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drifting to cores in Silicon Valley and Redmond - a contest between Microsoft and Apple and Google. And the prized Korean manufacturing excellence was no match for cheap Chinese and then Vietnamese labor welded to assembly-line technology. We see this pattern of network-led shredding nearly everywhere now, the result of powerful cores of knowledge and wide distribution of connection. Newspapers - removed from relevancy by crowd-sourced newsfeeds and constantly-connected smart databases. Once indomintable television networks, devoured by cheap home- made videos and large-scale platforms that use the Internet for distribution. Bitcoin and other first-generation block-chained currencies eating at the once unquestionable authority of central banks. Drones hovering along on a skein of GPS and data links are also among the new citizens of this connected skein. They are products of a data web: They depend on centralized connection and the distribution of technology, data, and design. They may do to old ideas of security and power what the fusion of GPS and smart phones and databases have done to hotel chains or medicine. Massed, self-organized drone fleets can turn aircraft carriers and exposed battle groups from sources of strength into vulnerable and even dangerously self- defeating antiques. They will remake urban landscapes. Think of the way that Baron Hausman redesigned Paris in the 18 Century to manage with the Enlightement-age danger of liberated, angry citizens. The creation of the city’s wide boulevards, central axes for easy movement of the police, and intersections engineered to quarantine riots was a reaction against the demands of mass liberty. Our cities are now vulnerable not simply to mass protest risk, but to the pinch of asymmetric levitating drones. The sensations of safety behind walls, up a staircase, inside a windowed room all begin to slip away. Drone risk - and all the potentially wonderful elements of constant, instant drone assistance — will command a retooling of cities, much as automobiles did a century ago. So this is power: Cores and distribution. They way that tension pulls particularly on certain, once-essential structures and objects and people explains a lot about our age — including the failure of so many institutions. Connectivity changes the nature of an object. That’s true for your doctor, your bank account, your army - and for billions of people whose lives alter irreversibly once they connect to markets, to knowledge, to the world. To connect now is to be exposed to this fresh young skin of linked power, a lively surface that transports anything at near instant speed. We have to ask just how many of the “scaffolds humans erect” that were essential for Enlightenment-era advances will be pulled down. And of course we face the exciting, uneasy task of thinking up the new scaffolds we now must build. If you have the tools or the skill to see the world this way, as a vibrating and pulling mesh of connections, then you can look ata tanks or soldiers or years of stability and see possibility. A friend who controls the largest secure Bitcoin vault in the world, put it to me once this way: “Platforms mattered once; now it is protocols.” His point was that the pipes and rules connecting the varied systems of our world affect, fundamentally, the distribution of power. The rules of the Bitcoin blockchain or the implications of a protocol like IPv6 or DNSSSEC reveals something about how we'll all connect in the future. Once these new rules become visible to you, then even the 74 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018306