Philosophical essay on historical power structures and modern networks

Here’s what's unnerving about this for us now: There are whole approaches to power that look extremely reasonable until one day they look insane. For thousands of years the idea that one feudal lord should control thousands of serfs seemed perfectly reasonable to the lords and serfs alike. John Maynard Keynes’ famous line about Egypt - Just because you built the pyramids doesn’t mean you get to use them - marked a whole approach that seemed inarguable for centuries, even if the experience of it was inarguably awful®?. Features of the world - moats, massive cathedrals, pyramids, sweatshops - exist only because distributions of power permitted or enabled or encouraged them. The quotidian interactions of our lives - how we shop, where we hang out with friends, the kinds of performance or politics we follow - these all produce long-lasting structures. Malls, democracies, war zones.”° Pushing power into networks, we can see already, creates whole new arrangements. Some are as unimaginable to us now as a voting booth would have been to an Egyptian slave. When we say that ours is a revolutionary age, it’s not because you can watch videos on your phone. It’s because of why you can watch video on your phone - and what that implies for the old, nervous structures around us. 4, Before the age of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution began most political and economic power was extremely concentrated. A few kings and feudal lords controlled most economic production. Priests decided who could speak to God, and how and when. Finance was dominated by a few families, largely working in the secretive counting rooms of early banking capitals such as Amsterdam or Genoa or Lyon. Knowledge about the world, a sense of science and of history and even geography, was closely held, fiercely opaque. Inside monastery walls or university halls the aim of protecting (and editing) what the world knew far outstripped any hunger for new ideas, for innovation or dissemination. In those times a lucky or brutal few decided the economic, political and intellectual lives of many. You can picture power as balled up almost, in the hands of a tiny and fortunate elite. Over time, cracks appeared in this system. One of the earliest was also one of the most fundamental: The schism that split the Catholic Church. This was, at first, the work of a young German theologian named Martin Luther in the 16" Century. Luther was a man whose view of life, he would say often in later years, was shaped by a single sentence: Romans 1:17. “The righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as itis written: The just shall live by faith.” The Epistle to the Romans, as Romans is formally titled, was a letter from Saint Paul to a collection of recalcitrant, 89 John Maynard Keynes’ famous line: Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 16 90 David Murakami Wood and Stephen Graham “Permeable Boundaries in the Software-Sorted Society: Survelliance and the Differentiations of Mobillity” in Mobile Technologies of the City eds. Mimi Sheller and John Urry. (London: Routledge. 2006) Chapter 10 66 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018298