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Centuries from now, our great-great grandchildren will look back at our age and
name it as we have named “The Enlightenment.” Perhaps they will call this era “The
Great Connection” or the “The Enmeshmnet” or somesuch. They will spot the
winners and losers of our age as we do in our own review of history. That distant
generation will identify a new “convergence club” emerging among us now, even if
we can’t quite name its members yet. Already we can see lavish rewards
accumulating to the people and nations and companies who have established an
early grip on this new sensibility. They understand and manipulate connective
power. What they all share is a feeling, as instant and certain as an instinct, for what
it means to be enclosed, constantly, by ever growing masses of connection. A set of
forces, invisible to many, is now applying a merciless and grinding pressure to the
familiar structures of an older age.
The struggles of our cherished institutions - the US congress, the military, the news
media, our educational system, our once-inclusive capitalism - to achieve the very
aims that they once elegantly and efficiently met is only the visible evidence of this
shift. Buried underneath their lurching collapse is the real source of this change, a
new connective energy. Power is now passing with a rippling, ripping energy from
old, once-useful people and institutions and ideas and into these new platforms and
protocols, built for an age of connection. If this passage has so far only wiped out
encyclopedias, telephone companies or taxi medallions, it is merely because it is just
beginning.
2.
The Seventh Sense, in short, is the ability to look at any object and see the way in
which it is changed by connection. This is the essential skill. Whether you are
commanding an army, running a Fortune 50 company, planning a great work of art
or thinking about your children’s education. You need to be able to look ata car, a
hotel room, a share of stock, a language, a translation machine and say to yourself:
Connection changes the nature of an object. It changes the nature of every object
around it. This book is the story of just how and why that happens and of the way in
which an instinct for this power now rests behind the fattest fortunes and the
greatest successes of our age. Connection changes the nature of an object means
connection changes the nature of your life, of mine, of our government, of the wars
we fight and the peace we secure. The heart of the problem ahead of us is not small.
It is nothing less than the most significant shift of power balances since the
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. How high are the stakes? If the
Enlightenment is our reference, then | think we can say they are nothing less than
total.
Of all the Seventh Sense ideas, this single concept is the most fundamental:
Connection changes the nature of an object. A medical diagnostic machine is
impressive; one that is connected to a database of information that can accelerate
and improve or perfect a diagnosis is revolutionary. The act of linking our bodies,
our cities, our ideas - everything really - together, introduces a genuinely new
dynamic to our world. It creates hyper-dense concentrations of power. It breeds
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