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ever better, like a video resolving itself from low-quality to HD in front of your eyes.
Success attracts still more users. All of them are Google's sensors, in a way. Medical
diagnosis, cybersecurity, trading algorithms, search – pretty much any linked ball of
chips and humans and sensors throbs with this logic. The best of the leading
technology firms understand the power of this logic: Google's TensorFlow artificial
intelligence engine, for instance, was largely regarded by experts as nearly a decde
ahead of competitors in 2015. So the company began giving away access for free. In
traditional economic terms this would be insane; but with network logic the
strategy is clear: The more people who use TensorFlow, the smarter it gets, which in
turn attracts still more users. Dense and learning fusions of mind and data like
TensorFlow and other soon-arriving AI systems are all gated universes. The
“increasing returns” for those inside – you, me, our neighbors – breed mutual
efficient success and, of course, massive power for their owners. We're part of the
game too: The more people tied in, the better our lives get.

The topological charm of these explosively growing clusters was first teased apart
by the electrical engineer Bob Metcalfe in the 1970s. Metcalfe was hunting for a
better way to send data – say grocery lists to his wife – through Menlo Park and he
perfected a connection protocol called Ethernet, which soon became a standard for
linking machines. What Metcalfe noticed, as more and more users piled into the
gateland of Stanford's Ethernet-connected machines, was that the power of the
system was growing exponentially with each additional user. This became known
later as “Metcalfe's Law”: The power of a network grows, massively, with each
additional user. A system with one phone, for example, is really not very useful. Who
would you call? A system with two phones means one possible connection – we can
call each other. But when you increase the number of phones by a factor of two –
from five to ten, say – the number of possible connections more than doubles from
ten to 45 . The difference between Bob Metcalfe and his wife sharing grocery lists
and a connected national network of husbands and wives is immense – an insight
that led Bob Metcalfe and his wife to start a networking company that made them
billionaires.

Metcalfe's Law has another angle, and it's here where some of the unnerving,
dangerous political power of network gates is revealed: It's not merely that the
power of a network grows exponentially with each additional user; it's that the cost
of being cut out grows every bit as fast. Maybe even faster. If I shut you out of Google
today, it's painful. But tomorrow – after a day of new information and websites and
services come on line – it will be even more costly. The network scientists Rahul
Tongia and Ernest Wilson have called this “The Flip Side of Metcalfe's Law.”235 To be
excluded from a database of cancer genetics, for instance, when it has a million
members is probably not such a painful problem; to be locked out of the chance to
compare your genes with a billion others, however, is hugely costly. Maybe even
fatal. Imagine if I cut you out tomorrow from the NYSE, your phone system, smart
diagnostic webs, cybersecurity patches? It's not like you can swap our your Ford for

235 The network scientists: Rahul Tongia and Ernest J. Wilson III, “The Flipside of
Metcalfe's Law”, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), 665–681

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