HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018376.jpg

unimaginably fast. No one had ever heard of the Syrian Electronic Army a year
before they were hijacking famous websites, injecting world-class malicious code
into opposition computers and demonstrating a digital attack fluency. 210 Of course
the charming side of such a shift is evident too: Walk the Vatican with an historian in
your ear, master sourdough in a weekend. There’s something not a little miraculous
in the way the networked tools to recombine DNA or hack computer code or design
viral software are getting both more sophisticated and simpler. If earlier eras put
epoch-making implements into human hands – the knife! the train! – our age is now
placing new, mind-shaping forces within instant reach.

In a networked world, economic or military power doesn’t come just from
controlling territory or information alone. It comes, more and more, from this
matery of the temporal. Securing territory today does not, alone, solve many
problems of safety. Control of information, of topologies and finally of time – this is
what matters most. Such temporal security will be elusive; always in need of
defense. The arrival of airpower in World War Two, for instance, shifted battles
from two to three dimensions. “Only large states are able to resist three-dimensional
envelopment,” the historian Nicholas Spykman wrote in 1942.211 Even today, “Air
Superiority” is the precondition of nearly any American war. If we can dominate you
from above, nearly anything seems possible. But networks add a fourth dimension.
“Time Superiority.” Can you move faster than your enemy? Can you bog them down?
Or are you a victim of fourth-dimensional envelopment. Control of time – yours,
your enemies – this will decide your strength.

6.

Back in the fall of 1988, at about the same moment that Danny Hillis and his team
were busy peddling their amazing Connection Machine – and trying to smash every
world computing speed record they could find – another device appeared in the
world of massively parallel super computers. It was, everyone who saw it agreed, an
extremely strange machine. It’s appearance was completely unexpected. It’s
designer was not a famous thinker about parallelism, cavorting with TV network
founders and physics Nobelists. In fact, its very success emerged from this strange
face: The creator knew basically nothing about the sort of parallel design that
informed Hillis’ thinking. Which was strange, because it was far more “parallel” than
the Connection Machine could ever be. It was also cheaper. Simpler. And: It was
faster. In fact, it was the fastest parallel machine in history.

The machine began, quietly enough, in the mind of a 28-year old Cornell graduate
student named Robert Tappan Morris. Morris came by his computer chops honestly
enough: He was the son of Robert Morris Sr., the legendary NSA scientist we
encountered several chapters ago, the man who penned those partly amusing, partly

210 No one had heard: Edwin Grohe, “The Cyber Dimensions of the Syrian Civil War:
Implications for Future Conflict”, Comparative Strategy (2015), 34:2,
211 The arrival of airpower: Nicholas John Spykman, “Frontiers, Security and
International Organization,” Geographical Review, Vol 32, No 3 (July 1942) p. 439

144

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018376