of network power: Contagions of fear, manipulation of data, the subtle and invisible influence of the boxes we depend upon but don’t understand.!73 Recall Francis Bacon’s Enlightenment line? That human knowledge is human power? Well, what is computer knowledge? It is human power? Or something else, in its entire, hidden immensity? You have to wonder if this packing of insight and vision and control into black boxes, or the hands of a small New Caste will bleed us of our liberty as a result. “Our constitution is called a democracy because the power to make decisions is not in the hands of a minority but of the whole people,” Pericles reminded Athens in his Funeral Oration 2500 years ago. “We regard a man who takes no interest in politics not as harmless, but as useless.”!74 Vital engagement is the food of democratic life. To be baffled to the outside of the essential boxes of power then, seems an instant sort of cancer on liberty. What do we make of a man who takes no interest in the networks of networks that control the power to make decisions? Perhaps you've heard of the famous manufacturing trilema: You can get something made any two of good, fast and cheap. If you want that custom table made quickly and well, it won’t be cheap. If you want it good and cheap, you had best be prepared to wait. In networks a similar puzzle emerges in my mind. Systems can be any two of fast, open or secure. A computer system that is really secure can be open, but it will be very slow, inspecting each packet and instruction like a bank security guard watching customers in a bad neighborhood. Think of the like an airport. Want it to be fast? Secure too? Then it won’t be very fast. Mostly what we want today are fast, secure arrangements for our markets, our nations, our data. So these will become, | think, ever less open. It used to be that history was made in public: Big visible wars and social shifts and revolutions. Pericles in the Athenian square; the churning protests of Jefferson’