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connected, and by the speed and thickness of that connection. The topology of Wall Street in the 1920s, for instance, was largely defined by who happened to come to the trading floor on a given day; today it is a global landscape, influenced by news, rumors and real-time profit twitches anywhere on the planet. Just like moving a river from one place to another would radically change the utility of a bridge, a change in topology changes the shape of systems that depend on it. That Seventh Sense instinct – the powerful can become useless because of connection, the useless can become powerful – is earned first through a fluency and even faith in these sorts of rapid, fate-changing topological shifts.

In recent years the topologies of our network world have changed at the pace of technology, which is very fast indeed. Every new piece of a network, every new platform or protocol, alters how we connect. This process works on our sense of distance like an efficient, strange sewing machine: Something very far away can be, suddenly, with one stitch of innovation, right on top of you. The speed and the quality of a connection is what determines how honestly “near” or “far” something is. Location is, in a sense, as changeable as velocity.198

Distance, on any living, networked web, is an endlessly pliable sheet. Just as you can bring two distant points on a piece of paper right next to each other by folding the sheet, so you can glue points in networks together by bending the space on which they are connected. A map of the networked world or of nations or even of our city is not some given, settled graph. One small twist and we are, like it or not, right on top of each other. This makes it particularly murderous to hold onto the old idea that you and I are unconnected points. Do countries like America or China have legitimate interests thousands of miles away from their coastlines? Of course.199 In this way, the entire premise of Enlightenment life, the atomic focus on the power of the individual, becomes dangerous.

It is now essential to use virtual topologies to operate in the real world, to bend these ethereal elements of connection to influence and even total control. Thomas Dullien, one of the researchers who discovered that “rowhammer” chip hack captured this in a new law of network security that echoes, in fact, through all of connected life: You don’t have to possess an object in order to control it. “Being hacked,” he explained in a 2011 speech called Why Johnny Can’t Tell If He’s Compromised, “is loss of control without change of ownership or possession.”200 Your phone, resting constantly in your pocket, may in fact be pwned at every keystroke by someone thousands of miles away. This is an extremely important idea, an expression again of how connection changes the nature of an object: It makes it controllable without possession. An army might be able to master an

198 Location: John May and Nigel Thrift eds. Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London: Routledge, 2001) 2
199 Of course: Distributed Lethality in Proceedings (U.S. Naval Institute) Jan 2015 p. 343
200 “Being hacked”: Halvar Flake, Why Johnny Can’t Tell If He Is Compromised, keynote Area41 Conference, June 2014, Zurich

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