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We said earlier that the Seventh Sense is tuned to spot the unsettling ripples that come from this fact: Connection changes the nature of an object. Doctors and voters and machines now sit, we’ve seen, on that stretched skin that links central and distributed power. This changes the nature of these nodes. A connected doctor is different than an unconnected one. Well, here is another insight we should know: The simple, benign looking act of connection makes complicated objects into complex ones. The moment an object clicks into a network, it is subject to all the wildness of complexity that may lie there: cascades, whipping external forces, unexpected internal faults revealed only under the pressure of connection. Cargo packages. Shares of stock. Linked to a whole system of constant evolution, even the most innocent looking point is subject to distant twitches, infections or liberating innovations. They become, as a result, complex. That old lemma of parenting - You’re only as happy as your least happy child - can be laid upon our devices. You're as complex as the most complex device you're linked to. Linkage to a complex network is like the difference between a boxed and a plugged- in, turned-on blender: one is dormant, one is spinning with a wild and dangerous energy. Connection can change the essence of a whole system if it is designed in certain ways, as complex forces work on what looks stable. It can, for instance, take once pliant, cooperative systems, people and tools and make them competitive.1!41 Jack an aspiring college graduate into a world where complex systems rip at his finances, his data and his beliefs and you can end up with a crack in his values, a move from aspiring middle class member to who knows what: nationalist, inventor, communist, bitcoin banker. “I had no idea my doctor/aircraft carrier /phone/hedge fund could do that!” is our common sort of surprise. Contagions, avalanches, tipping points, feedback loops, infections - connectivity exposes us all to these forces. “Everthing depends on everything else,” the mathemarical theorist Eugene Stanley has observed of highly connected systems?!22. On networks that hover apart, isolated from each other, small failures in one spot trigger limited damage’. But on highly connected systems, tiny failures tumble around, breaking things. Networks turn everything they touch from complicated to complex. Once a mesh of connection is really flowing, it creates. Networks cause things to happen, in this sense. New businesses, new fortunes, new ideas. Castell’s social protests emerged in this way, appearing like condensate in the cooling jar of the post-2008 economic crisis and then spreading, improving, evolving in scale and ambition faster than most traditional politicians could track. Researchers following in his wake studied the Spanish 15M demonstrations of 2011 and found it was composed largely of new, 121 Jt can, for instance: Martin Nowak, Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006) 122 “Everything depends on”:“Treading Softly in a Connected World”, Quanta Magazine, Mar 18, 2013 by Natalie Wolchover 123 On networks: Sergey V. Buldyrev, et al. “Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks”, Nature 464, 1025-1028 (15 April 2010) 88 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018320