HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018388.jpg

state can lose many battles, but the only loss that is always fatal is to be defeated in strategy.”

The leaders of our major global powers may be as blind to the dangers and possibility of our world as Europe’s heads of states were to the nature of their era 100 years ago. You know what the Seventh Sense is now. Who among them has it? We should wonder if we’ve merely now done Hiram Maxim one better: Have we developed something with our age of connection that will reach its fullest potential in allowing us to slit each other’s throats more efficiently? I don’t think so, but understanding why means we need consider the networks, to feel them out with our new sense.

3.

The essential problem of politics is not difficult to state. It was true for Seneca in the Roman Forum as it was for Lobengula on the Shangani riverbank or is now for congressmen in Washington or cadres is Beijing: Who has power? Why? By power I mean the ability to control others, to tell them what to do – or what not to do; and of course to avoid being dictated to yourself in that “Surrender or die” way. Max Weber, the German sociologist of the last century, had it right: Macht, the ability to achieve what you want despite the resistance of others.229 Don’t develop nuclear weapons. Or Don’t attack us. Or, Join our alliance against Sparta are all examples of power in action. The movement of power, from the balled-up fists of Kings and Popes and Emperors, to the hands of markets and voters and citizens, and now into a fresh, connected dynamic is the story of history. This is a lurching, worrisome, dangerous process even if it suggests some miraculous transformations. Whole new topologies of vital, life-giving control are emerging; surely contests for their mastery will occur. The terrible human infection of a hunger for power and security isn’t, much as we might wish, something quarantined safely to the pages of Homer or Hitler.

So let’s pass beyond describing the new and surprising elements that make up a Seventh Sense and onto its use. Examine our world with this instinct, for a moment. Picture that constantly stretched, complex network, spitting out drones, viruses, fortunes and disruption as it is wont to do. Recall the seething, insidious power of the Warez Dudes, the New Caste, the black boxes they all hunger to penetrate and make weird. Think of the compression of time, of twisting topologies that can place the distant atop us in an instant. What single feature stands out? Our world shuffles now, as all these forces slip into an order defined by closed spaces, by fresh in and out borders. What the Seventh Sense reveals as it feels at this new arrangement is gates. Everywhere. Facebook, bitcoin users, doctors with privileged access to genetic databases – all are gated, in-or-out worlds. Look around and see how many gates enclose you or your family or your company. The Internet. The FTSE 100. Your Apple or Android operating system. In our connected age, the act of drawing lines

229 Max Weber: Max Weber and Sam Whimster, The Essential Weber: A Reader. (London: Routledge, 2004), 355

156

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018388