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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.”1!9 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.2° 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 GPS- guided, 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 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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018256