became technically possible. They have since become essential, as crucial to our network world as the first maps were to explorers centuries ago. Fundamental papers, by now-legendary researchers like the mathematicians Steven Storgratz and Albert-Lazlo Barabasi or the biologist Simon Levin, identified simple laws running in single networks. The Internet, financial markets, jungle ecosystems and even our own brain connections were found to exhibit similar, often surprisingly common habits.
Unfortunately, most of our leading figures still think in terms of disconnected dangers, of risks that can be reduced to nouns: Atomic bombs, fundamentalists, hacks. To be sure plenty of these sorts of dangerous nouns confront us now. But the sharpest edges of our problems come from the fact that these nouns are part of networks, which spring them into connected, surprising action. Computers, airplanes, derivatives - they snap and break systems when connected into cascading, fast threats. When Master Nan spoke of spiritual illness, I think this is particularly what he meant. Total confusion about our world, followed by all the emotions of the lost: anger, denial, irrationality. “A commander in chief,” von Clausewitz wrote of an older age of land warfare, “must aim at acquiring an overall knowledge of the configuration of a province, of an entire country. He must hold in his mind a vivid picture of the road-network, the river-lines, and the mountain ranges without ever losing a sense of his immediate surroundings.”2® This sort of command mastery is still relevant in an age of networks. It is as important for the design and operation of our economy, our politics, our data and our security as it is in considering problems of war and peace. But who of our current leaders holds in his or her mind such a vivid map of the ethereal and essential networks running around us now? Who owns that subtle overall knowledge and then acts with the confident sensibility such wisdom would produce?
At this early moment in a new revolution, our leaders are blind. It’s not simple technical fluency that eludes them - though this is among the most embarrassing of their deficits. It’s that avoiding cyber accidents, controlling the spread of nuclear weapons, handling global warming, stemming fast financial crises, restoring equitable economic growth - all of these puzzles yearn to be tackled with a new sensibility. Not least because often they are produced by a fresh set of links and instincts. These problems linger not as independent fractures on a solid base, but rather as markers of spiderwebbing, connected cracks pressing out on knotted up networks. It is only by tackling them with network ideas that we can hope to make progress. That the rise of ISIS and the forces of global income inequality are driven by the same laws can only be understood with a knowledge, or better an experience, of connected power. Our leaders are preparing us to fight expensive new wars we need not fight, to confront enemies who might best be regarded as partners - even as they flail at the to corrosive problems of a new, emerging order simply because they can’t see or feel the essential links of power that are, even now, making the familiar dangerous and the dangerous familiar. “We got to know the nature of calculating by learning to calculate,” the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
28 “A commander in chief’: Von Clausewitz, p 110
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