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Gatekeeping, as we’ve seen, isn’t simply the act of marking geographic lines. Those hurrying walls and berms and triple-fences of the real world are a kind of gatekeeping but they are also, I’m pretty sure, expressions of a deeper desire. Each is a real-world defense against topological pressures of population and ideology and violence, all shaped by network magnetism. The likely futility of such gates is clear enough when you contemplate the forces they are intended to keep out: Refugees see prosperity miles on their phones. Little wonder they rush at it. Internet-transmitted messages light up ideologies, protests or fundamentalisms that pull people back and forth endlessly across physical borders. The world responds, as anyone without a Seventh Sense might, with walls. But to focus merely on the physical? This is to misread the issue. Gatekeeping includes real-world borders, of course, but the statesmen of the future will act particularly on topologies. They will work not merely to stop up flows, but to decide their movement. Gates will, for instance, serve as bespoke disease buffers, created to track and then freeze the worrisome pandemics now crawling at us on the connections of our age. Other gates will be economic tools: The will help isolate and then soothe the unstable and apparently broken, middle-class eroding financial patterns of the past decades.

Recall how the design of computer or network systems affects the real world, like a marble slipped under a carpet? Gatekeeping’s topological design is like placing marbles (or boulders) in particular ways, to direct movements and flows as you might guide water with a canal. The great historian Arnold Toynbee once recalled a passing moment with British Prime Minister Lloyd George during the endless (and disastrous) Paris Peace Conference of 1919. “Lloyd George, to my delight, had forgotten my presence,” Toynbee wrote, “and began to think aloud. ‘Mesopotamia...yes...oil...irrigation...we must have Mesopotamia; Palestine...yes... the Holy Land... Zionism... we must have Palestine...; Syria... h’m... what is there in Syria? Let the French have that.”246 This sort of charmless arrogance – The Holy Land....We must have that – doesn’t much suit our age, but that comprehensive view? What oil and irrigation and Suez were to Lloyd George, emergence and data flows and gates are to us. There’s a crucial difference, however: We need not take the most precious territory of our age through invasion or colonial exploitation or in mis-balanced peace settlements. We can build the essential landscape of power. We can build it for defense. And then we can grow it, perfect it, and attract others. Schmitt was right, human history is the story of enclosures – and nothing about our emerging age suggests any other approach can, with a single clear line, solve the vexing network x network x weapons problems we face. Hard Gatekeeping means molding the landscape, gate by gate, to encourage certain movements and make others difficult, costly, maybe even impossible. Any future order must begin with this first principle: The line between in and out is as essential as what goes on inside.

246 Lloyd George: Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, (New York: Random House, 2002) p. 381

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