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takes with it – if we don’t handle this properly – something even more precious: The division between periods of peace and of war.

That the knotting together of distance, speed and power changes the nature of an object was something Janelle, the father of “Space Time Compression,” anticipated. He labeled it “Locational Utility”, the way in which something becomes more useful or powerful or relevant as it is drawn closer to us by increased connection and speed, even if it stays the same “distance” away202. A nuclear weapon three hours from landing and one that is three months away are, nearly, a different object entirely. Adam Smiths’s famous remark in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that most people would be more perturbed by the loss of half a finger than the news that a million Chinese had perished, begins to take on a different color in an age when a billion and a half Chinese are nanoseconds away.203 When we say that connection changes the nature of an object, we mean this; Networks change the “locational utility” of anything they touch. When connection makes an object instantly, clearly visible, it revolutionizes its potential. Little wonder so many great fortunes are being made in applying this trick of plugging goods into compression engines like apps or matching services. It’s hard to know if firms like Airbnb or Uber will be around in a decade, but the economic energy they release emerges right out of Janelle’s theories: Connect a car seat or an empty room and you change its nature. You give it value. Part of our unease now – and part of the problem we have in strategizing about the world or our businesses – is that stability on our topological maps is some time off yet. There is so much yet to be connected. So many new topologies to be built.

“Time is a ride,” Danny Hillis once remarked in an early meditation about his rock-sunk clock, “and you are on it.”204 He was right. That ride takes place, in a connected age, on topological rails. And just how “instant” you are will be a mark of what sort of ride you’re on. In the same way that rivers and oceans and mountains define different landscapes in real geographies, topological neighborhoods too will each bounce with funny quirks. Some will be super fast. Others yoked by politics. Citizens of Santa Fe or Mumbai may choose to compress time in different ways. But they will all share a common desire. To do more with less. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdjik, writing about the way in which some people breeze through airports and borders (with first class tickets and pre-approved immigration) while others struggle to move at all out of refugee camps or poverty traps, has labeled the winners of this new order as a kind of “kinetic elite”205. They are a kind of temporal elite, in possession of golden keys to a special, frictionless topology. The technology to eliminate space and capture time.

202 He labeled it: Donald G. Janelle, “Spatial Reorganization: A Model and Concept”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Volume 59, Issue 2, 1969)
203 Adam Smith’s: famous remark: Adam Smith and Knud Haakonssen. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 198
204 “Time is a ride” Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 67
205 The German philosopher: Sloterdjik, TK

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