PREFACE
WHY NETWORKS MATTER
Since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with maps. I adore the layout of old maps depicting mountains and oceans, cities and roads. I find it fascinating how world history can be seen through the shifting borders of maps over time. But nowadays, what amazes me most is how old cartographers got it wrong.
One of my favorite examples is the way California has been depicted, having lived there for part of my childhood. For the longest time, travelers believed that California was an island, separate from the American mainland.
My favorite type of map is the road map, whether it shows layouts of city streets or depicts how railroads and highways, roads and turnpikes, lanes and pathways curve through the landscape of countries and continents. For me, the best part of the Lord of the Rings books is the amazingly intricate maps drawn by J. R. R. Tolkien, which let you follow the trail of the merry fellowship on their journey to Mordor.
But moving on from my hobbit habits, when you look more closely at the topology of maps, it’s clear that roads form a network. The infrastructure of how cities operate, their capacity and connections, tell the story of the economy and influence of a region. You can see which cities are at the heart of an economy and which are at the edge. You can understand how influential a town is, what its main economic arteries and roads are, and how it influences, stimulates, and feeds neighboring towns and hamlets.
I now spend countless hours poring over Google Maps and Google Earth. I love exploring regions that I’ve visited or will visit, ogling the enormous beauty and complexity of the roads and canals, and the intricacy of the routes and freeways. All of this was made by man.
When it comes to the mountains and lakes, the volcanoes and harbors, the plateaus and cliffs, we had nothing to do with those. But all the rest, that was us. We created these networks that carry our cars, wagons, trucks, boats, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians. There was no grand plan, as is made obvious by the myriad twists and turns and the fractallike complexity of the network.
There are exceptions, of course. The German autobahns were created through a grand scheme, and the U.S. interstate highway system1 copied the idea. These pathways seem more logical than the rest of the infrastructure, which seems almost organic. But their impact is immense. The U.S. interstate system helped shape the United States into a world economic superpower and a highly industrialized nation.
In newer economies like that of the United States, you tend to see more deliberate structure and order. Cities such as New York or Chicago are laid out on grid patterns, for example. It’s much easier to find the corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue in New York than the intersection of Avenida de Lanzarote and Calle Nicaragua in Madrid.
Over hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, these networks have grown and connected cities and towns, and have become the lifeblood of our economies. We hardly realize that anymore. On the contrary, we notice it only when it fails—when we’re stuck in traffic, trying to get into or out of a city, and cursing the designers of these blasted roads, traffic signals, or bypasses.
But the truth is, these infrastructure networks are the heart of our economies. They transport employees to their jobs, children to their schools, produce to the warehouses, and eBay purchases to your front door. Without these networks, there would be no economy, no global society, no wealth, and no prosperity.
But today, the roads on a map tell only a tiny part of the story. They tell the tale of the physical part of our economies—as Nicholas Negroponte2 would say, the “transport of atoms.”
Unseen by the naked eye, superimposed on these visible networks are countless invisible networks: wireless networks that connect people, phones, tablets, and other devices; radio and television networks that relay music and video across the globe; telecommunications networks that connect satellites, bringing continents and remote areas together; electricity networks that bring power from wind turbines at sea to homes, or watts from nuclear plants to factories; information networks that relay more and more content and knowledge at increasingly breakneck speeds.
What we see when we gaze upon our planet are manmade infrastructure networks that took hundreds of years to form. And if you could observe the spectrum of communications networks on top of that, you would find layer upon layer of networks, created over the last century, that have grown to a similar level of complexity and delicacy. All are expressions of humankind, our collective actions as a civilization.
I have become obsessed with networks: their absolute power and their pure simplicity.
So this book is about networks: why I have come to believe in them as the most fundamental driver of progress, and why we have to understand networks if we want to survive the next era of society.
I believe that networks will win. Networks always win.
We’re witnessing a revolution in the way society works. Many people, including me, thought at first that this was because of digital technology—that we were witnessing the advent of a new society, with digital natives leading the way and the toddler who can swipe an iPad as its poster boy. We were wrong.
It’s not because of digital technology. It’s because of networks.
What is happening in front of our eyes is that everything is becoming connected to everything else. Information is flowing through networks with greater intensity, and that completely changes everything. Markets are disappearing, becoming networks of information with the customer at their heart. And if the outside world becomes a network, companies will have to follow suit.
That’s the punch line. Plain and simple.
If you understand networks, you will understand the future.