ability to plug into and share with one another is the essence of their power.!!6 Your data-enabled phone or camera or database or stock-trading program is easy and powerful to use because so much of the world’s data - your Sigur Ros songs, your home movies, your skin temprature — can be reduced to ones and zeros, freed for fast transmission, endless storage and quick analysis.!!” A machine that can blithely handle digital inputs of one sort, whether it is trading orders or music files, has the capacity, in theory, to work with any data. Such adjustability is what forces app companies, gaming businesses, or phone companies onto an exhausting treadmill of constant upgrade. Interaction between the pieces of a system, every bit as much as design or mechanical manipulation, is the reason why change happens.118 Entrepreneurs mix GPS and phones to create a new business of tracking everything from our cars to our children. Algorithmic trading programs engineer completely virtual portfolios - you can buy the S&P Index but as your manager to strip out any performance from tobacco and gun companies, for instance. Or: Terrorists meet online and swap data. Some of the most astonishing systems of our new world have grown up this way. Google’s back-end search systems, for instance, were not “top- down” designed so much as they emerged, competed and evolved to deliver once- unimaginable loads of data. No one at Google is “The Architect.” There is no central approval for technology systems. Complexity and unpredictability and emergence are regarded as the best way to grow. 119 Long before the idea of a smart phone or 3D goggles, the British mathematician Alan Turing anticipated their arrival when he dreamed of what he called a “universal device”!2°: A notional box that, starting from the ones and zeros of digitized data, could be constructed to do anything. Since everything can ultimately be reduced to a binary encoding, nearly any sort of data can be shared, studied, combined or r