(AUTHOR NOTE: Synalosis, a term I coined from the Greek halōsis for the fall of a besieged city, names the single geometric operation by which the set of futures still open to a target contracts to a single point as many agents converge, the same shape running through the hunt, the siege, surveillance, investigation, and the cornered market.) A camera on a pole at the entrance to my town reads the plate of every car that passes, stores the number with a timestamp, and sends it to a database that other towns and other agencies can query. There are thousands of those cameras now, strung across American roads by a handful of private companies, and the most prominent of them, Flock Safety, has built a searchable record of where the country’s vehicles go. The same years that put those cameras on the poles put readers in the parking lots that log the Bluetooth and wifi signals leaking from every phone, and put data brokers in the middle of all of it, buying the location trails and selling the assembled portrait of a life to anyone with a credit card, police departments included. I have spent a good part of the last year writing about this build-out, the plate readers and the signal harvesters and the brokers, and about the thin and late defenses raised against it, like the California law that lets a resident order the brokers to delete what they hold. I went into that reporting thinking I was documenting something new. What I came out with was the conviction that I was documenting the newest body of something ancient.
The plate reader is a sensor on a ring, a ring with no walls you can see and no army camped along it, and its function matches the function a wall performs: it takes away a place a target could go. Every camera that logs a road removes that road as a route you can travel unseen. Add enough of them and the map of where you can move without being recorded shrinks toward nothing, the same shrinking, performed on the same kind of quantity, that a besieging army works on a trapped city and a wolf pack works on a moose. I wrote a book about that shrinking, because it had been running through human and animal life for as long as there has been prey, and no one had given it a name, since no single field had ever stood far enough back to see all of its faces at once. The book is called Synalosis, and it is out now. I built the word from Greek. The Greeks who watched their cities die under siege called the end of it halōsis, the taking, the fall, and to that word I joined syn, together, for the many who close as one with no single head giving the orders. Synalosis is the operation by which many agents, closing from many directions, drive a target’s open futures down to one, and that one is its capture.
The clearest picture of the operation is also among the oldest, and it gave me the title of this piece. In the year 52 before the common era, Julius Caesar ran down a Gallic army under Vercingetorix and trapped it on a hill called Alesia, where he did the thing that still holds the whole idea in a single image: he built two walls. The inner wall faced the trapped army and held it in place, and that wall alone would have been a siege of the ordinary kind. The outer wall faced the other way, out toward open Gaul, because a quarter of a million Gauls were marching to break the ring from behind, and Caesar meant to hold them off while the army inside starved. Two walls, back to back, one to keep the target from breaking out and one to keep its rescue from breaking in. The object of all that timber and ditch was a number rather than a place, the count of escapes still open to the men inside, which the digging existed to drive down to one. I have come to find that second wall, the one that faces away from the target and seals off rescue, almost everywhere the operation appears, and it is the part the target most often forgets to look for.
A book that claims the wolf, the wall, and the license-plate camera are one thing has to answer the obvious objection, which is that things can look alike without being alike, and that a writer who collects resemblances and stops there is doing astrology with a bigger vocabulary. The answer is a single quantity that stays the same as you move from the marsh to the manhunt to the road, one that the engineers who design guided weapons and self-driving cars had to define and measure long before I came to it, because you cannot build a machine to catch a moving thing, or to flee one, without it. They call it the reachable set: the collection of every future a target can still reach. For an animal it is every point on the ground it could run to next, given its speed and the lay of the land. A message has a reachable set of every route still open to it, a fugitive of every town that could still be hiding him, a detective of every account the evidence still permits, a chess player of every position still inside reach of the pieces. Draw the reachable set of a moose on open grass and it is a wide fan opening in all directions; set a wolf on the one causeway across the marsh and a whole arc of the fan goes dark, though nothing has touched the animal, because a path with a wolf on it has stopped being a future it can reach. The operation this book is about is the contraction of that set toward a single point, and because the set can be measured, the claim can be tested, in a marsh or a database, and made to give up a number.
Once you can see the reachable set contracting, you find it in places that share no vocabulary. The German submarine crews of the Second World War did not borrow their tactics from biology, yet they called their formations wolf packs, and what those packs did to an Atlantic convoy matched what a wolf pack does to a moose: they gathered unseen over the horizon and struck from many bearings at once, so the escorts could chase one submarine and lose the rest while the convoy’s open water closed bearing by bearing. How a thing comes apart under that kind of pressure was worked out by physicists studying glass and forest fires, who found that a network losing its connections holds together for a long while and then shatters in one step, at a threshold they named percolation. A contagion obeys the same threshold from the other side: a spreading pathogen is a reachable set expanding, and you collapse it by immunizing enough of the network that the paths between the sick and the well drop below the percolation point, which is the principle that took smallpox off the earth. That campaign found each case and vaccinated the ring of contacts around it, a closing run in reverse, a ring drawn around the killer instead of the victim, until the disease had nowhere left to go and died in the last man it reached, a Somali hospital cook named Ali Maow Maalin.
The same shape runs through money. A market can be cornered, its supply quietly bought up until the price is a single number one player dictates, which is how Rockefeller’s Standard Oil closed the country’s oil around itself a slice at a time. A bank can be run, and the run is the stranger case, because it needs no villain at all: each depositor, reasoning that the others may pull their money first, pulls his own, and the sum of those private and sensible decisions is a closing that no one ordered and no one wanted, the reachable set of a solvent bank driven to zero by the mere belief that it might fail. Extinction is the same arithmetic played slowly. A species thinned past a certain point can no longer find mates or mount a defense, and it spirals down under its own momentum even after the hunting stops, the way the passenger pigeon, a bird once counted in the billions, fell past the threshold below which its flocks could not function and was gone inside a single human lifetime. The cruelty of the slow version is that no generation sees the whole of it; each takes the depleted world it was born into as the normal one, a forgetting that a fisheries scientist named the shifting baseline, and it is the reason a closing slower than memory does not register as a closing at all.
Investigation is the operation turned inside out, closing on a truth instead of a target, and it has its own quiet technology now, geographic profiling, a method that works backward from the scattered sites of a linked series of crimes to the small district where the offender most likely sleeps, shading the map until one neighborhood is left. Addiction is the operation turned against the self, the closer and the target inside one skull, the brain’s wanting system growing more sensitive to a drug’s cues even as the pleasure drains out of the drug, so the person is driven harder toward a reward he no longer enjoys, his field of free action narrowing to a single compulsive route. The feed on your phone is a standing version of the same thing, a ring around attention rather than around the body, every swipe teaching the system more about where your notice will travel next, until the set of things you might have thought about in an idle hour has been quietly narrowed to the things it has chosen to show you. Even chess, the cleanest closing humans have built, ends in this shape: with few enough pieces on the board, a machine that has solved the position to its floor knows the exact move that holds the win, and the losing player walks the only road left to him into a checkmate that was certain a dozen moves earlier, a condition the game’s own language calls zugzwang, the moment when every move you are allowed to make only makes things worse.
The bank run points at the most unsettling form the operation takes, the one I find hardest to look away from. A closing does not require a closer. The ring around the trapped Gauls had Caesar standing over it, directing every spade, while the ring around a solvent bank has no one above it, only thousands of depositors each following a private rule that makes sense to him alone, and it assembles itself out of their uncoordinated fear. The same holds for the crowd crush that kills people at a concert, where no one wants the deaths and the geometry of packed bodies produces them anyway, and for the wildfire that encircles a fire crew from wind and fuel and slope rather than from any malice, and for the flash crash that erases a fortune in minutes because automated sellers were each obeying a sensible instruction at the same instant. These are the closings with no head to cut off, and they are the hardest to break, because every method for breaking a directed closing assumes a mind on the other end to deceive or outmaneuver, and here there is none, only a process running itself.
Hold the closing still, with every avenue already occupied and watched but no blow yet struck, and you have the form the book calls the standing ring, the one I started with, the cameras and the brokers and the watch that never quite closes its hand. A ring that holds still is the hardest of all to feel, because terror announces a hunt while the standing ring announces nothing; it reads as the ordinary condition of being alive in a wired country, the weather you stop noticing. The political danger lives in that stillness, because the same geometry that watches a citizen can be turned to wall a country. A government that means to close a people’s options rarely storms the wall in a day. It works the way the postwar Communists worked in Hungary, by what one of their own admiringly called salami tactics, taking one thin slice of freedom at a time, each slice too small to be worth a last stand, each removal dressed in the assurance that nothing has been removed, until the citizen’s reachable set of what he can still say and print and gather to do has been cut to the size of a cell. The second wall goes up in politics just as it went up at Alesia: while the inner wall pens the population, the outer wall seals the exits a trapped people would reach for as rescue, the independent courts and the free press and the honest count. One wall holds you in place; the other makes sure no help arrives.
The standing ring has a long pedigree in thought, even if no one ever filed it under geometry. Two centuries ago Jeremy Bentham drew up the panopticon, a prison built so that one guard at the center could see into every cell while no prisoner could tell whether the eye was on him, and Bentham’s insight was that the watching worked by being possible rather than constant, because a target who might be seen at any moment begins to police himself and spares the warden the labor. Foucault took that prison as the model of the modern state, the discipline that works through the lit cell and the felt gaze rather than the chain. Shoshana Zuboff gave the newest version its name, surveillance capitalism, the trade in predictions about people that turns the record of where you went and what you paused on into a product sold back into the work of moving you. The cameras strung across the country now are Bentham’s design built at national scale and paid for by the brokers, a panopticon with no center and no walls, and their power is the oldest in that design: the watched, sensing the ring, draw it tighter around themselves.
I did not write a book of doom, and the reader who wants one will have to look elsewhere, because the geometry that closes can also be cut, and a target who learns to see it learns where. There are three cuts, and there is no fourth that lies inside the target’s own power. Blind the sensor, and the closer loses the signal it steers by, the way a fugitive who goes dark denies the manhunt its feed and a citizen who encrypts denies the broker its trail. Outrun the closer, and keep your futures spread so wide that no arrangement of agents can shut them all at once, the way a network with no critical node holds together past the point where a centralized one shatters. Poison the gradient, and feed the ring a false reading so it tightens with its whole force onto empty ground. Every escape in the book is one of those three, and the first move in all of them is the same, which is to see the ring at all, because a closing you cannot see has already taken half your futures before you think to defend the rest.
I started with the camera on the pole at the edge of my town, and I will end there, because that camera is the whole argument in miniature. It is a single sensor on a ring most people cannot see, doing what a wall did at Alesia and what a wolf does on a causeway, taking away one more place a life could go unrecorded. The same shape that drew a ring around smallpox and lifted it off the earth can draw a ring around a citizen and wall a republic, and the geometry itself takes no side, which is the reason the only guard against it is to see it while there is still room to move. What makes the watching ring dangerous is its invisibility, because an invisible closing is one you do not resist, for the plain reason that you do not know it is there. The book exists to answer exactly that, and it is the only honest thing I have to offer in a wired age: a name for the operation, a way to measure it, and the three cuts a target still holds. Synalosis is out now. Learn to see the ring, in the marsh and the manhunt and the morning feed, and you will have already made the first cut, because the seeing is the cut, and it is the one move the closer cannot take away from you.
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