takes with it - if we don’t handle this properly - something even more precious: The division between periods of peace and of war. That the knotting together of distance, speed and power changes the nature of an object was something Janelle, the father of “Space Time Compression,” anticipated. He labeled it “Locational Utility’, the way in which something becomes more useful or powerful or relevant as it is drawn closer to us by increased connection and speed, even if it stays the same “distance” away’. A nuclear weapon three hours from landing and one that is three months away are, nearly, a different object entirely. Adam Smiths’s famous remark in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that most people would be more perturbed by the loss of half a finger than the news that a million Chinese had perished, begins to take on a different color in an age when a billion and a half Chinese are nanoseconds away.?°? When we say that connection changes the nature of an object, we mean this; Networks change the “locational utility” of anything they touch. When connection makes an object instantly, clearly visible, it revolutionizes its potential. Little wonder so many great fortunes are being made in applying this trick of plugging goods into compression engines like apps or matching services. It’s hard to know if firms like Airbnb or Uber will be around ina decade, but the economic energy they release emerges right out of Janelle’s theories: Connect a car seat or an empty room and you change its nature. You give it value. Part of our unease now - and part of the problem we have in strategizing about the world or our businesses - is that stability on our topological maps is some time off yet. There is so much yet to be connected. So many new topologies to be built. “Time is a ride,” Danny Hillis once remarked in an early meditation about his rock- sunk clock, “and you are on it.”2°4 He was right. That ride takes place, in a connected age, on topological rails. And just how “instant”