also that everything is monitored. Remebered. Studied. The Warez Dudes’ drive to get ever closer to the core, to perform even that atomic level hacking, tells us something about just how much power is locked up in those central cores where this information accumulates. The 2600 hz whistle was, it seems, only the first of an endless series of battles for control of the roots and trunklines of modern power. All around us today, huge power accumulates to certain irreplaceable cores. We know this is a problem of connected age design: Giant search engines, certain algorithms, database or communications protocols overmaster us because they can gather so much data, so fast, and process it with unique fidelity. What makes a city? urban scholars often ask. We might wonder: What makes a platform for network power? The answer to both questions is the same: Density.15? If the first cities of Aztecs or Mesopotamiaman civilization differed from early tribal clusters because of their density, the same is true for our first platforms of instant connection. Facebook is denser than AOL ever was. More people, more data, thicker connections. Future platforms will be denser still. And if cities and density were once sadly unanticipated accelerants to plague, poverty and revolution, we should be aware of the risks of our own tight-clustered centers of dense connection. The security of these cores that link us to each other and our essential data - when jacked by hackers, by companies, or even by fast algorithms we don’t understand - is important not merely because of the possibility of total control a breach might represent, but because they show us the very fact of such totalizing control exists. To infect, surprise, sicken - all this is alluringly possible and dreamable for anyone with a hunger for mastery. Imagine if you knew your government could be switched instantly and invisibly to malice. (Or, to effectiveness!) Or picture a nation of connected citizens wired for flash-started na