Gatekeeping, as we've seen, isn’t simply the act of marking geographic lines. Those hurrying walls and berms and triple-fences of the real world are a kind of gatekeeping but they are also, I’m pretty sure, expressions of a deeper desire. Each is areal-world defense against topological pressures of population and ideology and violence, all shaped by network magnetism. The likely futility of such gates is clear enough when you contemplate the forces they are intended to keep out: Refugees see prosperity miles on their phones. Little wonder they rush at it. Internet- transmitted messages light up ideologies, protests or fundamentalisms that pull people back and forth endlessly across physical borders. The world responds, as anyone without a Seventh Sense might, with walls. But to focus merely on the physical? This is to misread the issue. Gatekeeping includes real-world borders, of course, but the statesmen of the future will act particularly on topologies. They will work not merely to stop up flows, but to decide their movement. Gates will, for instance, serve as bespoke disease buffers, created to track and then freeze the worrisome pandemics now crawling at us on the connections of our age. Other gates will be economic tools: The will help isolate and then soothe the unstable and apparently broken, middle-class eroding financial patterns of the past decades. Recall how the design of computer or network systems affects the real world, like a marble slipped under a carpet? Gatekeeping’s topological design is like placing marbles (or boulders) in particular ways, to direct movements and flows as you might guide water with a canal. The great historian Arnold Toynbee once recalled a passing moment with British Prime Minister Lloyd George during the endless (and disastrous) Paris Peace Conference of 1919. “Lloyd George, to my delight, had forgotten my presence,” Toynbee wrote, “and began to think aloud. ‘Mesopotamia...yes...oil...irrigation...we must have Mesopotamia; Pa