preserved. But, also, we must move on. These people will never grasp the opportunity that lingers in front of us now. This book is not, in any event, written for them. It is written for those of us who are inheriting the possibility of their inventions, the price of their errors. And it is aimed too at the people and the generation who are coming to power and who are - in some senses—already in power, even if they don’t appear to be just yet. By this | mean the cohort bred into the age of connected acceleration; the first generation of leaders and students and warfighters and entrepreneurs to not find the digital strange, but to find it natural and curious and wonderful in its power. It is written for those who will have to manage machines that are smarter than humans, networks that move faster than we can calculate, and cascades of chaos and conflict and creation as this new era settles in. It is for anyone too who has ever begun to speak about the strange tensions of our age, who has begun maybe with the lines, “Maybe I’m sensitive or something, but...” as they feel the tickle of their own lives, minds and cells increasingly intertwined, electrified. It is written for those afflicted with an aching feeling that we're being torn apart. Pulled into foolish conflicts and dangerous failures by old figures who don’t understand this age. Pulled into sacrifices of liberty and freedom by young technological wizards who can’t balance the miracle of their cold inventions with our hot, human needs for freedom and control. But I should say too that this book is not, either, a full-throated endorsement of the technological elite. Yes, it’s wonderful that we are at the beginning of a new period. But it’s not quite right to say that where the network age begins, the old one ends. In fact, that's a dangerous conclusion. To begin with we're at an extremely primitive point in our understanding of networks, comparable to where economics was in the 1800s or medicine centuries ago. We