The global network has become dangerously unstable

["David Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

A bit over heated. djf


Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The global network has become dangerously unstable
Date: February 21, 2017 at 6:33:46 AM EST
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com

The global network has become dangerously unstable
By Niall Ferguson
Feb 20 2017
<https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/02/20/the-global-network-has-become-dangerously-unstable/HipA9St87H9GuzOuDj66BP/story.html>

The world today is like a giant network on the verge of a cataclysmic outage. 

The president of the United States tweets that his own intelligence agencies are illegally leaking classified 
information to The New York Times about his campaign’s communications with the Russian government, but he insists that 
it’s all “fake news.” (Read that again, slowly.) 

Meanwhile, having interfered in the US presidential election via WikiLeaks and an online army of trolls and bots (call 
it the LED Army), the Russians send their spy ship Viktor Leonov to have a snoop at the US submarine base at New 
London, Conn. 

On the other side of the Atlantic, French and German politicians alike fret about Russian meddling in their elections. 
But the big story in Europe is the implosion of 27-year-old YouTube star Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, whose recent 
flirtation with anti-Semitism has led to the cancellation of his deals with Google and Disney. 

Meanwhile, in broad daylight, a female assassin poisons the brother of the North Korean dictator at Kuala Lumpur’s 
international airport. Her T-shirt bears the universal webchat acronym “LOL.”

Laugh out loud if you dare. Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. 
How on earth do we make sense of all this? In pursuit of answers, many bewildered commentators resort to crude 
historical analogies. To some, Trump is Hitler, about to proclaim an American dictatorship. To others, he is Nixon, on 
the verge of being impeached. 

But it’s neither 1933 nor 1973 all over again. Easily centralized technology made totalitarian government possible in 
the 1930s. Forty years later, it had got harder for a democratically elected president to violate the law with 
impunity. Nevertheless, the media in the 1970s were still a few television networks and press agencies. And in more 
than half the world those media were centrally controlled. 

You cannot understand the world today without understanding how it has changed as a result of new information 
technology. This has become a truism. The question is, how has it changed? The answer is that technology has enormously 
empowered networks of all kinds relative to traditional hierarchical power structures. 

Networks were the key to what happened in politics last year. Russia’s intelligence network did its utmost to maximize 
the damage to Hillary Clinton’s reputation stemming from her sloppy e-mail security. The Islamic State’s terror attacks 
during the election year lent credibility to Donald Trump’s pledges to “strip out the support networks for radical 
Islam in this country” and to ban Muslim immigration. Above all, there was the grass-roots network of support that 
Trump built using the power of Facebook, Twitter, and Breitbart. It was this that defeated the “global special 
interests” that — according to Steve Bannon’s final campaign ad — stood behind the “failed and corrupt political 
establishment” personified by Trump’s opponent. Note here how one network attacks another.

The counterattack by the US intelligence network has been impressive, claiming the scalp of Trump’s national security 
adviser, Michael Flynn, last Monday after just 23 days. Is it proper that intelligence operatives are leaking 
information about Team Trump’s other contacts with the Russians to The New York Times? No. But this is how networks 
operate. They cut across the official chain of command that is the spinal cord of any state.

[snip]

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