted by ignorance and dulled by greed; by vision that does not extend much
beyond “What’s in this for me?” So we find our future not in our own hands, but
instead in the grip of two groups: One ignorant of networks; the other ignorant of
humanity. The only answer, then, is to educate ourselves. We need to cultivate a
sensibility that permits us to see through this manipulation; and then to act. The
instincts of technology and of history must emerge in our calculations now. What
will serve us best in a technical age is a sense of humanity that the old political
machines and the New Caste digital ones can’t match.

One of the most famous gates that Plato and Socrates drew around their imagined,
ideal and perfect republic was a kind of electric fence against, of all things, poets. As
Socrates explains in The Republic, poets “maim the thoughts of those who hear
them.” Poetry appeared to the philosophers as a pernicious force, an injection of

271 “One of the reasons”: Terry Winograd, Bringing Design to Software (New York:
ACM Press, 1996) p. 5

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