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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, fora moment: The train produced the train accident. The plane produced the plane accident'’”. 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, Al-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 calla “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 howa 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 Ze HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018254