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airplane accident. Well, networks will produce the network accident. Many, in fact.
A world primed for contagion, Gates suggested, needs – and is missing – more and
better gates. (Yes, here you can pause to double take at the serendipitously strange
fact that the wealthiest citizen of our gated age is named Gates, just as the richest
man in the era of pulling oil out of rocks was a “Rockefeller”) Connection demands
systems to gaze ceaselessly for the smallest sign of assault or need for change or
accidental shimmering movement of danger. Part of what made the Ebola response
successful is that the response really was in the form of gates as we’ve come to
understand them here, not walls. Protocols for biological reaction, for medical care,
for epidemic monitoring, the urgent helicoptering in of support and aid and ideas.
The gates assembled around the Ebola pandemic were its solution. Had it merely
been walled off it would have spiked, grown, mutated and finally escaped.”The
world,” Gates wrote, “needs to build a warning and response system for outbreaks.”
This is true for all the outbreaks we face – whether they are disease or financial
panic or terror. There will be, you can be sure, ignorant calls to build walls and not
gates. This misses the point of networks. In an age of interconnection walls are
nearly as dangerous as no walls. What matters is bulding topologies designed for
gating, for milking power from the profound logic of networks we’ve seen at work.

For decades after the 1929 financial crisis triggered an historic global depression,
economists and politicians debated what had gone wrong. What had they missed?
The world, it emerged, had been wired with an economic system designed rapid
movement, but politicians and bankers had forgotten to put in the needed brakes.
They had tried to run an industrial engine against the background of gasping
political structures. Basic adjustment mechanisms – release valves for financial or
currency pressures – had not been invented, refined or installed.238 When we find
ourselves in coming years gasping through some sort of financial crisis of our own,
or running scared from a cascading military or social epidemic that slaps us
unexpectedly, what do you think the most likely cause will be? It will be a failure of
gates. Too few in some places; too damn many in others.

Remember the haunting, persistent vulnerability of our age. A twitch anywhere in
the system can rock and even crack the whole edifice. Space Time Compression’s
ability to shrink distance to zero and time to an instant can turn anywhere, anytime
into a battlefield or a spot for revolutionary innovation. Any moment can present us
with questions of war and peace. Today we have no central theory of gatekeeping,
no ideas about balancing inside and out. We fly on instincts, but they are the old
industrial ones. Anyone can see a system that is full of holes and inconsistencies. Can
you see a way through it, though? Pressed by political, technical and economic
desire – to say nothing of the basic urge for self-preservation – more gates will be
with us from now on.

238 Basic adjustment: Ben S. Bernanke, “Money, Gold, and the Great Depression”, H.
Parker Willis Lecture in Economic Policy, Washington and Lee University, Lexington,
Virginia March 2, 2004

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