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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 | 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, | 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" century dances or Goethe’s 19" 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.”® 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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018248