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might safely open, develop, and change. They mixed the crouching nervousness of a
secret political party with the vivid nightmares of a nation that had been invaded,
abused – humiliated, they said – by nine countries since the mid-19th Century Opium
Wars. “We used to worry about war and talk about its possibility every year,” Deng
told them. “It seems the worry was overdone.” The world was, he felt, entering an
era of heping yu fazhan – peace and development. Terrible, nation-demolishing wars
would not soon victimize China, Deng thought. Nation building was the nature of the
age. Its tools would be science, finance, and trade. If the Chinese people worked
hard, he promised his incredulous listeners, they might by the year 2000 grow their
thin $250 per capita income to the nearly unimaginable target of $1000. “I don’t
care if the cat is white or black,” he famously observed, “as long as it catches mice.”
Socialism? Capitalism? No matter so long as it produced progress. Deng’s judgment
proved out. There were no major wars. Development was, for China, the name of the
age. The cat caught $1000 dollars of per capita income nearly on the old man’s
schedule. It is still playing with the string.

There is something admirably direct about the Western way of problem solving, of
course. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It has its uses. But
it’s also true that this sort of elementary geometry does not describe, always, the
best path. Particularly not today, in an era when topological collapse or instant
connection means that the distance from a to b can go to zero (or infinity) in a single
sudden shift. Yes, you may be stringing a line from a to b, but if you’re putting it up
in a tornado? Is the best route to a new Middle East really the tipping over of stable
states? Is the quickest path to climate control voluntary compacts? Are faster
markets and more unwatched capitalism the safest way to ameliorate our
unbalanced economics? Sometimes a more indirect line is called for. Sometimes it is
faster, safer. Huang Hua’s question – “Where is the world going, after all?” – turns
out to be the first essential one for any endeavor. If you are not looking from the
highest possible altitude, Chinese will warn you, you are not seeing the full picture.

The nature of our age has, I think, emerged clearly, vividly and broadly for us now.
Constant, instant, everywhere connectivity taps with the efficient mercilessness of a
steel hammer on the glass of most of our comfortable institutions. The Seventh
Sense has let us understand a bit about the origins of this creative violence. And it
has shown us too that our era’s dominant feature is not merely cracking disruption,
but also the construction of new orders. Da po, Da li the Chinese might say – great
destruction and great construction. This is the nature of our age. Tap, tap, crack. And
then: Gatelands – speed-bred by technology and filled with possibility. That some of
these gated worlds contain billions of people or trillions of sensors, computer chips
or network nodes only strengthens their inexorable grip. That they can be so easily
or even accidentally weaponized marks the edginess of our problem. That they will
be built atop the sharp-edged shards of a collapsing older system heightens the
urgency at which they must emerge. To be inside, we’ve seen, delivers the light-
speed benefits of time compression, of life on a nearly alive mesh. To be outside? It
is to be cut off.

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