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things like using Casio watches as timers.) No, the force at work was buried inside a network of personal and technological ties, sometimes explicit, other times almost ethereal in their nature until they were made real in a blast. By 2011 you could peel back some corner of the web and find sites like Al-Shumukh’s Special Explosives Course for Beginners, where dark diagrams were uploaded, debated, refined and re- drawn, like some sort of hobbyist site for car bomb geeks*!. Deeper still, encrypted chatrooms and messaging services pulsed invisibly, firing off real-time tips (use aluminum not copper for detonation packs) and suggestions (Marines are easier to target in the morning). When soldiers said they were fighting a “terrorist network” they really meant it: the force arrayed against them was a self-repairing, growing, constantly-learning web. The Pentagon had, after a few years of confronting this problem, organized a taskforce to deal at least with the IEDs, the “Joint IED Device Defeat Organization” (IEDDO).*2 The group specialized in miraculous engineering. They absolutely lived up to the can-do, American spirit sound of their name: Gee! Do! Scientists and warfighters in JIEDDO devised ways to secretly surveil streets so they could fire on bomb-planting terrorists. They developed slick, blast-deflecting new designs for cars and pioneered armor that could absorb the hit of repeated surprise blasts. Gee! Do! was, its motto ran, trying to, “defeat the IED as a weapon of strategic influence.” That made good sense, of course. It was a bit weird that $100 pipe-bombs were disrupting America’s ten trillion dollar national interest. But: Defeating the device? You could sense a limit in the way that mission statement was drawn out. It wasn’t enough. Beating the devices wasn’t the same as chewing apart the network that produced them. That was the real target. The devices kept coming with their own innovative, murderous rush, with the gotta-have-it new pressure we know as the desire for the latest phone or video game or flat-screen TV. This raised an important question: Just what did it mean, really, to beat a network? Could you win? Could you ever get aheader? In fact this is a question that resonates in many parts of life now. That feeling of constantly slipping behind, one that is tied to the heart of a connected order, a world where each additional link brings both a rich pipe of new data and a sense of what you might be missing or not quite understanding. To be aheader marks, we will see, the nature of a real Seventh Sense. When you can fully feel the network, understand its logic, then you can touch and use new sources of influence to reshape your business or your career or solve the problems in the world that 41 By 2011: Stenersen as above 42 The Pentagon had: On the establishement and background of JIEDDO: “The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization: DOD’s Fight Against IEDs Today and Tomorrow,” U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Subcomittee on Oversight & Investigations report November, 2008; “IEDs: the home-made bombs that changed modern war,”, [JSS Strategic Comments Volume 18, Issue 5, 2012. Also LTC Richard F. Ellis, USA, Maj Richard D. Rogers, USAF. LCDR Bryan M. Cochran, USN, “Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO): Tactical Successes Mired in Organizational Chaos; Roadblock in the Counter-IED Fight” Submitted Joint Forces Staff College, March 2007 38 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018270