Philosophical musings on network emergence and disruption without concrete allegations

merciless clawing action we saw at the start of this chapter, which explains the unique power (and value) of the essential firms of our age. Once that’s done, however, once the mesh of distribution and connection is in place and growing, then emergence begins. The completely new appears. This is why the most successful investors or leaders of our era have a near pathological desire to push and break old systems. They do this because they have a faith, an instinct, that if they shove hard enough to snap an equilibrium, then something else will emerge. They are right. They have all the laws of physics and history behind them. In commerce, the destruction of old business models breeds new ones. In terrorism, brutal violence is more useful than bottled anger; it’s a tool to speed the viral emergence of chaos (and, some hope, a new politics). What emerges from change? Fresh structures, gates that connect us and bind us .If the Seventh Sense features a nearly wild desire to smash old equilibriums it is because of the total confidence that something else will emerge. Later in life, turning to a philosophical view, Paul Baran said that his webs, distributing themselves around the world with such smooth and relentless energy, were reflecting a kind of inevitable progress, a propensity of linked things to keep linking. Even if he did not see and name our world exactly, he likely could have predicted it. “Every object in the universe,” he once wrote, “is connected (by gravity/radiation vectors) to every other object.” We know now just how much truth is buried in Baran’s almost philosophical words. Objects and people and places now feed data constantly into the network and to each other. This presses them to evolve, to change, to connect again. It is simply a matter of time before those connections bubble up into our real lives to change our economy, our security and our leaders. That kludgey, parenthetically weird phrase of Baran’s - wired together “(by gravity/radiation vectors)” - tells us a lot. The spread of links is like gravity now. It is like radiation. Irresistible. All-penetrating and revealing the deep human truth in Baran’s Holocaust-bred instincts: To survive and to connect are really the same thing. 91 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018323