The Seventh Sense
Power, Fortune and Survival in the Age of Networks
Joshua Cooper Ramo
1
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Part One: The Nature of Our Age
In which the revolutionary character of our era is explained. The need for a new
instinct is introduced. The historical stakes are weighed.
Chapter 1: The Master
Chapter 2: The Age of Network Power
Chapter 3: The Unbuckling
Part Two: The Seventh Sense
In which we regard the world with a new sensibility. Connection, we discover, changes
the nature of an object.
Chapter 4: The Jaws of Connection
Chapter 5: Fishnet
Chapter 6: Warez Dudes
Chapter 7: The New Caste
Chapter 8: “A mechanism and a myth”: The Compression of Space and Time
Part Three: Gateland
A guide to power in the world that becomes newly apparent with the Seventh Sense.
Chapter 9: Inside and Out
Chapter 10: Defense in Depth
Chapter 11: Citizens!
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Preface
Three hundred years ago the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution began
their pounding work on the foundations of an ancient order. Like twin hammers,
these forces demolished most of what once seemed permanent: Kings, alchemists,
popes, feudal lords – they were all undone.
Today, a fresh hammer is cracking away at our world. The demands of constant,
instant connection are tearing at old power arrangements. The formation of
networks of all kinds, for trade and biology and finance and warfare and any of a
thousand varied needs, is producing new and still dimly understood sources of
power. They are eroding the roots of an older order even as a new one is beginning
to appear. In fact, this process is only beginning. The networks ahead of us will be
even faster than those we have today. They will also be informed by artificial
intelligence. The combination of these two forces – instantness and thinking
machines – will further deepen an already profound change.
That last great shift of the Enlightenment was a violent and wonderful
transformation. It produced winners and losers, triggered tragedy and lit fresh
triumphs. What lies ahead of us is the same. A new landscape of power is emerging
now. This book is its story, and the tale of the instinct that will divide those who
master it from those who will be mastered by it.
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Part One: The Nature of Our Age
4
Chapter One:
The Masters
In which the immortal problems of power are discussed, and the possibility of a new
instinct is introduced.
1.
One morning in of 1943, a Chinese writer named Nan Huai-Chin packed his bags in
Shanghai and began walking out of the city. He was headed west, and traced a route
along the Huang Pu river, as he headed out towards E’Mei Shan several thousand
miles away in Western China. E’Mei Shan – Eyebrow Mountain – was and is one of
the holiest Buddhist sites in China.
Nan was an unusual young man. At fifteen, he had won a national sword fighting
competition against men twice his age. At sixteen he had been admitted to the best
university in Shanghai, where he excelled in the study of natural sciences and
philosophy. If you look at photos of Nan in those years, more or less at the moment
he left Shanghai for the mountains, you see a clean-shaven, and soft-skinned man.
He is handsome, with electric eyes. You can see, if you know to look, the rough
intensity of the man he’d become during the anti-Japanese war: A toughness in his
stance; some hint too in his grimace of a sword-fighter’s mercilessness. This was
long before Nan was regarded as one of the finest living exemplars of the Chinese
Buddhist tradition, before he became known as Master Nan. This was before his
flight from China with the Kuomintang in 1949 once the communists came to power,
before his decades of wandering, and his eventual return to the mainland. All that
lies ahead of the man you see in the photo. The man in the photo is young, energetic.
He is certain.
In Nan’s youth, in his early sword fighting days, he had come to understand that
mastering the blade of his sword involved really training his internal spirit to the
highest possible level of sharpness. The spirit moved first, then – instants later – the
sword. It was his desire to sharpen that inner blade that led him to E’mei Shan and
the study of Ch’an Buddhism. Ch’an – you may know it by its Japanese name, Zen – is
the steeliest of the Buddhist traditions, bred through the combination of the
Buddha’s ancient Indian teachings with the mystical philosophical habits of Chinese
Daoism. Its adherents explain that enlightenment in Ch’an demands concentration
strong enough to make and then smash diamonds. It produces, as a result, an
unmatchable form of enlightenment. So, with the anti-Japanese war still smoldering,
Nan traveled for a month through his convulsing country and up E’mei Mountain,
where he found a Ch’an lamasery near the peak. Once there, during three years of
constant effort and meditation and deprivation, he achieved a breakthrough to
samadhi, that state of spiritual alignment in which the world and your own soul
become as transparent as water. Fear vanishes, as does lust or any real confusion
about the deeper currents of life. You become, the priests like to say, as resilient as a
5
natural mountain spring: No matter what mud is thrown in, it is simply and
naturally bubbled away into clarity.
From E’Mei temple, with this fresh, clear-running mind, Nan began a quest to
sharpen his spirit even further. The journey took him, for nearly a decade, from
master to master in China, from monastery to university to rural huts. These were
the places where the last bits of some of China’s most ancient traditions had been
carried, places where classical wisdom had survived a hundred years of national
chaos. Nan’s wandering education resembled the way in which, in millennia past,
monks would make spiritual marathons around China, seeking an ever-sharper edge
to their insights. Solitary monks would stride into packed monasteries and engage
in tests of insight, contests to see who could feel the underlying nature of the world
with greater fidelity. The aim was, always, to touch the energy flows moving, just
unseen, below our lives. “Ten thousand kinds of clever talk—how can they be as
good as reality?” So the famous Ch’an master Yun Men, who himself trained four
great masters, faced down a King with pure silence in one such a battle. 1
Nan was trying to cultivate in himself deep ways of feeling and sensing the world.
During his wandering study, he followed a path that would lead him to
enlightenment in more than a dozen different schools of Buddhism. He mastered
everything from medicine to calligraphy. His youthful success and energy at sword
fighting, it emerged, was a sign of a prodigal genius. He became, in the 20 th century,
recognized as one of those crucial human vessels by which really ancient tradition is
preserved and carried forward for new generations.
After a few years of study, Nan saw the descending madness of Mao’s China and
slipped out of the mainland for Taiwan. He lived for decades between Taipei and
Hong Kong and America. During this time his fame as a teacher grew. In the mid-
1990s as China opened, Nan returned to the mainland. He had been invited by some
of China’s most powerful families, the children of communist revolutionaries who
were groping for a sense of history and identity. They wanted to absorb the lessons
of Chinese culture that Nan had internalized, they hoped to bend them into tools
they could use to shape a Chinese future. Might the old habits of the country, with
their ancient roots, have something to offer a nation nearly splitting with the
energies of modernity? Nan agreed to set up a private school. He selected a site on
the shores of Lake Tai in Zhejiang Province, not far from Shanghai. He chose the
location carefully: The still lake water near his campus was like a giant bath of
calming yin energy that balanced the urgent, uncertainly aggressive yang energy of
1990s China into a kind of harmony. Ash trees shaded the study rooms in the
summer. Wild peonies erupted in pink and white each spring.
1 So the famous Ch’an master: “Yun Men’s Every Day is a Good Day” in Thomas
Cleary, Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record: Zen Comments by Hakuin and Tenkei. (Boston,
Mass.: Shambhala, 2002) 39. Fir an excellent introduction to the thinking of Master
Nan, see Diamond Sutra Explained (Primodia Media 2007) and To Realize
Enlightenment: Practice of the Cultivation Path (York Beach, ME: S. Weiser, 1994)
6
It was here, when he was 92 years old, that I first came to know him.
2.
Before I moved to Beijing in 2002 a friend took me aside and offered this thought:
“Your life in China will change the way you see the world. But if you want to get the
most out of it, you have to understand that as important as being bilingual is, it is as
important to be bicultural.” I had not honestly thought of this as part of my plan, but
it seemed like good advice. I have hewed to it as a personal law ever since. From my
first days in China, I lived almost entirely among the Chinese. I can, for instance,
nearly number on one hand the meals I shared with Westerners over my years
there. This advice to learn to be bicultural really did change my experience of living
in China. It changed how I saw the world. It presented moments of really honest and
searching confusion. I had conversations where I understood every word and yet
had no idea what my interlocutor meant. I had periods where I did not know which
culture was pulling on my mind. But the decision produced, at least, a fortunate
encounter that led me to Master Nan’s school.
Several years after I arrived in Beijing, I was out for dinner one evening with a close
Chinese friend. My friend is a remarkable woman. If you ask how China has gone
from poverty to prosperity in record time, it is partly because of people like her. She
had studied in the Chinese educational system, had moved overseas and mastered
the technical arts of economics and finance, and had returned eagerly to help in the
construction of modern post-reform China. Nearly any time the government had
some new and difficult financial problem to manage, she would be shuffled into the
nervous hands of some baffled Minister or Vice Premier. She had, in her various
activities, helped put the Chinese stock exchange on its feet, rebuilt bankrupt banks,
and had overseen the construction of China’s first sovereign wealth fund. Though
only a few years older than me, her unique skills and absolute loyalty meant she had
seen much of the development of China’s speed-train economy – part miracle, part
near accident – from zero-distance range.
As she and I were finishing dinner that evening, a door opened to a private dining
room near us in the restaurant. Chinese often eat out in private rooms, and the best
restaurants are usually warrens of well-appointed secret spaces, a reminder that in
China door after door after door leads to ever more secure sanctums—think of the
nested power architecture of the Forbidden City. When the door near us opened, a
stream of senior Chinese party figures paraded past, hovering around an intense,
square-jawed and smiling man who was soon to become one of the most powerful
figures in China. As this man walked past, he nodded hello to both of us. I asked my
friend once he had left: “How do you know him?” I expected her contact with senior
leaders on financial matters would explain the connection. Her answer surprised
me.
“We both,” she said, “have the same Master.”
7
I had only been living in China then for about four or five years, so I was still a bit
surprised to learn in this unusual way about what I would later come to know – and
see and even experience myself – as the spiritual life of China’s communist officials,
particularly those at the absolute top of the system. The Master my friend was
referring to was Master Nan. Though he was largely unknown outside of China – I
am sure you had not heard of him until a few pages ago – in China he was an icon.
After his return to the mainland in the 1990s, his books about Buddhism and
philosophy sold millions of copies. His lectures are watched on DVDs and the
Internet, and he owns a fond fame that reaches across generations and transcends
politics or art or philosophy. You are as likely to find a copy of his book on the desk
of a university President as stuffed into the back pocket of a tea-server in Chengdu.
As you can imagine, when my friend first introduced me to the idea of someone like
Master Nan serving as a spiritual mentor to the figures struggling to master this
huge country, figures I had met and worked with in the brutally rational business of
everyday life in a modernizing China, it raised all sorts of questions. We both have
the same master? But in China, one thing you discover pretty quickly is that honest
understanding of anything isn’t achieved by asking lots of questions, particularly not
the direct sort. Yun Men had it right: Ten thousand kinds of clever talk get you
nowhere meaningful. But with her one sentence, the dinner conversation, which had
been moving pleasantly enough through the eddies of China’s politics and
economics, passed into deeper water, where it has stayed in the years since.
Master Nan’s particular passion, I learned that night, was a branch of Chinese Ch’an
Buddhism that had, about 1000 years ago, provided the seeds for the Japanese
school of “instant illumination,” known as Rinzai Zen. Rinzai is famed in the west for
asking students to grapple with koans, the sorts of puzzles – “What was your face
before your were born?” or “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or just “Mu!”
– that can never be approached or answered by reason alone. They require nothing
but pure, trained instinct. Koans are not like math problems or word puzzles, so
much as questions that have to be answered with your whole soul. We don’t really
have an educational concept like this in the west, but the aim of Rinzai meditation
and learning is to arrive at kensho (jianxing in Chinese), a sudden and complete
understanding of the true nature of the world. Such “instant illumination” marks a
very eastern sensibility: Real truth resists the grasp of mere logic. It can’t be simply
explained, or taught with words alone. It calls on more immediate feelings, in the
way we might fall in love or get angry. In Rinzai study, the aim is to tighten and
compress your mind with meditation and focus and exercise – and the occasional
slapping sharpness of a hardwood “enlightenment stick” – as a way to open it, with
the goal of instant, blazing enlightenment. In such a moment, all sorts of invisible
relations become unforgettably obvious.
I had been a student of Rinzai since I was 16. So it was that, in the springtime of the
year after that dinner in Beijing, I was surprisingly, luckily invited to Master Nan’s
campus.
3.
8
It is often said that during the days when Master Nan’s Lake Tai campus is open for
training, when hundreds of rich and connected elites from all over the Chinesespeaking
world converge there, it is the best networking spot in the country. But on
the weekend of my first visit, the Tai Hu center was closed to outsiders. Only about
ten of us were present. We were all, together, students. On our first morning we
walked to a large hall overlooking the lake and sat down quietly on benches and
meditated for three hours. And on our first evening, Master Nan sat with us during
dinner, looking young and vital and 20 years short of his 92, barely eating. Above the
bridge of his nose, I noticed, was a small marble-sized bump. This is the mark that
emerges, according to Buddhist tradition, when your self-cultivation and meditation
has led you to deep breakthrough, when energy begins to slip out of your head at
that “third eye” spot and into the world, leaving a little bump as evidence.
As we finished dinner, Master Nan turned the conversation to me and asked me to
speak about what was on my mind. In later years I would learn this was his habit, to
hand the floor over to his guests for a bit – whether they were politicians or
industrial titans or innocent visitors – before entering into his own reflections. He
pursued me with careful questions, his voice purring with a thick coastal accent. The
questions seemed removed sometimes from my main points, but I quickly came to
see them as needles. (“When he uttered a phrase,” it was said of Yun Men, “it was
like an iron spike.”) Many of those present were jotting notes: Whatever Master Nan
thought important, his students felt, must be worth putting down.
I knew that the records of Nan’s lectures and discussions were often circulated by
email. With subject lines like “Understanding This Chinese Generation” or “Master
Nan Answers Questions About Chinese and Western Knowledge,” they were realtime
maps of the usually invisible dance our daily lives do with history and
philosophy. We live now, of course, but Nan was always aware that we lived within
an historical flow too, in a particular moment amidst constant change. Remember
that the foundational text of Chinese civilization is the 2500-year old Yi Jing, The
Book of Changes. If Westerners are accustomed to consistent historical, Chinese
begin with the idea of a flux of forces as the only constant. A world of ceaseless
change means that valuable, useful education is less about facts than about the
training of a vigilant instinct for reaction. 2 It was a version of this same aim that was
at the heart of Nan’s teaching, and that made his ideas so magnetically appealing.
The circulation lists on his lecture notes were the Chinese equivalent of a roster that
included Ben Bernanke, Colin Powell, and Warren Buffett. They reflected the
breadth of curiosity about his ideas, and the hunger to understand and digest
changes in China and the world. “I just had a very senior leader here,” Nan told me
during a visit several years later. I had seen the high security at the compound and
2 A world of ceaslesee change: See Francois Jullien, The Silent Tranformations
(London: Seagull Books, 2011) 70, and David Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from
the Han Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany, N.Y.:
State University of New York Press, 1998) 150
9
the military cars whipping in and out all day. “He asked me what books I could
recommend to understand this period we are living in. I said, ‘I could give you some
books, but you wouldn’t understand them.’” Nan laughed. The iron spike. “This can’t
be understood by reading!” Nan was trying to educate his students in the original
principles of Ch’an: a set of psychological and physical tools to reveal deeper
patterns in the world.
After wearing his guests down with relentless dinner-time questioning that first
night I was at Lake Tai, Master Nan began to offer his views of our age. What he saw,
he explained, was a world pressing too hard on a fault line. We faced, he said,
choosing his word carefully, an “ephocal” quake. We were at a moment when the
river of change he had spent a lifetime feeling out was about to shift its course over
the landscape, drowning many of the reliable, old routes. The origins of this change
were buried in the very things we hoped might, in fact, save us from shock: money,
information, speed. “People are now constantly connected to computers and
machines, and this is changing the way they think. People just cannot make sense of
what is happening,” he said. “There is no respite. The world is going to go faster and
faster in this regard.”
“In the 19 th century the biggest threat to humanity was pneumonia,” he continued.
“In the 20 th century it was cancer. The illness that will mark our era, and particularly
the start of the 21 st century, is insanity. Or we can say, spiritual disease.” He paused.
“This next century is going to be especially turbulent. It has already begun. And
when I say insanity and spiritual disease, I don’t only mean inside the minds of
individuals. Politics, military, economics, education, culture and medicine – all these
will be affected.”
I could sense the logic behind Master Nan’s argument. The industrialization and
urbanization of the 19 th century had packed much of the world into Dickensian
urban pits. These became petri dishes for pneumonia. Too much industry and
urbanization, too fast. The 20 th century of plastics and artificial, untested, unsafe
materials had torn away at our genetic base and worsened cancers. Too much
science, too fast. In our age, in the 21 st century he felt a wasting disease would be
carried by information, by cell phones, by packets of data, by every bitstream we
jacked into our lives – and it would go right for our brains. Our institutions and our
ideas about power and stability would fall apart. The remapping of force that the
information revolution represented was a profound, destructive shift – what Nan
called a jieshu, the Chinese word for a rupture in the fabric of human history. In such
an era, the once reliable old habits would become useless, even dangerous. All that
would matter were your instincts. Frankly, all you would have would be your
instincts because no existing map could guide you through a completely new
landscape. In fact, the existing maps, should you stubbornly continue to use them,
would lead you along dangerous paths towards catastrophes you could not even
imagine.
�
4.
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The dining hall around us was dark as Nan finished his discussion that night. At our
table we sat in a pool of dim light and waited on the Master as he considered his
next thoughts. I knew that some of what drew China’s great minds here to dinners
with him was a sense that those old ideas of Chinese philosophy – born in an age of
chaos and dating back to a time before rational calculation and scientific progress –
offered hope. I asked Master Nan where he would begin on a quest to understand
this age and how best to prepare. How to cultivate oneself?
“You know you can’t just understand this easily,” Master Nan said sharply. He was a
little angry with me, I could see, for asking such a direct question – and he was also
using the Chinese teaching technique of taking students through a range of emotions
to accelerate their learning. Chinese philosophers believe we learn differently
depending on how we feel, so a teacher making a student scared or insulted or
proud is often just an educational tactic. Nan was working on my humiliation bone
now: “This isn’t like some idea I can sell you and then you can just go and use,” he
continued, his voice rising. “This is going to be hard.”
Master Nan inhaled on his cigarette and waited a moment. “If you work, though,
maybe you can be like Su Qin,” he said, “the man who wrestled 20 years of peace out
of 300 years of war.” Su Qin was the hero of the Warring States period during which
China collapsed into total chaos. He is remembered today, two thousand years later,
for the way he had penetrated the madness of his age and how he found there
deeper fibers of truth that he lashed into a stable peace. “Su Qin started as an
idealist. He failed.
“You know, Su Qin was humiliated in trying to advise kings. Even his kin were
embarrassed. His sister and mother refused to let him return to the family home. He
was in so much pain over this embarrassment that he sat in front of a desk and read
every book of history he could find for seven years. He tied his long hair to a beam
above his desk so that if he fell asleep it would hold his head up. Sometimes he
would stab a knife into his thigh to keep awake.” Nan’s voice was rising, his speech
picking up pace. “But in the end, he learned. Su Qin learned. You should study him. If
you do this, if you are sincere, if you work hard, if you learn these ideas, you can
understand. Can you be that disciplined?” The room was dead quiet now. No one
looked at me. In the silence, one of the guests passed around a plate of cut fresh fruit
and cherries and sweet dried dates.
Nan’s relentless, intense Ch’an Buddhism sort of enlightenment, delivered only after
painful years of carbon-crushing intellectual intensity, expressed a clear ambition:
To learn to feel through invisible relations and balances and to construct something
promising and hopeful on the other side. Nan’s long sessions of mediation or sword
play, his furious pursuing philosophical dialogues that reduced students to an
embarrassed sweating state, these were all aimed at sharpening a blade so as to
instantly carve at the energy flows of our age. Did “spiritual illness” really linger
ahead of us? What sort of tragedy did that suggest? What was it that, hair tied to the
5.
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ceiling, penknife jabbed into his leg, Su Qin had learned in those long, effortful years
of study? What secret had he penetrated? What sort of education had he finally
received at the end of his humiliations and breakthroughs? He had mastered the
energy of his age – and the exact right sensibility to use it. Might we, Nan seemed to
be asking, do the same?
7.
Faced with the mad unsettling of his world during the Industrial Revolution of the
mid 19 th century, the German philosopher Friederich Nietzsche once mused that
survival and greatness would depend on having what he called a “Sixth Sense”, by
which he meant a feeling for history. Surely, he felt, an instinct for ancient balances
and truths would provide a guide rail of sorts as the world lurched into a new age,
along an uncharted road. 3 If you could say “This has happened before” or “This is
how we got to where we are,” Nietzsche believed, it was the first step towards
knowing where to go next. Nan and Kissinger knew the need for something else for
our age as well, for a different instinct. It wasn’t just about knowing your history or
feeling the real possibility of human progress or tragedy. Rather it was about feeling
out the roots of the present in a certain way. All of our ideas – from how we love to
what we think of politics – are taken from the feedback and experience of our lives,
from what we’ve seen and done and felt and learned. We are the sum total of our
experiences, in this sense. But what to do if changes happen at some deeper,
insensible level where the old ideas and instincts, where the tools of sight and smell,
of feel and taste and hearing don’t fully answer? What to do when we are confronted
with what we’ve never experienced before? Never even dreamed of, perhaps?
This book is the story of a completely fresh way of feeling our world. By this I mean
a sensation that is as newborn as the lively sense of connection, of freedom, of
electric uncertainty and hope that come with the knowledge that we are unboxing a
new age. If Nietzsche’s era demanded a feeling for history, our own age insists on a
3 Surely, he felt: Nietzche describes the “Sixth Sense” in Beyond Good and Evil in the
following way: “The historical sense (or the capacity for divining quickly the order
of rank of the evaluations according to which a people, a society, a human being has
lived, the ‘divinatory instinct’ for the relationships of these evaluations, for the
relation of the authority of values to the authority of effective forces): this historical
sense, to which we Europeans lay claim as our specialty, has come to us in the wake
of the mad and fascinating semi-barbarism into which Europe has been plunged
through the democratic mingling of classes and races—only the nineteenth century
knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form and mode of life, of
cultures that formerly lay close beside or on top of one another, streams into us
“modern souls” thanks to this mingling, our instincts now run back in all directions,
we ourselves are a kind of chaos. In the end, as I said before, ‘the spirit’ perceives its
advantage in all this.” See Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Rolf Horstmann. Beyond
Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 224.
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sensation alive to the pull of constant, instant connection. This Seventh Sense reacts
to what none of our other senses can notice, to the subtle undercurrents of a
networked age. That moment of first connection you once had – to a computer, a
friend, a fast-moving financial product, a miracle medical cure, an idea, a smashed
up sound – is like the first time you looked at a Matisse painting or heard Beethoven
(or Orbital). It switched on a new sensibility. But you have probably had – or will
shortly – another moment. This is the instant a cold and creeping chill hits you,
started by the uneasy sensation that something you’ve done has been recorded or
predicted or watched and manipulated in some way you’d not quite imagined. That
some strange force from a great distance has slammed into your life. This feeling is
the sudden shudder of a bill come surprisingly due: You wanted to be connected?
Okay, here’s the cost. And the addition on both sides of the ledger, the massive
benefits of our links and the rather terrible potential of those same threads, is still
being settled. We can say at least that the sum of all the revolutions wrought by the
instant mingling of the world’s soon-to-be connected billions with each other and
with machine intelligence, biological innovation and the tremors of a globalizing
world will be, to use Master Nan’s word, “epochal.”
Most of us find ourselves torn now. Not just between future and past; not merely
between the habits and loves of a slower age and the ceaslesss promise of
something fast and new. We are trapped, as well, between two groups. An older
generation now in power, blind to the laws of networks and connection, uses old
ideas to battle problems of a connected age and makes them worse, ever faster.
Terrorism. Financial chasms. Environmental imbalance. At the same time, an
emergent class of powerful technologists fingers more influence than perhaps any
group in history. Machines watch, learn, think and increasingly control nearly every
element of our lives. This digital-age group understands networks; but if they have
ideas about virtue, philosophy and justice, (mostly they don’t) these feel susbsumed
by their confidence in networks and control. Each group pulls at the legacy of the
Enlightenment – our liberty. And, so far, we’ve no way of defending ourselves. No
new instinct for life in this still unfathomable age of connection. The Seventh Sense
is a feeling for just what constant connection means – and the start of (finally) a
confident knowledge of how to construct our future and protect ourselves against
what is even now descending upon us. A consciouness exists in the world, Master
Nan would say. It extends over borders, across differences, between people. And it
becomes, on networks now, visible in new, powerful and hopeful ways.
What I mean by a sensibility is really a kind of instinctive notion, a way to sense and
then use the energy flows of our age that hovers perhaps just below what the
rational mind alone can tell. Master Nan used to recall a famous story from the 2500
year old Daoist masterpiece Zhuangzi, about the butcher who worked for a famous
and powerful Duke. One day the Duke saw the butcher cutting meat, his blade
singing and moving with almost no effort. “Ah, this is marvelous. Imagine such
mastery,” the Duke said. “How have you achived this?” he asked. “What I follow is
The Way,” the butcher said, referring to the idea of a spiritual force, a natural energy
which Daoisim tells us infuses everthing, from trees to the human heart. “When I
started butchering, all I could see was parts of the ox itself. After three years, I could
13
see the the whole ox. Nowadays, I meet the ox with my mind and spirit rather than
see it.” 4 The butcher was not looking at his work; he was feeling the energy of the
task. “A good cook goes through a knife in a year, because he cuts,” the butcher
concluded. “An average cook goes through a knife in a month, because he hacks. I
have used this knife for nineteen years. It has butchered thousands of oxen, But the
blade is still like it's newly sharpened.” He was cutting not with his knife, but with an
instinct – and the result was the highest form of mastery: accomplishment with
nearly no effort. This our our aim: To see the world with our mind, not our eyes. So
much of what will affect us in the future is invisibly stashed on a connected
landscape we’re only now learning to feel. It will emerge from the complex, adaptive
sea of links expanding around us. We must tune our own instincts for this power,
which will make our moves almost effortless. The ever-sharp mental knife laid upon
the thick challenges of a new age.
There will be moments ahead for all of us – the most dangerous or terrifying or
wonderful ones – in which things will happen that none of our old ideas or senses
can help us understand. The truly new. We’ve had previews of such moments often
enough in recent years: innovative devices, surprise attacks, unexpected and
permanent economic quakes. A cracking of the old physics of wealth and power is
underway around us, largely invisible to most of us, except perhaps in its strange
and unnatural effects: everywhere terror, instant billionaries, the failure of ideas
and institutions, millions of migrants loosed and drifting across old borders, but
tethered to deeper fields of connection, data, and ideology. The Seventh Sense is the
ability to see why this is happening. And to use what you see. This is not merely
about brain power or sharpened intellect; it’s about a gut reaction. Just as the
demand for liberty or industry was once invisible and insensible to an age
accustomed hundreds of years ago to feudal, agricultural habits, so we’re likely blind
to urgent pressures of our own. Surely you’ve felt this creeping anxiety yourself, the
exciting nausea of movement coming from you know not where? The ability to sense
and feel the deeper chord changes of history has, always, been the decisive mark of
leadership and success in revolutionary periods.
Consider, for instance, Charles, the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel who faced
down Napoleon on the fields of Jena in what is now central Germany in October
1806. Brusnwick-Wolfenbuttel was then 71 years old. He was considered one of the
most courageous soldiers of his age, with a record of astonishing victories. He
looked over the sun-dappled fields along the Saar river on that fall day and saw
nearly certain victory in the coming battle. He had Napoleon outmatched two
soldiers to one. His men were masters of the subtle techniques of Frederick the
Great, tactics that had delivered victory in far more perilous moments. But
Napoleon, less than half the Duke’s age at 37, stared across the same undulating
land, the same poised armies and saw in the landscape something completely
4 When I started butchering: I’ve finessed the always-unstranslatable Zhuangzi.
See for reference Burton Watson, Burton, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1968)
14
different and totally, lethally correct: An interlocking set of murderous gears that
could be set loose by his artillery 5 .
In the course of the French victory the next day Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel was first
blinded by French musket shot and then bled to death. It was a poetic end. He had
been, like so many of the Generals who would tumble before Napoleon in coming
years, absolutely blind to forces perfectly clear and visible and usable to the
revolutionary upstart. Napoloen’s European opponents would come to fear and
admire nothing so much as the Emperor’s specific, almosty mystical sort of
battlefield vision. He could look at a battlefield and see possibilities – certanties, in
fact – that eluded older, famous men. They named his masterful insight the “Coup
d’Oeil”: an instant, apprehending glimpse of power waves 6 . He saw forces and facts
in war that were obscured from his enemies by their own habits of mind and the
limits of their creativity. The great Prussian military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz,
who was made prisoner by Napoleon during the massacre at Jena, used his time
locked up to begin compiling notes for his classic work of Western strategy, On War.
“Genius,” he later wrote, “rises above the rules.” Mastery of strategy, Von Clausewitz
explained, was not merely the result of steely courage, geometric calculation or even
luck, as earlier writers had figured it. Rather, it was derived from the ownership of a
sensibility that could discern the secretly running lines of power that made the old
ways instantly irrelevant and appallingly dangerous.
Historians who mark out and consider the really long, century by century movement
of humanity, often divide time into “historic” eras where fundamental, tsunami-like
changes wipe clean old orders and other, more sedate periods where time dawdles
like a quiet lake. This is the difference between living in Warsaw in, say, 1339 or
1939. The first period was sober and silent; the second was awfully awake. Historic
moments like 1939 are marked by the fact that change comes to find you. It is often
unavoidable. Your children are pulled into a World War. Your village is torn down.
Your health is remade by science. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called the
march of these snapping changes “punctuated equilibrium,” as the world is jumped
from one state to another – and never turns back. He was largely considering the
extinction of the dinosaurs, but we find the idea useful in thinking about history too.
The Revolution of 1789 in France, for instance, which enabled the massive,
volunteer armies Napoleon later brought to his wars, which were of unprecedented
size. “Looking at the situation in this conventional manner, people at first expected
to have to deal only with a seriously weakened French army,” Von Clausewitz
explained later. “But in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination.” 7 The
5 An interlocking set of gears: David Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New
York: Macmillan Publishing, 1974), 464; For a discussion of this generational
mismatch, see the essay “������������������”or Dai Xu,
“Reconsidering the military aspect of great power rise and fall from a cultural
perspective” PLA Daily, June 8, 2015
6 They named his masterful insight: Carl von Clausewitz, Howard, Michael, trans.
Clausewitz On War, (Washington: Library of Congress, 1998) 102
7 But in 1793: On War, p 591 (1984)
15
European riots of 1848 were another such example. Or the ideological and military
surging of 1939. Our very own age. There is a feeling of this sort of inevitable
punctuation in what is underway around us now, the insertion of a single period at
the end of one era and the first, italicized letters of a new one. Impulses and
connections we don’t fully understand and can’t yet control are at play. Our
imagination is beggared too now. Often. These forces are, we have to confess, wiping
away one system. But they are also producing another.
What I mean by the Seventh Sense is the ability to see both these old and the new
worlds around us, to feel too the real and the virtual – and to know power as it flows
through and between each. Rattling one apart. Enlivening another. I don’t mean here
blinding technological optimism; nor do I mean absurd conservative historicism.
The Seventh Sense is the ability to contemplate politics, economics, warfare,
innovation, genomics now – really every hot-connected discipline and sense in one
glance the new and the old power, and of course the fault lines running between
them. Connected and yet-to-be-linked. Colliding. Melding. Repelling. Our future will
be less an isolated technological paradise than an intermingling of real and virtual. It
will not be an age of blacked-out virtual reality goggles like Oculus Rift or the
blinding and submersive feeling of novels like Ready Player One but, I think, a bit
more like a semi-transparent screen, on which real and virtual worlds mash
together. Hololens or Magic Leap glasses that project virtual images on the real
world, for instance. Or the feeling of Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece
novel whose charaters move effortlessly between net and city. Maybe even
(probably most accurately) the game Ingress, in which the reality of streets and
buildings and homes was augmented into a giant chessboard and populated by
hundreds of thousands of us in the last few years. These cultural landmarks matter,
they are worth learning about and exploring. They stand out as trailguides to a fresh
sensibility in the same way Nijinsky’s 20 th century dances or Goethe’s 19 th century
poetry once did.
We flip back and forth between real and virtual in our every day lives now, popping
our head from screen to street. Our art, our music, our finances – they make the
same passage. To see both fields at once, to see the way they blend and pull on each
other, does demand a new sensibility, of course. And though, eventually, this new
instinct will be commonplace, for now at least it must be defined, refined, and
learned by each of us. Like Napoleon looking at a battlfield and discovering how to
spot the violent potential of industrial war. Or, Einstein reaching the deeper,
invisible truths of physics as he left Newton behind: “There is no logical path to
these laws,” he wrote later of the leaps that had carried him to relativity, “only
intuition.” 8 This is what Nan was trying to point to; the need to train an instinct for
the epochal changes ahead. Whether the future that emerges from our simultaneous
confrontation with real and network phenomenae will produce a speed-blasted
information paradise or a terrifying dystopia is hard to say now. That will be
decided largely by choices made in the next couple of decades. It will be decided by
8 Or, Einstein: Einstein, Albert, Essays in Science (New York: Philosophical Library,
1934), 4
16
people who do have the Seventh Sense. Even, I think, by people who are reading this
book.
Why start this journey into the churning, still-confusing and affronting world
around us now by the shores of Lake Taihu? Why begin with the sentiments of a
slower culture that Master Nan embodied, passed like delicate and still-warm tea,
with so much calm in the face of all this urgency? It’s not only because of Master
Nan’s insight that this world is tearing at our minds, that the faster we move the
sicker we’ll get. It’s something else. The training of an instinct, of a really fresh way
of looking at the world, demands a kind of calm. Understanding of anything, after all,
is most durably assembled in slow conversations, in patient probing. It is developed
as much from brushes with music and literature as it is from any direct, slamming
confrontation with the truth. The birth of an instinct requires a rewiring of our
minds, a reframing of our hopes, and this can only be done at the pace of
contemplation. (It’s the best way to keep the fear at bay.) We seek those stilled,
freeze-framed moments where we’ll pause amid lightspeed fast networks to think
about why they work and just what they are doing to us. Tranquility, for a moment
at least, in the face of the alternately horrible and wonderful way the world is being
remade. That’s what you’ll get here, in the following pages. Nan’s model statesman
Su Qin, knife stabbed into his own thigh and slouched with exhaustion is a sort of
totem for us. Knife in thigh. Stop. Think. Even, hard as it may be, wait for the right
path to present itself. No matter how uncomfortable it may be at times, it is better to
be unconventional than conventional in our revolutionary age. This is the only way
to cultivate a Seventh Sense. The old methods will not teach you a new way.
Let me tell you what is going to happen: In coming years there will be a struggle
between those who have the Seventh Sense – who are born with it or trained to it –
and those who don't. New, network forces all around us will take on old, established
ones – they already are – in business, politics, warfare, science. Then – because
those who don’t have the Seventh Sense for network power will lose, as anyone who
tries to stop the future always loses – a new age will begin. This age will involve
violent, historic wrestling between different groups with different versions of the
Seventh Sense.Competing interests and ideals and aims will fire these contending
forces. Networks will fight networks. Some of the plans of these connected age
groups will be good, others evil, and anyhow the winners will be ruthless. Then, and
this is where it will get particularly strange and incredible, there will be a battle
between those with the Seventh Sense and the very systems of connection,
machines and intelligence they have built. Human instincts laid in competition
against the machine instincts. That struggle? I’m not quite sure how it will turn out.
But for now, at least, we can say this: The future sits almost like a cold-eyed dare in
front of us. Just try to avoid this!
17
Chapter Two: The Age of Network Power
In which the Seventh Sense reveals a fundamental insight: Connection changes the
nature of an object.
Several hundred years ago the forces of the Enlightenment and the Industrial
Revolution, like twin hammers, began working away at the roots of an ancient order.
The powerful ideas of liberty, freedom of thought, science, democracy and
capitalism – these all layered one upon the other. They washed, like irresistible
tides, across the institutions and kingdoms and beliefs of Europe and in a process of
revolution, of invention, of destruction and creation, they put a period at the end of
one era, and began the very first lines of a new human story. These forces produced
what we know today as the modern world: Trains knit new markets, science tripled
life spans, democracy liberated politics. Confronted with this really irresistible
pressure, a gulf opened. The world started to cleave. On one side were the nations
and peoples that our modern economists would come to know and label as a
“Convergence Club.” 9 This group mastered and refined and then used the tools of
their era to become industrial, democratic, scientific and rich. 10 They left the age of
kings and feudal lords, of alchemists and all-knowing priests behind. At the same
time, a “Divergence Club” appeared. These nations missed the essential turn. They
were trapped. Old ideas, useless habits of power, inescapable history – varied
shackles held them back from the punctuated shift to a new, more advanced
equilibrium. Russia, China, much of Latin America and Africa – for them, the leap to
being honestly modern was fatally elusive. Even today, they struggle to catch up.
We are now in the earliest stages of a shift that promises to be still more
consequential than the one that enlightened and industrialized our world over
several centuries after the Dark Ages. The essence of this shift is best captured by
the prodigious explosion of different types of connection emerging around us now –
financial, trade, information, transport, biological – and the innovative combinations
that follow these and other fast, fresh links. Modern, highly-connected systems are
different than those with less connection. And, as we’ll come to see, they are
particularly different from those with slower connection. We experience power
through networks now, as once we experienced it through brick-bound institutions
like universities or military headquarters or telephone company switches. You can
no more understand the operations of Hizb’allah or China’s central bank or the most
valuable Internet companies today without at least this frank admission: Their
1.
9 On one side: William J. Baumol, Convergence of Productivity Cross-national Studies
and Historical Evidence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
10 This group mastered: See Joel Mokyr, “The European Enlightenment, the
Industrial Revolution, and Modern Economic Growth”, Max Weber Lecture,
European University, March 27, 2007
18
power operates as much through light pulses running through fiber optic webs as it
does in any physical sense. Think of the most influential geopolitical forces. The
most lethal militaries. The greatest new commercial or financial efforts. All now
depend on and are nearly defined by their fluency with different sorts of connection.
Networks emerge when nodes – which can be composed of people, financial
markets, computers, mobile devices, drones or any lively and connectable object –
link to other nodes. Networks can be defined by geography, or by language or
currency or data protocols or any of a thousand particular features. 11 People who
live in Bangalore, is a network. As is, Switches running DNSSEC protocol on the
Internet or Businesses transacting in Rupiah. An engineer might say: Network power
is simply the ceaseless summing, at any instant, of all these bundles of connection.
Real, physical networks hum magnetically now in cities that now pulse and grow
with accelerating, connected speed. New York City is network, in this sense, as is
Beijing or – in a less evolved way – the Alaskan steppe. So while it’s tempting to call
the 21 st Century the “Urban Century”, in fact the billion-people a decade rush into
cities is a symptom. A larger hunger for the constant knitting of lives together, for
fresh and efficient connection drives us. 12 Of course completely, powerfully virtual
instances of networks exist too: knit webs of computers teaching themselves how to
read, or the fast, paranoid and careful buzzing of constantly alert cybersecurity
firewalls. All of these systems are defined by relations. Their power comes from the
number, the type and the speed of the connections they hungrily establish and then
use. Networks don’t merely speed up our markets, our news, or our innovation –
they revolutionize the nature of their power. Broad-based interconnection can cause
and even determine events.
These expanding, ever-thicker webs of data and linkage can be mapped, and taken
together they reflect something we are coming to know as “Network Power”. 13 By
this phrase we mean not merely the Internet or twitter or crypto currencies like
11 Networks can be defined: For an excellent overview of networks the following
texts are of use: Albert Barabasi, Linked The New Science Of Networks Science Of
Networks. (S.l.: Basic Books, 2014), Mark Newman Networks: An Introduction,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010); Remco van der Hofstad, Random Graphs
and Complex Networks. Vol. I, (Eindhoven University of Technology, 2015);
Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit a Theory of Networks
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and S. Boccaletti, V. Latora, Y.
Moreno, M. Chavez, D.-U. Hwang, “Complex networks: Structure and dynamics,”
Physics Reports, Volume 424, Issues 4–5, February 2006, Pages 175-308
12 A larger hunger: Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer “Urbanization as Opportunity,”
Marron Institute Working Paper No. 1, 2014
13 These expanding, ever-thicker webs: See Castells, Manuel. Communication
Power. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009; and Castells, Manuel. "Network
Theory| A Network Theory of Power" International Journal of Communication,
Volume 5(8 April 2011)
19
BitCoin – these are, of course, expressions of a kind of network power. But “Network
Power” is something larger. It represents a potentially comprehensive grasp, new in
human history and enmeshing billions of connected lives and tens of billions of
linked sensors and machines. It is becoming, with every passing moment, more
comprehensive: more sensors, more links, more points and more speed. Cascades,
epidemics and interactions are ubiquitous on all these networks, producing
unexpected innovation in their collisions: the weaving of genetics and databases, for
instance, or of terrorism and mobile messaging 14 . Scientists who study networks call
this sort of change “Explosive Percolation,” by which they mean an instant shift in
the very nature of a system as it passes a threshold level of connectivity. 15 This
melding of nodes into a single fabric is not unlike the linking of water molecules one
to another as the temperature drops. One moment you have something you can
drink; the next you have ice. So: One moment you have a world of simply connected
users, the next a billion-person platform like Facebook or YouTube solidifies. One
day you have tumbling, angry fundamentalists; the next a linked terror movement.
And because the impact of terrorism – which might be best defined as violence with
an aim of causing psychological impact – depends on connection, exploding the
landscape of links instantly expands its effects. 16 The network enables a new kind of
terror. It changes its nature. Expands its impact. Such elemental phase transitions,
where more means different, appear everywhere in linked natural systems– the
formation of crystals, for example, of the collapse of an ecosystem when the last of a
keystone species is hunted down. They appear on networks too. So you might say: A
phase transtion lingers ahead of us in our security, our finances, our politics. The
age we’re entering now will be as different from the age we’re leaving behind as the
Enlightenment was from the dark feudal era that preceded it.
The Enlightenment’s revolution of free ideas and men and trade and capital
demanded a new sensibility. Our age is similar. It insists already on a fresh feeling
for the power that emerges as a result of connection. There’s an irony here: At the
very moment when we might expect ourselves to be most free – liberated by
wireless connections, by easy jet travel, by never-off communications – we find
ourselves, inescapably, enmeshed and dependent. Mastery of connection turns out
to be the modern version of Napoleon’s Coup D’Oeil. Connection increasingly defines
the most elemental pieces of our lives. The old individualistic, me-first instincts
don’t answer as well as they might once have when “me-first” now demands
connection of some sort in order to get what you might want: Am education, better
medical care, a pizza. What is true for the machines all around us now is true for us
too: We are what we are connected to.
14 Cascades, epidemics and interactions: Dirk Helbing, “Globally Networked Risks
and How to Respond,” Nature, 2013, 51-59.
15 Scientists who study networks: D. Achlioptas, R. M. D'souza, and J. Spencer.
"Explosive Percolation in Random Networks." Science, 2009, 1453-455.
16 And because the nature of terrorism: See Anthony Richards, Conceptualizing
Terrorism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
20
Centuries from now, our great-great grandchildren will look back at our age and
name it as we have named “The Enlightenment.” Perhaps they will call this era “The
Great Connection” or the “The Enmeshmnet” or somesuch. They will spot the
winners and losers of our age as we do in our own review of history. That distant
generation will identify a new “convergence club” emerging among us now, even if
we can’t quite name its members yet. Already we can see lavish rewards
accumulating to the people and nations and companies who have established an
early grip on this new sensibility. They understand and manipulate connective
power. What they all share is a feeling, as instant and certain as an instinct, for what
it means to be enclosed, constantly, by ever growing masses of connection. A set of
forces, invisible to many, is now applying a merciless and grinding pressure to the
familiar structures of an older age.
The struggles of our cherished institutions – the US congress, the military, the news
media, our educational system, our once-inclusive capitalism – to achieve the very
aims that they once elegantly and efficiently met is only the visible evidence of this
shift. Buried underneath their lurching collapse is the real source of this change, a
new connective energy. Power is now passing with a rippling, ripping energy from
old, once-useful people and institutions and ideas and into these new platforms and
protocols, built for an age of connection. If this passage has so far only wiped out
encyclopedias, telephone companies or taxi medallions, it is merely because it is just
beginning.
The Seventh Sense, in short, is the ability to look at any object and see the way in
which it is changed by connection. This is the essential skill. Whether you are
commanding an army, running a Fortune 50 company, planning a great work of art
or thinking about your children’s education. You need to be able to look at a car, a
hotel room, a share of stock, a language, a translation machine and say to yourself:
Connection changes the nature of an object. It changes the nature of every object
around it. This book is the story of just how and why that happens and of the way in
which an instinct for this power now rests behind the fattest fortunes and the
greatest successes of our age. Connection changes the nature of an object means
connection changes the nature of your life, of mine, of our government, of the wars
we fight and the peace we secure. The heart of the problem ahead of us is not small.
It is nothing less than the most significant shift of power balances since the
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. How high are the stakes? If the
Enlightenment is our reference, then I think we can say they are nothing less than
total.
Of all the Seventh Sense ideas, this single concept is the most fundamental:
Connection changes the nature of an object. A medical diagnostic machine is
impressive; one that is connected to a database of information that can accelerate
and improve or perfect a diagnosis is revolutionary. The act of linking our bodies,
our cities, our ideas – everything really – together, introduces a genuinely new
dynamic to our world. It creates hyper-dense concentrations of power. It breeds
2.
21
fresh chances for complex and instant chaos. The emergence of surprise, tragedy, of
wealth and hope will be more common now than in less revolutionary times. To
follow the logic of the French philosopher Paul Virilio, for a moment: The train
produced the train accident. The plane produced the plane accident 17 .�Surely we can
count on the network to produce the network accident – and many of them. In such
a world the question of what you “have” – by which I mean what you are connected
to – determines what you “are.” You have friends on a social network. The US has a
currency platform. Some new startup has an artificially intelligent machine. We all
have possibilities and vulnerabilities we only dimly understand.
The great insight of the Enlightenment was that the nature of an object – a person, a
piece of land, a vote, a share – changed when it was liberated from old fetters of
tradition, ignorance, habit or fear. That single shift triggered centuries of disruption,
of wars, of creativity and great human advance. The world realigned itself. The
Seventh Sense era will be similar. When we are connected, power shifts. It changes
who we are, what we might expect, how we might be manipulated, attacked,
enriched. It is too early to map with any real fidelity the landscape that will emerge
as a result, but we can say at least this: The nature of an object, any object, changes
when it is connected. We need to say too: We are relatively early in our age of
connection. It’s not just that so much of the world remains to be linked; it’s also that
the nature of connection itself is changing. It is becoming instant. It is increasingly
sharpened and enhanced, we will see, by the use of artificial intelligence. Basic
connection is a powerful force; instant, AI-enabled links? You can imagine it must be
something else entirely.
Let’s take as an example a tool you’re using right now, the English language. Any
language is an “object” of sorts, a tool whose power depends on how and where it is
used. Just as widespread use of the dollar or the British Pound or gold – for trade,
for finance or for stashing under mattresses – marks a network of economic
exchange, so English is a mesh for information sharing. When Spanish and Lebanese
and Russian researchers gather to design a drug molecule, when astronauts talk in
the International Space Station, when bankers settle finance policy in the midst of
yet another unexpected crisis, they are using a powerful, standardized, shared tool
that makes their work possible and efficient. English in this role, like French before
it, has an appealing leverage: The more people who use it, the greater the incentive
to learn it.
But when we think of English in a network sense, we see it is more than simply an
object. It’s a means of connection, something that information scientists call a
“protocol”. You may know the word from the realm of diplomacy, where protocols
ritualize and decide everything from where the President sits at a dinner to how a
letter must be addressed. In technical terms a “protocol” is also a rulebook too.
Some network protocols you may have heard of – HTTP, DNS, SWIFT all serve as
links in this sense. They translate digital bits into organized web pages, secure
17 To follow the logic: Paul Virilio and Philippe Petit. Politics of the Very Worst: An
Interview by Philippe Petit. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999
22
packets or financial vouchers. Protocols embody shared rules. Their subtle, decisive
power is to place each bit of data in a reliable, predictable order, just as diplomatic
protocol might seat ambassadors at a negotiation. “Protocol,” the theorists
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker have written, “is a system for maintaining
organization and control in networks.” 18
In a world of older, more traditional power distributions Americans might worry
about a day when another language, another “protocol” in a sense – Chinese or
Spanish, say – would pry the central connective role away from English. Protocols
are hard to change, of course. So many people have learned English; whole systems
depend on its use. To suddenly switch the world’s airline pilots, bond traders and
computer programmers to Chinese or Spanish would hardly be worth the immense
cost and the colliding confusion such a transfer would demand. But it’s here where
the Seventh Sense axiom, that connection changes the nature of an object, gives us a
new view. For the first time, as a result of connectivity, a once unimagined
possibility exists: rapid, real-time machine translation. Fast, ubiquitous network
links mean that the central role of English is boiled away by another language than
by a connected, intelligent network skin. “Good morning,” is less likely to be
overtaken by a greeting from some other language as it is to be effortlessly, invisibly
transmuted into “� �” or “Buenos Dias.” Fast access to a great translation
algorithm will be more important than the ability to speak English (or Spanish or
Chinese). Even as an advocate of learning other languages, it’s hard not to feel that
the American parents now plowing their children urgently into Chinese classes are
missing the point. Fluency in any second language in the future will be an arcane
specialty. Better to teach the kids how to build an AI, or to debate the moral
reasoning of Confucius and Socrates than how to order dinner. The machines will
take care of that. Power in a connected age will pool, then, not in the mouths and
minds of English speakers, but rather into the hands of anyone who controls the
best translation server.
Connection has changed the nature of several objects here: The language itself, the
people who use it – pilots, commodity traders, machines, you and I. You can see how
the ability to design, build and turn on (or off) the fastest, smartest, most connected
language machines becomes a nexus of fresh power. What will replace English isn’t
Spanish or Chinese, but a protocol. This sort of specialized data-pipe will permit
instant, always-improving translation. It will become as crucial to the operation of
the global economy or research laboratories or entertainment companies as English
now is. More crucial, in fact, because these machines will enable vast new
communication links with a fidelity far better than pidgin-level speech. They will
consider not only what we say, but what they suspect we mean to say in the quest of
ever clearer discussion. The pre-network instinct of Fear Chinese! Fear Spanish! is
the wrong one. As is the idea to teach the world Chinese or Spanish as a source of
power. Rather, Can we control this turbo-smart connected language platform? is the
right question. So many of the threats we worry about today have been similarly
18 “Protocol”: Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, “Protocol, Control, and
Networks” in Grey Room 17, Fall 2004, pp. 9
23
simplified and misplaced. Fear deflation? Fear ISIS? Fear the RMB? What we should
be contemplating with great care is the connected skein that enmeshes us and all
these connected knots of worry. We will see, over and over again, the way in which
connection shifts, alters and even destroys the way an object moves and lives. The
main point here is straightforward: New links, exploding into operation around us
everywhere now, alter everything from how terrorists operate to how investments
perform. And the failure to spot, use and understand that fact will be a source of our
biggest future tragedies. Do you feel the global economy is more stable now than in
2008? Are we less susceptible to terror now? Is your data more secure than in the
past? What do all these problems have in common?
Perhaps we’re targeting the wrong things.
If the idea of a Seventh Sense for our changing world is quickly apprehensible
enough – It’s that gut feeling that seems to animate wild new businesses or attacks or
risks – the deeper logic will be harder to name and master. We will have to consider
the most ancient instincts for power and safety in light of the very newest
technological experiences: speed, machine intelligence, really constant connection.
“Instead of thinking in terms of surfaces – two dimensions – or spheres – three
dimensions – on is asked to think of nodes that have as many dimensions as they
have connection,” the French philosopher Bruno Latour has written of a network
age. “Modern societies cannot be described without recognizing them as having a
fibrous, thread-like, wiry, string, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by
the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structures, systems.” 19
Familiar borders, like the ones dividing science and politics or military power and
civilian safety begin to erode when everything is linked. Computing machines and
networks were once locked into usefully narrow silos, unconnected: banking,
medical monitoring, power grids. In the past you could mark them as having
“levels”. But now they overlap and inform each other, meshed into that stringy
surface Latour describes. 20 The Seventh Sense is a feeling for just how this world
might be navigated; how those fibers might be pulled and yoked to new purposes.
This multitude of interwoven links is why networks and their pieces spill now even
into the non-digital elements of our life, from how we grow our food (with GPSguided,
self-driven tractors) to how we fight our wars (from a distance, using
constantly connected drones.) As a result, many of the technical choices we’re about
to make will be strikingly political. Who has access to what data? Where is the line
3.
19 “Instead of thinking”: Bruno Latour, “On actor-network theory: A few
clarifications,” In: Soziale Welt47 369-381
20 Now the overlap and inform: Richard Mortier, Hamed Haddadi, Tristan
Henderson, Derek McAuley, and Jon Crowcroft, “Human-Data Interaction: The
Human Face of the Data-Driven Society”, Social Science Research Network (October
1, 2014)
24
between human choice and machine intelligence? Why is one computer system
better than another? These decisions – and the people who make them – will
determine power distributions. They will reverberate through our future with the
same constant noise as the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, the Analects or the Koran
still do. The real contests ahead will be over networks, and we will come to
understand in this book how these struggles will unfold and how to fight them – but
keep in mind that this means, in fact, a deeper conflict. A fight about values.
Networks are like any organized system; they reflect the aims and ethics and habits
of the people who build them. The price of meshing so many different aims and
sensibilities, hopes and hatreds, will be costly. When Nan said that really, fully
grasping our world would be expensive this is what he meant. Particularly if he’s
right that we’ll all be going half mad under the pressures of constant connection as
we try to make the shift. We will pay with our old ideas, our current fortunes and – if
we’re not careful – our safety.
Engineers know this idea that network design shapes the real world as “Conway’s
Law.” 21 Melvin Conway was an early AT&T systems designer who noticed that the
organization of any connected telephone system had an impact on the communities
or offices it touched. Who could call who was a kind of power map. The physical
world, Conway realized, could be shaped and influenced by something other than a
physical force; it could be reshaped by information flows, by connection. The
expansion of airline routes to Indonesia, for instance, was a network design change
that tilted real-life economic patterns. New flights enabled tourism, manufacturing,
investment. In our connected age, the design of research studies, voter databases,
genetic information sharing networks, financial webs – all of these will create
bumps in the surface of our every day lives. 23 The way in which phones or data links
or mobile devices are tied together changes the way we act when we use them or
when we handle them to touch each other, even if the design of these systems is
insensible to us most of the time – the way a marble under a carpet might create a
surprising bump. Networks can organize themselves in many different ways. And in
the choice of layout, or the evolution of that layout in response to pressures of profit
or technology, a great deal can be decided. “When you decide what infrastructure to
use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision,” the programmer and
investor Paul Graham has written. “You're also making a social decision, and this
may be the more important of the two.” 24
You might ask: What drew tens of millions of people to watch live as Steve Jobs
unveiled some new Apple device in the last years of his life? Of course, partly it was
the cool technology, the warmly charming charisma of the man. But something else
was at work, I think. What Jobs was unveiling atop those black-backed stages over
21 Engineers know this idea: Melvin E. Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?”
Datamation, April, 1968.
23 In our connected age: Barbara Schewick, Internet Architecture and Innovation,
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010) Chapter 1
24 “When you decide what infrastructure to use”: Paul Graham, “Great Hackers”,
on paulgraham.com July 2004
25
the years as we waited for him was nothing less than whole new worlds, connected
landscapes that emerged entirely from systems Apple was secretly breeding. He
wasn’t merely introducing a phone; he was changing how we were going to
experience life. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that
changes everything,” Jobs began his famous rolling introduction for the first iPhone
in 2007. “In 1984 we introduced the Macintosh. It didn't just change Apple. It
changed the whole computer industry. In 2001 we introduced the first iPod. It didn't
just change the way we all listen to music. It changed the entire music industry.”
Apple devices were cracking open paths to whole new worlds in this sense. The
company develops an app for podcasts; a new media form is born. It builds an
architecture for video calling; our relations to each other deepen a bit. What Jobs
was presenting was new and – until that very instant – unimagined universes of
possibility that we’d all explore. No wonder the world tuned in.
When we speak of “architecture” in a digital sense we mean the design of the inside
of a computer – how the chips link to each other – or the layout of a phone system,
the mechanics of a block-chain or encryption tool, or the ethereal construction of a
datascape so it can be better used to train artificially intelligent programs. These are
design choices that, just like the ones about where to put a door or a freeway,
conclusively decide and shape movement. They affect speed. Politics, social norms,
technological needs – these and other forces all shape the architecture of digital
systems. But –and this is where a new sensibility comes into play – the
architectures, in turn, touch and twist politics, social norms and technology. Instant
communication, social webs, fast-spreading news – all of these forces redound
powerfully on the real world. They affect how we think and act. And, as a result,
controlling these connections is a profound source of power. It’s also true that
architectures and designs dropped into different places have different results: Think
of how an open computer system plopped into the Middle East might be used
differently than one placed in the American Midwest.
It was these sorts of vibrations, the ones made by power pulsing through certain
forms or networks in history, that led the Orientalist scholar Karl Wittfogel to his
famous “Hydrological Hypothesis” in the last centrury. Ancient agrarian societies –
Egypt or China, for instance – developed political orders that were decided by their
need for large scale irrigation, Wittfogel explained. Without water, these societies
were dead. Without control of that water? Exposed to constant chaos. Chinese
dynasties tumbled and Egyptian prosperity collapsed as unexpected, unpredicted
droughts and flooding tore them apart. Taming water became the aim of all politics.
An unusual centralized effort emerged. It screwed these scattered, nomadic
societies into a tight, enduring and largely effective authoritarianism. Wittfogel
argued that the “irrigation societies” of Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, and South
America all reflected this link between survival and water control. Power pooled in
the hands of what he called a “Hydraulic Bureaucracy”. China’s ”Yu the Great”, for
instance, rose to power around 2800 B.C. because of his skills in throttling the
unpredictable and deadly Yangtze flows. “Contrary to popular belief that nature
always remains the same,” Wittfogel wrote, “nature changes profoundly whenever
26
man, in response to simple or complex historical causes, profoundly changes his
technical equipment.” 25
Control of water in those ancient ages and control of information in our own are not
so different. We are in the midst, after all, of a change in our own “technical
equipment.” We should read Wittfogel with one eye on our own age, particularly his
warnings. “Like the tiger, the engineer of power must have the physical means with
which to crush his victims,” he wrote of those older orders. “The agromanagerial
despot,” he said of the masters of those connected water systems, “does indeed
posses such means.” We should ask: Are we watching the emergence of an
infomanagerial despotism? Who controls the dataflows we rely on now? The
protocols?
If we want to earn an honest understanding of how power works now, we need to
begin by looking under the carpet in for the marbles, in a sense. We need to touch
and follow the networks themselves, observing their construction and flow as
Wittfogel once traced the transmutation of ancient water systems into the politics of
an earlier age. We too need to go down, inside the connected systems of our era
before we can come back up and begin, confidently, to act. That journey won’t
always be easy because it will require us, as we’ll see, to consider some ideas that
make no sense using our current way of thinking. But, remember: The idea of a
democracy sounded like a laughable joke to hereditary heads of state until the 18 th
century – Let the peasants vote for what they want? The implications of our new
networks will set uncomfortably against many of our own habits and biases – or at
least what we’ve been told our habits and biases should be by an older generation.
But once we have mastered this new instinct, there will finally be a day after which
we will look at the world and really feel the new logic at work. We’ll be Napoleon,
not Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. And from that day on, everything will honestly be
different.
4.
We are still early in this age of network revolution. It was less than 50 years ago,
after all, that the first digital communication switches emerged. Today, devices,
places, people – are all losing what we might think of as their innocence of isolation.
The “Internet of Things” will expand the range of connected devices – phones,
refrigerators, heart-lung machines – from 10 billion today to 50 billion in less than a
decade. And even with 50 billion connected points only 2 percent of the world’s
people and devices and locations will be linked 27 . The analysis of this linked space is
a young discipline, younger even than the nearly newborn technologies at play. It
was only in the mid-1990s that the first sophisticated studies of “network science”
25 “Contrary to popular belief”: Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism; a
Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957)
27 “The Internet of Things”: See “The Zettabyte Era – Trends and Analysis” from
Cisco Systems (San Jose) 2015
27
became technically possible. They have since become essential, as crucial to our
network world as the first maps were to explorers centuries ago. Fundamental
papers, by now-legendary researchers like the mathematicians Steven Storgratz and
Albert-Lazlo Barabasi or the biologist Simon Levin, identified simple laws running in
single networks. The Internet, financial markets, jungle ecosystems and even our
own brain connections were found to exhibit similar, often surprisingly common
habits.
Unfortunately, most of our leading figures still think in terms of disconnected
dangers, of risks that can be reduced to nouns: Atomic bombs, fundamentalists,
hacks. To be sure plenty of these sorts of dangerous nouns confront us now. But the
sharpest edges of our problems come from the fact that these nouns are part of
networks, which spring them into connected, surprising action. Computers,
airplanes, derivatives – they snap and break systems when connected into
cascading, fast threats. When Master Nan spoke of spiritual illness, I think this is
particularly what he meant. Total confusion about our world, followed by all the
emotions of the lost: anger, denial, irrationality. “A commander in chief,” von
Clausewitz wrote of an older age of land warfare, “must aim at acquiring an overall
knowledge of the configuration of a province, of an entire country. He must hold in
his mind a vivid picture of the road-network, the river-lines, and the mountain
ranges without ever losing a sense of his immediate surroundings.” 28 This sort of
command mastery is still relevant in an age of networks. It is as important for the
design and operation of our economy, our politics, our data and our security as it is
in considering problems of war and peace. But who of our current leaders holds in
his or her mind such a vivid map of the ethereal and essential networks running
around us now? Who owns that subtle overall knowledge and then acts with the
confident sensibility such wisdom would produce?
At this early moment in a new revolution, our leaders are blind. It’s not simple
technical fluency that eludes them – though this is among the most embarrassing of
their deficits. It’s that avoiding cyber accidents, controlling the spread of nuclear
weapons, handling global warming, stemming fast financial crises, restoring
equitable economic growth – all of these puzzles yearn to be tackled with a new
sensibility. Not least because often they are produced by a fresh set of links and
instincts. These problems linger not as independent fractures on a solid base, but
rather as markers of spiderwebbing, connected cracks pressing out on knotted up
networks. It is only by tackling them with network ideas that we can hope to make
progress. That the rise of ISIS and the forces of global income inequality are driven
by the same laws can only be understood with a knowledge, or better an experience,
of connected power. Our leaders are preparing us to fight expensive new wars we
need not fight, to confront enemies who might best be regarded as partners – even
as they flail at the to corrosive problems of a new, emerging order simply because
they can’t see or feel the essential links of power that are, even now, making the
familiar dangerous and the dangerous familiar. “We got to know the nature of
calculating by learning to calculate,” the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
28 “A commander in chief”: Von Clausewitz, p 110
28
observed in his “On Certainty” at the end of his life. 29 So with networks. We will get
to know their nature by learning to use them. By watching what they do, observing
them in their surprising movements. We know at least already that puzzles like the
future of US-China relations or income inequality or artificial intelligence are simply
not addressable with traditional thinking because they occur on a network surface
now. Old-style ideas about each of these will likely lead us down dangerous paths.
Our leaders today are, as a result, imperiling us in ways they can’t even understand.
Honestly, these figures are not mentally prepared to fight any sort of battle on this
landscape. They probably never will be.
I’m not saying effective leadership now demands you know what “the instantiation
of a class” in object oriented programming means – or that you master the technical
roots of some other crucial, philosophical idea of connective design. But a feeling for
the laws of networks, for the normalness of connection and the pressures that it
produces is essential at least. That the terrorists of ISIS or the founders of gaming
app companies are better at growth hacking – the subtle art of using data,
connection and instinct to breed massive virtual communities – than our own
institutions or our leaders should unnerve us for a couple of reasons. First, because
it demonstrates a mastery of new power tools that move with astonishing speed,
assembling nation-sized movements and forces in incomprehensively brief periods
of time. But we should also worry – and this is as crucial – because that fast pace is
colliding with a set of slower-moving instincts, institutions and people who still
control substantial levers of power.
At the same moment in time that many of us are alive with the joy of being around
something that is beginning, most of our leaders are locked sadly or with terror into
the ending of something else. Same exact moment. Different instincts. It reminds me
of Virginia Woolf’s novel of transitions, The Years, when the once-commanding
Colonel Pargiter finally passes away, liberating his daughter Eleanor into a world of
adventure even as the change dooms Crosby, the family’s long-serving maid. “For
Crosby, it was the end of everything,” Woolf wrote. “She had known every cupboard,
flagstone, chair and table in the large rambling house, not from five or six feet
distance as they had known it; but from her knees as she had scrubbed and
polished; she had known every groove, stain, fork, knife, napkin and cupboard. They
and their doings had made her entire world. And now she was going off, alone, to a
single room at Richmond.” 30 The people now lamenting the decline of television, of
newspapers, of a disconnected age, who are baffled by constant connection or apps
of the moment or machines that learn should be given their quiet moments with the
old structures. They knew that world from their knees, built and maintained it as
much for us as for them. Elements of that slower unconnected era must be
29 “We got to know the nature of calculating”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty
ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.von Wright Translated by Denis Paul and
G.E.M.Anscombe, (Oxford: Blackwell 1969)
30 “For Crosby”: Virginia Woolf, The Years, (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Jovanovich, 1937) p. 216
29
preserved. But, also, we must move on. These people will never grasp the
opportunity that lingers in front of us now.
This book is not, in any event, written for them. It is written for those of us who are
inheriting the possibility of their inventions, the price of their errors. And it is aimed
too at the people and the generation who are coming to power and who are – in
some senses—already in power, even if they don’t appear to be just yet. By this I
mean the cohort bred into the age of connected acceleration; the first generation of
leaders and students and warfighters and entrepreneurs to not find the digital
strange, but to find it natural and curious and wonderful in its power. It is written
for those who will have to manage machines that are smarter than humans,
networks that move faster than we can calculate, and cascades of chaos and conflict
and creation as this new era settles in. It is for anyone too who has ever begun to
speak about the strange tensions of our age, who has begun maybe with the lines,
“Maybe I’m sensitive or something, but…” as they feel the tickle of their own lives,
minds and cells increasingly intertwined, electrified. It is written for those afflicted
with an aching feeling that we’re being torn apart. Pulled into foolish conflicts and
dangerous failures by old figures who don’t understand this age. Pulled into
sacrifices of liberty and freedom by young technological wizards who can’t balance
the miracle of their cold inventions with our hot, human needs for freedom and
control.
But I should say too that this book is not, either, a full-throated endorsement of the
technological elite. Yes, it’s wonderful that we are at the beginning of a new period.
But it’s not quite right to say that where the network age begins, the old one ends. In
fact, that's a dangerous conclusion. To begin with we’re at an extremely primitive
point in our understanding of networks, comparable to where economics was in the
1800s or medicine centuries ago. We have a small, modest collection of tools to
analyze and think about and consider the complex physics of a networked world.
We barely understand the operation and evolution of many single networks today –
and really only sort of grasp one or two types of design with any real depth. But
networks of networks? Instant networks? Artificially intelligent ones? We have
basically no laws or experience with these yet.
The headlong rush ahead into a world of constant connection will, of course, be
balanced, resisted, braced against, undermined, fought and manipulated. Networks
touch everything, remember? The idea that such elemental control – of you, of me,
of our finances or our nations – would move with anything less than a few
explosions is naïve. Revolutions don’t occur quietly. Consequently, the very thing
that makes many of the greatest tech minds of our age magnificent – a sense of
unstoppable determinism, a disregard for history, a slavish and instinctive urge to
follow what we’ll come to know as a Seventh Sense – is a bit of a disadvantage at
times. I know many of these men and women; their iron certainty is only a bit more
dazzling than the success they have had in building something from nothing in a
human instant. But that confidence in the new leads already to crushing collisions
with the sorts of older ideas – privacy, localism, slowness – that echo throughout
30
mankind’s history precisely because they touch in subtle ways on the human heart,
on what it means really to live.
A friend of mine who runs one of the leading technology firms told me of the
unnerving realization that the most important figures at the firm were under 25 –
and no senior person had much of an idea about what they were doing. This is an
inversion: Usually in a society the most power accrues to those with the most
experience, and judgment and perspective. Today, tremendous even decisive
influence clusters in the hands and machines of a young caste whose very fluency
with the norms of a revolutionary age blots out a whole set of important
connections, a group that instinctively feels networks but is deaf to the music of
philosophy, history and even tragedy that should inform the operation of so much
power. To love risk, to love creating and building – this is fine. Wonderful even. But
it’s also not enough.
“It happens that programming is a relatively easy craft to learn,” the MIT scientist
Joseph Weizenbaum observed in the 1970s, as computers emerged into academic
life. “Almost anyone with a reasonably ordered mind can become a good
programmer with just a little instruction and practice. And because programming is
almost immediately rewarding, that is because a computer very quickly begins to
behave somewhat in the way a programmer intends it to, programming is very
seductive.” The mistake, Weizenbaum warned, was to think that easy programming
of a machine was really a predictor of anything other than getting a machine to
follow commands. It didn’t mean easy programming of a complete operation. Or of
science. Or, godforbid, to think you could easily program the world. Programming,
he warned, “appeals most to those who do not yet have sufficient maturity to
tolerate long delays between an effort to achieve something and the concrete
appearance of success. Immature students are therefore easily misled into believing
that they have mastered a craft of immense power and of great importance when, in
fact, they have learned only the rudiments.” 31 Tempting as it may be to call for our
world to be turned over to entrepreneurs or technocrats, to let their tools of wired
efficiency tear with a fast disruptive enthusiasm into our politics and economics, the
reality is that the world (thankfully) does not respond like a cold machine. That
delay between an effort to achieve something and its realization that Weizenbaum
mentioned, it’s the essence of being human. The delay is filled with worry, hope,
debate, exploration, error, success. In short, it’s a hitch that should never be ground
out of our system, no more by technology than by authoritarian or totalitarian or
fundamentalist doctrines that have ever promised instant solution to any probem.
“Just let the entrepreneuers do it” or “Just let the machinces do it,” is no more a
solution than “Just let the Nazis handle this,” could have been.
So this is our dilemma: Old, white-haired, network-blinded leaders (and young
figures who think like them despite their age) pull us from Washington and other
31 “It happens that programming”: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and
Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman 1976),
276
31
capitals and traditional power centers into a world where their ideas and policies
constantly fail. They don’t understand networks; never will. At the same time a new,
rising generation lashes us into connected and amazing meshes. We welcome this
connection. Centered in Menlo Park or Seattle or Zhonguancun or Shenzhen, these
figures understand networks perfectly, but not yet much else. Old and new, each
group works anyhow on our freedom. We are pulled dangerously between these
forces. Problems seem to get worse. What we need to find is a way out of this trap. A
fusion. A blended sensibility of both the edgiest ideas of connection and the most
unshakeable and brutal and inarguable requirements of power. This is the Seventh
Sense. It is our only possible protection.
5.
In the last century, as the economist Fredrich Hayek watched Europe both struggle
against and flirt with the then-appealing ideas of Nazi and Soviet socialism, he
marked the fundamental conflict of his age as the one between individual liberty
and central planning. Recall that at that moment in history, the 1930s, America and
much of Europe were in deep depression, their political systems struggling. The
rapid growth in the USSR and Germany looked awfully appealing to many. The
political stability of totalitarian ideologis had a certain placid charm in some
quarters. But, Europe was, Hayek argued, walking nothing less than a road back to
serfdom. Was man happier, better off, more justly fulfilled by the chaos of a market
and democracy or in the orderly machine of authority, of clicking heels and
machines? Hayek voted with his feet. He fled the Nazis in 1938, and he worried for
the rest of his life that in the attempt to manage the risks of free markets and minds,
the Europe he loved was running into socialism. “Is there a greater tragedy
imaginable,” Hayek wrote, “than that we should unwittingly produce the very
opposite of what we have been striving for?” 32
Hayek thought two safety catches of might protect mankind from the totalizing
control habits of Soviet-style thinking: First, an unkillable human instinct for
individual freedom, the squirm humans have always shown under the boot of too
much authority. And, a second protection he thought, would be the really terrible,
absurd inefficiency of centrally planned systems. No bureaucrat, no economist,
could possibly out-perform the productive chaos of a market or an election in the
long run Hayek felt. Finding the right price, matching supply and demand – it was
impossible to think this could be done by some technocrat in a room somwhwere.
This was what markets were for. This is how they encouraged profit, free-thinking,
invention. Chuchill’s famous line, that “Democracy is the worst form of government
except for all the others,” contained a certain truth: civilizations, yoked by
democratic and market rules, reached more durable outcomes than despots or
oligarchs. Hayek, as we look at his judgment now, was correct. People wanted to be
free; the dream of central planning collapsed under its own weight with the USSR in
1989.
32 “Is there a greater tragedy”: F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994),
32
In our own age, a fundamental conflict lingers as well. This is the struggle between
individual liberty and connection. We have to ask a version of Hayek’s question: Are
we happier, better off, more justly fulfilled through ceaseless linkage to the fast
systems all around us? The appeal of constant connection is not a mere economic
fact. It’s become a feature our personalities and psychologies and even the
biochemistry of our brains. To be disconnected, in so many senses, hurts. And while
the human twitch for freedom remains as alive as a protection for us all, Hayek’s
second safety catch is eroding. Networks of deep connection, speed and intelligence
will be powerfully more efficient than central planning; they know more than any
central bureacrat might have. And they may yet be even more productive at times in
their connection and intelligence than our existing structures or markets or
electoral systems. Think of the way centralized, linked dispatch systems make a
“sharing” economy of on-demand cars and rooms available in ways the market itself
could not. Similar alluring evolutions lie ahead in medicine, in finance, in politics.
The temptation to throw all in for some sort of technological political fusion, one
that promises better returns on our time and money in exchange for our liberty, will
grow. When we depend so much on connection for our identity, our work, and our
safety how far from John Stuart Mill’s line from On Liberty might we tread: “Over
himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” 34 Are we
sovereign over our own bodies and minds? Over the machines? This is not a puzzle
today’s power class can or should touch. They may accidentally lead us to disaster.
Hayek’s fear, that in pursuing one end (freedom) leaders would secure its opposite
(tyranny), is what we should share. The tools of the network age are ripe for misuse.
In some senses, they are built for misuse: They are opaque. They are blindingly fast.
They seduce and enmesh us with their new power. They demand, as a result, new
sensibility for their final control.
There are many ways we will explore the Seventh Sense. The rise and fall of startup
technology companies or terror groups or epidemics will lead us. We will examine,
carefully, the tensions of a network age to understand where the cracks are coming
from, and where new ideas are emerging. But I’m trying at least to write a bit with
that challenge of Master Nan in mind. If we are, really, facing an ephochal change
then we should handle the problems of our era with particular care; we should
study the opportunities with real urgency. Two hundred years from now when the
great companies and billionaires and revolutionaries of our age are crushed down
below the horizon of history, it is the massive movements of states and populations
that will remain, with their awful or wondrous traces. Will we live in an age of war
or peace?
Is that something we can actually decide?
34 When we depend so much: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and the Subjugation of
Women, (New York: Penguin Classics 2007) 19.
33
34
Chapter Three:
War, Peace, Networks
In which The Seventh Sense reaches towards the questions of war and peace and
power that will flavor our lives, like it or not.
1.
One afternoon in the fall of 2009 I received an unexpected call from the Pentagon.
The US was, then, nearly a decade into the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq. Each, in its
own way, possessed a strange and shifting character, the sort of dim premonition of
a greater violence that has always most unnerved warriors and politicians. The old
soldier’s saying – Fear chaos as much as the enemy – seemed to animate, constantly,
the progress of these two fights. Once, before I gave a speech to an audience of
newly promoted one-star generals in 2010, a four-star general pulled me aside for a
moment. He explained that I’d be speaking to a crowd of officers who had come of
age pacing the murderous streets of these wars, watching soldiers under their
command killed by an often invisible enemy. “You have to remember that these men
have been seared, seared, by a decade of combat,” he said. The best American
military minds had tried, with characteristically direct and relentless energy, to box
the wildness of these wars. In books and papers and thousands of patrols, through
millions of hours of language training, and endless risky nights, they had tried. It
never quite seemed to work. There would never be a durable sense of mastery. The
wars, which appeared a certain and unfairly tilted fight to American victory at the
beginning, had run longer than any in the nation’s history. They were engines of
chaos and fear.
The American Marine Corps General Victor Krulak once observed, “The war you
prepare for is rarely the war you get,” and you could find this phrase whistling
through the years of American combat after 9/11 35 . One of the lessons of both Iraq
and Afghanistan – and of the post-World Trade Center wars generally – was that the
Pentagon and the fighting services had been unready for what they faced. Soldiers
had arrived in Baghdad with forest-colored uniforms, thin-skinned transport, tankled
battle plans – all wrong and mostly dangerous. The most feared weapons system
of the era told you something of the tone of the new millennium’s wars: $50 to $100
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Hidden smashups of dynamite, duct tape,
cellphone detonators and as much stubbly, impaling iron as could be found. They
were impossible to deter. Rapidly deadly. The IED threat, one officer later reflected,
“is a contemporary example of conventional militaries being confronted with a