packets or financial vouchers. Protocols embody shared rules. Their subtle, decisive power is to place each bit of data ina reliable, predictable order, just as diplomatic protocol might seat ambassadors at a negotiation. “Protocol,” the theorists Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker have written, “is a system for maintaining organization and control in networks.”18 In a world of older, more traditional power distributions Americans might worry about a day when another language, another “protocol” in a sense — Chinese or Spanish, say - would pry the central connective role away from English. Protocols are hard to change, of course. So many people have learned English; whole systems depend on its use. To suddenly switch the world’s airline pilots, bond traders and computer programmers to Chinese or Spanish would hardly be worth the immense cost and the colliding confusion such a transfer would demand. But it’s here where the Seventh Sense axiom, that connection changes the nature of an object, gives us a new view. For the first time, as a result of connectivity, a once unimagined possibility exists: rapid, real-time machine translation. Fast, ubiquitous network links mean that the central role of English is boiled away by another language than by a connected, intelligent network skin. “Good morning,” is less likely to be overtaken by a greeting from some other language as it is to be effortlessly, invisibly transmuted into “5 E&/” or “Buenos Dias.” Fast access to a great translation algorithm will be more important than the ability to speak English (or Spanish or Chinese). Even as an advocate of learning other languages, it’s hard not to feel that the American parents now plowing their children urgently into Chinese classes are missing the point. Fluency in any second language in the future will be an arcane specialty. Better to teach the kids how to build an AI, or to debate the moral reasoning of Confucius and Socrates than how to order dinner. The machines will t