HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018435.jpg

There is a lesson for us here, one that redounds onto Plato’s political question and
our own: Who should rule? We feel overwhelmed by our age. So much to master:
Fighting wars. Complex politics. Radically changing economics. New technologies
replacing old ones before we can understand them. The mastery of each of these will
not be achieved by dashing success in each. So we need to cultivate a single,
essential instinct here. A new temprament that I’ve called The Seventh Sense. And,
with that done, to fight the wars, write the poems, make the civilizations to confront
all that lies ahead. Our greatest hope in the race against the totalizing machines and
those who control them; our finest insurance for liberty and prosperity instead of
madness is not in technology. Our greatest weapon will not be our bombers our
drones or our financial strength. It will be in our own humanity. We have to accept
that we are going to be gated in all the ways we’ve seen: By speed, by AI, by the New
Caste. We’ll be torn apart by those new network dynamics, and placed on topologies
we can hardly understand. Our future fight is not about if we are going to be
enmeshed or not. It is about the terms of that enmeshment – and it is here that the
great questions of politics will be decided. And where the protection of the things
you love and care about will be braced against the crashing of an old order.

5.

Everything ahead of us will be political. We’ve established already: Connection
changes the nature of an object. What’s true for a phone or a medical device, a
weapon or an currency is true too for a vote. Or a citizen. The nature, the essence of
an object changes as a result of connectivity. It takes that old Platonic notion of an
“ideal” state and stretches it beyond what we’re fully capable of understanding. Our
puzzle is that while “we are what we are connected to,” it is also true that we don’t
fully know or understand just what those links are yet. At certain moments it seems
we’re linked to something miraculous, at others to a system of really instant
viciousness. And because we are all connected, changes in one part of the system
invariably redound elsewhere. An object seems miraculous one moment, violent the
next. This isn’t getting easier for us. We are, as we’ve seen, heading to an era where
the machines and the networks will have ever more, ever more decisive power,
largely because we’ve given it to them. We’d be wise to consider the lesson of
history here: Structures snap when bent by forces for which they are not prepared.

Those fast, hammering centuries that ran from the reformation to the scientific
revolution to the enlightenment to the industrial revolution were like this. The
redistribution of power and finance into the hands of the many demanded the
demolition of old structures, the ones mastered by a few. For one man to rule
millions with no reason other than birth made no sense anymore. The last six
centuries have been nothing but a tale of liberation, its price and its rewards. We are
more free now than we ever have been, in a sense. And, at this very same moment,
we are more enmeshed. Power is moving now from institutions and ideas built for
liberty to ones built for enclosure, for connection, for speed and for the beyond-
human intelligence that complexity demands. This will snap our votes, our money
and our ideas with the same blunt efficiency the last revolution managed in Luther’s

203

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018435