Abstract discussion of network connectivity and technological evolution without specific allegations

permits the easy spread and accumulation of links.Terror cells or social networks or financial markets all lay out in this fashion. Wide-open, convenience-making links are expanding, and they serve as a kind of global nervous system, more sensitive with each passing generation. These lines of connection run two ways, of course: Networks permit any of us to connect to nearly anywhere, and to unimaginable technological power. But, at the same time, the world connects back to us. Wired jihadis and currencies and bio bits - they’re all tied in with us too. So yes: We’re murdering the exotic with our data connections and machines and discount plane flights. Should we be surprised when, from time to time now, the exotic shows up and murders us right back? We've seen, now, the way in which that pulling connection between center and periphery - that tension of our network - pulls apart old structures. And this is the first, urgent Seventh Sense understanding: Connection changes the nature of an object by placing it on this tense mesh. Connect a patient, a doctor, a flying machine, a currency - each is twisted and changed as a result. Some become great. Others snap, never to be rebuilt. Some adjust, painfully. The pulling network action accounts for our greatest new fortunes but also the tumbling of old ideas and institutions. This is why our age is so uneasy. This is also part of the picture of network power we have to keep in mind, the image of a stretched skein plucking apart old structures. Baran’s fishnet grows, it locks everything it touches into anew structure, one that resists the “arrest the usual suspects” sort of interruption. We’ve said: Connection changes the nature of an object. To be connected to a Baran-style system instead of a brush-cut 1950’s AT&T system makes a difference. The connected devices themselves are constantly improving. Back in Baran’s day, dozens of scientists counted themselves lucky to share a single computer. A few decades later, the PC revolution gave everyone their own machine. And now, of course, we each have many computers in our lives: phones, wired TVs, computers. Because of connection, we have access to thousands of such devices in data centers.1°7 We can touch them in an instant, a fusion of software and hardware and connection that we are starting to know lean on as “everyware.” This now commonplace magic was formalized back in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of the founding engineers at Intel, who noticed the rather amazing fact that since the introduction of integrated chips in 1959, the number of transistors on each tiny chip had been doubling every two years.!°8 It seemed hard to imagine this pace could endure, but then it did and does, something known as Moore’s Law. Back in 1997 Andy Grove, who followed Moore as CEO of Intel, the chip giant, was named TIME’s Man of the Year. I wrote that story and I remember Grove telling me, in a confessional spirit: “I never stopped thinking about the business. I worked 107 And now, of course: Richard Harper, Tom Rodden, Yvonne Rogers and Abigail Sellen Eds. Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the year 2020, (Redmond: Microsoft Research Publication 2008) 108 This how commonplace magic: Chris Mack, “The Multiple Lives of Moore’s Law: Why Gordon Moore’s grand prediction has endured for 50 years”, IEEE Spectrum (March 30, 2015), accessible online. 83 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018315