all, mark the political topology on which on which all the fundamental act of our age will occur: our own gating. But as essential as more technical knowledge is, I don’t think it’s likely to be where we come up short. Yes we need more computer coding academies, we need better popular education about network choices, we need to retool our leaders. But I don’t think it’s a shortage of bolt-heads that will do us in. Rather, given the unique pressures of what is ahead, I think it is our human side that may let us down. I’m sure we'll all be told in coming years that everything would be fine if we just let the New Caste figures take over, with their bloodless technological tools. These revolutionaries are a crucial part of the story of human progress, but they cannot alone write the next chapters. | think, asked to run our government, they’d likely end up like Plato’s pro-Spartan relatives in that awful dictatorship of the Thirty: A crew of buddies convinced they can get things under control who become rapidly overwhelmed by the human element, by wild network thumos and then reduced toa murderous madness. They would use technology to manipulate our voting just as they might manipulate our options for a new liver - or news or financial security. “One of the reasons computer software is so abysmal is that it’s not designed at all, but merely engineered,” the computer scientist Terry Winograd has written. “Another reason is that implementers often place more emphasis on a programs internal construction than its external design.”?”! This black-box temperament, the sense of efficacy as a final value for code, of internal design, of closed control, isa dangerous fit to the human business of free politics. But to expect our current leaders to catch up? | fear this is also unlikely. It’s not merely that they continue to wield the aging tools of industrial power with a strange confidence. No, their failures - which don’t seem to faze them much - are less dangerous than where the