Philosophical essay on digital connectivity and a ‘Seventh Sense’

sensation alive to the pull of constant, instant connection. This Seventh Sense reacts to what none of our other senses can notice, to the subtle undercurrents of a networked age. That moment of first connection you once had - to a computer, a friend, a fast-moving financial product, a miracle medical cure, an idea, a smashed up sound - is like the first time you looked at a Matisse painting or heard Beethoven (or Orbital). It switched on a new sensibility. But you have probably had - or will shortly - another moment. This is the instant a cold and creeping chill hits you, started by the uneasy sensation that something you've done has been recorded or predicted or watched and manipulated in some way you'd not quite imagined. That some strange force from a great distance has slammed into your life. This feeling is the sudden shudder of a bill come surprisingly due: You wanted to be connected? Okay, here’s the cost. And the addition on both sides of the ledger, the massive benefits of our links and the rather terrible potential of those same threads, is still being settled. We can say at least that the sum of all the revolutions wrought by the instant mingling of the world’s soon-to-be connected billions with each other and with machine intelligence, biological innovation and the tremors of a globalizing world will be, to use Master Nan’s word, “epochal.” Most of us find ourselves torn now. Not just between future and past; not merely between the habits and loves of a slower age and the ceaslesss promise of something fast and new. We are trapped, as well, between two groups. An older generation now in power, blind to the laws of networks and connection, uses old ideas to battle problems of a connected age and makes them worse, ever faster. Terrorism. Financial chasms. Environmental imbalance. At the same time, an emergent class of powerful technologists fingers more influence than perhaps any group in history. Machines watch, learn, think and increasingly control nearly every element of our lives. This digital-age group understands networks; but if they have ideas about virtue, philosophy and justice, (mostly they don’t) these feel susbsumed by their confidence in networks and control. Each group pulls at the legacy of the Enlightenment - our liberty. And, so far, we’ve no way of defending ourselves. No new instinct for life in this still unfathomable age of connection. The Seventh Sense is a feeling for just what constant connection means - and the start of (finally) a confident knowledge of how to construct our future and protect ourselves against what is even now descending upon us. A consciouness exists in the world, Master Nan would say. It extends over borders, across differences, between people. And it becomes, on networks now, visible in new, powerful and hopeful ways. What I mean by a sensibility is really a kind of instinctive notion, a way to sense and then use the energy flows of our age that hovers perhaps just below what the rational mind alone can tell. Master Nan used to recall a famous story from the 2500 year old Daoist masterpiece Zhuangzi, about the butcher who worked for a famous and powerful Duke. One day the Duke saw the butcher cutting meat, his blade singing and moving with almost no effort. “Ah, this is marvelous. Imagine such mastery,’ the Duke said. “How have you achived this?” he asked. “What I follow is The Way,” the butcher said, referring to the idea of a spiritual force, a natural energy which Daoisim tells us infuses everthing, from trees to the human heart. “When | started butchering, all I could see was parts of the ox itself. After three years, I could 13 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018245