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observed in his “On Certainty” at the end of his life.2? 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, toa single room at Richmond.”?° 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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018261