permits the easy spread and accumulation of links.Terror cells or social networks or financial markets all lay out in this fashion. Wide-open, convenience-making links are expanding, and they serve as a kind of global nervous system, more sensitive with each passing generation. These lines of connection run two ways, of course: Networks permit any of us to connect to nearly anywhere, and to unimaginable technological power. But, at the same time, the world connects back to us. Wired jihadis and currencies and bio bits - they’re all tied in with us too. So yes: We’re murdering the exotic with our data connections and machines and discount plane flights. Should we be surprised when, from time to time now, the exotic shows up and murders us right back? We've seen, now, the way in which that pulling connection between center and periphery - that tension of our network - pulls apart old structures. And this is the first, urgent Seventh Sense understanding: Connection changes the nature of an object by placing it on this tense mesh. Connect a patient, a doctor, a flying machine, a currency - each is twisted and changed as a result. Some become great. Others snap, never to be rebuilt. Some adjust, painfully. The pulling network action accounts for our greatest new fortunes but also the tumbling of old ideas and institutions. This is why our age is so uneasy. This is also part of the picture of network power we have to keep in mind, the image of a stretched skein plucking apart old structures. Baran’s fishnet grows, it locks everything it touches into anew structure, one that resists the “arrest the usual suspects” sort of interruption. We’ve said: Connection changes the nature of an object. To be connected to a Baran-style system instead of a brush-cut 1950’s AT&T system makes a difference. The connected devices themselves are constantly improving. Back in Baran’s day, dozens of scientists counted themselves lucky to share a single computer. A few decades later, the PC rev