From www to nodes, cybernetics and the historical paradox

From few nodes to many nodes: the scenarios

In the last article, we saw how the transition from the internet to the world wide web represented a “Copernican revolution,” as philosopher Immanuel Kant would say. It went from a network of a few computers, nodes, to the extension of information to more nodes and therefore the involvement of more people and more protocols. The WWW becomes the network par excellence, uniting people and services and allowing anyone to insert content, creating a series of links not only between contents but also between users who begin to converse to spread and share those same contents.

In this sharing, two scenarios are opened: the first is that, paradoxically, from a product born afterwards, we collect scientific discoveries of some previous theories. In the second, the more the sharing scope grows, the more vulnerability of both systems and human relationships increases.

Let’s start with the first scenario: with the World Wide Web, we collect the results of both sociological and physical theories, which then exploded in the 2000s, of the so-called Theory of Networks, while in the purely informatic, but also conceptual, field, we collect the fruits of what we now call Cybernetics. Indeed both theories are antecedent to this process and historical development. As for vulnerability, the second scenario instead begins to grow what we have long defined as critical infrastructures and today call essential services.

Network Theory and Cybernetics

For a correct first application of the WWW and its hyper textual connections, scientists aim to develop, for its logical and informative functioning, with respect to the procedure of connection between people and services, the Theory of Networks.

The Theory of Networks, preceded by the Theory of Graphs, was born in the first half of the 1700s with the mathematician Leonhard Euler and his famous problem of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. In 1959, mathematicians Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi defined the concept of the random graph, a network with homogeneous architecture, in which no node is privileged over others.

From here, in 1998, the definition of Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz of small-world networks, that is a regular graph, in which few nodes have casual connections with distant nodes, up to the enunciation, the following year, of the complex network, called “scale invariance,” by Réka Albert and Albert-László Barabási, which is then the most suitable to represent the dynamics of the Internet and the Web.

Cybernetics come into play when defining a correct interaction between man and machine.

Born a few years ago from Norbert Weiner, exactly in 1948, cybernetics is a science that deals not only with web or ethereal connections but also with the study of integrated systems, natural and artificial, living or non-living. The term has also spread through various regulations of recent times on the Cybernetic Perimeter. The perimeter activities that man does online are delimited through a series of legislative interventions.

Speed and Vulnerability of Content

In this paradoxical scenario, which forms the basis for many scientific and philosophical theories, as we will see in the concept of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm, everything that is interconnected is linked to a concept: speed is directly proportional to the vulnerability of content.

With this simple formula, it is easy to understand that the intersections where our links on the web or our lives meet, after the birth of social networks, become easily attackable and are defined as Critical Infrastructures.

Critical infrastructures are highly interconnected transnational systems and therefore highly vulnerable. Defined by the European Directive 114/08 EC, “critical infrastructure means an element, a system, or part thereof located in Member States which is essential for maintaining vital societal functions, health, safety, economic and social well-being of citizens, and whose damage or destruction would have a significant impact in a Member State due to the impossibility of maintaining such functions” [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/IT/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32008L0114].

We are talking about roads, airports, pedestrians who meet and create all kinds of connections.

“The interconnections between infrastructures can be physical, environmental, cybernetic and are mutually dependent, to the extent that the degree of interconnection has a reciprocal effect on operational functions.

Many things happen due to interdependence, to the extent that they generate the ability to not satisfy primary needs.

Today, Intelligence, as a result of the latest blackouts (see Venezuela) and cyber attacks (see various web attacks, including the malware attack on WhatsApp), is becoming increasingly aware of this” [https://www.agendadigitale.eu/sicurezza/infrastrutture-critiche-ecco-le-nuove-sfide-per-lintelligence/].

From these theories to page rank, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, cookies and Blockchain, the distance is very short.