CONCEPT
Network-Making Power
Manuel Castells’s term for the most consequential form of power in the network society—the capacity not merely to operate within networks but to constitute them, to program their goals and protocols, and to determine which nodes are included and which are excluded from the circuits that produce value.
Network-making power sits at the apex of
Castells’s fourfold taxonomy of power in the
network society. Where networking power is exercised over excluded nodes, network power is embedded in protocols, and networked power reflects differential positions within an existing network, network-making power is the capacity to constitute the network in the first place—to determine what its goals are, which actors participate, which protocols govern the flow of information and value, and what kinds of nodes will be included or excluded. It is, in Castells’s framing, the power that determines the rules of every other form of power. The companies developing the foundational AI systems—
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and their competitors—exercise network-making power of extraordinary scope and speed. Their decisions about training objectives, safety constraints, pricing structures, API terms of service, and deployment policies are not merely technical or commercial decisions; they are decisions about