Abstract essay on network power and historical analogy

most inarguable current sources of influence and control - the US Dollar, say - look weak. The Seventh Sense is defined first by an intuitive feeling for just how power is being re-geared now. If you look at a kid with a phone and think “Strong”, you have the Seventh Sense. If you look at an angry, barely educated terrorist wannabe and think, “Junior Varsity”, you don't. And as a result you may be about to have a very unpleasant surprise. Try this: Ball up your right hand and hold it in front of you; now take your left hand and open the fingers and hold it a few inches away with your fingers pointing back towards the right. You can think of your left hand as the vibrating, living network of connection — reaching towards the concentrated power that your right hand represents. This is the heart of understanding our age. Networks live in that tension between distribution and concentration. To connect any object - my dad, a newspaper, a radio-controlled plastic drone - to this skein is to change, irrevocably, its essence. The reason the legitimacy of old leaders is failing, the reason our strategy is incoherent, the reason our age really is revolutionary, is that they are all sitting in the midst of these pulling, powerful forces. We should steel ourselves for the shredding imminence of this violence . But also - and you know this already, | think - we must prepare ourselves for the possibility of immense construction. Network power does not only pull apart. It also creates. This paradox confused me, to be honest, for a long time. Power is, manifestly, concentrated with astonishing efficiency now. And it is more widely dispersed than ever too. We can stare at this difference, this strange polar tension and baffle ourselves as we try to figure out just how and why it moves. The best way of understanding this, I finally concluded, requires a cognitive leap, perhaps, over our usual Western way of understanding the world as either “a” or “b”, as either “distributed” or “concentrated”, and into a view of how opposites might ceaselessly balance into a whole. Not “a” or “b” but “a” and “b” at the same time. Let me tell you what I mean: In 1132 the Song Dynasty that had ruled China for nearly 200 years collapsed in the face of an invasion by wild Manchurian soldiers from the northern plains. The Song leadership - along with its best minds and cultural figures - fled south from Beijing for a thousand miles, until they were safely on the opposite bank of the Yangtze River. They settled in a lakeside city we know today as Hangzhou. In those days Hangzhou was known as Lin’An, which might best be translated as “Gazing at Peace.” The little town must have seemed to the Song leaders a perfect respite from the horror and war they had left behind. The city lay then, as it still does, along side XiHu or West Lake, a tranquil and horizon-filling stretch of water framed by rolling hills and tea plantations. The famous poet and statesman Su Dongpo later compared gazing at the lake to looking at a beautiful woman - that same fused sense of calm, peace and astonishment you might feel while considering the object of your own love. Stilled water is regarded in Chinese culture - you may recall from Lake Tai Hu where Master Nan set his campus —as a reservoir of yin energy. Song leaders had fled the angry yang energy of invasion for the yin peace of the south. Yin energy is associated with calm, femininity, fertility. Yang expresses action, violence, creation. Yang is the thunderstorm; Yin is the peace 75 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018307