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between points is also an act of drawing a line around those points. It is not simply that we’re enmeshed in networks now; no, we’re enclosed even entrapped by them. If the great ambition of Cecil Rhodes’ era was for the expansive conquest of territory, in our own it is for the construction and manipulation of gated spaces. Gatelands.

In an age of network power, no position is more important, formidable, influential or profitable than that of the gatekeeper. Defining who is in or out of any network is among the most essential moves of design. In financial markets, on the Internet backbone or inside the human immune system, the accept-or-reject decision determines a great deal. The first sign of order breaking down, whether it is the Roman Empire or your lungs, is an inability to manage what slips in and out. Flows of bits, of migrants, of gold and patents and medicines – all of these life-giving forces can be controlled, bent for good or stopped for ill, as they pass through or collide with gates. By gates I mean not only in-out passages but all of the tools that meter and enclose the various Gatelands: Protocols, languages, block-chains. Whatever binds and shapes an information topology. Any sort of code or encryption or binary instruction that can unlock an in and out. If you want to make a fortune or a revolution (or both), if you hope to shatter some barrier of tools or ideas between you and a dream, or to lead a religious revival, spread an infection of hate or revolution or insidious Morris-style computer code – then fundamentally this is what you have to consider: Where are the gates? How to smash them? How to build your own? We are entering, as a result of our dependence on networks of all sorts, a landscape where the very clustering of power creates new border regions, bridges and gates. If older, hierarchical systems craved a top – a king, a superpower, a Pope – our connected, meshlike age demands valves and protocols and gates. It hungers for connection, which means it hungers too for throttles and accelerators and brakes. And of course people to run them. To speed them up. Slow them. Finger off switches. This reordering of power will produce, is producing, a fight over topological spaces for finance, biology, trade or pretty much any source of power. The scramble is as urgent, decisive and essential as the one Rhodes and his peers embarked upon. Inside or out? A fresh Meliananxiety haunts us: Are you the gatekeeper? Or the gatekept?

We wander into Gateland the moment we switch our phones on. We enter it when we book an airline ticket, when our genetics folds into a pool of data, or when we take a new degree, master a computer language, or check on friends via one stateful connected platform or another. We enter it, in short, when we connect. Gatekeepers choose what we see. They determine the rules we follow, what we can and can’t change. They reward us too – once we’re inside – with benefits of speed, knowledge and safety. Gatekeepers, which can be people or protocols or code, decide who can join closed communities and who is left out and why. They pass us the fine benefit of the compression of time, even as they expose us to the zipper of instant potential disaster hitting everyone in a closed space at once. Gatekeepers control, for instance, how (and how fast) financial data moves between members of light-speed “in the know” trading pools, and the suckers outside. What you can see in your phone or your university computer, why, how – all of these choices have to be made by

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