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each of us. This is why we say that if in the past the most important things happened in public – wars, riots, and elections – in the future many of the most powerful shifts will, rather worryingly, occur in secret.

Fourth, we met the New Caste that masters many of these hot cores of power, for good and ill. Past eras were dominated by merchants, sages and soldiers who competed and collaborated in the pursuit of power. Now a new, young technological group is appearing. The nations and companies that train and equip them best of them will have an incalculable advantage. But there’s a hitch: As much as this group knows about networks, they know little about history or politics or economics. Dangerously, they often see the world as a machine to be coded.

Fifth, we unearthed a new and invisible set of landscapes that will decide much of our future. These are called “topologies” and they are the connected fields on which power moves now. The web where stocks are traded, cyber attacks occur, imports are moved, or biological data are recorded and studied – each of these is a crucial topology. Control of them will be as important in the future as control of sea or air or capital once was.

And, finally, we learned what the networks are for: The compression of time. For all their technical magnificence, we find that beating in the cold technological heart of these systems is a most human desires, to negotiate a bit the one really inarguable constant of our lives: We are all burning candles. The compression of time is why we connect. It lets us do more, experience differently, live longer. What the demand for liberty was to the Enlightenment, the call to compress time will be in our future – a fundamental political demand. None of our existing institutions have been built to answer this cry.

These six elements make up a rough outline of a new sensibility. To see them at work in the world is the mark of a powerful way of thinking and feeling. The Seventh Sense. And this is important, we saw, because the shift ahead of us really is like the Enlightenment in its scale. It will tip everything over. It can’t be totally understood in advance. We can see now that our old institutions are failing. Their strategies for solving problems only makes them worse. We saw how, at that level of war and peace, old ideas are laying new traps. No one in power seems to have a clear, convincing picture of just what is going on. We can feel the danger we face, like rippling heat from a nearby inferno – our world tugged into the future by a class of old leaders who don't understand networks and a collection of new technologists who don't understand the world. We had better find some way forward that does not depend entirely on either of these groups. The first may destroy our liberty in the name of an elusive security; the other will consume our freedom in pursuit of a mad efficiency. And there’s one last thing we didn’t really learn here, but I think you probably suspected it even before you started reading many chapters ago and met Master Nan and his warning of impending “spiritual illness”: If we’re going to shape this world at all, we don’t have much time.

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