It’s The Network: Social Engineering in the Network Setting
A team of computer scientists at the University of Pennsylvania investigating the political, social and economic struggle between individual self-interest and the need to build a consensus have learned that, depending only on the structure of the network of participants, they can engineer surprising experimental results.
For example, depending solely on the ability of individuals to interact in a network, as well as the number of connections they have to other participants and other structural properties, there are networks that generate the global adoption of minority viewpoints. In addition, the team demonstrated, individuals with extreme behaviors, or a greater awareness of the incentives of others, may actually improve the collective performance of the group. Put simply, stubbornness or extremism may pay off when it comes to social welfare. (more…)
The Geopolitics of Cyberspace
by Blake Harris
My initial article on Internet culture published in Infobahn magazine.
Even many of those who have never read William Gibson now
know that he was first to coin the word “cyberspace” in his
science fiction story Burning Chrome and again in his novel
Neuromancer. Originally, cyberspace referred to a
hallucinatory virtual reality generated by a dense matrix of
computer networks. Mercenary hackers jacked their nervous
systems directly into “the net” so they could overcome complex,
and sometimes lethal security measures to break into computer
installations across the planet. (more…)
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