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data – our DNA, our wedding photos, our hopeful voice mails and most essential knowledge, our small savings against disaster. In its speed and its depth, in its increasingly comprehensive grasp of each of us and our world, this new network order is at once the most amazing thing we’ve ever created and the most terrifying. But recall, for a moment, Hillis’s dream for his parallel computer: “The ability to configure the topology of the machine to match the topology of the problem.” What if we really could rewire our thinking, our networks and politics and economics to match the problems we face now? Finally, with the Seventh Sense kicking alive in each of us, we can at least see the topological landscape where such a construction might occur. Now we must turn to the exciting question of just how we’d configure it to do our bidding.

We’ve covered a lot so far; perhaps it is worth a glance back.

First, we’ve come to see how networks really operate, the way in which they breed a lively connected skein that concentrates and distributes power. These systems are, as a result of their very design, plucking apart many of our old structures and ideas. Recall my dad, the doctor, ripped one direction by millions of disease advice websites (distribution) and in the other by massive diagnostic databases (concentration). This pulling process creates too, as we saw: Billion-user firms (and billion dollar fortunes) bred with breathtaking speed. Drones, derivatives, waves of migrants torn from their states but plugged into technological tapestries – all of these are products of network power. Connection, we learned, changes the nature of any object. You. Me. Money. Terrorists. Pretty much anything. And because there is a lot more of the world that has not yet been fully connected, it’s easy to see that we live in a revolutionary age.

Second, we learned that the world of networks is complex. It’s made up of many complicated pieces, but complexity is something entirely different: It’s the unpredictable and colliding evolution you might see in a rainforest, where uncountable forces intermingle to produce life and death, growth and change. Scientists call this “emergence” – and it is happening on all our connected systems. Connection produces new, ripplingly powerful and unpredictable structures. The Arab Spring. The 2008 financial crisis. Connection changes complicated objects not least by making them complex. This is why our whole world, even the parts we might expect to be most stable, whips around now with a new and wild energy. In a way, we saw, this should reward a careful confidence: Go ahead and break the old systems. Something new will emerge.

Third, we followed the trail of hackers like the Warez Dudes and discovered something unnerving about the networks around us. Not only are they honeycombed with dangerous and unpatchable holes, but historically unmatched amounts of power rests in their central cores. The reason hackers are so eager to get to these kernels of power is that in doing so they can manipulate entire landscapes of power with a profound efficiency. A “weird machine,” fired with an invisible and dangerous hacked logic, is a possibility that flutters through any network. Trade. Politics. Finance. Choices made in the center of network systems will redound on

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