young organizations that blossomed from connectivity. Other Spanish protest groups, such as labor, anti-abortion activists or regional separatists, relied on decades-old organizations. 15M - like Occupy Wall Street or pieces of the Arab Spring or Al-Qaeda - relied on groups fresh-born into a hollow, worried political vacuum. A survey of 15M members looked like a review of new Internet companies: Young, wired, vividly unplugged from history and impossible to understand without their constant connection. They were built by leaching people away from traditional parties, the appeal was both the potential of the new and the chance to get away from the rotting smell of old politics, surely an instinct many of us feel now.!24 This is one reason it’s wrong to look at the world and consider it filled merely with random events, with Black Swans. In fact, regularities and patterns appear many places on the mesh of connection that surrounds us. They can be searched and mapped and studied with the tools of data science, but of course they can also be felt. They may surprise you if you don’t know how to look for them. But the regularities are there. Human history is not only made of earthquakes. 4. Even if it can’t be predicted, complexity in any system, whether it is an Indonesian coral reef or a Russian computer network, can at least be measured. How many points are connected? How quickly and deeply do they interact? It is the multiplication of connection that produces a complex landscape. There won't be much emergence in a desert, for instance. You alone, unconnected: one point. You online: Several billion. The essential benefit of many points connected in real time is that they are an extremely fast feedback loop. This fine-tuning of action-reaction forces them to adapt and adjust quickly, as if they were runners with a coach constantly at their side. Compare the feedback loop of a marching Cairo street protest to, say, the feedback loop of the old men around Mubarak. One wa