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 | 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,