Centuries from now, our great-great grandchildren will look back at our age and name it as we have named “The Enlightenment.” Perhaps they will call this era “The Great Connection” or the “The Enmeshmnet” or somesuch. They will spot the winners and losers of our age as we do in our own review of history. That distant generation will identify a new “convergence club” emerging among us now, even if we can’t quite name its members yet. Already we can see lavish rewards accumulating to the people and nations and companies who have established an early grip on this new sensibility. They understand and manipulate connective power. What they all share is a feeling, as instant and certain as an instinct, for what it means to be enclosed, constantly, by ever growing masses of connection. A set of forces, invisible to many, is now applying a merciless and grinding pressure to the familiar structures of an older age.
The struggles of our cherished institutions - the US congress, the military, the news media, our educational system, our once-inclusive capitalism - to achieve the very aims that they once elegantly and efficiently met is only the visible evidence of this shift. Buried underneath their lurching collapse is the real source of this change, a new connective energy. Power is now passing with a rippling, ripping energy from old, once-useful people and institutions and ideas and into these new platforms and protocols, built for an age of connection. If this passage has so far only wiped out encyclopedias, telephone companies or taxi medallions, it is merely because it is just beginning.
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The Seventh Sense, in short, is the ability to look at any object and see the way in which it is changed by connection. This is the essential skill. Whether you are commanding an army, running a Fortune 50 company, planning a great work of art or thinking about your children’s education. You need to be able to look ata car, a hotel room, a share of stock, a language, a translation machine and say to yourself: Connection changes the nature of an object. It changes the nature of every object around it. This book is the story of just how and why that happens and of the way in which an instinct for this power now rests behind the fattest fortunes and the greatest successes of our age. Connection changes the nature of an object means connection changes the nature of your life, of mine, of our government, of the wars we fight and the peace we secure. The heart of the problem ahead of us is not small. It is nothing less than the most significant shift of power balances since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. How high are the stakes? If the Enlightenment is our reference, then | think we can say they are nothing less than total.
Of all the Seventh Sense ideas, this single concept is the most fundamental: Connection changes the nature of an object. A medical diagnostic machine is impressive; one that is connected to a database of information that can accelerate and improve or perfect a diagnosis is revolutionary. The act of linking our bodies, our cities, our ideas - everything really - together, introduces a genuinely new dynamic to our world. It creates hyper-dense concentrations of power. It breeds
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