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It won't surprise you that, in recent years, for instance, the world has seen an acceleration in the construction of physical barriers, of fences and walls running between nations and defining and in and out. Roy Hassner and Jason Wittenberg, two American political scientists, scored out the pace of global wall building and found a sharp acceleration: In fact, of 51 national enclosures built since the end of World War Two – the Berlin Wall being the most famous example – more than half were constructed in a rush of self-protection between 2000 and 2014²³⁶. And more are coming: Hungary, Kenya, Algeria and India now posthole their borders in initial exploration of what might be built. There's a frantic urgency to some of this. The Spanish government, for instance, raised a ten-foot high, razor and camera topped fence around their Saharan footholds in 1998 – the enclosed land was controlled by Madrid, so it was technically “Europe,” which made an irresistible target for would-be migrants. The fence wasn't enough to stop the flows. So they built a second one to run around the first in 2001. Then, in 2005, thousands of desperate Africans launched a coordinated charge against. A couple of dozen migrants died in the attempt; a thousand made it through. The Spanish responded with a third line of fence, this one 20 feet high, electic, camera-watched.

This pattern of ever more stacked defense is repeated everywhere. The walls, fences and trenches of the modern world seem to be getting longer, more ambitions, and better defended with each passing year, Hassner and Wittenberg concluded. Unlike traditional lines of defense, the Maginot Line or the Great Wall of China for instance, the aim of 21st century barriers in places like Israel or the US or Spanish Morocco have been less to stop a rolling armor blitzkrieg than to slow the insidious movement of smugglers and spies and criminals, or the hopeful dashes of fleeing refugees. There's an affective and – to those on the inside – appealing asymmetry to these borders. They are mostly marked and built by richer, more modern, more stable nations desperate to control in and out. The creation of gates is, we should sense now, the corollary of connection. That they can sometimes be piled into the “winner take all” efficiencies Brian Arthur first teased out should give us a sense that there is a logic to this emergence.

Reviewing the problems of deadly disease contagion after the 2015 Ebola pandemic, Bill Gates examined this connection-and-gate lemma in the sharpest, most worrisome historical terms. “There is a significant chance that an epidemic of a substantially more infectious disease will occur sometime in the next 20 years,” he wrote. “In fact, of all the things that could kill more than 10 million people around the world, the most likely is an epidemic stemming from either natural causes or bioterrorism.”²³⁷ This was the cost of a fast-moving, interconnected world. It was what floated free from the extension of Paul Virilio's line: Airplanes produced the

²³⁶ In fact: Roy Hassner and Jason Wittenberg, “Barriers to Entry: Who Builds Fortified Boundaries and Why?” International Security, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Summer 2015), pp. 157–190
²³⁷ Reviewing the problem: Bill Gates, “The Next Epidemic — Lessons from Ebola” New England Journal of Medicine 2015, April 9; 372:1381-1384

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