Networks Don’t Throttle. Platforms Do.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about platforms, and how whoever is in charge of the platform has a whole lot more power to control it than we think. First there’s Elon Musk and his choice to limit Ukraine’s use of his Starlink satellite system. Ukraine has been using Starlink to intercept Russian missiles, but after Zelensky conducted a long-range strike on a Russian oil refinery, Trump got mad. Especially since he’s now trying to buy Russian and Iranian fuel for American trucks. (That’s a whole other story, but yes: some of that fuel would come from Iran, the enemy in the very war that’s shutting down the oil in the Strait of Hormuz.)

Musk recently configured Starlink to refuse to connect anything traveling over 100 mph, which includes Ukraine’s interceptor drones—the ones they use to stop Russian ballistic missiles from landing in their cities. Conveniently, Russia had planned its most extensive strikes on Ukraine at the same time. Ukraine’s interceptor drones launched and when they reached 100 miles per hour, they literally fell out of the sky.

Now I’m not criticizing the war here. That’s not my expertise. I do find it tough to get my head around changing sides from Ukraine to Russia, or sending US envoys to grovel at Putin’s feet, calling him a great humanitarian, making billion-dollar side deals, and begging to buy his oil. But for right now, I’m concerned with the way a platform’s CEO can choose favorites in a war, and arbitrarily restrict a user’s access.

In the best light, we can argue that Musk is looking at the big picture, and making an ethical decision of where to draw the line. His satellites can be used for war, as long as you don’t blow up oil refineries? Or go too deep into enemy territory? Even so, it’s one individual controlling the governance of a platform through which important, real things happen. Globally important, life-or-death geopolitics dictated by a single, unelected, trillionaire.

Or take the current elections in Brazil. A leaked Facebook message revealed that the platform restricted the account of Lula, the left-wing candidate, while simultaneously recommending right-wing Bolsonaro’s profile and WhatsApp channels to users. Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court concluded that Meta disabled Lula’s ability to run ads, froze his video metrics, and hid progressive political profiles from Instagram search results.

Zuck, really? You’re the son of a dentist from Dobbs Ferry, New York. You could have been an important person, but now you’re really going to promote far-right lunacy in a country that actually succeeded in pushing out its dictator and resisting American control? Are you that much invested in the new global authoritarianism? But again, politics aside, we have a single tech billionaire choosing to throttle the information space. This is precisely what the free-speech absolutists were complaining about when platforms attempted to stop the spread of Covid disinformation or Russian trolls and bots. Only so much worse.

Part of my horror and surprise at hearing stories like this, the sense of injustice, comes from a fundamentally naïve expectation of networks. Or really, the way I mistakenly assume something is a network, when it’s actually a platform.

See, I was introduced to networking in the early ’90s, before the net was even called the Internet. It was a zillion decentralized computers, owned by individuals, pinging each other to see what might be of interest. Then that chaotic proto-network of users was bequeathed the government’s computer network, ARPANET. It had originally been developed for the military, but literally no one wanted it—not even AT&T, who had been offered it for free back in the early ’70s, but turned it down because they saw no potential for profit.

That’s not because they were dumb. It’s because that’s how open and fun and free a real network can be. The Internet became a safe haven for the counterculture. An alternative universe unencumbered by the demands of capitalism and conformity. People would try out new personalities, genders, world views…as if we were playing a giant fantasy role-playing game. We were imagining new possibilities together. Inspired by ideas like James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, we imagined ourselves as neurons in a new global brain. Anything was possible. It was an intellectual and creative orgy.

I was writing some of the only journalism about Internet culture at the time. This was long before Wired magazine recast the net as a neon business opportunity. The culture was more Whole Earth Catalog—nerds learning to compost information the same way hippies composted soil. The sense of fertility was just as palpable. As one of the first on the scene, I managed to get a column in the Guardian, distributed by the New York Times Syndicate. Not in any business or tech section, but in culture. That’s what it was. A culture. Like a yogurt starter.

So imagine my surprise when I get a call—yes, a phone call—from a headhunter, asking if I’d be interested in a job. I was still temping in my spare time to support my journalism habit. I figured it was another offer to transcribe depositions for a law firm, or tutor SATs to rich private school kids. But they wanted me to take a call from some bank. Sure.

Turns out, it was the executive vice president of one of the major banks, but I can’t remember which. That’s how much I knew and cared about banks in the 1990s. Anyway, this guy tells me they’ve been reading my pieces, and want to know if I’d be interested in “taking the bank onto the internet.” They were inviting me to apply to be the guy to lead the team that would figure out how to put banking online.

And I remember saying to the guy, “are you fucking crazy? You can’t put a bank on the Internet! Do you know what the internet even is? It’s thousands of computers each pinging each other, asking ‘do you have something for me?’ ‘I have something for you!’ ‘Let’s share some stuff.’” I told him how the Internet was a place where people pretended to be cats and argued about manga plot lines or the merits of 5-MeO-DMT over regular DMT. It was the place for weird people to experiment, not banks to safeguard money. It was literally built to be hacked.

But yeah, the banks went online—with all of business, really. When the dot-com companies crashed in 2000, I thought, finally, the net has fought off this opportunistic infection, and will return to the open, crazy, promiscuous free-for-all I once knew and loved. And maybe, just maybe, the emergence of Blogger and Myspace and other social stuff would rekindle the fire, or restart the yogurt culture.

Then 9/11 happened, and it really did change everything. No, it wasn’t an Internet event, but it was Internet-style, in that it exploited a high-leverage point in a highly networked society. A few guys with box cutters managed to turn multi-million-dollar planes in a multi-billion-dollar aviation system into high-impact urban bombs. It was as if the danger of free and open networks, of walking onto a plane without a body scan, or participating on the net without total surveillance apparatus in place, had been proven.

Admiral Poindexter, part of the Bush administration, proposed a Total Information Awareness Program—mass surveillance and predictive policing on an unprecedented scale. It was shut down in a year by a horrified Congress, and then essentially restarted in the private sector by Palantir. Snowden-era documents later showed Palantir’s software inside the very kind of surveillance apparatus Poindexter had proposed.

In parallel, the net became safer for banking, ultra-fast trading, and derivatives activity unimaginable in the era of manual buy order tickets and live phone calls between traders. The whole yuppie scum normative business culture we were trying to escape by going online had successfully taken over the whole thing. Being online was, is, no longer an escape from “the man.” It is to deliver oneself unto him.

I’ve liked telling myself this is all okay. We went online to get away from them and have our own free play space. Now they’ve all gone online, so let them have the net, and we can take back the real world. Unplug their fucking metaverse and let them float into the ether, while we reclaim the soil and babies and frogs and lived experience of this dimension.

But not so fast. Their platforms have been tied to way too much of the real world. Ukraine’s drones. Brazil’s presidential candidates. Surveillance cameras. Electrical grids. Credit. Food distribution. These sociopaths—these men who believe they can judge who shall live and who shall die, who is worth the air they breathe, and who is not worth saving—are controlling what gets through, and who gets what. They are warlords, now operating “at scale” thanks to the systems they control.

I still love networks, but these are not networks at all. Networks are communities of inter-actors. Individuals and groups all pinging each other. Sharing and exploring. Exchanging and metabolizing. The systems controlling our world from data centers are platforms: privately owned systems that gate who and what is served and slaved.

In such a world, the object of the game for us must be to get as much off their platforms as possible. Reduce our dependency on the privately owned landscape of remote control, and remake our networks from the bottom-up. I almost said “human” networks, but it’s more than that. The networks of our bioregions, from the bacteria and plankton up to our villages and down to our gut biomes and back up to our elementary schools. More than Team Human, it’s team earthlings—team life.

And our digital networks once did and still could model the same fractal, open, distributed architecture of nature—of coral reefs and rainforests. Their systems of access, consensus, co-regulation, all have digital analogues in gates, protocols and governance, should we choose to build networks instead of platforms. It would look a lot more like Tor networks than Web 2.0, and it would ultimately make everyone a lot safer than privately owned surveillance platforms.

Being networked doesn’t require wires or WiFi. It can use them, but it originates from somewhere else. From a sensibility of what do I have for you, and what might you have for me. It’s not simply generosity (though that may come along with it). It’s alive. It’s back and forth. It’s sexy.

Can a network like this shoot ballistic missiles out of the sky? No. But it can more easily distinguish between social media and weapons of mass destruction. And bring a bit more clarity to the problem of trillionaires deciding whose cities must submit to getting bombed, and who gets to be president of a South American nation. Are these the platforms we mean to support? With our consumer choices or our government policies? I don’t think so.

And the better networked we are as real living earthlings participating together, the less power we will cede to the machine, and the better shot we’ll have at disabling these mechanisms, and stopping the warlords from running our world.

If anything, the failure of hundreds of million of dollars in cash and AI-generated social media from Musk and his ilk to prevent a “blue tsunami” of Democrats and datacenter regulation may show that we’re on our way.